Massive.
And that directly led to the ugliest part of this—at least for the officers in that command center. The reporter’s plea was broadcast to the troops outside the building via the school’s public address system.
The result?
One by one the soldiers at the fence stood up and refused to follow orders. They would not kill the children.
It was mutiny, and one officer—a young lieutenant—tried to nip it in the bud, but he was overwhelmed and, eventually, outranked as a more senior officer—Captain Rice—went to stand with the mutineers.
The president had immediately ordered General Zetter to relieve Dietrich of his post and assume overall command of the situation. Every officer there knew that it was unfair to put the blame on Dietrich, just as it was unfair that the public and the media would demonize them for their actions in Stebbins County.
Actions that, had they not been taken, would have opened the door to a massive and perhaps unstoppable pandemic.
That was the biggest elephant in the room, and nobody there dared talk about it.
Now, another chapter had been completed. Zetter had contacted the reporter and two police officers inside the school and made them a deal. If they sent out every infected person then the school would be spared.
It was a bad deal and everyone—inside and outside the school—hated it.
But it would play well in the media. As well as something like this could play.
Zetter looked at each of his officers and read variations on this story in each pair of eyes. He grunted softly and nodded.
“You all have your assignments,” he said. “Let’s finish the cleanup so we can all go home.”
The officers stood to attention—crisply, silently, and with absolutely no trace of expression or emotion on their faces. Zetter couldn’t blame them for not wanting to show anything to him. He was the hatchet man for the administration, and that administration would be looking for more scapegoats to sacrifice on the altar of public outrage. It was how the politics of warfare worked, and it was how that worked probably going back to Alexander the Great.
When he was alone, Zetter sat down and sagged into his chair, feeling all of his years and more that he hadn’t earned. He knew that once this was over he was as done as Dietrich. Done and gone.
He wasn’t even sure he minded.
Not after a day like today.
He reached for his phone and punched in the number that direct-dialed the White House Situation Room.
The chief of staff, Sylvia Ruddy, answered the phone and then put it on speaker.
“Mr. President,” said General Zetter, “we have contained the outbreak. It’s over.”
CHAPTER FIVE
GOOD-NITES MOTOR COURT
FAYETTE COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA
Dr. Herman Volker parked his car in one of the vacant slips outside of the small motel. He turned off the engine and sat for nearly ten minutes watching the rain hammer down on the windshield. The sluicing water blurred the glass and transformed the neon sign above the office into an impressionist painting. All pinks and greens.
He took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his eyes, blew his nose, and then tossed it onto the seat.
Then he opened the door and stepped into the downpour. He wore trousers, a dress shirt, tennis shoes, and a blue sweater, and he looked like the tired, defeated, sad old man that he was. His feet barely lifted from the ground as he shuffled toward the door, pulled it open, and went inside. He carried no suitcase or overnight bag. The only thing he brought with him was his wallet, and it took him a long time to organize his thoughts well enough to fill out the information sheet given to him by the bored night clerk. He paid for the room with his credit card, took the key, and walked outside again. His room was on the same strip where he’d parked.
Volker used the keycard to open the door, went inside, closed the door.
He sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at the ugly painting on the wall. An artless mess that was supposed to remind people of Joan Miró, but didn’t. Not in any way that lifted the soul.
The doctor stared at the painting for a long time.
CHAPTER SIX
STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL
STEBBINS, PENNSYLVANIA
At first they could only sit there, huddled against the wall, locked in each other’s arms, beaten mute by horror, wrapped in their cloak of shared grief.
Time was fractured and each second seemed to expand and stretch, refusing to end, refusing to pass.
Dez kept repeating JT’s name.
Over and over.
Was it a plea or a prayer? Trout couldn’t tell.
Then suddenly Trout felt a change in Dez. It was a subtle thing, but it was there. One moment she was empty of everything except her pain, and then he felt her body change. Her muscles tensed. No, that was wrong. It was more like they somehow remembered their strength. She straightened in his arms and her clutching hands gripped him and pushed him slowly but inexorably back. He resisted for a moment, then let her create that distance between them. A necessary distance for her, he was sure of it. And in that space Dez Fox reclaimed the personal power stolen from her by disease pathogens, guns, and betrayal.
There was a final moment of intimate contact, when their faces were inches apart. Dez was flushed, her face puffy from weeping, her eyes red and filled with pain. Then he saw the blue of those eyes become cold and hard. And unforgiving.
Her full lips compressed into a tight line with just a hint of a snarl. Trout knew that look, and he was fully aware of how dangerous she was when her mouth wore that shape and her eyes were filled with that much ice. So, he eased back, releasing his embrace, shifting his body toward the wall and away from her.
There was one heartbreaking moment, though, where he saw that she was aware of his allowance and acceptance of her power, and how he withheld his own. Dez gave him a single, tiny nod of shared awareness.
