O’Grady’s false teeth lay shattered and scattered around her, and from the bridge of her nose to her chin the skin was torn away and the bones smashed to pieces. Rempel stared in mute horror at the exposed splinters of bone that stuck up through the mangled flesh.
He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. This was the work of a madman, a maniac. Could Burke have done this? Rempel tried to imagine the soft-spoken Irish writer going apeshit like this. He didn’t like Burke, but this didn’t fit at all.
It was hard to imagine anyone doing this to a nice old broad like Mrs. O’Grady. Killing her was bad enough, but disfiguring her was …
Well, Rempel thought, it was just plain crazy.
Rempel got up and moved cautiously through the trailer. No sign of Burke. No sign of a mad killer, either. He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and punched 9-1-1. The phone went immediately to a “No Service” message. Not even a ring.
“Shit.” He tried 4-1-1 and got the same thing, and he had no better luck with Burke’s home phone. It made a weird electronic beeping sound, but there was no dial tone. Rempel had two thoughts about that. The storm and the killer. In the movies it was the killer who disabled the phones, but that wouldn’t explain the lack of a cell phone signal.
He heard a sound behind him and turned, expecting it to be Burke.
It was Mrs. O’Grady.
She stood a few feet away from him, her eyes wide and dark and empty, and her face a ruin of jagged bone and ripped flesh.
Rempel stared blankly at her.
“What—” he asked.
She answered with a bite. Not with her old false teeth — they were destroyed — but with a new set of teeth formed by the jagged bones of her exposed jaws. It was a disjointed, improbable weapon, and he should have been able to block her, evade her, sweep her aside. Rempel was easily twice her size. Mrs. O’Grady wasn’t even particularly fast.
It was all about shock. All about impossibility.
Rempel stared in shock one second too long.
Which is how so many in Stebbins died that night.
And it was why so many of the dying spoke the same last word. A single syllable, spoken with fear and wonder.
“No.”
Dez slowed to a cautious walk as she approached the trailer park. Even from a hundred feet away she could tell that the wave of the infection had already reached here and swept through it.
Two of the trailers were burning.
Doors were open, cars stood idling and empty.
There was no blood, not in this rain, but she saw the glint of shotgun shells on the ground.
Dez wasn’t sure how to react to this. On one hand, the violence seemed to have rolled around her rather than over her. On the other, she felt like she was losing what little grasp she had on exactly what was happening.
How long had she been asleep in the back of the cruiser?
It was full dark, and she didn’t think it was an early dusk caused by the storm. This was night. The dead of night, she thought, and shivered at her own joke.
She moved into the park. The closest trailers were dark except for Rempel’s, but he wasn’t home. She wasn’t sure if she was happy or disappointed that he wasn’t the main course in a monster feast.
A moment later the implications of that thought hit her. It wasn’t another bad joke. She really had been disappointed that Rempel wasn’t dead, and that was really bad thinking.
I’m losing it.
As she continued deeper into the trailer park she tried to knock down that observation, but it dodged every blow.
God … how far gone am I?
How do I even know if I’m crazy or just in shock?
At the corner of Rempel’s trailer she paused. Her own double-wide was sixty feet across open ground. No cover except for some flower gardens that had withered in the cold and were now beaten flat by the rain. She was about to sprint for it when she saw a figure come walking out from between her trailer and her neighbor’s.
It was a teenager. One of the Murphy twins from the F-section of the park. He was dressed in jeans and a white sweatshirt. No shoes or coat. Even from twenty yards Dez could tell that he was dead. The realization drove a knife into her heart.
The twins were thirteen. Still kids.
She raised her pistol and aimed. The distance was far too great for an accurate shot, but she suddenly found herself running forward, the gun leading the way, her feet making the quick, small steps she was taught in the military. Large steps jolt and jerk the body, spoiling aim; small steps roll the body forward, keeping the gun level. She ran toward the boy and, as he turned toward her and began to reach, Dez fired a single shot from eight feet away. It took the boy in the forehead, blowing an apple-sized chunk out of the back of his head as the impact snapped the child’s neck.
Even with the roar of the rain muffling the blast, the gunshot seemed too loud. It would draw them. She knew that for a fact, which meant that she had just blown a hole in her own future.
Hurry, you bitch.
She ran to her trailer, jammed the key in the lock, opened the door, jumped in, and shut and locked the door behind her.
Byron Rempel sat on the floor, dead but newly awake, inert because there was no prey to follow, when Desdemona Fox ran past the open doorway.
The sight of her. The smell of her. The living reality of her triggered a response in the parasitic hive mind that now ruled his body. It was not a thought, merely a reaction. An impulse to follow, to attack, to feed, and to transfer larvae to a new host. To another host. One of many.
Rempel and Mrs. O’Grady struggled to their feet and shuffled slowly out of the trailer, following the scent of fresh meat. Other figures emerged from trailers all along the path the running woman had taken.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX
The trailer was dark. There was no backup generator, no emergency lights.
Dez unclipped her flashlight and used its beam to find the stove. It was gas, so she lit all four burners. The light filled the kitchen and dining room. She fished in the cabinets until she found a box of candles. She didn’t have any of the thick girlie-girl scented candles. All she had were thin colored candles left over from JT’s birthday, so she lit those and carried a fistful of them into her bedroom. Since she couldn’t hold them all and do what she had to do, she grabbed her metal trashcan and dropped the candles on the balled-up tissues, used makeup sponges, torn-up bills, and a card from Billy Trout that she had thrown away unopened. The tissues caught right away and then the rest, throwing bright yellow light into the room.
Dez set the can down on the bedroom carpet, fished in her pocket for her keys, and fumbled the right one into the lock. The Yale clicked open and Dez lifted the lid.
It was all there. Handguns in wooden boxes. Shotguns. Hunting rifles with scopes. Stacked boxes of bullets. Knives. Everything.
For the first time in hours, Dez Fox smiled.
And then the dead began banging their pale fists against the walls and windows of her trailer.
