have time to look for extra magazines. They had to do the job or the job wasn’t getting done.
She pulled the bag of weapons out of the Tundra, slung it over her shoulder, groaning a little at its ponderous weight. She slung one of the M4s on the opposite shoulder, worked the bolt on the other, and stepped out from behind the wreck of the two trucks. Dez took a breath, set her jaw, then set the selector switch on the M4 to semiauto and started running, cutting to the left of the leading edge.
The dead turned to follow her, but she didn’t fire. Not yet.
She moved in a wide arc, hoping to draw more of them away from the entrance so she could make a run at the doorway. They came for her, hungrier for her flesh than they were for whatever waited inside the building.
Finally, she had no choice, and she fired a burst at the closest infected. The unfamiliar weight of her burden threw off her aim and the bullets stitched holes in the chests of the dead closest to her. She corrected, steadying the gun, and fired again. One of the monsters staggered back with two new black holes above its empty eyes. As it fell, Dez fired again and again. Some of them went down, but by the time she’d burned through the magazine, only five of them were down. With the gun bag on her shoulder she had no aim at all. Without stopping, she dropped the first M4 and unslung the other, tried to aim better, fired, fired, fired. And it clicked empty.
“Shit!”
She dropped the second rifle and pulled her Glock. The rear security door of the school was closer now and she could see a couple of the creatures standing just inside. She fired at them, dropping one but wasting three rounds on the brick doorframe trying to hit the other. The angle was all wrong.
She ran into the rain, toward the school, sloshing through the muddy grass, firing at everything that moved. She was only halfway there when her foot came down on a Frisbee lying in a puddle and she was sent sprawling onto the grass. The big bag of guns came off and went sliding away into the darkness. She kept her grip on the Sig, but the barrel punched three inches into the mud, totally clogging it.
Something moaned and she rolled onto her back as Harvey Pegg, the school’s gym teacher, lunged at her. His hands closed around the open
“Thank you, Billy Trout,” she said between gritted teeth.
Dez started to get to her feet even as Pegg got to his. He was a second sooner and began to rush at her, and there were three other dead behind him. Dez fired two shots and then the slide locked back.
Shit.
There was nowhere to run and no time to grab another weapon. She was done and she knew it.
Then suddenly the world was filled with bright light and noise. There was a huge
Dez stared up in total shock as the driver jumped out.
Voiceless with the impossibility of this, she mouthed his name.
“Billy?”
CHAPTER EIGHTY-FOUR
Goat trudged through ankle-deep mud for miles. He was not built for this kind of physical activity, and by the time he was halfway to the highway his muscles were screaming at him. He tried to buck himself up with images conjured from a thousand news stories he’d watched. Soldiers humping fifty pounds of gear through twenty-five miles of desert under relentless Arabian suns. Medical teams for Doctors Without Borders walking for days through malaria-filled jungles in order to bring medical supplies to remote villages. Stuff like that. It helped, but not much.
What really kept him going was Dr. Volker’s voice. He had his earplugs in and as he walked he listened to the recording Billy Trout had made at the doctor’s house. It had scared him then and it scared him worse now.
When he finally reached the highway he thumbed a ride with a guy driving a semi from Akron to Baltimore. Goat spun a story about his car breaking down. The driver didn’t care and seemed disappointed that he wouldn’t have company for longer than the five miles it took to get to Bordentown. The trucker had the radio tuned to Magic Marti, who said that the storm showed signs of weakening. From where Goat sat it was hard to tell. Well … maybe the rain was a shade less intense.
The trucker dropped Goat at the Starbucks, accepted a coffee for the road, and left.
Goat brought his coffee with him as he searched out the most isolated corner of the coffeehouse. He opened his laptop and went to work.
The first thing he did was to download the files from Volker’s flash drives and e-mail them to himself at several accounts. He copied the e-mail to Trout and their editor, Murray Klein. Then he updated his Twitter account with a “Breaking News Coming Soon” post. With that done, he downloaded the interview as MP3 files.
Then he waited for Trout to call.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-FIVE
Billy Trout had rehearsed this moment fifty times since bypassing the National Guard out on the highway and sneaking back into town. Not this exact moment — in none of his fantasies did he imagine that he’d swoop in and rescue Dez Fox — but the moment where they’d meet again. In most of his scenarios, Dez’s mouth would soften from the angry stiffness it wore since the last time they’d broken up; her eyes would glisten with unshed tears, and the two of them would fly into each other’s arms, realizing the rightness of them here at their darkest hour. He knew it was a chick flick ending, but he secretly believed that such tender moments could happen. In each scenario they would kiss. The kind of kiss Bruce Springsteen could get a number one record out of.
So he was already smiling and reaching for her when Dez stared up as he looped the equipment bag over his shoulder and got out of the Explorer.
“Billy—”
“Hey, Dez,” he said warmly. “I knew you’d be here … I knew you’d still be alive.”
She said, “What in the deep blue fuck are you doing here, you asshole?”
Trout’s smile faltered. “What? Um … I’m … rescuing you?”
“Oh, great. So what am I supposed to do now? Swoon into the arms of the big, strong ‘Fishing for News with Billy Superman Trout’ hero of the day? Give me a fucking break.” She dropped-out the empty magazine and slapped a new one angrily into place.
“Huh? No, Dez, I—”
“You should have gotten your ass out of town, Billy.”
“I
“Oh, please. With all this going on? You expect me to buy that shit? You came back for a Pulitzer and a ticket out of this shithole. The only thing you care about is your next byline.”
“You know that’s not true, Dez.” He shook his head in disgust. “Where’s JT?”
“He left me. Just like the others.”
“Left you? You mean he was infected?”
Her eyes shifted away from his. “I don’t know what happened to him. He just left.”
“Just like that? No mitigating circumstances?”
“No, not just like that, okay? They arrested us and put us in separate cruisers. His crashed. My driver got
