Beecher stood and waited while Yakima listened.
“Okay, with any luck I’ll be eating a nice piece of veal at the Restaurant du Palais-Royal before they pull the plug. Thanks, Carol. Keep me posted.”
He disconnected and placed the phone on the table.
“So—what’s the verdict?” asked Beecher.
“Carol says they’re going to do it, but the official order hasn’t come through yet.”
“The storm’s going the other way. Local winds are below twenty and—”
“It’s not the storm. Carol said they were going to impose martial law on western Pennsylvania and maybe parts of Maryland and West Virginia, too.”
“For a riot?”
“She says it’s not a riot. Carol said her brother-in-law works for MSNBC and they’re still running the virus story.”
“I thought they shot that down.”
Yakima spread his hands. “What can I tell you? The good news is that it doesn’t affect us. We’re wheels up in sixty-six minutes. C’mon, let’s get a coffee before we go aboard.”
He closed the flight log and stood up. As they headed toward the door to the crew lounge a short fit of coughing stopped Yakima in his tracks. He coughed for twenty seconds, then waited, listening inside his body for more, and gradually felt the spasms stop.
“You okay?” asked Beecher.
“Yeah. It’s nothing. Tickle in the back of my throat.”
“I have some lozenges,” said Beecher. “In my bag. Want me to dig ’em out? Won’t take a sec.”
“Nah,” said Yakima. “It’s nothing. I have four days off in Paris. If it’s a cold, where better for a little R and R?”
They headed out of the lounge, got their coffee, and proceeded directly to their plane. In a little over an hour they were in the air, flying high over the storms of Pennsylvania, skirting the edge of the worst of it, crossing into New Jersey and then far out over the Atlantic.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TEN
TRICKSTER’S COMEDY CLUB
PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA
The comedian’s name was Jeremy Essig and he felt like there should be sirens blaring and dogs hunting him. Not just there at Trickster’s, but at a lot of comedy clubs. After all, the image the audience saw was a sketchy-looking character looking nervous in a spotlight splashed against an unpainted brick wall. It screamed “escaped prisoner.” If not from a prison than definitely from a facility for people with dangerous social disorders.
And the audience was a lot like a posse. They seemed like nice people, but they could turn mean and dangerous in a heartbeat. He’d seen it. All comics have seen it. One minute you have a crowd hanging on your every word, laughing in anticipation of what you’ll say before you even begin the joke, willing to follow you through twists and turns of skewed logic and occasionally clinical observation, believing that you’ll steer the boat into port in some magical lands. That’s when it’s working right, when the rhythm is like jazz and the words tumble out with the kind of timing that opens minds and unlocks the muscles so that smiling and laughing is the easiest thing to do. Those are the times when the comic and the audience are all together, sharing the ride, understanding each other on a level you can’t really describe.
But then there are those times when everything on the other side of the spotlight looks alien and hostile. Pale faces in the dark, staring with dead eyes, their mouths unsmiling, hands on tables or in laps as if they’re too damn heavy to light for even a token clap. There are times when the joke’s rhythm is off, like a discordant note that paints itself in the air and no matter what else is played that’s the thing everyone can’t look away from. Like that. What sucked most was that there was no pattern to it. Sure, sometimes it’s hitting the wrong note or forgetting to take a look at the demographic. Like busting on the Tea Party in South Carolina, or skewering Obama in Chicago. Like being the first comic to make a joke after a crisis and really seeing firsthand what “too soon” actually means. Rookie mistakes that even the pros make, and Jeremy could remember too many of those moments in his own career.
On the upside, after you survive the moment and crawl out of a dead gig like that, you can take the experience and spin it into material for another date.
Tonight, though, the audience was right there with him. The mojo was red hot and despite the late hour they were all coconspirators in a mad scheme.
Plus, everybody was hammered. Even the waitstaff at Trickster’s was in the bag. And the emcee for the event, Lydia Rose, was smiling the kind of smile only a very happy, very drunk person can manage during that last hour before falling over becomes a gravitational imperative.
Jeremy walked back and forth on the tiny stage, letting movement and the shifting of the travel spot kept any moment from getting stale. He wore an ancient Flaming Moe’s T-shirt and scruffy jeans and looked as comfortable as he felt.
The gig was largely impromptu. What had started with a standard double-bill with him and Tom Segura, and a handful of raw up-and-comers, had become something else. The original show should have ended at midnight, but then word started coming in about how Superstorm Zelda had pretty much wiped a small town off the Pennsylvania map. A lot of people were believed dead. And there was a bunch of wild conspiracy theory crap thumbtacked to the story. Viruses, something about the National Guard trying to kill a bunch of kids, some asshole ranting about the apocalypse, and—this was the best part, as Jeremy saw it—zombies.
Fucking zombies.
They all had a good laugh about that during the break, but then they started hearing more and more about the number of expected casualties and it stopped being funny. Jeremy couldn’t remember who suggested doing a fund-raiser. Maybe him, maybe Tom. Maybe Lydia. Or maybe it was one of those things that just evolved. At first it was something they thought would be good if someone else did it. Then it was something they thought they should do. Then it became something they needed to do. Then it became what was actually happening tonight.
