He shook his head. “I won’t ever leave you, kid. Not in any way that matters. Now … go on. There are eight hundred people inside the school, Dez. There are children 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.
* * *
JT 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.
* * *
Inside the school building, huddled together on the floor, Desdemona Fox and Billy Trout held each other as 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.
And then … silence.
Plaster dust drifted down on them as the roar of the helicopters’ rotors dwindled to faintness and then was 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 THREE
STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL
STEBBINS, PENNSYLVANIA
The gunship hung in the air like a monstrous insect. Except for the heavy beat of the rotors there was no sound, inside or out. Sergeant Hap Rollins, the door-gunner, crouched behind the M134 minigun, mouth acrid with the gun smoke he’d swallowed, his ears ringing with remembered thunder. Thousands of shell casings rolled around his feet, eddying like a brass tide as the Black Hawk and its crew waited.
Waited.
Rollins removed his hands from the minigun’s handles but his skin and bones still quivered from the vibrations of firing four thousand rounds per minute in a steady flow down into the parking lot. He reached up to his face and with clumsy fingers pushed his goggles up onto his forehead. His eyes burned from the smoke, but as he blinked he could feel wetness on his lashes. It wasn’t sweat and he knew it. Rollins wiped at his eyes with the backs of his trembling hands.
Below was a scene conjured in hell itself.
The parking lot of the elementary school was littered with the dead.
A few of them whole, most of them destroyed, torn apart by the relentless plunging fire from Rollins’s Black Hawk and the other gunships.
But what drew Rollins’s eyes and pulled tears from them was the figure that lay twisted into a scarecrow sprawl by the back door. It was a tall black man. Or it had been. A man dressed in the uniform of a police officer.
A man who had been infected; a man no one and no science could save.
But he hadn’t turned yet. That was clear to Rollins and probably to everyone. The man had come out of the school leading a staggering line of sick and injured people.