Fall of Night (Dead of Night Series) (23 page)

“No,” he admitted sheepishly.

“No,” she agreed. “It sounds like big trouble. So, go big picture for a minute. Pull back and look at it. If you’re General Zetter and things are going to shit, do you give a crap about, as I said, inconvenient people trapped in a school, or do you go fight the fight?”

“You go fight the fight.”

“Right, now look at it from where we stand. Sure, we have a secure building and, yes, I think we could hold it against a million of those things.”

“Exactly.”

“Until we run out of bullets and bread. Until there’s no more gas for the generator, no more fresh water, and no more cans of Spam. Tell me, Billy, what happens then? And before you say something stupid like ‘but they’ll come for us by then,’ take a moment and think about how long people waited after Katrina. Weeks, in some cases. And that was without a bunch of dead sonsabitches trying to eat everyone.”

Trout used her words as a lens to stare into the future, and the things he saw were ugly and wrong.

“Jesus,” he murmured.

“We’ve got our window. No one’s watching us and, for the moment, no living dead assholes are trying to bite us. I say we load all our supplies and all of us into those buses. We have more than enough of them. We load up and we get the hell out of Dodge.”

“And go where?”

She shrugged. “Pittsburgh’s nice this time of year. So’s Harrisburg. So’s Philly.” Then she paused. “Actually, if things are really hitting the fan, there’s Sapphire Distributors in Fayette.”

“What’s that?”

Dez smiled. “A food distribution warehouse. Big-ass brick building. No windows on the ground floor, truck bays where we can backup the buses, its own generator with probably a lot more fuel than we have here, plus enough food to replenish a dozen full supermarkets. We could survive there for months.”

“How do you know about it?”

Dez’s eyes slid away for a moment and she focused on packing the bag.

“Dez—?”

“I, um, dated a guy who works there. Head of security.”

“Who? Do I know him?”

“Maybe.”

“Who, Dez?”

“It doesn’t matter, damn it.”

Trout sighed. “What makes you think your
boyfriend
would even let you in?”

Dez colored.

“Dez?”

“He’s, um … still sweet on me.”

“Jesus H. Christ in a clown car.”

Dez glared at him. “Give me a better idea, then.”

Trout picked up a box of bullets, looked at the label without reading it, and shoved it into the bag.

“Is anything with you ever simple?” he muttered. “I mean
ever
?”

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

ROUTE 653

BORDENTOWN, PENNSYLVANIA

Patrick Freivald knew that he was crazy to be out on a motorcycle in the middle of one of the worst storms in Pennsylvania history. Crazy and maybe a little suicidal. The problem was that his car—his nice, warm, dry car—was parked outside of his nice, warm, dry house way the hell up in the Finger Lakes region, on the far side of Canandaigua Lake, and that was a hell of a lot of miles from here.

He’d hit the road after a very good but very long couple of days bartering and dealing at Monster Madness, a small pop culture convention in Friendsville, Maryland. Patrick had traded some old Aurora monster model kits, including an absolutely pristine
Forgotten Prisoner
for some newer stuff, including the Vampirella, which was a new limited edition based on a Frank Frazetta painting. He’d made enough profit off the Aurora model to stock up on a bunch of lower-end but still cool PVC statues of classic Universal monsters. All of that was in UPS boxes on their way home, and like a lot of the conventioneers, he’d waited out the storm yesterday and hit the road when they said the worst of it was over.

The weatherman was dead wrong.

Big surprise.

He’d barely hit the Pennsylvania state line before the rains started again. Not the sluggish end-of-the-storm showers, but a real downpour. So bad a lot of cars were pulling off the road. Good for them, they could sit there and listen to Howard Stern on Sirius and stay dry. Can’t do that on a hog.

Outrunning the storm wasn’t going to happen, Patrick could tell that much without having to listen to the news. There was lightning so thick and frequent it looked like a neon forest stretched all the way to the horizon. To every horizon. Going back was for shit, too.

His only real option was to motor through until he hit the first town with a cheap motel. With a storm like this even a roach motel would be good. If it got any heavier, a barn out here in the sticks would be just fine.