Alcohol and some serious weed were involved in every stage of the process. Smoke your way to the right level and everything seems incredibly doable, even logical. The basic pitch was a comedy marathon for the duration of the storm, with Tom Segura and Jeremy Essig as ongoing headliners. Calls went out to other comics within driving distance.
Finding a name for it took the longest. Tom wanted to call it Blow Me, Zelda. Jeremy liked Comic Relief: Redneck Edition, but Lydia thought they’d get sued for that. After another blunt they settled on Laugh at the Storm, and bullied a friend who had a 501(c)(3) to accept donations via PayPal.
Now they were into the second hour of it.
They streamed the show live to the Net and put clips on YouTube, reposting those to Twitter and Facebook. Some friends of Jeremy and Tom Skyped in and did bits that were flashed onto the wall. While the comics were doing their bits, Lydia put the event on Foursquare, then pulled photos from the video stream and posted them on Pinterest, Tumblr, and InstaGram. Suddenly it was real. It was an actual charity fund-raiser for the victims of Superstorm Zelda.
The crowd at Trickster’s were totally into it, and within forty minutes carloads of people showed up from all over Pittsburgh, fighting their way through storm winds and rain hard enough to swell all three of the city’s big rivers. It was standing-room only, and the bartenders were mixing drinks and pulling pints as fast as they could.
Jeremy did several twenty-minute sets, cycling through old material and some new stuff, and also improvising on what was happening.
“According to the Internet news,” he said, half-smiling as he paced in front of the audience, “there are monsters out in the sticks around Stebbins. Slack-faced, empty-eyed, unthinking, shambling hulks who will kill anything that moves. And aside from the locals, they also have zombies.”
The audience loved that. It was a running joke that the entire length of the state between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh was an even more redneck version of Mississippi. A red state with blue bookends. Certifie
d gold for observational comics like Jeremy Essig and Tom Segura.
“It’s not really surprising that they have a zombie outbreak in farm country. All those graaaiiiiins.”
A smaller laugh that time, but they were still with him. Jeremy took a beat to comment on the lack of laughs, and that got a laugh. One of the golden rules of his kind of comedy was to own the bad moments so they were part of a shared experience, rather than simply try to limp away from a wounded joke.
He switched gears a bit and drove his routine onto safer ground by talking about how people on the Net were saying that the government was trying to cover up the zombie thing. No matter which lever the audience pulled, it was usually safe ground to attack the government as a whole. Not necessarily taking potshots at specific politicians but at the huge, self-destructive, creaking machine that was national politics. He saw Tom and Lydia watching from offstage, grinning and nodding encouragement.
Jeremy took some of his old jokes about FEMA’s failure after Katrina and gave them a Superstorm Zelda spin.
“If you wait until the zombies eat most of the people, then you only have to save a few. And since the survivors will be the ones fast enough to outrun the living dead, you have people who look better on TV.”
From there he cruised into the vagaries of pop culture.
“Tell me there won’t be a reality show in six months. Real Zombies of Stebbins County. Strap on a lie detector and tell me we won’t be watching that.”
And he was casting the show with redneck subtypes when someone in the audience screamed.
It wasn’t a scream of laughter or even a shout of inarticulate drunken mirth.
It was a real scream.
A stop the show scream.
The kind of scream where the entire crowd is jerked out of the moment, the spell instantly broken, and they focus on a single spot in the room.
In the back of the small club, standing framed in the pale rectangle of light from the lobby, stood a tall figure. A man. Bare-chested and wild-looking. Grinning. The woman who’d screamed sat at the table closest to the exit, and she and everyone at her table were frozen in a tableau of horrified recoil.
And …
Here Jeremy’s mind began stumbling over the details.
The man was wrong.
His whole body was wrong.
It was red.
Bright, glistening red.
Like he’d been splashed by red paint. Or …
A Carrie joke started forming in his head in the split second before the red-splashed man turned, grabbed the woman who’d screamed, hauled her to her feet, and …
And he dug his teeth into the hollow of her throat.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED ELEVEN
STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL
STEBBINS, PENNSYLVANIA
“Forget the supplies,” growled Sam. “Get the kids on the damn buses.”
He didn’t wait for Dez to respond. He laid his rifle atop a car hood and began firing slow, spaced shots. With each shot Trout could see the head of one of the infected fly apart and splash those around it with black blood. The other soldiers were nearly as good, and soon the bodies were piling up, clogging access to the fence.
But that was one attack point.
Dez vanished into the building but was back a moment later leading a line of children. The kids were all holding hands. Most of them were screaming as they ran. Adults ran with them, shepherding the kids toward the buses. It started as an orderly evacuation, but with each second it began to disintegrate.
Boxer yelled, “Hostiles at nine o’clock. Count seventy plus.”
He peered through a bus window and saw several tattered figures climbing awkwardly over the low chain-link fence. Boxer opened fire on them, but the wind was whipping up leaves and debris, spoiling his aim and warping the flight path of his rounds.
“Close on them,” bellowed Sam.