Then she got to her feet. It took effort and it took time, but when she was standing Dez towered over him, and he sat there in her shadow, looking up at her.
“We have to make sure the kids are okay,” she said in a voice from which all emotion had been banished. Trout wondered what it cost her to affect that much control.
“Yes,” he said.
“And we have to search the building again.”
“Okay.”
She began to turn.
“Dez—” he began but she held up a hand.
“No,” she said. Then she began climbing the stairs.
No.
Trout wondered if she thought he was going to say something about JT’s sacrifice. Something encouraging about how the kids inside were safe. Or something more personal. Something about what he felt.
He knew that what he’d planned to say was that he’d do whatever she needed him to do, to help however he could.
But he wondered if those were the words that would have actually come out of his mouth. Dez hadn’t thought so.
Maybe, he thought as he got heavily to his feet, she was right.
“Damn,” he said aloud.
He patted his pockets and realized that the satellite phone Goat had given him was somewhere upstairs. He needed to get it. To tell Goat what just happened. To have Goat tell the world.
This is Billy Trout reporting live from the apocalypse.
There was more truth to tell. More of the story he needed everyone to know.
Maybe it would help.
Trout was past knowing that, or anything, for certain.
Aching in body and heart, Billy Trout lumbered up the stairs after Dez.
CHAPTER SEVEN
TUNNEL HILL ROAD
STEBBINS COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA
Corporal Lonnie Silk was sure he was dying.
He could feel the warmth leave him, running in lines inside his trousers, down his legs, pooling in his shoes.
The bleeding wasn’t as bad now, but he didn’t think that was a good thing. As his
daddy used to say, you can’t pour coffee from an empty cup.
And he felt so empty.
Of blood.
Of breath.
Of everything. Like God was rolling up the whole world to throw it in the crapper.
It was like that.
The rainswept street was all harsh whites and blacks in the stark illumination thrown by the headlights of abandoned cars and businesses with all the lights turned on but nobody there. The glow gave everything a harsh look, like crime scene photos in old newspapers. No soft edges, even with the rain.
Lonnie knew that he was a dead man. Would be a dead man soon. The captain had told everyone in his platoon about the infection. About how it worked. About what it did.
About how there was nothing anyone could do.
Nothing except die.
And how fucked up was that? How crazy? How impossible?
His legs needed to stop moving, and he collapsed against the corner of a burned-out store at the corner of Tunnel Hill and Doll Factory Road. Across the street was the hulking mannequin factory that had given the road its name. The windows were smashed out, the parking lot littered with the blackened shells of cars and bodies. A car stood alone in the middle of the intersection, its radio playing.
He moved on, stumbling down the long blocks, splashing through puddles. Some were filled with dirty rainwater; some were viscous pools of dark red.
There were so many bodies. All of them sprawled in a sea of black blood. Thousands of shell casings stood like tiny islands. Weak sunshine and dying firelight gleamed on the metal and winked on the rippling surface of that dark lake. No wind stirred the surface, though. Lonnie knew that for sure, and it was one of the things that made dying feel worse, more deeply terrifying.
The black blood was alive with worms. Tiny, white, threadlike. So small that they looked like thin slices carved from grains of rice. But there were so many of them.
From where he stood, Lonnie couldn’t see the worms, but he knew they were there. The worms were everywhere.
Everywhere.
He could feel them.
On him.
In him.
Wriggling through the ragged lips of the bite on his arm. Twisting and writhing inside the lines of blood that ran crookedly down his body.
He tried not to look at the wound. He could not bear to see the things that moved inside it, around it.
He could feel that wound, though. And even that was wrong.
The bite was deep. Skin and muscle were torn. It should hurt.
It should be screaming at him with the voices of all those torn nerve endings.
Instead it was nearly silent.
Cold.
Distant.
As if the skin around that bite was no longer connected to him. No longer belonged to him. As if it was on him but not of him.
Cold emptiness ran outward from the wound, tunneling through his body like threads of ice. Every minute he felt more of the cold and less of the warmth he needed to feel. With every step he knew that his desperate heart, his pounding heart, was pumping that infection throughout his body. Cold blossomed like small, ugly flowers all over him. Taking him away, stealing his awareness so that he wasn’t even sure he could feel himself dying.
Would he slip away completely and not be aware of it?
The captain had said something about that. And that guy on the radio, the reporter trapped inside the Stebbins Little School. What was his name? Billy Trout? He’d said something scary. Something that was crazy wrong.
That the self—the consciousness, the personality, the everything—of the victim didn’t die with the body. Instead it would be there. Hovering, floating, aware but no longer in control of the meat and bone that had been its home.
“Please,” said Lonnie, asking of the day. Of the moment. Of anyone or anything that could listen. “Please…”
He did not want to die like this. He didn’t want to become something sick and twisted. He didn’t want to be a ghost haunting that stolen home of flesh and blood.
