Fall of Night (Dead of Night Series) (32 page)

Rain hammered down on the machine. The bucket was half-filled with dirt from the trench in which he lay, and water filled the rest of the steel cup. It spilled over and ran down the sides, dripping onto him, touching him with cold fingertips. Rainwater had filled the pit nearly to the top and the cold was like a thousand knives stabbing over and over again into his flesh. He could barely feel his feet and his fingers felt like they were each being crushed in a vise. Cold was a beast that crouched over him, wrapped around him, bit like a vampire into him and sucked away his warmth.

Jake was afraid to crawl out of the dirty pit of cold water.

He had no idea what time it was. His cell phone was in his pocket and his pocket was under water. The only other clocks were the one in the office—a small travel-trailer parked at the edge of the construction site that might as well have been on the dark side of the moon—and the steel diver’s watch strapped to the forearm of Burl Hansard, the shift foreman.

Burl lay thirty feet away.

What was left of him.

His body was mostly hidden by mud and the front wheel of Burl’s Expedition. All Jake could see was half of Burl’s face, his shoulder, and his right arm.

Or rather what was left of the supervisor’s right arm.

Two fingers and a thumb. Some meat on the wrist, part of the upper arm.

Tendons and bone. Visible now that the rain had washed away the blood.

That was it.

And the face.

He had no face at all. All Jake could see were the ends of broken bones and lumps of meat he could not and would not try to identify.

Jake lay there, shivering, staring at his dead friend.

Two hours ago that ruined face had worn a smile. Two hours ago a soggy cigar had been clamped between strong white teeth, and a grin curled the lips. Burl had been that kind of a guy. You couldn’t depress the sonofabitch. No matter how bad things were, he could find something to crack a joke about. He’d always get people to laugh at funerals, even the family members. He killed them when he gave a toast at the union Christmas dinners. Tall, but nowhere near as tall as Jake’s six-eight, and built like a cannonball on bowed legs. A John Goodman kind of guy, bigger than life in every way. And smiling. Always smiling, no matter how bad the shit was coming down, or how late an emergency shift went, or how tough a job was. Always laughing.

Until three teenage girls came out of the woods and ate the smile off his face.

The thought—the memory—was so insanely vivid, playing in his head in HD with surround sound. All the colors, all the sounds.

They had been out here working the storm because the weather service said this was going to be a nut-buster. A hurricane, or whatever you call a storm like that this far inland. A supercell. Something like that. Torrential rains, hurricane-force winds, and an absolute guarantee of flash flood.

This was the storm, everyone said, that would finally break the levees.

Everyone always said that.

They were always wrong.

Until they were right.

Until today.

Jake and his crew were at it before the sun was even up yesterday morning and they kept at it all the way past midnight, working with bulldozers and front-end loaders, including his own big Caterpillar 950H. The one under which he lay. The crew were hard at it all damn day, pushing hundreds of tons of dirt into berms to reinforce the levees, cutting rain runoff lines, trying to help the town get ready for the storm. They needed five times as many men and machines on the job, but they used what they had. Did some good, too. The levees held north of the town proper, which is where everyone said the water would do the most damage. Jake and the guys saved maybe fifty, sixty farms from being flooded by dirty river water.

Below the town line, though, the National Guard was supposed to be doing the same job. And they had more equipment.

But then Magic Marti on the radio said that the levees had collapsed down there. Jake never got all the details, though. Not on that and not on whatever the Christ else was happening over there in Stebbins. Even with headphones on, between the rain and the engine roars, it was too loud to hear much of the news. And reception was for shit. He lost Magic Marti, whose radio show on WNOW came up from over the Maryland line, and when he had the chance, Jake tried to pick up the network news out of Pittsburgh. Got a little of it, but the news guy seemed to be losing his shit. Typical newspeople, he’d thought at the time. They go ass-wild whenever things get really bad, so instead of reporting the news they act like the news is all about them. Like Anderson Cooper standing in the fucking wind during Katrina. They shout a lot so you know they’re taking the big risk, but they don’t say much of anything people can use.

