As soon as he rounded the bend, Billy Trout cut sharply off the road and crashed through a screen of brush onto a deer path that snaked between two farms. The brush closed behind him, and if some of the bracken was crushed and twisted, Trout figured that anyone would blame it on the storm. There were trees falling, who cared about some brush?
Branches and shrubs scratched along the sides of the Explorer, and mud splashed as high as the windows as he bumped and thumped over ruts and roots.
This path wound around the Miller and Rubino farms and then crossed a paved road that would take him right into the back of the Regional Satellite News parking lot. With any luck the whole staff would be there, reporting the storm and manning the journalistic bastions. They’d help him get word out to whatever cops were left in town and definitely to the authorities. Some public appeal might coax the feds into considering other choices.
Of course, getting the word out would put his neck on the federal chopping block. Prison was a real possibility, First Amendment notwithstanding. They could beat him to death with the Patriot Act, disappear him to some hellhole for a few decades, and call it “interests of national security.” It was no joke, and Trout wasn’t laughing.
“What the hell are you doing, Billy Trout?” he asked himself.
Even though the heater was only set for defrost, he was sweating badly and his mouth was as dry as old cloth. It wasn’t simply the threat of government retaliation for what he had planned. Things were much, much worse than that.
Trout was still in his thirties, but he’d seen his share of life’s awful moments as a reporter — first in Pittsburgh after college and then here in Stebbins. Nothing he’d seen, however, ever filled him with anything approaching the fear that was screaming in his head. He had always considered “terror” to be more of an abstract political concept rather than an actual state of human experience. That was before Volker and Lucifer 113. Now he was truly and completely terrified. He wanted to pull off the road, curl up in the back, and pull his coat over his head. Or drive to Pittsburgh and buy a ticket for the first flight out of the state. Maybe out of the country. For once that wasn’t a joke.
What if he ran into Homer Gibbon?
That thought made Trout want to scream.
It was one thing seeing that maniac in leg and waist chains in a courtroom or strapped to the execution table behind reinforced glass. It was something totally different thinking about meeting him out here. Meeting a Homer Gibbon who was free, insane, and infected. A Homer Gibbon who was a zombie.
The word was still so unreal.
Suddenly something broke from the foliage on his left and ran across the road. Trout stamped on the brakes and skidded through mud, fishtailing as he rocked to a stop.
He flicked on his brights and stared.
The lane was empty. Whatever it was had cut into the woods on the right.
And then the same shape moved back into the road, standing there in the glow of the lights, head swiveling in fear and panic.
A deer. Only a damn deer. On a deer path. Who’d have thought? Trout began to smile, but then he bent close to the windshield and took a closer look at the animal, and his smile bled away.
The deer was covered with open wounds that bled sluggishly in the rain.
Not bullet wounds.
Bites.
Clearly … bites.
The deer kept looking from one side of the road to the other, ignoring the car completely. It was a doe, maybe two or three years old. Lean and strong, but dying on its feet, its sides heaving with exertion or panic.
Trout put it all together. It wasn’t hard. Everything Volker had said was burning in his mind like words written in fire.
“No,” Trout said. “Come on … no.”
Then a figure stepped out of the woods and stopped in the middle of the road, ten feet from the hood of the Explorer, thirty feet from the doe. A woman. Raven black hair, pale skin. Ample curves in a velvet and lace dress and spiderweb pattern stockings. The heart-shaped face stared at him, ruby red lips parted in a soft “oh.” A Goth look. Heavyset but sexy.
And heartbreakingly familiar.
“Oh … no,” whispered Trout, and the ache in his chest became ten times worse.
The woman’s face was totally unmarked. The rest of her was not. Her arms and legs, her generous breasts and stomach … every other part of her was torn.
Bitten.
“No.”
Trout knew every line and curve of the woman’s face, from her liquid green eyes to her full-lipped mouth. Eyes that always twinkled with wicked fun; a mouth on which a thousand variations of a saucy smile flickered. Now those eyes were as empty as green glass; that mouth slack. Her expression was a total blank. No pain. No fear. Not even the wry, self-aware humor that perpetually defined her. There was nothing.
“God,” said Trout as tears broke from his eyes. “Marcia.…”
Another figure stepped out into the lane. A young man in mechanic’s coveralls and a baseball cap twisted sideways on his head. A stranger. His lower face and throat had been savaged, and even with the rain the whole front of his coveralls was dark with blood. He shambled into the path, turned awkwardly toward the headlights for a moment, and then wheeled around toward the deer. Without hesitation he lunged at the animal, but the deer pelted away down the road, uttering the strangest cry Trout had ever heard a deer make. The mechanic lurched after her.
Marcia, however, stood her ground, her head tilting first to one side and then the other as if she were trying to see past the high beams; but as she did that her expression maintained its bland vacuity. It was as unnerving as it was grotesque. This was the secondary infection that Volker described. Bodies totally enslaved to the parasites. Hosts without conscious control.
But where was the consciousness? Volker had intended for Gibbon to retain consciousness while in the grave. Unable to move, but able to feel and experience. Was that what he was seeing here? Was Marcia trapped in there?
It was the most horrible thing Trout could imagine. Her body hijacked by mindless insects that functioned on a purely instinctive level, and her mind — Marcia’s beautiful, clever, cheeky, delicious mind — trapped and unable to control what the parasite made her body do. Like a ghost haunting a house that once belonged to it in life.
He wished he’d killed Volker. God, he wished he’d taken that gun and beat that fucking maniac to death with it.
Or, better yet, he wished he’d made Volker come with him. So he could see firsthand what horrors he’d wrought. Then he’d kick the son of a bitch out into the rain and let Marcia have her way with him.
He gagged and almost vomited on the dashboard.
Marcia was a monster. An actual monster.
Trout knew that if he stepped out of the car she would attack him. Or … rather, her body would. Marcia would have no control over it. She would have no choice. She would have to watch her body commit murder and cannibalism.
“Jesus Christ,” Trout said.
How widespread was this? How many people had been infected?
Where was Dez?
That thought ignited like a flare in his mind. Where the hell was Desdemona Fox? Was she alive or dead? And, if she was dead … what kind of dead was she?
Tears brimmed in his eyes again. He had the pistol, but Trout had no idea how to use it. He’d never fired a gun in his life. Even if he knew how, he was sure he couldn’t bring himself to use it on Marcia. Or Dez.
Maybe on himself, though. That thought was whispered constantly in the back of his mind. If Dez was
