Volker’s face was unreadable. “It’s already too late for that, Mr. Trout. I called the Centers for Disease Control before you arrived. They did not believe me. I called the warden, and I called my CIA handler. He did believe me, and it is up to him to get the government machinery working to contain this situation.”
“Wait … so the authorities already know about this?”
“Yes. But, there is one more … wrinkle.”
Volker’s eyes were jumpy. Trout thought the man was half wacko when they arrived, but now he was sure Volker was a short twitch away from going totally batshit.
“Then tell me,” demanded Trout.
“Minutes before you arrived I placed another call,” Volker said, his voice slow and dry. “To Selma Conroy.”
“Why? To warn her?”
“To have her warn everyone. Gibbon was supposed to take the parasites with him into the ground. Into a sealed coffin. With their reduced life cycle they would consume all of the host matter in a few weeks and then die. End of Gibbon and the end of them. Clean and tidy. These parasites were never intended to be allowed to enter the general biosphere. Even when we were working on them in East Berlin we knew that Project Lucifer was likely to produce a bioweapon that was too unstable to use, even when deployed in remote spots.”
“Did Selma call anyone? Is she out there raising the alarm?”
A drop of drool dripped from the corner of Volker’s mouth and ran down his chin. He did nothing to wipe it away.
“No,” he said, and in a voice that was almost too soft for Trout to hear, he added, “No … after I told her some of what I told you, Mrs. Conroy cursed me and damned me … and then she put Homer Gibbon on the phone.”
CHAPTER FIFTY
HART COTTAGE
Lee Hartnup stood in the middle of the living room, his body swaying with mindless indecision as the immediate need leeched away to be replaced by a deeper and inexplicable need. The front door was open and the wet fingers of the storm reached in to touch everything. The walls, the furniture, the curtains, the bodies.
The smell of blood was even stronger than the wet-earth smell of the rain. Even floating formless within his stolen body, Hartnup could smell it. And it drove him to madness that the smell made him feel hungry. Or, rather … it made him completely aware of the hungers that drove this thing, this shell.
Worse than the hunger, though, was the grief. It was so vast a thing that it should have split this infected husk apart and sent his soul screaming into the wind.
April.
Tommy.
Gail.
Oh God … please let me die.
His stolen eyes were not looking in that direction, so for the moment Hartnup was spared the horrors of seeing what had become of his sister and her children. Even so, the last image of them hung burning in front of him, there in the vast inner darkness. April in a sprawl, dying as she tried to run with a savaged throat. Her blood painted in broad arterial splashes onto wall and ceiling. And the two smaller bodies who lay under her, still wrapped in her limp arms as if she could protect them in death more effectively than she did in life.
Tommy and Gail. Small bodies. So little of them left. So much of them in him, in his own stomach.
Please let me die and not see this … let me not know this …
There was a wet sound behind him and his body turned, a clumsy, lumbering act, triggered by an awareness of movement. He saw the policeman. Was this the second policeman he had killed, or the third? Gunther, Hartnup thought, his name is Ken Gunther.
The policeman rose slowly from the cooling body that was bent backward over the arm of the couch. Hartnup stared at the sprawled corpse, wishing he could weep for her. For all of them. But he did not own even as small a thing as his own tear ducts, and so no tears fell for officer Dana Howard. Her eyes and mouth were open. So was her stomach. Steam rose from the red drama of that gaping hole.
As Gunther moved sluggishly toward the door, his shoulder collided with Hartnup’s and the impact staggered them both. There was no reaction other than for each to right himself. No growls, no exchange of words. Like insects, Hartnup thought.
On the couch, Dana Howard suddenly sat up, and the motion forced air out through the torn tissue of her throat. A hollow sound for a hollow person. She slowly clambered to her feet, indifferent to the intestines that sloshed out of the ragged hole in her stomach and slapped onto the carpet. Dana tottered two crooked steps forward, her head slowly turning left and right but her expression remaining vacant. Absent.
Hartnup wondered if the real Dana was still in there. As he was in here, a hijacked soul in a hollow body. He wanted to step close, to look into her eyes, to see if there was still some sign, however small, that the soul or personality of Dana Howard still remained.
