Even with the roar of the rain muffling the blast, the gunshot seemed too loud. It would draw them. She knew that for a fact, which meant that she had just blown a hole in her own future.

Hurry, you bitch.

She ran to her trailer, jammed the key in the lock, opened the door, jumped in, and shut and locked the door behind her.

* * *

Byron Rempel sat on the floor, dead but newly awake, inert because there was no prey to follow, when Desdemona Fox ran past the open doorway.

The sight of her. The smell of her. The living reality of her triggered a response in the parasitic hive mind that now ruled his body. It was not a thought, merely a reaction. An impulse to follow, to attack, to feed, and to transfer larvae to a new host. To another host. One of many.

Rempel and Mrs. O’Grady struggled to their feet and shuffled slowly out of the trailer, following the scent of fresh meat. Other figures emerged from trailers all along the path the running woman had taken.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX

SWEET PARADISE TRAILER PARK

The trailer was dark. There was no backup generator, no emergency lights.

Dez unclipped her flashlight and used its beam to find the stove. It was gas, so she lit all four burners. The light filled the kitchen and dining room. She fished in the cabinets until she found a box of candles. She didn’t have any of the thick girlie-girl scented candles. All she had were thin colored candles left over from JT’s birthday, so she lit those and carried a fistful of them into her bedroom. Since she couldn’t hold them all and do what she had to do, she grabbed her metal trashcan and dropped the candles on the balled-up tissues, used makeup sponges, torn-up bills, and a card from Billy Trout that she had thrown away unopened. The tissues caught right away and then the rest, throwing bright yellow light into the room.

Dez set the can down on the bedroom carpet, fished in her pocket for her keys, and fumbled the right one into the lock. The Yale clicked open and Dez lifted the lid.

It was all there. Handguns in wooden boxes. Shotguns. Hunting rifles with scopes. Stacked boxes of bullets. Knives. Everything.

For the first time in hours, Dez Fox smiled.

And then the dead began banging their pale fists against the walls and windows of her trailer.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN

DOLL FACTORY ROAD

Billy Trout drove across town like a madman. At the corner of Doll Factory and Meetinghouse Road he saw a National Guard Humvee.

“Thank God,” he breathed. Guardsmen were mostly local guys, if not from Stebbins then at least from this part of the state. If anyone would understand, they would; and if anyone had the resources to turn this thing around, they would. The feds might be willing to wipe Stebbins off the face of the earth, but he did not believe that of ordinary guys.

The soldiers turned at the sound of his horn. Trout flashed his brights at them. He was looking for a sign, a wave, a smile. Anything.

The soldiers leveled their weapons at him.

Trout slowed the car, still forty yards from them.

He tooted the horn again.

There was a two second pause as the Guardsmen bent their heads together to consult. Trout began to smile.

Then they opened fire.

Mud popped up in lines all the way to his car and then Trout was down, cringing and curling himself onto the seat, screaming as the bullets tore into the grille and hood and punched holes in the glass.

“Jesus Christ! What the fuck are you crazy bastards doing?” he yelled.

There was a lull in the gunfire.

The entire windshield was a lace curtain of cracks and holes.

Trout raised his head, risking a glance over the dashboard.

The soldiers were advancing on him, their barrels smoking in the rain but still aimed his way.

Trout reached out and threw the car into reverse and then shot upright in the seat and kicked down on the gas pedal. The Explorer lurched and jumped backward, rolling fast away from the soldiers who immediately opened fire.

“I’m not infected!” he screamed.

He knew that they could not hear him over the roar of their own guns, but Trout was furious. He kept yelling that as he hit the brakes, shifted into drive, spun the wheel and went diagonally across Doll Factory Road. More bullets stitched a line of ragged holes in the passenger side. Both side windows blew out and Trout was peppered with flying bits of glass; but the car was gaining speed now, clawing across the gravel parking lot of a closed down Denny’s, cutting over to a side road and blasting away from the soldiers. Bullets continued to whang and ping off the back of the car for a quarter mile.

Trout was panicking now. Wind and rain battered his face as he drove. He kept thinking, They didn’t care if I was infected or not. They didn’t care. God Almighty, they don’t care.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT

THE SITUATION ROOM

WASHINGTON, D.C.

