The principal nodded, and JT led Dez out into the hallway. They listened at the open stairwell but heard nothing. “Let’s try the top floor,” said JT. “It needs to be checked anyway.”

Dez looked up at him. “You be careful, Hoss. No heroics.”

He snorted. “I’m fresh out of heroics, girl.”

They smiled at one another and were about to enter the stairwell when Trout came running out of the auditorium.

“Hey! Dez!”

She wheeled on him. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

“With you. But I need a gun.”

“Not a chance, Billy. Stay here with the kids. I don’t trust you.”

“What? How the hell can you say—”

“With a gun, dumb-ass. You don’t know how to shoot, remember? Go find a baseball bat or something and stay the hell in there.”

“Dez, I—”

She got up in his face, and though her mouth was hard, her eyes were pleading. “Billy … stay with the kids. Please.”

“Ah … fuck,” he said, but he nodded. “Okay, Dez.”

There was a brief look of relief in her eyes as she turned away and hurried down the hall with JT. For just a moment, and despite all of his conscious reasoning to the contrary, it felt to Trout that Dez was not running off to a fight, but that she was running away from him. It made no sense, but it opened a little door of insight in his head.

He turned away and Dez watched as the auditorium doors closed behind him.

Dez watched him go and she had to smile. At his willingness to help. At the courage he’d shown in coming back to town. At his ass. He had a great ass, she decided. She sighed and turned away, aware that the members of her “team” were watching her.

JT murmured, “I thought you were done with that boy.”

“I am.”

“Doesn’t look like it to me.”

“Yeah, well I thought you didn’t walk with a limp,” Dez said.

“I don’t.”

She got up in his face. “Want that to change?”

“Um … no, I don’t.”

Dez nodded. “All right then, end of discussion.”

If JT planned to say more it was cut short by a piercing scream of terrible pain that floated on the sluggish air from the darkened stairwell.

CHAPTER NINETY-FIVE

OLD FAIRBANKS ROAD

NEAR BORDENTOWN

Homer Gibbon heard the sound before he saw them. It was a big, deep, bass sound that filtered through the rain and the radio and the sound of his wipers. The throp-throp-throp of helicopter rotors. He pulled to the side of the road, rolled down his window, and leaned out to look.

They came over the treeline like a flight of giant insects from some old monster movie. Homer had never been in the military, but he knew everything related to war. From movies, from books and magazines, from endless jailhouse conversations. These were Apache Longbows, and he was pretty sure they were outfitted with 30mm chain guns, Hellfire, Hydra, Stinger, and Sidewinder missiles. At least that’s what he remembered.

Homer smiled.

Nice.

He turned up the radio. Jason Aldean was singing “My Kinda Party.”

“Yes, sirree,” he said to the radio. Homer put the car back into drive and kept going.

CHAPTER NINETY-SIX

THE WHITE HOUSE SITUATION ROOM

“We have another video from Billy Trout,” said Scott Blair.

The president swiveled his chair to face the monitors. “Let me see it.”

Blair hesitated. “Sir, this is pretty delicate stuff. This is going to be a political nightmare.”

“Run it,” said the president firmly.

The YouTube video played. It showed the same female officer standing in a hallway filled with corpses of the infected.

“She obtained a walkie-talkie from a National Guardsman that she attacked.”

“Did she kill him?”

“No-o-o,” Blair said, dragging it out. “Three soldiers required medical treatment and she wrecked their Humvee.”

The president shushed him as the audio played. They sat and watched the one-sided conversation Dez Fox had with Lieutenant Colonel Macklin Dietrich.

Colonel Dietrich, you are incorrect, sir, when you say that we are unaware of the nature of this event. We are very goddamn aware. And we are asking how you intend to help.

There’s nothing we can do. If you’re in the thick of this then you should be able to comprehend that.

I comprehend some of it, Colonel. What I don’t comprehend is why you’re not even trying to rescue or protect the uninfected. This isn’t an airborne disease. It’s spread through spit or a bite or some other fluid contact.

Blair leaned closed. “This is the crucial bit.”

I’m asking you—telling you—to get in touch with your boss and tell him to get in touch with his, as far up the line as you have to go. Tell them that we know who let this monster off the chain and who’s responsible for killing an entire town … and who now wants to try and cover it all up by pretending that the surviving witnesses are infected just so you can slaughter us all. You tell them that.

There was a few seconds more silence as Fox waited for a reply that was not going to come. Then she looked straight into the camera and said:

They’re going to let us die here. God … they’re going to murder all these kids.

