Sheriff Rory Madison’s office was two doors down from the interrogation room. The door was open, so Jack entered without knocking. The sheriff sat at his massive mahogany desk, dwarfed by it. The desk took up nearly the entire length of the room and was the one piece of furniture in this building that didn’t look like it had been picked up at a Saturday-afternoon yard sale.
Rory stared at the computer screen, shaking his head. “I’ve watched this a hundred times, Olson. I don’t know if I should be amazed or scared shitless.”
“Watched what, sir?”
“Come around; take a look.”
Jack crossed the room and squeezed himself through the foot-wide gap between the desk and the wall. With the computer mouse, Rory clicked STOP on the video player he had up on the screen, and the player window went black.
“Briggs brought me the call logs pulled from Anna Howland’s cell phone. In a week’s time, she attempted to make over a thousand calls, more than half to 9-1-1. Each call failed.”
“Doesn’t prove anything,” Jack said.
“Well, that’s debatable,” Rory said. “But Briggs also found two videos taken from the cell phone. Together, they’re just thirty-two seconds long, but they…well, like I said, take a look.”
Rory clicked PLAY.
The video was taken from a higher vantage point, through a window—a second-story window, Jack presumed—striped with dark streaks of what looked like oil. Though somewhat blurry, in the background Jack immediately recognized the Cromwell Church Cemetery—or what was left of it. The ground appeared as if it was boiling in a mess of mud and grass and headstones. Then, through the plip-plop of the rain, came a muffled but gut-wrenching scream. It was followed by another scream so deep and blood-curdling, even heard through the tinny computer speakers was enough to make Jack’s knees weak and his stomach lurch.
And then he saw it…
“My God,” he whispered.
“Watch,” Rory said.
The video cut out just as—Christ, Jack thought—a skeleton, an undead thing crossed the road. The second clip, just ten seconds long, showed Garret Denny’s home, surrounded by the reanimated bodies of the dead. They moved herky-jerky, like the monsters in the old Ray Harryhausen movies Jack had watched as a teenager. They scratched and clawed, snarled and moaned. Everything was covered in a brown-black liquid, sopping with it, dripping, it fell from the sky in great blobs…just like Garret Denny had said.