Homer was the same one that had bent to peer at him when the body bag had been unzipped. The mortician. Homer got out of the car and the man suddenly staggered toward him, taking two quick steps as if preparing to attack.
Homer knew that he wanted to attack. He was hungry, after all — Home knew that on a gut level.
Then the man stopped and stood in the rain, looking lost. Looking … empty.
“Guess I’m not your Happy Meal, sport,” said Homer.
The dead mortician lifted his head at the sound of Homer’s voice and the barest shadow of perplexity flicked across his dead features. Then he turned and began staggering in the same direction he’d been going before Homer stopped. On the other side of the road was a farm field, and beyond that … a farmhouse.
“Nice,” Homer said with approval. There was more movement up the road, and he saw a cop step out of the woods. His shirt and throat were ripped away, his eyes dark and dead. The cop crossed the road and headed in the same direction as the mortician. “Very nice.”
Homer got back into the car. He felt satisfied. He’d wanted an answer to his question, and the universe had given it to him, no muss, no fuss.
The empty ones, like Aunt Selma and the mortician, were no different than the worms under his skin. They did what they did but there was no one at the wheel except the will of the Red Mouth.
“Kind of perfect,” he said, nodding to himself. “That’s right on the fucking money.” He pounded the side of his fist on the steering wheel. Then he rolled up the window, put the car in gear, and kept driving. A mile down the road he came to a crossroads. Turn left and the road would take him into the town of Stebbins. Turn right and he could pick up Route 381, heading to the county line.
In the rearview mirror a military-style Humvee materialized ghostlike out of the rain, and a moment later a troop truck appeared. And another.
Homer waited for the Red Mouth to tell him, but there was silence inside his head. Then he remembered that he was the Red Mouth now.
Beneath his skin the larvae wriggled and in his stomach the hunger howled.
The crossroads waited. Left or right?
Smiling, he made his turn. He even used his turn signal, just for the hell of it.
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
Dez Fox ran along the side of the road. Main Street was empty and on any other day Dez would have blamed the storm. Today, though, she could no longer take anything for granted.
The downpour reduced visibility to a dozen yards. Everything beyond that was a confusion of gray. Threatening shapes seemed to materialize out of nowhere and Dez suddenly tensed, bringing the shotgun up, finger slipping inside the trigger guard, only to take two more steps to reveal them as mailboxes, a stand of corn stalks left over from Halloween, a sheet-metal cutout of a smiling car salesman outside of Dollar Bill’s Used Cars. Nothing. None of
A mile and a half from her trailer park, she found three dead bodies lying in the middle of the road. Two men and a woman. Civilians. Each of the bodies had been virtually torn to pieces by automatic gunfire. Multiple head wounds.
The ground was littered with brass. 5.56 x 45mm NATO rounds. M16s.
Dez looked around and saw muddy impressions from truck tires and boot marks from at least a dozen men.
The National Guard. Had to be. Hope flared in her chest. If the Guard was here, then someone was using their head. Someone asked for some serious backup and the Guard had come in here to kick ass and take names.
She kept moving and as she ran questions filled her head. How much did the government know? Did the government know anything? The Guardsmen could have been here to sandbag the riverbanks or evacuate the townsfolk. They might have fired as a response to an attack. If so … did the Guard take any injuries? Were any of them bitten and possibly infected?
That was the ugliest thought of all, because they went everywhere in the state. It would be a real bitch if the good guys riding to the rescue were the ones to spread this.
She realized with a sinking stomach that she had already seen that. That’s what happened to Andy Diviny and the others. And Chief Goss. Probably Trooper Saunders, too.
Somebody had to warn them.
“Oh, shit,” she growled and increased her pace. Running hurt her head, but she didn’t care. She slogged through the mud as fast as her weary legs would carry her.
She got answers to some of her questions a quarter mile down the road. She saw the smoke first and as she rounded a curve in the road she saw the burning car. It was a Toyota RAV4. The vehicle was completely gutted by fire, the tires melted, the windows gone, bullet holes everywhere. Spent brass all over the muddy road.
There were six bodies there. Two of them were still inside the Toyota, both strapped into car seats in the back, burned to charred lumps.
“God,
She turned away in grief and horror. The bodies on the road were all adults. Two women and two men. Dez knew the women. Katie Gunderson and her sister, Jeanne. Both of them were married, both had kids in preschool.
Had.
“God…”
Lying partly under Jeanne was a man Dez vaguely recognized from town events. A farmworker. She had no idea what his name was. The three of them were riddled with bullet holes. The farmworker was clearly one of the infected. His face and throat had ragged bite marks; but Dez couldn’t see any trace of bites or the black goo on the women.
The last body was a real puzzle, and again it made Dez’s heart sink.
It was a National Guardsman in a torn white hazmat suit. Dez squatted down and gingerly lifted his gas mask to reveal a young face, maybe twenty. He had a bite on his left hand, but it wasn’t the disease that had killed him. Someone had put three rounds through his forehead.
But … why hadn’t they taken the injured man into quarantine, given him some kind of treatment? Why leave his body here? Even if he’d died as a result of the bite, or if they’d killed him because they were terrified of the disease, why leave his body? Leaving a soldier behind is against everything soldiers are taught. They didn’t even take his dog tags. They blew his head off and left.
That made no kind of sense.
Unless …
“Oh … shit,” she said and she could hear the panic in her own tone.
It made no sense unless the Guardsmen were that afraid of the plague. Unless the plague was so desperately dangerous that even the respect for a fallen soldier had to be prohibited.
Dez licked rainwater off her lips. How bad was this thing? She looked at the bodies and then down at the dead soldier.
The dead kept their secrets, but their silence seemed to mock her, to promise awful things.
Then she heard a squawking sound. At first she couldn’t understand what or where it was, and then she heard it again, and she knew. It was squelch from a walkie-talkie.
Dez found it under the man’s hip. Dez tore off a handful of leaves from a roadside bush and wiped the device clean of blood and mud. She began fiddling with it as she jogged down the road toward her trailer park. When she found a channel where there was some chatter she slowed to a walk and pressed the device to her ear, sticking a finger in her other ear to block out the sound of the storm. There were a lot of voices, lots of overlapping chatter, a