Like today.

Nobody seemed to know what in the blue hell was going on.

Certainly no one on the stations Jake listened to when he could get a signal. And no one he talked to. Lots of cars went by, but everyone was driving so fast you’d have thought the devil was after them.

Then those three girls came out of the woods.

Jake saw them and he was so startled that he almost ran his bucket through the berm he was building. He jerked to a stop to watch.

The girls came walking slowly out of the woods like there was no crisis, no storm, no goddamn ocean of water pounding down on them.

And damn if one of them wasn’t naked.

These were high school girls, or maybe college.

The one on the left wore jeans and a torn sweatshirt, the flaps of it hanging down to expose a blue sports bra and pale skin. The one on the right had a windbreaker on with the logo of some sports team Jake never heard of. Probably a school team. But the one in the middle was as naked as if she was taking a shower instead of walking through the woods where everyone could see her. She was thin, with tiny breasts and visible ribs.

Jake had two reactions.

The guy in him immediately checked out her body.

The man in him became instantly concerned. She was young, naked, vulnerable, and clearly out of her mind. Drugs? Something else?

All three of the girls had marks on them that looked like cuts, but the distance and the cleansing rain made the marks look blue and bloodless.

The girls came straight across a muddy field, negotiating the uneven terrain where heavy-equipment wheels had created an obstacle course of wheel ruts. One by one the other guys killed their engines. They all stared. A few of the men were smiling, and one clown whistled, but the sound was shrill and it died in the air. And these kids were clearly in trouble. That bullshit about construction crews sitting around whistling and acting like they had dicks instead of brains may be true sometimes, but nearly every man here had a family, kids.

Burl was the first guy to do more than sit there and gape.

“Yo!” he cried as he jumped down from the cab of his Cat D9. “Yo, kids … what the hell’s going on? You girls okay? What are you doing out here?”

He kept up a string of questions as he jogged heavily through the mud to intercept them. The girls paused for a moment—just a moment—as he drew close, and it seemed to Jake that in the cold and misty rain they’d been unaware of him until he spoke, until he moved.

He thought that then, and knew it now.

The girls all smiled at him, grinning to show white teeth. Then they broke into a run to meet Burl. Arms outstretched, like children running to the safety of their daddy’s arms.

Except that wasn’t what it was.

Of course it wasn’t.

Even with fractured logic, even if things weren’t what they were, that wouldn’t have been the way it was.

Maybe Burl knew it, too, Jake thought. Knew it a step too late, because as he got close to them his own pace faltered, and his voice trailed away, ending on a rising note of question.

The girls answered that question by leaping at him.

Driving him backward.

Driving him down to the ground.

Climbing all over Burl.

Bending toward him.

In a damaged guy’s fantasy world that would have been a
Penthouse
letters page three-on-one. But this was the real world and naked teenage girls didn’t walk out of the rain to bang a fat construction worker.

That’s not what they did.

For a moment, though, Jake didn’t understand what they were doing. From a distance it really did look like they were kissing him. His face, his throat. Their hands were all over him.

And then the screaming started.

So high.

Jake would never have guessed that a man as big as Burl could scream so loud, so high, so shrill. Like a whistle blowing at the end of a shift. A long, sustained blast that went on and on as the girls’ mouths bent to him over and over again.

Everyone started screaming then.

All four of the other guys—and Jake—screamed as they started running toward the tangle of white limbs that were now streaked with bright, bright red.

The first one there was Richie, another bulldozer jockey. He ran up like he was going to handle this shit right there, right then. But when he was twenty feet out his nothing-can-stop-me run slowed to a walk as he saw what was actually happening.

His screams went up a notch. From man yell to something younger, higher, and more frightened.

The three girls raised their heads and snarled at him.

Like lionesses around a zebra.

Jake was fifty yards back and he could see strings of meat caught between their teeth, swaying as they looked at Richie.

Then two of them came off the ground and rushed him. It was so unexpected.

