Her words disintegrated into sobs and Dez sagged to her knees. She shook her head as the moans floated toward her through the rain.
“I can’t,” she blubbered as tears and snot mixed with rainwater on her face. “I can’t do this…” Not with JT gone. Probably Billy, too, the bastard. And the chief, and Flower … and everyone. All gone. How the fuck was she supposed to go on without any of them still left?
She let the shotgun fall to the asphalt as she collapsed forward onto her palms, head hanging down between her heaving shoulders. Voices—a thousand variations on her own voice—spoke inside her head. Telling her to get up. Telling her to give up. Telling her to just let go. Telling her that it was okay, that she didn’t have to be afraid anymore. Telling her that this was all just a dream. A dream and Daddy will come and tuck her in and kiss her good night and make everything better. Nothing but a dream. Only that.
The moans changed into a hummed lullaby. A dozen voices humming in her daddy’s voice.
No matter what happens, pumpkin, I’ll always come back for you.
Come back for you.
She looked up, her eyes wide and desperate as if she expected to see her father come lurching out of the rain, his body twisted and torn by the explosion that had killed him. Daddy, coming for her. To take her. To consume her, the way these monsters wanted to consume her.
“PLEASE!” she screamed.
The moans were louder now. Dez closed her eyes. If it hurts, so what? It won’t hurt for long.
It won’t hurt for long. And then …
And then what?
The voices muttered and yelled and whispered, but none of them had an answer.
And then what?
Death? Sure … that was certain.
And then what?
Dez heard a sound. A soft scuff, and she raised her head an inch, opening her eyes to a squint as if afraid of a bright light. Raindrops swung pendulously from her eyelashes.
She saw a foot. Small, with a bright red sneaker. White tights.
Dez looked up. White tights and a plaid skirt and above that…? Blood.
The face that came out of the rain could have been her own, years and years ago. Big blue eyes, corn yellow hair. Round cheeks. A pretty little girl.
A …
… little …
..…… girl …
The little girl reached out her hands, a soft and plaintive gesture. A child wanting warmth, craving the safety of strong arms to hold her and keep her safe from the boogeyman.
The little girl could have been her.
Only it wasn’t.
“Please…” whispered the little girl.
That’s what Dez’s mind tried to tell her, that’s the lie her inner need created. Please. But it was a lie, and Dez knew it. Some fragment of her still understood that much. The voices in her head yelled the lie, but some deeper part of Dez was whispering back. No.
The little girl had not spoken at all.
She could not.
All she could do was moan. An empty plea to satisfy a hunger that was vast and endless. Dez looked into the little girl’s eyes. She had seen the eyes of the other ghouls. Chief Goss … others. In their eyes all she had seen was nothing. But here, for a fragment of a moment, Dez thought that she caught the flicker of something else; it was as if she looked through the grimy glass of a haunted house and saw the pale, pleading face of a ghost. In the second before the thing lunged at her, Dez saw the shadow of the little girl screaming at her from the endless darkness.
It was the single most terrible moment of her entire life. Worse than the lingering death of her mother as cancer carved her down to a skeletal parody of who she had been. Worse than the imagined ghost of her father come shambling into her bedroom months after he had been buried in a sealed coffin. Worse than all the intervening years of drinking to shut down her mind and fucking to try to feel something. Worse than all of the things that had happened today.
The screaming face of the little girl, trapped inside the mindless thing that had been her, was worse than anything. Worse even than all the voices screaming inside Desdemona Fox’s head.
So, Dez screamed, too.
And with a movement as fluid and fast as if she had been practicing her whole life for this single moment, Dez drew her Glock and pointed and fired straight and true and blew out the lights in the haunted house. The little girl pitched backward and fell onto the asphalt. Dez crawled over to her and looked down into the dark eyes. She bent close, staring, staring. All that she saw, however, was her own pale reflection in the black pupils and fading blue irises. The ghost was gone.
The screams in Dez’s head … stopped. Just like that. Blown to silence by the blast of her gun. Falling empty on the ground like spent brass.
Dez Fox raised her head. There were other moans in the storm, coming closer. Slow shapes with dark bodies and pale faces were emerging from the shadows of the downpour. Dez lingered for one moment longer, looking at the victim of the small murder she had committed. However, Dez offered no apology. This was not her crime.
She had saved this little girl.