Tears broke and rolled down her cheeks, and the tape ended.

Blair flapped his arms. “This was just posted and it’s already burning up the Internet. It’s everywhere. It’s on CNN and FOX and everywhere.”

“God…”

“And I take it you heard that one line?”

“About her knowing who let the monster off the chain? Yes. Do you think they know about Lucifer 113?”

“I … don’t know, sir. I can’t see how they could know.”

An aide came hurrying into the room. “Excuse me, Mr. President … the helos have crossed into Stebbins airspace.”

CHAPTER NINETY-SEVEN

STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL

They went up the stairs. Dez first, with her Glock held in both hands; JT was right behind her with a Mossberg 500 Bullpup with dual pistol grips, including one on the pump. Eight steps from the top they paused to listen.

“Oh, god! Help … oh, Christ…”

“That’s Lucas,” said JT. They took the last steps two at a time, swiveling their weapons around at each corner, expecting white faces to come lunging out of the shadows. They saw the blood first.

A footprint perfectly outlined in red. A heavy shoe, a Timberland or a good knockoff. Dez pointed with her Glock.

“I see it,” JT said quietly as they moved up the steps.

“… please … God…” Lucas Chestnut’s voice was faint, depleted. Dez already knew that they weren’t hurrying up the steps to save him. He sounded hurt, and the day they’d lived through had taught them that “hurt” was a death sentence. No matter how small a bite, it was as good as a bullet to the heart.

They rounded the last turn in the stairwell and found another footprint.

And a foot.

The shoe, ankle, and part of the shin stood on the top step. The rest of their owner was twenty feet down the hall, crawling along, inch by inch, toward a man who sat with his back to the door of the English room. A bloody fire ax lay across the man’s thigh, and his body was covered with bites. Dozens of them.

Two other figures crouched on either side of him. One held Lucas Chestnut’s arm in both of her hands, and as Dez watched she bent and sank her teeth into the flabby flesh on the inside of the teacher’s elbow. The other person, a teenage boy, knelt and worked at Chestnut’s abdomen, biting and tearing to get through the tough abdominal wall. The zombie with the missing leg crawled inexorably forward, moaning piteously at the meal it longed to share.

Chestnut was too weak to scream. He sobbed and shook his head over back and forth in a permanent denial of what was happening. Then, as Dez and JT stepped out of the stairwell, Chestnut turned his streaming eyes toward them.

“Please…” he begged weakly. “For the love of God … please stop this…”

Not stop them. Stop this.

Dez heard JT inhale with a hiss.

“Steady on, Hoss,” she said softly and stepped past him. The maimed zombie heard her first and he turned and snarled. Black saliva dripped from his lips. Dez recognized him as one of the janitors. Roger somethingorother.

She raised the Glock and fired. The bullet caught Roger in the temple and the force blew one of his eyes out of the socket. He collapsed forward, the bones of his face crunching onto the hard floor. Behind her, Dez heard JT gag.

Dez did not look. She shifted the barrel of the Glock to the teenage boy.

Bang.

Then the woman, a stranger.

Bang.

Lucas Chestnut raised his eyes to her. Blood bubbled from between his lips.

“Please…” he begged.

Bang.

Dez lowered the gun and closed her eyes.

Behind her a door creaked and she whirled just as JT bellowed in surprise, his cry mingling with moans as the dead poured out into the hall. Five of them. No, more. Eight or nine!

“JT, look out!”

JT went down under a pile of them and the impact made him jerk his finger on the trigger. The blast hit one of the dead above the elbow and blew away her arm. She did not even pause as she flung herself at JT.

Dez fired three fast shots at the infected who were still standing, killing two and sending one staggering backward toward the top of the stairs. The creature fell and went tumbling and crashing down out of sight.

Under the pile, JT pivoted his big shoulders and smashed the shotgun across a zombie’s face, knocking the creature off of him. The dead man fell with a swatch of JT’s shirt between its teeth. Another of the dead immediately lunged into the opening and then Dez was there, kicking at them, slamming the steel toe of her shoe into the temple of one, stamping her heel down on another’s spine, using her free hand to grab one by the belt and pull him back. When that zombie hissed and turned toward her, she pistol-whipped his mouth away from her and then shot him through the ear. JT rammed the barrel of his shotgun under the chin of the closest infected and pulled the trigger, blowing the thing’s scalp and brains all the way to the ceiling.