fading.
“Go on, honey,” JT said.
“No goddamn way, Hoss,” she growled, fighting with Trout, hitting him, hurting him. “We stand together and we fucking well go down
“Not this time,” JT said, and he was smiling. Trout could see it even if Dez could not, that JT was at peace with this. “I’m going to keep these bastards away from those kids as long as I can. I need you to go inside. I need you to tell the National Guard to do what they have to do, but make sure they do it right. They got to wipe ’em all out. All of them.”
What he meant was as clear as it was horrible.
“JT — don’t leave me!”
He shook his head. “I won’t ever leave you, kid. Not in any way that matters. Now … go on. There are kids inside that building who need you.
And there it was.
Dez sagged against Trout, and he pulled her inside and held her tight as the door swung shut with a clang.
They heard the first blasts of the shotgun. Trout didn’t hear the next one because Dez was screaming.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWO
JT Hammond stood with his back to the line of bite victims, holding the shotgun by its double pistol grips, firing, pumping, firing. There was almost no need to aim. There were so many and they were so close. He emptied the gun and used it as a club to kill as many as he could before his arms began to ache. Then he dropped the gun and pulled his Glock. He had one full magazine left.
He debated using the bullets on the wounded, but then he heard the whine of the helicopters’ rotors change, intensify, draw closer; and he knew what would happen next. He just had to keep the monsters away from the children until then. Soon … soon it would all be over, and it would happen fast.
He took the gun in both hands and fired.
And fired.
And fired.
Then one of the dead came at him from his left and JT turned to see that it was Doc Hartnup. He almost smiled.
“Sorry, Doc,” he said, and fired.
Doc Hartnup saw JT Hammond fighting for his life. He would have given everything to help this man, to save a single life. It would not repay all of the lives he’d taken … but it would give him at least a moment’s grace. However he had no control over the body. It staggered toward the officer, legs moving quickly as the hunger built to insane levels.
His white hands reached for JT, ready to grab, to rend and tear and expose all of that fresh meat.
Then JT turned toward him and raised the pistol.
Hartnup looked into the barrel of the black automatic. It was bottomless and as dark as forever.
“Sorry, Doc,” said JT Hammond.
There was a moment of intense white, brighter than the sun. Then everything went black. Hartnup felt his body falling.
Then he felt something else. Inside the hollow body he felt
He could not feel the body of the Hollow Man.
He could not feel anything. Not the hunger, not the pain. Nothing.
And soon, he could not think anything.
As his body fell to the bloody ground, Doc Hartnup fell into the black well of death and was truly and completely gone.
JT Hammond stood above the children, his smoking gun in his hand, the slide locked back, the gun empty. Searchlights swept across the sea of zombies and focused a burning ring around him. JT raised his arms out the side, letting the pistol fall. The living dead swarmed him.
The Black Hawks opened fire.
The heavy bullets tore into the zombies, punching through meat and shattering bone, knocking the dead backward and off their feet. Exploding skulls and tearing limbs from their sockets.
In the White House Situation Room, the president of the United States sat with his aides and Scott Blair, National Security Advisor, and watched the slaughter of the infected.
“What have we done?” whispered the president.
Blair took off his glasses and rubbed his face. “We did the right thing, Mr. President.”
The president shook his head. “No,” he said, “no we did not.”
Inside the school, huddled together on the floor, Dez and Trout held each other as the bullets hammered like cold rain on the walls. It seemed to go on forever. Pain and noise and death seemed to be the only things that mattered anymore. The barrage began chewing through the walls, showering them with debris.
And then … silence.
Plaster dust drifted down on them as the rotors of the helicopters dwindled to faintness and then were gone.
“It’s over,” Trout whispered. He stroked Dez’s hair and kissed her head and wept with her. “I won’t ever leave you, Dez. Never.”
Dez slowly raised her head. Her face was dirty and streaked with tears, and her eyes were filled with grief and hurt. She raised trembling fingers to his face. She touched his cheeks, his ear, his mouth.
“I know,” she said.
Dez wrapped her arms around Trout with crushing force. He allowed it, gathering her even closer. They clung to one another and sobbed hard enough to shatter the whole ugly world.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THREE
Goat looked out at the storm. The night sky was still black, but the rain had slowed to a gentle drizzle. From where he sat he could see the lines of red taillights and white headlights on the highway. He wondered how many of those travelers knew what was happening?
Probably all of them by now.
The story was everywhere. It was the only story on the news right now, and Goat suspected that half of those oncoming headlights were reporters trying to get to Stebbins while the story was still breaking. He had already seen ABC, CBS, and CNN vans come through.
He trolled the online news. FOX was the first to pull the word “zombie” out of the info dump of the Volker interview. “Zombie Plague in Pennsylvania.” Goat snorted. It sounded like an SNL skit. Wasn’t funny at all.
He looked down at the clock on his laptop. Ten minutes to one. It wasn’t even twenty-four hours since this thing started. It felt like a year.
