He found a chair and dragged it over to a spot near where the child and the dead Mr. Maines lay. He didn’t want to see them, but he felt it was important to stay with them until Bob and Luke returned with their makeshift body bags. When he tried to understand this self-imposed vigil he found no useful answers. No insights.
He checked his sat phone to see if there was anything from Goat, but got no signal down here in the basement. It made him wonder how the story was spreading. Was it time to do another broadcast.
This is Billy Trout, reporting live from the apocalypse.
That was what he’d said. It hadn’t sounded silly at the time. He meant it to be shocking. Now it sounded strange to Billy. It was less than one hour since the military attacked the school.
And yet it felt like forever. Like he and Dez and the others had always been here; like this was one of those nightmares he sometimes had where he felt trapped in a twisted funhouse experience that never ended.
Reporting live from the apocalypse.
Shock tactics or straight reporting?
The line seemed badly blurred right now.
Goat had told him that the whole thing had gone viral, but Trout didn’t know what that actually meant in terms of the survival of the people here and the handling of the outbreak. Was it all over?
Was his part in it over?
Trout was a career reporter, even though that career had dumped him back into his hometown of Stebbins. A one-stoplight dirt stain on the Pennsylvania map. Rarely had he gotten so much as a whiff of a significant story. Even his coverage of the execution of convicted serial murderer Homer Gibbon was not star-making. There were too many better-known reporters there. At best the pieces he filed for Regional Satellite News were folded into stories by bigger—and very likely better—journalists around the country.
But now he was the story, and that was a paradigm shift so radical it stripped all the gears.
He sat on the rickety folding chair, staring at the shadows, listening to the sounds of an old building settling into its own grave. He could still feel the dried tear tracks on his own cheeks. Somewhere, beyond the walls of the school, out there in the black night, he could hear the heavy drone of helicopters, the menacing thr
op-throp-throp of their blades.
“Ah, Dez…” he said softly. He thought about what this was doing to her. Hurting her, aging her.
Desdemona Fox was the most beautiful woman in the world to Trout. Tall, fit, powerful, blond, with great bones and every curve on his personal must-have list. Curves he knew more intimately than anyone. Granted he was far from the only person—or even the most recent person—to have explored that landscape, but he was the one who loved them and loved her. Not in that order.
They’d been an item more times than he could count, and they’d both logged mileage in breaking each other’s heart. The last time had been a doozy. He’d proposed marriage and the next day he walked in on her with a biker. That was her reply to the proposal. Classic Dez. Why cross a bridge when you could burn it?
Since then, she’d been a raging bitch to him. And, to hear others tell it, she’d been a raging bitch to the whole world. Even more viciously defensive than normal, which was saying quite a lot. There was, however, a corresponding increase in her efficiency as a police officer. She wrote more tickets, arrested more drunks, broke up more bar fights, and kicked more ass than before, all of it with a nasty fuck-you smile on her pretty lips.
Then the devil came to Stebbins County.
Even now Billy found it hard to reconcile the fact that his town was being destroyed by something conceived half a world away during the Cold War. It was spy movie stuff. It was horror movie stuff.
He wondered what the death toll was here in town. Seven thousand people had lived here. Were all of them dead now?
Was that even possible?
Add to that the kids bused in from neighboring districts and the parents who had come to get them out of the path of the storm. What was that—another thousand, maybe two?
Someone else’s madness had brought wholesale death to town.
Except in Stebbins County “death” wasn’t death anymore.
He put his face in his hands. Not to weep, but to try and hide.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
WHAT THE FINKE THINKS
WTLK LIVE TALK RADIO
PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA