And how fucked up was that? How crazy? How impossible?
His legs needed to stop moving, and he collapsed against the corner of a burned-out store at the corner of Tunnel Hill and Doll Factory Road. Across the street was the hulking mannequin factory that had given the road its name. The windows were smashed out, the parking lot littered with the blackened shells of cars and bodies. A car stood alone in the middle of the intersection, its radio playing.
He moved on, stumbling down the long blocks, splashing through puddles. Some were filled with dirty rainwater; some were viscous pools of dark red.
There were so many bodies. All of them sprawled in a sea of black blood. Thousands of shell casings stood like tiny islands. Weak sunshine and dying firelight gleamed on the metal and winked on the rippling surface of that dark lake. No wind stirred the surface, though. Lonnie knew that for sure, and it was one of the things that made dying feel worse, more deeply terrifying.
The black blood was alive with worms. Tiny, white, threadlike. So small that they looked like thin slices carved from grains of rice. But there were so many of them.
From where he stood, Lonnie couldn’t see the worms, but he knew they were there. The worms were everywhere.
Everywhere.
He could feel them.
On him.
In him.
Wriggling through the ragged lips of the bite on his arm. Twisting and writhing inside the lines of blood that ran crookedly down his body.
He tried not to look at the wound. He could not bear to see the things that moved inside it, around it.
He could feel that wound, though. And even that was wrong.
The bite was deep. Skin and muscle were torn. It should hurt.
It should be screaming at him with the voices of all those torn nerve endings.
Instead it was nearly silent.
Cold.
Distant.
As if the skin around that bite was no longer connected to him. No longer belonged to him. As if it was on him but not of him.
Cold emptiness ran outward from the wound, tunneling through his body like threads of ice. Every minute he felt more of the cold and less of the warmth he needed to feel. With every step he knew that his desperate heart, his pounding heart, was pumping that infection throughout his body. Cold blossomed like small, ugly flowers all over him. Taking him away, stealing his awareness so that he wasn’t even sure he could feel himself dying.
Would he slip away completely and not be aware of it?
The captain had said something about that. And that guy on the radio, the reporter trapped inside the Stebbins Little School. What was his name? Billy Trout? He’d said something scary. Something that was crazy wrong.
That the self—the consciousness, the personality, the everything—of the victim didn’t die with the body. Instead it would be there. Hovering, floating, aware but no longer in control of the meat and bone that had been its home.
“Please,” said Lonnie, asking of the day. Of the moment. Of anyone or anything that could listen. “Please…”
He did not want to die like this. He didn’t want to become something sick and twisted. He didn’t want to be a ghost haunting that stolen home of flesh and blood.
Above him, somewhere up there, hidden by the buildings, he could hear helicopters. Black Hawks. Vipers. Apaches.
And way above them, the growl of jets carrying fuel-air bombs, waiting to turn the whole place, the whole town, into hot ash.
Forty minutes ago Lonnie Silk would have screamed and run at the thought of that fiery response to the plague.
Now he looked to the heavens, and prayed for it.
It was better to burn on earth than be damned here. Hell here, heaven later?