Jimmy was twice the secretary’s size, but shock and the ferocity of the attack was crippling him. In a moment it would kill him, unless …
Elizabeth burst through the doors and into the newsroom.
She stopped, momentarily forgetting even the weird and absurd gavotte being performed in front of her. The newsroom was in shambles. Desks were overturned, papers thrown onto the floor. Computer monitors had been smashed and some still leaked smoke; and someone had splashed bright red paint everywhere.
Once more Elizabeth’s mind rewound that thought and edited it with new words. Not paint. Blood. Pints of it. Gallons. Walls, floor, and even some on the ceiling.
Bodies lay scattered around. The rest of the afternoon staff. The weatherman, Gino Torelli, was spread-eagled over a desk with his crotch and the inside of both thighs simply … gone. Torn away. Elizabeth could see torn muscles and white bone, but worse than that someone had rammed a letter opener into one of his eye sockets, angling it to drive all the way into his brain.
“Oh…,” murmured Elizabeth.
The other secretary, Wilma, was slumped in her chair as if she was trying to awaken from a terrible dream. There were others, too. Two reporters, an engineer, a copy editor, and a man dressed like a state trooper. The engineer was lying face down on the floor; the others knelt around him like picnickers, pulling red pieces out of him.
Elizabeth uttered a single, sharp, high yelp. A sound with no meaning beyond an expression of horror so profound that adjectives for it did not exist.
Their white faces turned toward the sound; toward her.
Jimmy, still wrestling with Connie, yelled, “They’ve all gone crazy! Get out!”
She almost did. She almost turned and ran right then.
But Elizabeth liked Jimmy. A whole lot. She’d been waiting for a decent guy like him for years. And, irrational as it may have been, she felt her disgust and horror suddenly drain away to be replaced with a towering indignation. She did not know what kind of madness was unfurling around her, but she was goddamn well not going to let anyone take Jimmy away from her.
With a growl that was as inarticulate as her yelp but filled with much greater purpose, Elizabeth strode over to the wrangling couple, grabbed Connie by the back of the hair and yanked her away from Jimmy with such ferocity that Connie’s feet momentarily left the ground. The smaller woman lost her grip on Jimmy and landed with her heels in a puddle of blood. Possibly her own blood. Elizabeth didn’t care. She spun Connie around and belted her across the face with every ounce of strength she possessed.
Connie’s head whipped to one side and she staggered several steps away.
The things that were crouched around the engineer dropped the pieces of meat they held and began to get to their feet.
Which is when Elizabeth’s brief rage slammed into the wall of reality.
“Oh … fuck,” she said.
“W—what the hell’s going on?” demanded Jimmy. His eyes were glazed and, sweetheart though he might be, he was clearly not capable of handling this.
“Get out, Jimmy!” Elizabeth bellowed. “Run!”
He stared at her, clearly unwilling to leave her, but then the state trooper spat a mouthful of black mucus at Jimmy, who backpedaled to avoid it. His body, once in motion, apparently wanted to keep moving, and he turned and crashed through the saloon doors and then out through the vestibule and into the rain. The monsters—Elizabeth couldn’t think of any better word for them—began to lumber after him, drawn by the sound and movement of his departure.
“No fucking way!” snarled Elizabeth. She hooked a foot around the leg of a wheeled chair and kicked it into their path. The state trooper fell over it, and the others fell over him. Elizabeth laughed by reflex even though the moment possessed not one ounce of comedy. Even to her own ears her short laugh had an hysterical note.
Connie turned toward her. Her lips writhed back from cracked white teeth.
“Shit,” said Elizabeth, and then she was running. Not after Jimmy. She had the presence of mind to go another way, to give him a chance. Instead she shoved Connie out of the way and ran between her and the other monsters, barreled down the corridor past the editing rooms, and hit the crash bar on the back door with both hands.
She ran into the rain and darkness. Behind her she heard the crash bar strike again and again as the monsters followed her outside. Elizabeth was not a fast runner and the monsters seemed awkward and slow, but every time she looked back … they were closer. She realized with even greater horror that a few of them could move fast. Not as fast as Jimmy but faster than her.
I’m going to die! Jesus God, I’m going to die.
As she ran, she knew with completely certainty, that she was right about that.
But it wasn’t the dead who killed her.
She cut across the parking lot and out into the street and never saw the National Guard troop truck that came bucketing down Main Street.
“What the hell was that?” yelped Corporal Nick Wyckoff as he fought to control the troop truck after the impact.
Sergeant Teddy Polk was in the passenger seat. He cranked down the window and craned his head to look down the road. “Nice one, Nick. You got one of those fuckers.”