Not really fast.

It was awkward and even a little slow.

But there was absolutely no hesitation. One moment they were looking at Richie and the next minute they were at him. Just like that.

Richie skidded to a stop and tried to backpedal, but the mud was too wet. He went down hard and the girls were on him. Once more the screams changed.

Changed into something raw and filled with denial.

The other guys were there. Hank and Tommy and Vic.

Jake was almost there. He’d been farthest away.

They grabbed the girls. Shoved them. Knocked them back.

The girls turned on them. Their faces were smeared with blood that was so thick the downpour couldn’t wash it off.

Everyone was wrestling, struggling.

It was crazy. All those big men. Three teenage girls, none of them bigger than one-ten. The blood.

All that blood.

Jake stepped down wrong and sank to mid-shin in watery mud. Pain detonated in his knee and for a terrible moment he thought he’d broken his leg. But it was just jammed straight. Maybe sprained. It stopped him cold, though, and pitched him face-forward into the mud. It went straight up his nose, into his eyes, into his screaming mouth. Down his throat.

He coughed and gagged and blew, pawing at his face, trying to unclog his nostrils and mouth so he could drag in a breath. Swallowed more mud doing that and a worse spasm of coughing nearly tore him apart. His chest convulsed and he vomited mud and coffee and two Egg McMuffins into the storm, and the fierce wind blew it back into his face.

For a long, twisted time he lay there, dripping with mud and puke, trying to breathe. Failing. Trying.

Until black fireworks exploded in his head and the sounds of the rain dwindled into a distant buzz and Jake knew that he was choking to death. Right there. While his friends fought little girls and screamed and bled.

Desperate, terrified, Jake balled his right fist and punched himself in the solar plexus as hard as he could. It felt like being shot, but a ball of something—bread or Canadian bacon or mud or all of that shot from his mouth and vanished into the rain. He dragged in half the air in the world. The flesh around his eyes tingled and the world was incredibly bright but filled with fireflies.

Then the wind brought the screams back to him.

That was how the day started for Jake DeGroot.

It was the best part of his day.

It got so much worse after that.

CHAPTER EIGHTY

STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL

STEBBINS, PENNSYLVANIA

Dez Fox made no sound at all as she opened the small door that connected the teacher’s lounge to the corner of the schoolyard. The wind screeched through the chain-link fence and rain hit the concrete so steadily it sounded like white noise. Dez took several small, quick steps, her feet barely lifting from the ground as she moved up behind two of the patrolling soldiers. They were twenty feet ahead of her, walking at a measured pace, heading to the turn at the far end. They carried their M4s at an angle to keep rain from filling the barrels. Even though both of them wore gray-green hazmat suits, Dez could tell that one was male and the other female.

Dez stopped behind a decorative outcropping of red brick and racked the slide of her Daewoo shotgun.

Even with the storm it was a loud and distinctive sound, and she’d waited until she was in position so the soldiers could hear it.

She yelled, “Freeze right fucking there.”

They froze. Right there.

“Unsling your rifles and stand them against the wall,” Dez ordered. “Do it now.”

The soldiers hesitated and the woman started to turn.

“Don’t make a stupid mistake, girl,” warned Dez.

“You’re the one making a mistake,” said the female soldier.

“And I’ll cry about it later. Drop the guns or I’ll drop you. Last warning.”

The soldiers exchanged a brief look, then they slid the straps from their shoulders and very gingerly stood their weapons against the wall.

“Place your hands on top of your heads, fingers laced. Good, now turn around slowly. Fuck with me and I will kill you.”

They did exactly as told and though Dez couldn’t see their faces behind the masks they wore, each of them stiffened in surprise. Dez smiled as she stepped away from the wall. Behind her, Uriah Piper and eight other men—each of them experienced deep-woods hunters—knelt in the rain in a shooting line with rifles snugged against their shoulders. A sound made the soldiers look up to see eight more gun barrels—small arms and long guns—pointing at them from half-opened windows.