Big brown rats, in Mike’s view.
In the dark, though, and with all this rain, deer were a real problem. You could hear them and not know what was moving in the woods. You could see them and not know what they were, because they blended in so well, and moved so quietly. And they could just as easily trip a mine as one of the infected.
Mike explained this to Cyrus, who didn’t so much nod or say he understood as simply look marginally less vacant for a moment.
“We need an elevated shooting position,” suggested Mike. “That way if we see any deer coming along the path we can put them down, keep the network of devices intact. Okay?”
Cyrus made a grunting sound that Mike took as assent.
He put Cyrus in the crotch of an elm. For all his apparent vacuity, the kid could climb like a monkey. He was also a good shot, a safe weapons-handler. He wasn’t rewarding company but Mike didn’t expect to take any friendly fire.
With Cyrus in place, Mike drifted down a game trail, stepping around or over tripwires, double-checking that everything was just so.
Then he froze.
It wasn’t exactly that Mike heard or saw anything, but instead had a sense that something moved out there in the storm-filled, shadowy woods. He turned very slowly, surveying the landscape. The boughs of the trees swayed like the arms of drunks fighting for balance. Rain fell between the trees, gathered into fat dollops, and dropped from branches and leaves. Winds howled through the forest at ground level, slapping the bushes and shrubs this way and that.
There was so much movement that Mike couldn’t tell if there was nothing out there or an entire herd of deer.
Command had warned of packs of infected crossing farm fields after the bombs in Bordentown, but so far Mike hadn’t seen a single one of them. He hard the chatter on the radio and knew that there were some real problems out there, but it all seemed to be happening elsewhere. Sure as hell not here. So far the most they’d seen was a red fox, a bunch of squirrels, and not much of anything else.
The forest kept moving, but as far as Mike could tell it was just Superstorm Zelda being a total bitch.
He found his own tree and climbed up onto the lowest limb, relieved to have the dense canopy of leaves shield him from the heaviest of the rain.
And then he saw something that was neither wind nor squirrel.
The leaves trembled on the far side of a slope, and Mike put his rifle to his shoulder and aimed at the center of a wall of rustling shrubs. If it was a deer, he was going to shoot its Bambi-ass before it could trip one of the mines.
Then the shrubs parted and something stepped through.
It wasn’t a deer.
It wasn’t a fleeing civilian.
It was a soldier.
It was a soldier, in fact, that Mike knew. It was a good friend of his.
“Teddy?”
Sergeant Teddy Polk staggered out of the dense line of shrubs and nearly lost his footing at the top of the rise. His white hazmat suit was covered in mud and torn in several places, the hood hanging down behind his back. Polk had no rifle and he walked uncertainly, weakly, with one hand clamped to his left bicep. Polk’s foot came down wrong and he pitched forward, staggering down the slope toward the pressure mine hidden halfway down.
“Teddy! No!” bellowed Mike as he dropped from the tree and began to run toward his friend. He knew the pattern of his traps; Teddy was walking right toward a blast mine.
“Stop!” screamed Mike. “For God’s sake, Teddy, freeze. Don’t move. Land mines!”
Teddy stopped. He looked around but his face was clouded by pain and confusion. He blinked and his mouth worked for a moment, trying to form a word.
“M-Mike?”
“Yeah, it’s me. Shit, man, don’t move. There’s a mine five feet in front of you. Stay right there. Let me come to you.”
Teddy Polk nodded, but it was a vague movement and Mike couldn’t be sure if his friend really heard him.
“Stay right there, okay, buddy? Don’t move.”
Teddy swayed like a drunken man, but he didn’t take another step.
Mike began creeping through the deadly landscape he’d created. He knew where he’d planted everything, and the yellow and orange tags were there, the colors glowing with luminescent paint even in the darkness, and pulsing when the lightning flashed. Mike was almost to the safe zone when he heard a sound behind him, and he pivoted, expecting to see that idiot Cyrus.
It wasn’t.
A woman stood directly behind him.
Middle-aged, dressed in jeans and a sweater covered in flower appliqués and blood. A woman with ragged bite marks on her cheeks and eyebrows. Black blood dribbled from between her lips.
“Shit!” cried Mike as he reached for his side arm.
The woman spit right into his face. Into his eyes and mouth. A big, wet gob of black blood.
Mike screamed and backpedaled, dropping the gun that was halfway out of its holster. The black muck was as thick as molasses and it tasted like copper and bile. He gagged, but he could feel it in his mouth. Itching. Burning. He pawed it out of his eyes as he reeled. He could see, but only a smeared swatch of the world. The woman hissed and reached for him, but Mike backhanded her away.
Then Teddy Polk caught him, kept him from falling.
Teddy called his name.
Except that wasn’t what Teddy said.
It wasn’t his name. It was just a meaningless moan. Not his name, not even a word.
A moan.
Like the sound the woman made.
Mike screamed.
He tore free from Teddy Polk and shoved his friend—or whatever this thing now was—and watched the wounded soldier stumble backward. Two steps. Three.
And Teddy’s foot came down on a pressure mine.