And if it did, what then? What would it change? Would it make him feel less alone, knowing that he was part of some larger, shared catastrophe? Or would it build another layer of impotent sadness and grief atop what he already felt? Which was better? Which hell burned less intensely?
There was another moan. More truly a moan than the sound Dana had made. Hartnup’s body turned and he cursed God as it did so, because he knew what horrors lay behind him.
No. Not lay. Stood.
April.
Somehow her face was untouched, though every other part of her was crumpled and torn and slashed by teeth and nails.
April. With her dead eyes. Holding small, squirming, hissing, moaning things in each arm.
The Hollow Man turned away and shambled toward the door, moving away from this place because there was nothing left here to hunt. The ache, the deep hunger, was waking once more in his stolen body. Within shuffling steps, he followed his sister and the police officers out into the howling wind.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
INTERSECTION OF DOLL
FACTORY ROAD AND MASON STREET
STEBBINS COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA
When Dez and JT got to the gas station it was deserted, the doors locked and the staff gone.
“Turk’s gone,” JT said as he peered in through the grimy office window.
Dez rubbed a clean spot on the window of the roll-down garage door. “Yeah, both of his wreckers are gone. Must be out cruising the roads between the schools.”
Turk and his son made money every time there was a heavy rain, pulling cars out of the mud. Dez slammed her fist on the door and turned back to their car. It was a smoking wreck and getting to the gas station took all that it had left.
JT ran over and crouched behind a corner mailbox, squinting through the gloom up Doll Factory Road. Dez opened the cruiser door and grabbed the mike, but all she got was static. Her cell phone was lost and she had no idea where. Maybe at Hartnup’s, maybe at the hospital.
“Talk to me, Hoss,” she called over her shoulder. “Are they coming?”
JT reloaded his shotgun and shoved the remaining shells into his pants pocket. “I can’t see them,” he called in a loud whisper. “They must be over the rise. Did you get Flower on the line?”
“Trying…”
Dez tried again, but there was only white noise. She threw down the mike and hurried over to kneel down next to JT.
“What are we into here?” she asked. “I mean … Jesus, JT, this thing is spreading out of control.”
He licked his lips. “Those people … they’re dead?”
It was maybe the tenth time he’d said it since they got out of the car.
“Yes, they’re fucking dead,” she said through gritted teeth.
He glanced at her. “No … no … I mean…” He shook his head, tried again. “We shot the shit out of them, Dez, and they kept coming.”
“Except some of them,” she corrected.
“Right, that’s my point. Some of them went down. Some of them are dead dead, you know? Not running around dead. God—could this make less frigging sense?”
Dez touched his shoulder. “I know, Hoss … I know. The chief … a few of the others. I shot them and they didn’t go down, and then I shot them and they did. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“When you … killed the chief,” he asked slowly, “where’d you hit him?”
Dez thought about it. “In the forehead.”
JT let out a breath, almost a sigh of relief. “Same thing happened when you shot the EMT. And I hit Paul Scott in the head and that broke his neck.”
“And the cleaning lady back at Doc’s?”
“I shot her in the cheek and she—”
“No,” he said, “where’d you put your last shot?”
Dez paused. “Right above the eye.”
“Head shot,” said JT. “That’s it, then. It’s the head. The brain, probably. Definitely the spine. That’s how to put them down for good.”
“Are you sure?”
JT said, “Think … did any of them get up after you shot them in the skull?”
Dez thought about it. “No,” she said. “Not one.”
“Head shots,” he said again. “We need to get them in the head.”
She shook her head. “I’m a good shot, but I can’t guarantee a head shot unless those fuckers are right on top of us. Maybe if I had a hunting rifle with a scope. No … we need SWAT. We need snipers firing from elevated positions.”
“Try the radio again, Dez. Maybe we can stop this if we get those snipers in here.”
She nodded. “Or enough people with guns to create a shooting line. Most rounds slow them. Double tap the fuckers back to wherever they came from.”
JT gave her a troubled look. “Dez … they came from here. That was Chief Goss and Sheldon and Paul…”
“You know what I mean,” Dez snapped, though in truth she didn’t know what she meant. She turned and hurried back to the cruiser and tried to call the station again. Nothing. Dez threw down the mike in disgust and just as the handset bounced off the seat she heard a voice.
“… report your…”
Not Flower.
Dez lunged for the handset and clicked the button.