JT pushed on the crash bar and the door opened. There were bodies outside, crumpled and broken. JT looked around for movement and saw none.
“It’s clear.”
He stepped outside and held the door as the line of infected people shambled out. Trout and Dez came last, still holding the children. The soldiers had popped more flares, but they were on the far side of the parking lot, and trucks with sirens were parked on the other side of the fence.
“Are they going to help us?” asked one of the bite victims.
“They’re coming,” said Dez, hating herself for the lie inside the truth. She told the wounded to sit down by the wall. Some of them immediately fell asleep; others stared with empty eyes at the glowing flares high in the sky.
For a moment it left Dez, JT, and Trout as the only ones standing, each of them holding a dying child. The tableau was horrific and surreal. They stared at each other, frozen into this moment because the next was too horrible to contemplate. Then they saw movement.
JT peered into the shadows. “They’re coming.”
“The Guard?” asked Dez, a last flicker of hope in her eyes.
“No,” he said.
They heard the moans. For whatever reason, pulled by some other aspect of their hunger, a few of the dead had not followed the flares and the sirens, and now they staggered toward the living who stood by the open door.
“We have to go,” said Trout.
“And right now,” agreed JT. He kissed the little boy on the cheek and set him down on the ground between two sleeping infected. Trout sighed brokenly and did the same. “Dez, come on…,” murmured JT.
But Dez turned half away as if protecting the little girl she held from him.
“Please, Hoss…?”
“Dez.”
“I can’t!”
“Give her to me, honey. I’ll take care of her. Don’t worry.”
It took everything Dez had left to allow JT to take the sleeping girl from her arms. She shook her head, hating him, hating the world, hating everything.
“Better get inside,” JT warned. Some of the zombies were very close now. Twenty paces.
Trout ran to the door. “Dez, JT, come on. We have to go. We can’t leave the door open.”
Dez retreated toward the door, backing away from the child she had to abandon. Trout reached down and took her hand, and when she returned his squeeze it was crushingly painful. He pulled her toward the door as the first of the dead stepped into the pale light thrown by the emergency light.
“JT, come on, let’s go!” Trout yelled.
The big cop did not move. He held the little girl so gently, stroking her hair and murmuring to her.
“JT!” cried Dez. “We have to close the door!”
He smiled at her. “Yeah,” he said, “you do.”
They waited for him to come, but he stayed where he was.
“JT?” Dez asked in a small, frightened voice. “What’s wrong?”
JT kissed the little girl’s forehead and set her down with the others. Then he straightened and showed her his wrist. It was crisscrossed with glass cuts from the helicopter attack.
“What?” she asked.
Then she saw it.
A semicircular line of bruised punctures.
Dez whimpered something. A question. “How?”
“Upstairs, when those bastards tackled me. One of them got me … I didn’t see which one. Doesn’t matter. What’s done is done.”
Then the full realization hit Dez. “NO!”
It was all Trout could do to hold her back. She struggled wildly and even punched him. The blow rocked him, but he did not let go. He would never let go. Never.
“No!” Dez screamed. “You can’t!”
The dead were closing in on JT. He unslung the shotgun. Across the parking lot the last flares were 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 together.”
“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. You can’t leave them.”
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
STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL
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 himself fall. Moving. Being pulled down into a well of darkness. He panicked and tried to fight it but it was like being pulled into the gravity well of a black hole. Hartnup fell and fell, and as he fell he could feel the connections to his stolen body snap and fall away, as if the scaffolding that kept him in position within the empty shell was collapsing.
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
BORDENTOWN STARBUCKS
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.