Mike tried to run.
He really tried.
He pivoted in the mud, spun the woman behind him—trying to put her between his body and the blast—and Mike bolted for the steep upslope that was free of mines. He got four good steps away from Teddy before the blast.
The shockwave picked him up and punched him hard into the slope. He felt something hit him in the lower back. He felt it stab him.
Stab all the way through him.
He half-lay, half-stood against the sharp canted slope, his chin resting on the knurled curve of an exposed tree root, his arms dangling at his sides. Thunder echoed in his ears and he could feel warmth running in lines down the insides of his clothes, front and back. It was the only warmth he could feel; everything else was strangely cold.
Off somewhere to the north he could hear someone call his name.
Was it Cyrus?
Was it his mother?
He couldn’t tell. His eardrums were ruptured and his head hurt so badly he couldn’t think.
He didn’t even remember pushing off from the slope. It happened somehow and now he stood on the path, looking down at the red things that had been Teddy and the woman with the sweater. They had been right there when the mine exploded, and it had exploded them. Torn them from humanity into—what? Parts? Pieces?
Mike didn’t like putting the right word to it.
Teddy had no legs at all. He couldn’t even see the pieces of them.
His back hurt.
And his stomach.
He touched the front of his hazmat suit and tried to understand what he was touching. His eyes stung from the black blood the woman had spat at him. The itching in his mouth and throat was really bad.
But Mike wasn’t sure if he cared about that or if he was just aware of it.
He ran his fingers over his stomach, and over the thing that stood straight out from the white material of the hazmat suit. When he raised his fingers he saw that they were smeared with red.
Yeah, he thought. That’s right.
He knew on some detached level that he was hurt. Maybe hurt bad.
He heard his name again. It floated to him on the wind.
Definitely not his mother.
After a while, Mike looked down at his stomach. Just to see.
It took him a long time to understand what he was seeing, to construct an explanation for the long, slender white thing that seemed to be growing out of him. It was jagged and heavy.
Like polished ivory.
Except that it wasn’t ivory.
He knew what it was.
He knew where it had come from.
The woman’s legs had been totally blown away.
But not all of the parts were lost. Mike tried a word, one he thought made sense of this.
“Femur,” he said. He heard how rational his voice sounded. That was okay.
The itching in his mouth was now deeper. Inside his nose, behind his sinuses, down in his stomach. His lungs.
Itching.
Hurting.
Aching.
Mike felt something moving on his lips. Drops of blood. He touched them, looked at them. Red. Sure. But threaded through the red were lines of black. And inside the black were twisting little white things.
He said the only word that really mattered. The word that made a statement about this whole farce, from the time his unit was rolled out until now. And maybe it was a statement about how this thing would continue to unfold.
He said, “Fuck.”
He heard Cyrus call his name, and hearing the voice provoked two immediate and intense reactions in him.
The first was that he wanted Cyrus to find him. To get him the hell out of here. To get him to an aid station because, fuck it, he had a piece of thigh bone shoved all the way through his body. Shit. Shit. Shit.
The other reaction was totally different, totally alien, totally terrifying.
When he heard his partner’s voice it made him so goddamn hungry.
Hungry.
Hungry.
Oh God, he thought.
He could hear Cyrus coming, crashing through the wet brush, circling wide around the area marked by the yellow and orange tags. Coming close, coming fast. Coming soon.
Mike Chrusciel tried to yell, to warn his partner, to tell him to get the fuck out of here. But his voice was barely his anymore. It was thick, filled with wrongness, and his warning cry sounded more like the moan of someone in pain.
But not physical pain. Not thigh bone through the stomach pain.
No, it was a different kind of pain.
The pain of a terrible, bottomless hunger.
Cyrus would be here in a few seconds. He’d come running up to help. And then what?
The officers had been pretty damn graphic in the briefings. They pulled no punches when they explained what happened to the infected.
People who were like him.
Jesus.
As Cyrus came running, calling Mike’s name, Mike turned and used the last little bit of him that was his left to own. He made his legs move. It was just a few steps.
He heard Cyrus yell, “No!”
Then Mike stepped onto one of the mines.
He loved explosions. Always had. They made him feel powerful. They always comforted him.
Take me home, he thought as he raised his foot, releasing the trigger.
He rode the blast all the way out of the world.
CHAPTER NINETY-SEVEN
ROUTE 26
SOUTHWESTERN PENNSYLVANIA
“Put something on it,” screamed the man.
“I’m trying,” his wife yelled back.
In the backseat the baby was crying. The woman knelt on her seat and tried to cram a folded baby blanket against the hole in her husband’s shoulder. It was not a torrent, there was no artery there, but it pulsed with his heartbeat, and his heart was hammering. His whole right side was slick with red.
“I don’t have anything to tie it with,” she said, trying to hold it in place with one hand as she tried to unbuckled her belt with the other.
“How bad is it?” he demanded in a terrified voice.
“It’s not bad, it’s not bad,” she said, knowing it was a lie.
“Did you see that? That cop just fucking bit me.”
