Wyckoff stabbed a finger at the scene. “We’re supposed to go in and secure that? Not a chance.”

“I know.”

“Why’d they send us down here?”

“’Cause no one knows what the hell’s going on, that’s why. They don’t know how bad this shit is. We got no air reconnaissance, Nick; we’re the first ones to put eyes on this.” Polk pulled his map out of its case and studied the position of the school, pointing out landmarks to Wyckoff. “Okay, here’s the school and here’s us. We have two squads, so we’re sure as shit not going in there. Beyond the school is some forestland, what looks like a stream that feeds into a series of ponds, part of a golf course, and then the Maryland state line. That stream is going to be a river right now, so that’s good news. No one’s crossing that, and sure as hell not those awkward sonsabitches. That leaves the western side. There’s a soccer field and a parking lot, and another fence. The east is a fence and then a couple of farms.” He chewed his lip. “We might be luckier than I thought.”

“How?”

“We have a combination of natural and man-made barriers that could contain the infected at least for now.”

“What if they come this way?” Wyckoff asked.

“We hold them.”

“With two squads?”

Polk didn’t answer. Instead he grabbed for the radio and called in a situation report to his commanding officer, Captain Rice. Each squad was composed of two four-man fire teams. That gave him sixteen men to hold a gate and the road. It was ugly math, but at least the infected seemed to be focused on the school. None of them had noticed the vehicles sitting at the base of the long entry road.

At least for now.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE

SWEET PARADISE TRAILER PARK

Dez landed too hard, the heavy bag driving her into the mud with so much force that her legs screamed in pain and buckled. She went down to her knees in the rain, but she kept the shotgun barrel out of the mud, and, as the first of the dead turned toward her, Dez fired.

There had to be forty of the monsters clustered around her trailer.

Dez fired and fired.

Each 12-gauge shell was packed with nine lead pellets. The blast caught a woman in a bathrobe full in the face and blew half her head away. The dead man behind her caught some of the pellets and one went down with a hole through his eye.

Dez forced herself to her feet and fired, turned and fired, spun and fired. Rainwater hissed on the barrel as it flared hotter with each blast.

The dead were so close to her that she barely had to aim and couldn’t miss. Not every shot was a kill, though. Her own awkward gait as she slogged through the mud and the twitchy shamble of the dead threw wild cards into the point of impact. She blew the left arm off of Donny Phelps and caught Lisa Davis on the shoulder. Seven of them went down before the magazine went dry. Dez kicked one of the dead in the thigh, knocking him back as she reached for a second mag and swapped it out. This was worse than her worst day on the Big Sand. This was a different kind of hell.

Rempel’s Tundra was parked thirty feet away, in the slip by the office, but there were so many of the infected, and more were coming from the other trailers, drawn by the blasts of the shotgun. She fired and fired, and the dead fell away, their faces splattered, their bodies pirouetting sloppily as they fell.

Tears ran down Dez’s cheeks but she didn’t know it. She tried not to name the dead as she killed them. She knew that to allow them to be her neighbors, to be the people she knew, was going to kill her. The process had already begun. So she opened her mouth and roared out an incoherent bellow of rage and grief and need and kept firing.

Then Rempel himself was there, and he was the last one between her and the Tundra. His Tundra. As Dez pulled the trigger to fire the last round in the second magazine, she remembered something from that morning. After the hot water had cut off in her shower Dez had thought that she could put a bullet into Rempel’s brainpan without a single flicker of regret.

The blast caught Rempel on the bridge of the nose and the top of his head leapt off with a geyser of blood and gray matter, and Rempel was falling.

“God!” Dez screamed as she leapt over him. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry … God I’m sorry!”

She reached the Tundra.

Which was locked.

Of course it was locked.

Dez dropped the heavy bag of weapons, whirled and charged back, swapping in the last magazine for the shotgun, firing at the McGill twins and old Mr. Peluzzi, destroying them, erasing their faces while burning their names into her mind.

She knelt by Rempel, trying not to look at his ruined head, and fished in his pockets as the dead drew closer and closer, their moans louder than the rain. The keys rattled in his left front pants pocket and Dez dug into it, scrabbling at them with one hand while pointing the shotgun at the approaching monsters with the other. Then she had then and was scrambling away. She put the leather key ring between her teeth and took the shotgun in both hands, firing as one of them reached over Rempel’s corpse to grab her. The blast caught Max Scheinhert in the throat, pitching his body backward but dropping his head right in the mud between Rempel’s outstretched legs.