Patrick wasn’t crazy enough to listen to an iPad while driving his bike, but he didn’t need the weatherman to tell him there was a storm. Everyone knew about Superstorm Zelda, Sandy’s country cousin. As the miles fell away, though, he began wishing he could hear a traffic report. Ahead of him he could see the double rows of red taillights thickening from a sparse few into tightly packed lines that vanished into the distant rainy darkness. Road speed, already down to forty because of the rain, was slowing more and more until he was barely making enough headway to balance his bike.

“Shit,” he muttered as the line of cars finally ground to a complete stop. Right out in the big dark, smack dab in the middle of nowhere. The last sign he remembered seeing was for a twenty-four-hour Starbucks in someplace called Bordentown. He’d never heard of the town, and at that moment didn’t give a crap if it was a nice tourist spot or not. A coffee shop open all night was like a gift from God.

He roll-walked his Italian motorcycle out of his lane and saw that the shoulder was clear ahead. He gunned the bike and began moving again. The winds tried to knock him sideways into the line of stalled cars, but Patrick leaned forward to cut the resistance and kept moving. He cut quick looks at the people in the cars. Some of them ignored him, some flipped him off for doing what they hadn’t yet dared.

The first thing that troubled Patrick was the sudden sound of a helicopter overhead. With the helmet and the roar of the Moto Guzzi’s burly engine he couldn’t hear most sounds, but this was a roar, and he risked a look up as a big damn chopper flew right above him. It was huge, one of those bulky military machines, with stubby wings laden with what looked like missiles.

Missiles?

He was so surprised that he almost rear-ended a Civic that cut onto the shoulder right in front of him. The chopper moved slowly above him, heading farther up the road. The rotor wash took the rain and wind and churned them into a fresh and more intense miniature storm. Patrick had to really fight to keep from having those winds knock him down.

The second thing that bothered Patrick was how low the chopper was flying. It could not have been more than a hundred feet above the tops of the cars. Patrick had never even seen a news helicopter fly that low, especially in winds like this.

That’s when Patrick saw beams of light sweeping down from the storm clouds. Massive, bright searchlights. Intensely bright, but for a moment they did not appear to belong to anything. It was like a scene from that old movie
Close Encounters
, and for a brief, irrational moment Patrick thought that’s what he was seeing. UFOs. Aliens.

Then the helicopter above him switched on its light, and Patrick understood.

The stormy sky was filled with helicopters.

No.

That wasn’t exactly right.

The sky was filled with
military
helicopters.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

ROUTE 653

BORDENTOWN, PENNSYLVANIA

Goat Weinman was pretty sure he was dead.

So why was he moving?

He tried to open his eyes but either the world was totally without light or he was blind.

Am I dead
? He wondered.

Panic detonated in his mind as everything Volker had said about the Lucifer pathogen came sweeping back. When a person is infected, the physical body dies but the mind, the consciousness, lingers, trapped inside hijacked flesh, floating, observing, able to see and feel, connected to every nerve ending but totally unable to do anything.

Trapped.

Was that what was happening?

Was his body now a … a …

“Oh, God!” he cried out. “I’m one of them … please, God, no don’t—”

Then a voice said, “Wake the fuck up.”

That was immediately followed by a hard slap across his face and Goat felt himself reeling and then slamming into some hard. Metal. He began to fall and thrust his hands out to stop himself.

He.

Thrust.

His
.

Hands.

He
did it. Not some parasitic impulse over which he had no control.

Goat grabbed on to what had to be the fender of a car and he crouched there, sore, his face stinging, terror and doubt screaming at each other in his head. He could feel his hands on the wet metal of the car. He flexed his fingers and they obeyed.

He wasn’t dead. He wasn’t one of them.

Then he felt the wetness on his face. Not the rain. Something heavier, thicker. On his forehead. In his …

Eyes.

Suddenly he was pawing at his eyes and immediately there was faint light. Bad light, but there. He wasn’t blind after all. Not blind or dead. There was something in his eyes. He tilted his face to the rain and rubbed at his eyes until he could see. There was something black on his fingers.

