footage and photos of children in Iraq and Afghanistan, in Somalia and Chechnya, in war-ravaged places around the globe. The hollow stares of hollow children who have been emotionally and psychologically gutted by fear, horror, and the betrayal or abandonment of those who were supposed to be there to protect them.
The only relief, and it was a small one, is that there were no casualties. Despite injuries, some serious, to everyone in the room, no one had been killed. In Trout’s view, as far as miracles went this one was kind of left- handed.
He could hear the helicopters outside and wondered why they had stopped.
His camera was on a stool at the edge of the stage. The Record and Send buttons were still locked down. The images of bloody children crawling out from their marginal niches of safety did not need a narrator, and Trout was too busy anyway.
He thought about the diatribe he’d given during the attack. The phrasing was probably too colorful, a bit over the top. On the other hand, this whole thing had a “worst-case scenario” flavor to it.
There was a knock on the door and everyone froze. The teachers with guns rushed over, grimacing with impotent anger. Trout ran with them. If this was another attack, then Team Stebbins was going to rack up some points.
The knock came again. Three hits, then two, then three.
“It’s Dez!” Trout said as he shouldered his way past the armed teachers. He unlocked the doors and pulled them open.
Dez Fox and JT Hammond stood there, bloody and shaken, looking as battered and abused as the people inside. Even though he had no invitation, no right, no permission to do so, Trout took Dez in his arms and pulled her into a fierce embrace. For a moment she tensed to push him back, but then wrapped her arms around him, and they held each other, feeling unuttered sobs tremble beneath each other’s skin.
“God, Dez,” Trout whispered, kissing her hair.
The teachers lowered their guns. And Trout slowly, reluctantly released Dez. She did not move away from him, and he was glad of that.
JT still stood in the hallway, apart and alone, his shotgun held in his bloody hands. The expression on his face was indescribable. It was a bottomless sadness mixed with a realization of the worst horrors.
“We heard from the National Guard,” he said. “They called Dez on her walkie-talkie. They offered us a deal.”
The crowd pressed close to listen.
“What kind of
“A bad one,” said Dez softly. “But it’s all we’re going to get.” Trout watched her eyes as she looked out at the sea of faces. Most of the little children were backstage now, but there were teenagers here, and babies in the arms of people who had probably rescued them from the things that had been their parents.
“Tell us,” said Mrs. Madison.
She told them.
That’s when the weeping began. Shock from the helicopter attack crumbled in the face of this new grief.
“How many bite victims do we have here?” asked Dez.
Mrs. Madison shook her head, refusing to say.
One of the other teachers put her hand on the principal’s shoulder but looked at Dez. “Fifteen adults. Three … children.”
Dez sagged back against Trout and he caught her.
“You can’t send the children out there,” insisted Mrs. Madison. “It’s inhuman.”
“It’s a plague,” snapped JT so harshly that it silenced everyone. “If the infected stay in here they will get sick and die, and then they will reanimate. Even if you keep them locked up, you can’t save them. All you can decide is whether they die a slow agonizing death or go … more quickly…”
His voice broke at the end, but his words hung in the air.
Mrs. Madison turned to the other teacher and buried her face in her shoulder and wept. Everyone stood there and watched her thin back hitch and buck with each terrible sob.
JT, Dez, and Trout went to do what had to be done. They asked for volunteers and got none. Not one.
The three of them closed the auditorium doors and walked down the hallway to the classrooms where the infected were being kept in isolation. Trout thought that it felt like walking that last mile from a jail cell to the execution chamber. It had the same sense of finality at the end of it, the same enormous dread of the unknown.
But what he said aloud was, “With everything that’s happened, we’ve kind of lost sight of how this started.”
“Volker?” asked JT.
“No … Homer Gibbon. Volker said that he’d be different than the other infected. That he might still have some conscious control over his body. I wonder … could he be out there now? Is he the reason this spread so fast? Is he going around like some monstrous Johnny Appleseed, spreading the plague?”
JT said nothing.
Dez shook her head. “If he is, then the Guard will have to hunt him down.”
“Right now,” JT said softly, “it’s hard to say who’s worse. Gibbon, Volker, or the people in the government who allowed
Dez nodded, and Trout agreed wholeheartedly.
The bite victims were in one room; those sick from the black mucus were in another.
“Billy,” said Dez, “you unlock the door and then get behind us. We’re going to have to go in guns out just in case they’re turned.”
Trout looked at her. “Would it be easier if they have?”
JT and Dez said it at the same time. “Yes.”
But none of them had. They were all there, still alive, but terribly sick. They sat slumped in chairs with their heads on the little desks; or they lay on the floor covered with coats and anything else that would keep them warm.
Trout looked around the room and then at JT and Dez. “We’re all going to hell for this.”
“Already there,” said JT. He knelt by a man who was a friend of his, Greg Schauer, who owned a little bookstore in town. He touched his shoulder and rocked him gently. “Hey, man … hey, Greg…”
Schauer opened his eyes like a sleeper after a long night, but his gaze remained vague and disconnected. “JT…? What’s going on, man?”
“C’mon, Greg,” said JT as he tucked his hands under Schauer’s armpits and pulled him to his feet. “Time to go, brother.”
Schauer peered at him with dreamy eyes. “Go? Go where?”
“Outside … they’re waiting for us.”
“Who?”
“The National Guard.”
Schauer managed a weak smile. “’Bout time the cavalry arrived.”
JT sniffed back tears. “Yeah. The good guys are here to take care of us.”
He shot a look of black hatred at Dez. It wasn’t meant for her, and she knew it; he was sharing what could not be expressed, and she met him with equal intensity.
The words were like a curse, or the punch line of a bad joke told in front of good people.
One by one they helped the sick people to their feet. Dez produced her last pairs of polyethylene gloves from the compartment on her utility belt. She gave one pair to Trout and dragged the others over her own lacerated hands.
There was no trouble, no resistance. The people were too sick and frightened, and those who had the energy to be involved in what was happening were guided along by the thought that they were walking toward