Dez gagged as she got to her feet and fired again, walking backward, killing the ones closest to her, trying to buy a second’s room to breathe.

Then the gun was empty. Dez threw it in the face of the closest infected person, then she leapt for the door of the Tundra, jammed the key in the lock, opened it, threw the bag inside, and climbed in as cold fingers began clawing at her thighs. She kicked at them and jerked the door shut.

She put the key in the ignition and it roared to life without hesitation. Dez pawed tears from her eyes, put the truck in gear, turned the wheel, and smashed her way through a line of things that had been her neighbors.

“I’m sorry,” she said with each sickening impact. “I’m sorry…”

CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO

BEAVER ROAD

STEBBINS COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA

Billy Trout’s panic eased down one notch but not any further. His narrow escape from the National Guard had made him far more cautious, but it also filled him with equal parts rage and hopelessness.

They don’t even want to know if we’re infected.

It was a staggering idea but he knew that this was true. The Guard were not here on a rescue mission. It was a hard, ugly truth but it was irrefutable. If he had any doubts, then what he saw over the next few minutes clarified things for him.

As he turned onto Beaver he saw a silver Lexus askew in the middle of the road, both front doors open. Heather Faville, mayor of Stebbins, lay sprawled in the street a few feet from her husband, Tony. Neither of them bore the signs of infection: no bites, no black goo, nothing. However, they had been gunned down so comprehensively that the car and both bodies were ripped apart. Hundreds upon hundreds of shell casings covered the road. Trout stared. He knew the Favilles, liked them. He wondered if he would live long enough to grieve for them.

The scene was almost a duplicate of what had almost happened to him. The Favilles had seen the Guardsmen and had stopped, probably relieved. They’d gotten out of their car … and died in a hail of bullets.

This wasn’t an attempt to contain the infection … this was murder. The genocide of an entire town.

From then on, Trout went slower, checking each street to make sure there were no soldiers. White-faced things kept coming out of the rain and most of the time he managed to veer around them, but several times he saw them too late and the big SUV slammed into them. After the third impact he felt some eccentricities manifesting in the steering, and there was a disheartening knocking under the hood. However, the tires hadn’t blown and the motor still worked, so he kept going.

There were so many of them on the streets, though. Block after block he saw the infected staggering toward the sound of his engine. He did not see a single living person. Not one. That tore at his heart. This thing was spreading so fast. Even with the rain. It was far worse even than Volker had suggested, and he prayed that the National Guard barricades would hold. That thought felt weird in his head. On one hand he hated the soldiers for what they were doing, and on the other hand he was glad they were there.

He had his doubts, though, about whether the soldiers could adequately monitor and defend the perimeter of the entire town. After all, he had been able to sneak into Stebbins without detection. That thought conjured a flicker of horrific memory—Marcia sliding inch by inch beneath the Explorer’s wheels.

God.

He was almost to the center of town when he heard more gunfire. Trout slammed on the brakes and the SUV skidded forty feet into a sideways stop. He cranked down the window and stared at the scene unfolding before him in the big parking lot around Wolverton Hospital. A mass of about a hundred of the infected, most of them wearing lab coats, surgical scrubs, and pajamas, was lumbering its way toward a pair of National Guard Humvees. Soldiers stood atop each vehicle, alien in their white hazmat suits, and fired pedestal-mounted machine guns at the crowd. Trout didn’t know models or calibers of machine guns, but these brutes were tearing the front rank of the crowd to pieces. Literally to pieces. Arms and hands and heads flew into the rain and were sent flying by the gusting wind. The mass of the dead never paused though. Their bodies soaked up the bullets, and the ones that didn’t fall kept moving, kept reaching.

A figure came staggering out of a side street. He was heavily tattooed and dressed in the uniform of a corrections officer. Trout knew him. Michael McGrath, the sergeant in charge of the county lockup. McGrath staggered jerkily toward the soldiers, a pistol in one hand and the other raised. He called out to them in a voice that was completely human, and with horror Trout knew what was about to happen. He’d once done a story on this man. McGrath always walked like that. He had spastic cerebral palsy and yet was able to maintain his job as a tough corrections officer.

The soldiers did not know this. They turned and saw another shambling, twitching figure coming toward them. Trout tried to yell a warning, but his cry was drowned out by bursts of gunfire. McGrath’s body shuttered and danced as the bullets tore into him. His pistol felt from his hand and his face drained of expression. He took a single, final step, and then fell.