“I know, I know. He must have been…”
She let that go because she didn’t know what the cop could have been. The radio was saying wild things, and the whole world behind them seemed to be on fire.
“We need to find a hospital.”
“No,” he barked. “No way. Keep the pressure on. I’ll be okay.”
“But you’re bleeding!”
“No way I’m stopping anywhere near here. Everyone’s nuts around here.”
She worked the belt off and managed to cinch it around his arm.
“Not too tight,” he cautioned, feeling a little calmer, a little more in control as the miles fell away behind him.
The baby was crying so loud that they both had to shout.
“I’m okay,” he said. “I’m good. See to Lucy. I’ll be fine.”
“We need to stop.”
But he shook his head. “No way. No damn way.”
The car shot down the road and vanished into the storm. They crossed the state line into West Virginia at nearly eighty miles an hour.
CHAPTER NINETY-EIGHT
BEYOND THE QUARANTINE ZONE
THE HEARTS AND ARMOR MEDIEVAL FAIRE
NORMALVILLE, PENNSYLVANIA
Rob Meyer and his friends sat around a small foldout table in the singlewide trailer used as a greenroom for the performers on the fairground. None of them were in armor, having shucked the heavy chain and plate mail hours ago, after the pig roast that ended each day of swordplay, bawdy songs, medieval crafts, heavy drinking, and choreographed jousting. Since most of the events were under tents, the show had gone on yesterday—although in abbreviated form. The guys were all in sweats and T-shirts, their hair and beards glistening from rainwater. Rob had gone around the camp, banging on trailer doors, rousing the staff, telling them what was going on.
Some of them already knew. Night owls who’d been glued to their portable TVs or laptops since last night, watching storm-soaked reporters do standups outside of the Stebbins County line. Others had slept through it, dropping off to exhausted sleep after shucking their weapons and armor.
Now everyone was watching. Some there in the greenroom, others in their own trailers. No one was sleeping anymore.
Not on the fairgrounds, and probably not anywhere.
“Is this shit real?” asked one of the roustabouts. It was the sixth or seventh time he’d asked the same question.
“It’s real,” said Rob.
“Yeah, okay, but what is it?”
“It’s a riot,” said one of the grooms.
“I don’t think so,” said Rob. Before the groom could ask him to explain, the CBS affiliate out of Pittsburgh cut in with breaking news. They managed to get one of their news trucks close to a section of Route 653 in Fayette County. The reporter stood in the rain and shouted impossible things. Behind the reporter something was burning. Police vehicles whipped red and blue lights through the night.
“This is a scene of total chaos,” said the reporter. “You can see the fires that are still burning. Witnesses claim that military aircraft dropped bombs on the western edge of Bordentown. We can’t get any closer than two miles, but even from here the heat is incredible. An unnamed source in Washington says that these measures are being taken to prevent an outbreak of an as-yet unknown disease. This source claims that the disease is highly contagious and causes anyone who becomes infected to act in a violent and irrational way. Local police departments throughout the region, including many in northwestern Maryland, are reporting a shocking increase in violent crimes.”
Behind the reporter a man and woman, both bleeding from several wounds, were shoving their children into their car. The children were screaming, and the woman clutched a small, limp child to her breast. The husband slammed the doors
and hit the gas so hard the rear tires showered a dozen people with mud. A moment later there was a heavy crunch and then the reporter was running with the cameraman following. On the road a woman in a waitress uniform lay sprawled in the road as the taillights of the car dwindled in the rain.
“Are you seeing this?” cried the reporter. “That car just ran over a woman.”
“Is this shit real?” asked the roustabout again.
“It’s real,” said Rob.
“This is crazy,” said one of the jousters. “That’s close. That’s like fifteen miles from here.”
“I know,” Rob said and cast a troubled eye toward the door.
The groom said, “It doesn’t make any sense. What kind of virus makes people do this kind of thing?”
“Maybe it’s a—” but that was as far as Rob got. There was a series of loud pops and they all whirled toward the door. “What the hell?”
There was another wave of them. Sharper now, closer.
“Someone’s shooting.”
But it was more than that. Beneath and between the shots, wrapped inside the fist of the storm, there were screams.
Suddenly the whole bunch of them were scrambling up from the table and crowding through the door into the rainy darkness.
The shots were louder but sporadic. A handgun, thought Rob. Not a rifle. Not automatic gunfire.
They peered through the rain, trying to orient themselves.
“There!” cried the groom, pointing down the long, wide avenue of the jousting field. The colored banners whipped and popped in the gusting wind. The field was turning into a muddy lake. On the far side of the field the horses neighed and whinnied with anxiety.
Rob took a few tentative steps onto the field and for a few seconds he couldn’t see anything.
Then there were three more shots. Three muzzle flashes that created a brief strobe-effect that revealed struggling, staggering figures. The screams came from there, and Rob’s mouth opened in horror as he saw staff members from the fair fighting with dozens of people. Strangers. Someone was firing, but there was only one last hollow crack and the gun fell silent.
The screams increased.
Some of the men—the groom, the roustabout, and a few others—immediately began running toward the melee. They all had friends there.
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