“No, Scott doesn’t see it that way. He doesn’t have to worry about reelection.”
“There are more important things than winning another four years.”
“Are there?” she asked.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL
STEBBINS, PENNSYLVANIA
“Oh, God—there’s another one!”
Billy Trout wheeled around but had no time to get out of the way as half a dozen people came running straight at him. The lead man was one of the teachers and he simply shoved Trout, and as Trout tried to take a step to catch his balance his back flared and his right leg buckled. He collapsed to the floor and half the people running down the hall tripped over him and went sprawling.
It was like a bad comedy routine, except no one was laughing. Most of the people had weapons. Guns, makeshift clubs, and fire axes. Everyone was ragged and dirty, streaked with grime, wild with panic.
Trout scrambled painfully to his feet and grabbed the sleeve of the closest man—Bowers, the art teacher. “What’s happening?” he demanded.
Bowers was a frail, frightened man with eyes that jumped and twitched. “Down in the gym,” he gasped. “I think it’s Mr. Maines.”
Trout didn’t know who Mr. Maines was. A parent of one of the children? A teacher? A refugee trapped in the school?
“Is he infected?”
Bowers’s face, already pale, turned a sickly white. His eyes were jumpy with shock. “They said … they said he bit one of the kids.”
It felt exactly like being punched over the heart. Trout wanted to sag back against the wall, slide down, bury his face in his hands, and weep. He wanted this to end, to go away, to not be real.
“Show me,” he said.
Trout heard himself say the words, felt his body launch into motion, felt his pulse quicken, but he did not want to see this. Not more pain. Not another kid.
No way he wanted to see another infected kid. Another hurt kid.
Another lost kid.
But he heard himself growl as he snatched up a fire axe dropped by one of the men who had fallen.
“Hey!” said the man, grabbing for it, but Billy ignored him and kept the axe.
At first he followed Bowers.
Soon, though, he simply followed the screams.
Billy Trout ran down two flights of stairs. Each step shot an arrow of pain into his back. Earlier, when he and Desdemona Fox had fought their way across the parking lot to the school, Billy had picked up a heavy bag filled with guns and ammunition. He grabbed it the wrong way, though, and something had exploded in his lower back. The pain was awful but it was also useful. It made him grind his teeth on it, to bite down on it to say fuck it to agony and everything else. Fuck it to his rage at what was happening, to his terror, and to his grief.
His fists were locked around the handle of the fire axe as he ran, but already he could feel fear sweat loosen his grip. Rage, he was discovering, was not a constant. It wasn’t armor that he could wear until this was all over.
If it was ever going to be over.
The screams echoed upward from the basement, bouncing off the walls of the fire tower.
Another one.
That’s what Bowers had said. That’s what he was running to see.
Another one.