Until the lighting flashed and then he saw that his black fingers were red.

Slick, glistening red.

It was blood. His eyes had been pasted shut with dried blood that was now washing away in the rain. And there in front of him, crumpled against a tree, was the ruin of a metallic green Nissan Cube.

And that’s when it all came back to him. Homer. Starbucks. The accident.

He turned sharply to see Homer Gibbon standing behind him. The killer stood there in the howling wind and pouring rain, bare-chested, wide-legged, with a monstrous grin of red delight on his face as the lightning burned the sky behind him.

“Don’t you go die on me,” he said with a wicked chuckle. “Not until I want you to.”

Traffic splashed by on both sides of the median, but the Cube was almost invisible in the copse of trees into which it had plowed. Goat looked at the car. It was totaled. Smoke curled up from the wheel wells and one tire had exploded.

“Never liked that faggoty little piece of shit,” grumbled Homer. “Now we need to shop for something better.” He pointed a finger at Goat. “Stay.”

He said it the way people do to dogs. Homer chuckled to himself and began walking toward the highway.

Goat stayed.

Then Goat realized that for some reason the traffic was completely stalled over there. Cars and trucks sat bumper to bumper under the pounding rain. The line stretched all the way to the west, far out of sight. On the other side of the road there was nothing. He tried to make sense of it, but his head was too sore and none of his thoughts worked the way they should.

You have a concussion,
he told himself, but he couldn’t remember hitting his head. Could an airbag concuss a person? He thought he should know the answer to that, but couldn’t find it in the messy closets of his brain.

Homer was almost to the line of stalled cars now.

Run, jackass!

Goat tried to run. He had that much pride, that much clarity of thought left. But when he took his first step toward the opposite side of the highway, his left leg buckled and he went down hard into the mud. Like an old tape player slowly catching up to speed, Goat’s mind replayed the events of the crash. He remembered seeing the tree suddenly filling the view beyond the windshield, and then the windshield itself bursting inward in ten thousands pieces of gummed safety glass. He remembered the white balloon of the airbag and the numb shock as the dashboard seemed to reach in toward his knees, hitting one, missing the other.

Then blood and darkness and nothing.

He propped himself up on his elbows, spitting bloody water and mud from his mouth. How long had he been unconscious in the car? Long enough for the blood to dry to dense mud in his eyes.

For a moment—just a moment—Goat wished that the crash had been a little harder. Or that the blocky little Cube had been built with less care for the safety of its passengers.

It is a weird and dreadful thing to realize that death was far more desirable than being alive. Goat had never suffered through depression, never rode the Prozac and lithium highway. Never held a razor next to his wrists and wondered if the pain of the cut was worse than the pain of the next hour or next day. Never looked into the future and saw a world where he was absent. He was in love with life. With living it. With women and sex. With film and the complexities of filmmaking. With the tides and currents of social media. With being him.

But now …

Behind him he heard Homer calling out to the people in the cars.

“L’il help! L’il help now.”

Goat thought he heard a car door open. Then a man’s voice asked if Homer was hurt, if everyone was okay.

And then screams.

Such high, shrill, awful screams.

Goat closed his eyes and stared into the future and prayed, begged, pleaded for him not to be any part of what was happening or what was to come.

Like all of his prayers over the last twenty-four hours, it went unanswered.

And then suddenly the sky seemed to open and against all sanity and logic the morning sun rose in the middle of the night. Goat gaped at it, at the gorgeous, impossibly huge burning eye of morning.

“Oh … my … God…” he breathed and despite all of his lifelong agnosticism and cynical disapproval of organized religion, he believed that he beheld the fiery glory of a god revealing himself to His people at the moment of their greatest need.

He began to cry. He covered his head with his hands and wept, apologizing for everything he had ever done wrong, promising—swearing—that he would be a better man, that he would hone the grace of this moment. A part of his bruised mind could hear the shrill, hysterical note in his voice, but he didn’t care.