She turned toward the side road. Her trailer was less than a mile away now. Go there. Get the guns. Get Rempel’s truck. Then get over to the elementary school. The Stebbins Little School at the end of Schoolhouse Lane. A gym for peewee league basketball. An assembly hall for meetings and Christmas pageants. And a basement designated as a shelter for all civil emergencies and natural disasters.
A safe haven … or a well-stocked larder, depending on who was in charge.
All the children of Stebbins County. All of the little boys and little girls.
Needing help.
Needing her help.
The ghouls were going to slaughter them all. And if not the ghouls, then the National Guard. Teeth or bullets or a fucking fuel-air bomb. Either way, no one was left to protect them. Everyone else had run away or died.
Except Dez.
“No,” she said to the storm and the moans and to her own pain. “No!”
Dez holstered her pistol and ran.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO
STEBBINS COUNTY LINE
As soon as he rounded the bend, Billy Trout cut sharply off the road and crashed through a screen of brush onto a deer path that snaked between two farms. The brush closed behind him, and if some of the bracken was crushed and twisted, Trout figured that anyone would blame it on the storm. There were trees falling, who cared about some brush?
Branches and shrubs scratched along the sides of the Explorer, and mud splashed as high as the windows as he bumped and thumped over ruts and roots.
This path wound around the Miller and Rubino farms and then crossed a paved road that would take him right into the back of the Regional Satellite News parking lot. With any luck the whole staff would be there, reporting the storm and manning the journalistic bastions. They’d help him get word out to whatever cops were left in town and definitely to the authorities. Some public appeal might coax the feds into considering other choices.
Of course, getting the word out would put his neck on the federal chopping block. Prison was a real possibility, First Amendment notwithstanding. They could beat him to death with the Patriot Act, disappear him to some hellhole for a few decades, and call it “interests of national security.” It was no joke, and Trout wasn’t laughing.
“What the hell are you doing, Billy Trout?” he asked himself.
Even though the heater was only set for defrost, he was sweating badly and his mouth was as dry as old cloth. It wasn’t simply the threat of government retaliation for what he had planned. Things were much, much worse than that.
Trout was still in his thirties, but he’d seen his share of life’s awful moments as a reporter—first in Pittsburgh after college and then here in Stebbins. Nothing he’d seen, however, ever filled him with anything approaching the fear that was screaming in his head. He had always considered “terror” to be more of an abstract political concept rather than an actual state of human experience. That was before Volker and Lucifer 113. Now he was truly and completely terrified. He wanted to pull off the road, curl up in the back, and pull his coat over his head. Or drive to Pittsburgh and buy a ticket for the first flight out of the state. Maybe out of the country. For once that wasn’t a joke.
What if he ran into Homer Gibbon?
That thought made Trout want to scream.
It was one thing seeing that maniac in leg and waist chains in a courtroom or strapped to the execution table behind reinforced glass. It was something totally different thinking about meeting him out here. Meeting a Homer Gibbon who was free, insane, and infected. A Homer Gibbon who was a zombie.
Zombie.
The word was still so unreal.
Suddenly something broke from the foliage on his left and ran across the road. Trout stamped on the brakes and skidded through mud, fishtailing as he rocked to a stop.
He flicked on his brights and stared.
The lane was empty. Whatever it was had cut into the woods on the right.
And then the same shape moved back into the road, standing there in the glow of the lights, head swiveling in fear and panic.
A deer. Only a damn deer. On a deer path. Who’d have thought? Trout began to smile, but then he bent close to the windshield and took a closer look at the animal, and his smile bled away.
The deer was covered with open wounds that bled sluggishly in the rain.
Not bullet wounds.
Bites.
Clearly … bites.
The deer kept looking from one side of the road to the other, ignoring the car completely. It was a doe, maybe two or three years old. Lean and strong, but dying on its feet, its sides heaving with exertion or panic.
Trout put it all together. It wasn’t hard. Everything Volker had said was burning in his mind like words written in fire.
“No,” Trout said. “Come on … no.”
Then a figure stepped out of the woods and stopped in the middle of the road, ten feet from the hood of the Explorer, thirty feet from the doe. A woman. Raven black hair, pale skin. Ample curves in a velvet and lace dress and spiderweb pattern stockings. The heart-shaped face stared at him, ruby red lips parted in a soft “oh.” A Goth look. Heavyset but sexy.