Boxer shot him a despairing look, then climbed down from the bus and began running across the playground toward that part of the fence. At twenty feet he knelt, put his rifle to his shoulder, and began firing. Now one after another of the dead pitched backward. The other Boy Scouts closed on other sections of the fence and began firing from closer range.
The children kept screaming, and the sound tore at Trout’s heart. It was a steady, unbearably shrill wail of total terror and total hopelessness.
“We’re losing the fence,” cried Gypsy, and even as she said it a fifteen-foot section of the chain link collapsed into the schoolyard. Infected spilled forward, falling over each other, piling up, writhing and scrambling to keep moving forward toward their prey.
Moonshiner and Gypsy began shuffling backward, yard by yard, while still firing.
“Reloading,” called Moonshiner. “Last mag.”
“Dez, hurry up goddamn it!” roared Sam.
Trout limped over to try and help, but there were already enough people. There simply wasn’t enough time. Six hundred children, many of whom were too scared to leave the school. Many of whom had to be dragged or carried out. Some of them broke away and ran back into the school, with teachers and parents chasing them.
There was no order left in the exodus.
Against all sanity, one of the children tore free from Mrs. Madison and went running directly toward the zombies who were getting to their feet. Trout could not understand it until he heard one awful, heart-wrenching word.
“Mommy!”
In the midst of the living dead, a woman with half her hair torn away and fingers missing from her left hand, reached for the child, her mouth splitting into a mockery of a mother’s smile, teeth bared to bite.
Trout realized that he was running. Pain shot up his back and down his legs. Cracked ribs grated beneath his skin. His breath burned in his lungs, but he was running, angling away from the bus, racing to intercept the little girl.
He reached her four paces before the zombie did.
With a cry of agony he snatched her up and tried to run with her.
But his legs buckled and he went down hard on his kneecaps. He twisted as he fell, hitting the ground on his back instead of crushing the girl under him. Then cold fingers were tearing at him, trying to rip the child from his arms. Black drool fell from ragged lips as the infected thing bent close to try and bite the child who had been her daughter when the world was a different world.
Trout rolled sideways and kicked out, felt his foot hit something, heard a bone break, and then the zombie fell next to him. It did not react at all to its broken leg, but immediately buried cracked teeth in Billy Trout’s shoulder.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWELVE
TRICKSTER’S COMEDY CLUB
PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA
Tom Segura sat on a stool with Lydia, the short, curvy, brunette emcee. The two of them were having a great night, riding the wave of excitement that was their impromptu fund-raiser comedy marathon. Tom was sipping a Redbull and covertly trying to count Lydia’s tattoos every time she moved. Some of them were in really interesting places. Onstage, his friend Jeremy Essig was killing them with an on-the-spot series of jokes about a zombie reality show.
Then everything changed.
Just like that. From one side of a moment to the other.
The audience was laughing their balls off about Billy Bob and Bubba the zombies and their monster truck when suddenly a woman’s scream knocked the whole night off its wheels.
“What the hell?” cried Lydia as she launched herself from her stool. Tom was a half-second slower, and he tried to see what was going on, but there was a waitress with a tray of drinks between him and the woman who’d screamed.
“Great fucking timing,” Tom muttered as he tried to edge around to get a better look. On the stage, Jeremy looked like he was frozen into the moment, eyes and mouth wide.
The whole club went silent for a heartbeat, but as Tom stepped around the waitress to see what was up, the entire club erupted into mad panic.
Utter.
Mad.
Panic.
Suddenly everyone was screaming. Women. Men. Everyone.
On stage, Jeremy screamed, too. The part of Tom Segura’s mind that was a regular guy felt twin pangs of fear and confusion. The part of him that was a professional comic actually provided commentary.
You scream like Chloë Moretz, dude.
But then the crowd split apart as people panicked and scattered, revealing an image that Tom knew was being burned onto the front of his brain as he looked at it. A bare-chested, bloody man, viciously tearing at the skin and muscle of a woman’s throat.
Right in front of him.
This wasn’t movie special effects and it sure as shit wasn’t someone’s idea of a practical joke. What Tom was seeing fifteen feet in front of him was real. Real blood, real flesh, real madness, real pain.
And he screamed, too.
He did not remember picking anything up, and even when he threw the beer bottle he was surprised that it was his hand that winged it at the attacker’s head. Tom was not a fighter. He didn’t know many comics who were. Words had always been both his sword and shield. Sarcasm was his left hook and insight was his right cross.
He saw the bottle leave his hand, saw it close the distance in what appeared to be ultra-slow motion. Saw it strike the killer right on the temple.
As good a throw as anyone in the Major Leagues ever hurled.
Dead on. A hundred-mile-an-hour ball that burned across the plate fast enough to make a fool out of a .300 batter.
Tom expected the killer to go down.
That would have been the button on this routine. That should have been the logical end, or maybe the opening act of a new phase of his career. Tom Segura, hero comedian. The stocky kid from Cincinnati who dropped a psycho with a bottle of Coors Lite.
That was the script he was already writing in his head. That was the lead for the Breaking News.
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