“Not killed children.”
“Which is what Mr. Trout told the world we were doing, and the president pulled back. The bombs never fell and the kids in this school are alive. Okay, that’s a wonderful thing. No one wants to kill kids. Not even the most extreme hawks. I’ve got a younger brother and a baby stepbrother. It would crush me if anything happened to them. If they were in Stebbins County, I know I would feel exactly the same way you do. It’s impossible for a sane and moral person to feel anything other than outrage, shock, and horror.”
“If your brothers were in Stebbins and it was on you to order the bombs,” asked Trout, “what would you do?”
“The soldier in me would order the drop,” said Sam. “But me—Sam Imura—I’d never want those bombs dropped. I’d hesitate and hope for another solution. That’s what anyone would do. And that is what they call fatal hesitation. Emphasis on ‘fatal.’ That human connection skews the logic and in these situations the logic cannot be skewed. That’s why we have so many procedures in the military—in everything from basic training to missile launch sequences—that are designed to separate the human element from the necessary action.”
“But the children…” said Mrs. Madison, leaning on it, forcing awareness of the implications.
Sam looked around at the faces. “This is the problem. You don’t understand the implications of what you’ve done. Of what you still think is the right thing. You want to save these children, and that’s beautiful, that’s so wonderfully human. But if we can’t get ahead of Lucifer, then these children are going to die anyway. If not today, then when your food runs out. You’ll have to leave the building and all you’ll find out there will be more dead. Dead adults and dead children. That’s the only other way this works out. If we can’t stop Lucifer then everyone will die. Everyone. Everyone’s children. Here in Pennsylvania and everywhere else. Listen to me; hear that word. Everywhere. There is no way this disease can stop on its own. It will continue to spread exponentially. The most conservative estimates of a global pandemic of this disease is total human annihilation in ten weeks, with the deaths of all three hundre
d million Americans occurring during the first five to ten days.” He looked at Billy Trout. “Tell me … how many children are you willing to kill?”
CHAPTER EIGHTY-NINE
THE NORTHERN LEVEES
STEBBINS COUNTY
Burl and Vic lumbered toward Jake and with every step the world tilted further and further off its axis. Nothing here made sense. Not in any way.
Three teenage girls walking in a storm like they couldn’t even feel the weather. One of them naked.
Then those same girls attacking Burl and the other guys.
Biting them. Eating them.
Jake’s friends—big men—screaming and falling. Dying.
And …
And getting the fuck back up.
It was all so wrong that for a broken handful of seconds Jake forgot about everything else. He lay there in the mud and didn’t think about the pain in his leg, the ache in his chest from coughing up mud, or the need to flee. He lay on his stomach, hands pushed into the mud to raise his chest and head, and watched things come toward him that used to be his friends.
“No.”
He heard the word but for a moment he could not tell who’d spoken it. Jake never felt his lips move to form the word, didn’t feel the push of air as it escaped his throat.
No.
The word hung in the air, telling him everything he needed to understand about the moment and about the future. It answered every question he had.
No.
The rain fell in great slanting lines, popping on every surface.
“No,” Jake said, trying to explain it to the day, trying to be reasonable about all this. “No.”
Burl and Vic opened their mouths. They had nothing to say, though. Instead they shared with Jake the only thing they understood. The only thing that mattered now to each of them. They uttered a deep, resonating, aching moan of appalling hunger. It did not matter that the hunger was new. The sound of their moans made it clear even to Jake’s tortured mind that this hunger ran as deep as all the need in the world. A strange and alien hunger that could never be satisfied.
Behind the two men, the girls raised their heads. Then, to his deepening horror, Jake saw that Richie and Tommy—what was left of Richie and Tommy—were climbing to their feet. All those pale faces turned toward the sound of that dreadful moan.
And joined it.
With broken jaws and shattered teeth, with torn throats and dead mouths, every one of them—all of them—raised their voices in a shared expression of that endless hunger.
Jake DeGroot clapped his hands to his ears to stop the noise, but he could hear it all the way down to the pit of his soul. He screamed.