Above him, somewhere up there, hidden by the buildings, he could hear helicopters. Black Hawks. Vipers. Apaches.
And way above them, the growl of jets carrying fuel-air bombs, waiting to turn the whole place, the whole town, into hot ash.
Forty minutes ago Lonnie Silk would have screamed and run at the thought of that fiery response to the plague.
Now he looked to the heavens, and prayed for it.
It was better to burn on earth than be damned here. Hell here, heaven later?
“Please,” he said to the sounds of salvation that flew in formation above the storm clouds. “Please.”
But there was no one and nothing to help him.
Lonnie turned and headed along a side street toward the edge of town.
Trying to go home.
CHAPTER EIGHT
OFFICE OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR
THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
Scott Blair, the national security advisor, wanted a drink so bad his skin ached. He was not normally a drinking man. A few martinis at a State Department dinner, a beer after eighteen holes. But now he wanted to crawl into a closet with a bottle of bourbon and chug the entire thing.
Instead he opened a drawer, removed a bottle of Tums E-X, shook ten of them into his palm, and them shoved the entire handful into his mouth.
Everything was spinning. His head, the room, the media, and maybe the world.
The actual world.
All because of a tiny shithole town in an inbred part of Pennsylvania no one gave a damn about. Not in any strategic sense.
The devil is off the chain.
That was how it started. For Blair and for everyone.
The director of Central Intelligence called the president to forward an urgent message from a nonentity named Oscar Price, a CIA handler whose only job it was to babysit retired Soviet defectors. How hard could it be to keep tabs on a bunch of old men? Instead, one of Price’s charges, Dr. Herman Volker, a former Cold War scientist, had taken an old and classified bit of science and turned it into what could only be described as a “doomsday weapon.”
Doomsday.
There was a time in Blair’s life when that concept was a ludicrous abstraction. A scenario to be considered with no more reality than something cooked up by a Dungeons & Dragons games master.
Except now this wasn’t a role-playing game for nerds. It was the most important issue to ever cross Blair’s desk. Perhaps the most important issue to ever cross the desk to fall under the umbrella of “national security.”
A doomsday weapon. Conceived by devious minds, funded by a desperate government, constructed in covert labs, and then brought to America by a defector who was long past the point of relevance.
And given a name that was far too appropriate.
Lucifer.
Blair wondered if that kind of name was too close to actually tempting fate. It felt like a challenge. Or an invitation.
All Price had to do was keep the old prick out of trouble until old age or the grace of a just God killed the son of a bitch.
But then that message came in.
The devil was off the chain.
That was how it started. A flurry of phone calls, teams of investigators put into the field, and the machinery of control and containment put into play. Except that nothing was controlled, and Blair did not share the president’s confidence in General Zetter that this thing was contained.
His desk was littered with intelligence reports. The latest on the storm. Satellite pictures and thermal scans of Stebbins County. Casualty estimates. And projections of how bad this could get if even a single infected person made it past the Q-zone. This wasn’t swine flu or bird flu or any other damn flu. It was a genetically engineered bioweapon driven by parasitic urges that were a million times more immediate and aggressive than those of a virus, though equally as encompassing and indifferent to suffering. Every infected person became a violent vector. Everyone
exposed to the black blood was likely to become infected, even if they were not bitten. The larvae in the infected blood clung to the skin and would find an opening. Any opening. A scratch would do it.
There were response protocols. Of course there were. Politics floated on a sea of paper, so there were reports for everything. There were reams of notes on the Lucifer program. Tens of thousands of pages. And right now virologists and microbiologists and parasitologists at the Centers for Disease Control, the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center, and over a dozen bioweapons labs were poring over those protocols and the accompanying scientific research records. The protocols prepared after Volker’s defection were very specific. Coldly alarming, detailing in precise terms the consequences of inaction or insufficient action.
There was, in fact, only one possible outcome of a Lucifer outbreak.
Doomsday was no longer an abstraction.
Blair made a series of phone calls to get the latest on the hunt for Volker. With each call his heart sank lower in his chest.
The bastard had vanished. He’d walked out of his house, got in his car, and disappeared from the face of the earth, taking with him the greatest hopes of understanding his variation of the pathogen. Lucifer 113, the version loose in Stebbins, did not precisely match the profiles of the old Cold War version. It was much faster, much more aggressive, and the reanimation of the “dead” victims took place in seconds.
Seconds.
It would mean that in any confrontation with a group of infected, the newly bitten victim would become an aggressive vector—a combatant, in a twisted way—while the fight still raged. Apart from the obvious tactical disadvantages, that scenario created a devastating psychological component. When soldiers would be required to suddenly fire upon their fellow soldiers, doubt and hesitation would be born. And many more would die.
It was a nightmare.
It was surreal.