The president of the United States sat in his big leather swivel chair, fingers steepled, brow knitted, staring at the satellite map of Stebbins County. Phones rang all around the crisis room as his staff worked to implement the Wildfire protocols. Above the main screen were several smaller screens, one of which was a Doppler radar display of the storm. The National Weather Service was giving a fifty-fifty chance that the storm could veer northeast or continue to stall over Stebbins County. If the latter happened, the computer models estimated that it might be as much as six hours before helicopters could fly. Six hours during which ground visibility was compromised.

Another screen showed men working in a raging storm to load thermobaric devices onto a row of parked Apache gunships.

The president’s mouth was dry, and he sipped water. There were a lot of people in the Situation Room, and it took effort to keep his emotions off his face as he studied the weapons being installed.

Thermobaric devices. Fuel-air bombs. Massive cluster bombs that explode in two stages, the first of which creates a cloud of explosive material which is then ignited. As a general had told him once, “Mr. President, this is the most powerful nonnuclear weapon currently in existence. It is, I can assure you, the very definition of hell on earth.”

Those words had been said with pride by an officer fighting the endless war in Afghanistan. Now, however …

He picked up a file from the table and opened it. The top page was a printout of the estimated rate of infection if Lucifer 113 could not be contained within Stebbins County. The numbers were impossible. They were bad science fiction. They were a horror story.

The president closed the folder and leaned forward to watch the loading of the fuel-air bombs.

“Dear God,” murmured the president.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE

SWEET PARADISE TRAILER PARK

Dez looked up from the arms chest and snarled at the sound of hands beating on the thin skin of her trailer. She hurried to the window, peered out, and looked right into the face of her landlord, Rempel. There were others out there, too. Half the goddamn residents of the trailer park were out there.

“You fuckers,” she said, but the bravado was thin and fragile, nailed to the walls of her heart by rusty pins. She tried not to think about what she was seeing in rational terms. None of them were friends, but she did not even want to see them as her neighbors. She could not afford to pay that kind of coin, not if she was going to get to the school … and right now everything was about the school.

If the school is even there.

A nasty inner voice whispered it to her every few minutes, but Dez could not afford to hear that, either.

She tore open a closet and pulled out a big gray canvas ski bag, threw it onto the floor, and began stuffing as many guns and boxes of ammunition as she thought she could carry. She strapped on an extra gun belt, crossing it with her regulation belt so that both draped across her hips like a gunslinger’s rig. Dez pulled on a nylon shoulder rig and snugged a Sig Sauer nine into that. Magazines were stuffed into every pocket. They were so heavy that she had to cinch her trousers belt tighter. The last thing she pulled on was a heavy leather biker jacket Billy Trout had given her for Christmas two years ago. She pinched the thick leather.

“Bite through this, motherfucker.”

As she slung the bag over her shoulder, Dez caught sight of herself in the floor-length mirror that hung from clips on the bedroom door. She looked like a character from a video game. One of those improbably busty, impossibly well-armed superchicks who could do acrobatics and hit the kill zone even while firing guns from both hands during a cartwheel.

“You look fucking ridiculous,” she told herself.

Her reflection grinned back at her. Dez picked up a Daewoo USAS-12 automatic shotgun, slapped in a ten-round magazine, faced the door, and drew a deep breath.

“Yippie ki-yay and all that shit.”

She kicked open the door and jumped out into the rain.

PART FOUR

THE LAST MEETING PLACE

But I’ve a rendezvous with Death

At midnight in some flaming town.

—Alan Seeger, “I Have a Rendezvous with Death”

CHAPTER EIGHTY

STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL

STEBBINS COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA

Corporal Wyckoff let the Humvee roll to a stop just inside the big wrought iron gates of the Stebbins Little School.

“Holy God,” he said softly.

Beside him, Sergeant Polk stared openmouthed.

The entry road wound upward from the gate to the block school that sat like a medieval castle on a knoll surrounded by neat rows of ancient oaks. The school looked solid enough to withstand a mortar assault, but that wasn’t the problem.

The road leading to the school was choked with dozens of crashed and abandoned school buses. Hundreds of passenger cars were clustered around them. A few were burning, several were overturned. Even in the downpour, two of the trees were burning as well, the fire having spread from a wrecked yellow bus that still smoldered. And everywhere—everywhere—were the infected.

“Jesus Christ, Nick … there are hundreds of those things.”

“Thousands,” murmured Polk. “Oh man … we are so fucked.”

The dead surrounded the school like an invading army laying siege. Wyckoff and Polk heard a few pops of small-arms fire, but whoever was shooting was either in the crowd, in which case he was dead the second he ran out of bullets, or inside the school, and in that case he might as well be on the moon.