carrying its own mysteries, followed.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Chief Goss stared down at the madness that lay sprawled in shades of red and green before him. Two officers here. Another down the slope. Not his officers, but that didn’t matter. The towns in this part of the county always shared work; their cases always overlapped. They were all a family.
Three dead.
One completely out of his mind.
The clearing was still. No one moved. Shock danced in every set of eyes; it beat wildly in their chests.
He stared at the bodies. Mike Schneider, Jeff Strauss. Not only dead but torn apart. What the hell was Andy doing to them? Eating them?
Goss felt the contents of his stomach turn to greasy sludge. He wanted to throw up. He wanted to go the hell home. He turned to Sheldon.
“Shel,” he said softly, “what happened here?”
Sheldon shook his head. Then he took a breath, licked his lips, and explained things exactly as he’d seen them. Goss was shaking his head throughout. Not to suggest that Sheldon was lying, but because it was all so weird. So wrong.
“Any sign of Doc Hartnup?”
He carefully lowered his bulk to one knee a few inches from Strauss. Goss knew him better than Schneider. Their kids were in the same grade, they played on the same Little League team. Strauss’s son was the shortstop, his own Mikey was the catcher.
This was going to have to be a closed casket. The whole lower half of Strauss’s face was gone. Pieces of it were stuck to the dead man’s uniform, to the grass, to his hair. The rest was …
He couldn’t allow himself to frame the thought.
“Ah, Jeff … damn it to hell.”
Goss had never been beside the body of a fallen friend. Everyone he knew had died in bed or in the hospital, and accident victims were usually strangers. He wondered if he should close Strauss’s eyelids. That’s what they always did in movies. Close the eyelids. Kind of like closing a door, or pulling up a sheet. It meant something, he supposed. A show of respect. A gesture to restore some little bit of dignity.
Would it matter to the forensics guys?
He thought about that, lips pursed, heart heavy.
“Yeah,” he murmured to himself, “it’s only right.”
He reached his hand out, his fingers trembling with adrenalin and shock. And revulsion. It was hard to look at that torn face. Goss felt the greasy sludge in his stomach bubble and churn.
His fingertips brushed the half-closed lids.
Suddenly Jeff Strauss’s lipless mouth lunged forward and those naked teeth clamped down around Chief Goss’s fingers.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Sergeant Teddy Polk stood in the rain, waving his men forward and pushing them up into the back of the troop truck. A line of troop transport trucks stood idling in the downpour.
One of the soldiers, a corporal named Nick Wyckoff, from Pine Deep, the same small town as Polk, nodded at the convoy. “What’s the op? Sandbagging streams and shit?”
Polk shook his head. “Nobody’s saying nothing, Nickie.”
Wyckoff nodded and reached for the strap to pull himself up into the truck, but Polk tapped his shoulder and Wyckoff bent close. “Couple weird things about this, man.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
Polk spoke as quietly as he could given the roar of the rain. “We were told to handpick single men. No one with family in the area, no one with kids. Married guys are to be used for flood control and emergency evac only. None of them roll with us.”
“What’s the—”
“No, wait,” said Polk, “it gets weirder.… I saw them loading some crates into a couple of the trucks.”
“Crates of what?”
Polk licked his lips. “Hazmat suits.”
“Oh … shit, man,” murmured Wyckoff.
“Yeah.”
A few minutes later the trucks were rolling through the gate.
Major General Simeon Zetter stood at the window in his office, hands clasped behind his back, face impassive, eyes fixed on the line of vehicles heading into the storm. He was alone in his office. All of his senior officers had gone with the convoy. This wasn’t an operation that could be trusted to lieutenants.
The rain troubled him. It was like a thick gray veil and even from where his office was set it was hard to see the line of trucks. With these winds his Apaches and Black Hawks were grounded. That was bad. If there was ever something that was a perfect operation for the air cav, this was it.
Ground troops? Stebbins County was sparsely populated, but it covered a huge amount of ground. Fields and forests and barns. So much natural cover. In any other situation he could rely on thermal scans for target acquisition, but during the conference call with the governor, the president, and the national security advisor, he had been told something that still echoed in his head. Something that screamed in his head.
“Hostiles may display variable heat signatures,” said Blair, the national security advisor.
“Sir?” Zetter had asked.
“We have to prepare for the possibility that a fair number of the infected may not be trackable by body temperature.”
“How so? Are they using thermal suppressors or—”
“No,” said Blair, “these are civilians.”
“Then I don’t—”
“Their body temperatures are dropping. On average, one degree per hour. Faster in this cold.”
“Is … is this a symptom of the disease, sir?”
Blair said, “No, General Zetter, it is proof of the absence of life.”
PART TWO
DEATH’S OTHER KINGDOM
We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.
