What was it? Some kind of party to celebrate the storm? Ditzy broads.
The carpet was going to be ruined. That came out of his maintenance budget. His bonuses were based on a percentage of the budget leftover at the end of the month. Replacing carpets for a whole unit was going to cut that down to chicken shit.
Nick debated what to do. Call them or go the hell over there?
He called.
The phone rang and rang. He slammed down the phone, looked up their cell number on the register card, and called that. It rang three times and went right to voice mail.
“Shit.” He grabbed his raincoat off the peg behind the counter and pulled it on, then crammed a Pirates baseball cap down hard on his head. Even with that he knew he was going to get soaked, but he was so mad that he didn’t care.
He pushed the door open and had to force it closed against the claws of the wind; then he hunched his shoulders and bent into the blow, trudging through the rain like a man walking through mud. The gale winds were intense and the rain was numbingly cold. By the time he was halfway across the parking lot he was drenched, with lines of water running down inside his clothes. Rain pelted his face with the stinging force of hail, and runoff dripped from the tips of his long chin beard. Through squinted eyes he could see the crowd of people gathered at the open door, some of them inside Unit 18, some outside. None of them had umbrellas or rain hats. They stood in the rain like they didn’t give a shit and Nick was twenty yards away from then when that fact started to bother him.
He was ten yards away when he realized that everyone was chewing. They stood with their hands cupped and held to their mouths, each one totally absorbed in whatever they were eating.
“The hell—”
What was this? Some kind of crazy storm tailgate party? Beer and ribs and…?
He was five yards away when he realized that he was wrong. About the nature of the gathering. About the menu. About everything. The people closest to him raised their faces from their meals and stared at him with eyes that were far too dark and mouths that were far too red.
Nick was three yards away when he stopped walking and turned to run.
That was two yards too late.
Jillian Weiner felt the darkness closing in. The calm-down drugs were taking her below the level of pain and stress, and soon the big, dark, soft wave of anesthesia would roll over her and she would go down into a sweet nothingness. She wouldn’t feel the scalpel as the doctors went in and removed her appendix. Who needs an appendix anyway? She knew that there would be pain when she woke up, and more pain during the recovery, but for now … it felt like rolling down a hill that was lined with silk and covered with pillows.
Sounds were becoming muted, distorted, softened so that they made little sense other than as background noise. She could hear the doctor and the nurses speaking, and even understand snatches of what they said, but if it made any sense to Jillian, she was too deep to care.
“… the hell’s going on out there…?”
“… someone’s hurt out in the hall…”
“… oh my God … my God!”
“… please … oh, sweet Jesus … please, don’t let it in here…”
The screams became the cries of seagulls over a lazy beach. Even when blood splashed her, it was nothing more than salt spray from the summer waves.
It’s nice down here, she thought. So sweet, so soft …
Jillian felt hands on her. Nurses? Doctors? Who cared?
She couldn’t exactly remember what a doctor was.
Or why she was here.
The darkness was flowing around her, filling up the room. The figures that moved around her were painted in tones of mint green and bright red. Then the colors swirled as she went deeper, and deeper.
She felt the others hands, the colder hands, on her. But she didn’t care.
She felt the dull pinch of teeth. That registered as pain, but as far away, on a shelf, over there, somewhere else.
As Jillian’s eyes closed, as the anesthesia took her all the way down, she had one last glimpse of the room. A doctor with an Indian face and eyes filled with blood, bending toward her stomach. Another pinch, another bite.
The anesthesia pulled her under and she was smiling as Dr. Sengupta, the nurses, and several patients gathered around her gurney and devoured her.
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
The dead moved toward the cruiser. Trooper Saunders had stopped screaming by now. Dez’s screams died slowly in her throat as she stared through the rain-smeared window at the monsters. Most of them were clustered around the body, but the rest were coming her way.
There was no way out.
The rain was getting heavier by the moment, obscuring the window, making it hard to see what they were doing.
“Shit,” Dez breathed and immediately slid down off the seat, crammed herself into the footwell and tried to disappear. The rain was so loud she could not even hear the moans of the dead.
Then she heard the driver’s door creak against its hinge. She dared not look. Above her, around her, there were soft sounds. Hands touching. Bodies bumping without force against the skin of the cruiser.
Dez held her breath.
The thin hiss of fingernails on wet glass and dripping metal.
The vehicle rocked as someone … something entered it.
The rain was so loud. It drowned everything out. Dez willed it to drown her out. The air began to burn in her lungs.
Outside there was a whishing sound as another vehicle drove by, and then a change in sound as it slowed.
“Hey!” called a voice. “Are you … oh, Jesus Christ!”
The scream of tires. Turning, turning, burning as the water on the blacktop evaporated and the rubber smoked. A higher shriek as the tires found purchase, the roar of the engine as the car accelerated away.
Then nothing but the rain. So much. So heavy.
It fell and fell. A steady thunder on the roof and the rear windshield. Cold and wet breeze coming in through the open door.
But beneath the rain … nothing.
Dez had to let the breath out. It was a fireball behind her sternum.
She let it out open mouthed. Slow, forcing her throat open wide. No stricture, no sound. Exhale it all out. Hold. Wait. Inhale. Silent.
She waited for the dead-limp hands to start beating on the glass. She turned her head an inch and peered up, wanting to see and terrified to see the worm-white fingers poke through the grille.
Waited. Watched.
