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 deal?” asked Trout cautiously.
“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 anyone to work on the Lucifer thing. They’re all monsters.”
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 good guys.
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 rescue and medical treatment and safety. Even though none of them had been told that beyond JT’s cynical comment.
The good guys are here to take care of us.
When the infected were all out in the hall, Dez reached for the doorknob to the second quarantine room. That was where the three children were kept. Trout stepped up and pushed her hand away.
“No,” he said. “I’ll do this…”
It meant so much to Dez that Trout understood this about her, and she smiled through her tears. “No,” she said, and she opened the door.
The children were small. There were two boys of about kindergarten age and a girl who looked to be in second grade. All past-tense designations now. These little ones would never go back to school. They would never learn, never play, never grow up. They would always be remembered as children, if there was anyone among the survivors who knew them.
Despite the risk of infection, Trout bent and picked up one of the little boys. The child was on the edge of a fevered coma, but his eyes were still open. He looked despairingly at Dez, who nodded.
He understands, she thought.
JT picked up the other boy and cradled him in his big arms. The child had a bite on his arm that was already festering.
“We have to do this quick,” he said.
Dez went to the little girl. The child was as hot as a furnace, but her eyelids fluttered open as Dez gently picked her up.
“Are … we going home now?” the little girl asked.
A sob broke in Dez’s chest and for a moment she stood there, clutching the girl to her chest, her face crumpled into a knot of grief.
“Yes,” she whispered to the little girl. “Yeah, baby … we’re going home now.”
She led the way out of the room and down the hall. JT and Trout waited for the staggering adults to follow, and then they came last. A procession of the dying and the broken.
They walked to the stairwell and then down the cold tower that was no longer part of a knight’s castle or a princess’s glittering palace or a wizard’s lair. Now it was cold stone, as lifeless as the stones on the walls of a crypt.
They stopped at the back door and, still holding the girl, Dez unclipped the walkie-talkie and keyed the Send button.
“We’re bringing out the bite victims. Three of us are not sick. Two cops and a civilian in a blue shirt and khakis. Do not fire on us.”
“Roger that,” said a voice. Not Zetter.
“We don’t want to get overrun either. Can you draw the infected away from the door long enough to let us bring them out?”
“Yes, ma’am. You’ll hear it.”
Trout grinned at Dez. “‘Ma’am’? You’d have threatened to kneecap me if I ever called you that.”
“That still applies, so don’t get any ideas.”
Suddenly outside a siren began howling. Another joined it, and another. Dez leaned close to the door to listen. The sound began to move, to fade.
“They’re using sirens to draw them away.”
JT nodded approval. “First smart thing they’ve done.”
After a couple of minutes the walkie-talkie squawked.
“You’re clear, Officer Fox,” said the voice. “It’s a tight window, so hurry.”