His voice was cocky, but his eyes were filled with terror.
Wyckoff licked his lips. “Are you sure? You sure it was one of the infected?”
“Has to be,” said Polk. Despite the cold, he was sweating inside the hazmat hood. “You heard what the captain told us. Everyone in this damn town is already dead.”
“Dead,” echoed Wyckoff. He crossed himself and touched the medal of Mary beneath his clothes.
The truck raced along a side road, kicking up plumes of mud behind it.
A figure suddenly appeared in the headlights, running along the shoulder of the road.
“Christ, there’s another one,” said Wyckoff. In the pale glow of the dashboard the sergeant looked ten years old.
“Get her,” urged Polk.
“Are you nuts?”
“Hey—the captain said that we can’t let any of them out of here—”
“I know, Teddy, but she’s just a—”
“Run her the fuck down, Nick!”
However, when the driver swerved to clip the figure, it was gone, vanished into the woods beside the road.
Wyckoff did not stop. He kicked down on the gas and headed toward the center of town.
As the truck’s taillights dwindled into the distance, the figure stepped out of the woods. She was panting, drenched, bedraggled, and furious. She held her Glock in a two-handed grip and her lips were curled back from gritted teeth.
“Fuckers,” growled Dez Fox. Then she lowered her gun, asking herself if she would have fired on them if they’d stopped and gotten out of the truck. Could she have drawn down on soldiers who were out here doing their jobs? Even if that job was the systematic extermination of everyone in town?
Could Dez even be sure that she didn’t have the plague? She wasn’t sick, but she knew that people could carry diseases that didn’t make them sick. Typhoid Mary.
She touched the walkie-talkie in her jacket pocket. If she called them and tried to explain things to them … would they even listen?
At some point she was going to have to find out.
She checked the road for more vehicles, but there was nothing.
Dez holstered her pistol and kept running. She was almost there.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR
REGIONAL SATELLITE NEWS
Billy Trout sat in his Explorer and watched most of the people he knew and worked with at RSN close in around the office gopher, Jimmy, and drag him kicking and screaming into the shelter of a parked news van. Trout almost got out of the car to try to help, but as he reached for the door handle he could see that Jimmy was already pretty far gone. The actual killing was over quickly. So quickly that it left Trout breathless.
They grabbed Jimmy from all sides. The weatherman, Gino, had his teeth buried in Jimmy’s cheek. Wilma had both arms wrapped around Jimmy’s waist and was tearing at his thigh with bloody teeth. The young man’s screams were as high and shrill as a girl’s.
There wasn’t a goddamn thing Trout could do about it, and, as he watched, the scene collapsed down into a feeding frenzy more savage than a pack of hyenas around a downed zebra. Trout reeled back from the sight, squeezing his eyes shut and wincing as if he could feel the pain of those bites. How had it spread so far so fast? His mind kept replaying the image of Marcia falling slowly under the wheels of his Explorer.
Come on, you idiot, growled his inner voice, you’re wasting time.
He opened his eyes and studied the building. From where he was parked he could see in through the open front door, through the glass vestibule, and into the reception area. There was no movement inside.
Trout licked his lips. Volker’s pistol was a cold weight on his thigh, and Trout touched it with trembling fingers. He expected the solidity of it to comfort him, but it did not. To kill these things—to really kill them—Volker said that you had to destroy the motor cortex or the brain stem. Trout didn’t like his chances with a head shot. He’d be lucky to hit the body let alone a target as small as the motor cortex. Not unless he was almost face-to-face with them, and that thought was unbearable.
He got out of the car very carefully. The zombies did not look up from their meal. None of them appeared to notice the dome light come on in the Explorer. The rain was still an effective screen. Even so, every sloshing footfall, every ragged breath seemed insanely loud to him as he crept from the side of his car to the side of the building. It felt so strange to carry a gun and, despite everything, Trout felt vaguely foolish, like a kid playing cops and robbers.
He paused at the entrance, looked inside and looked back, and cursed himself. That quick look into the lighted building spoiled his night vision. Taking the pistol in both hands, Trout sidled in through the vestibule and hip-checked the door so that it swung shut.
The reception area was empty, and he cautiously crept into the newsroom. Trout bit down on a cry of horror. The station engineer, a gray-haired man named Jock Spooner, lay on the floor. The dead had been at him. The man was like a scarecrow with all the stuffing removed. His arms and legs were spread like a starfish and were strangely intact … but the rest of him—chest, stomach, organs, and meat—had been torn away. And eaten. Trout was sure of that.