Goat licked his lips, tasting mud and blood, and he dared ask a question.
“Where are we going?”
Homer took his time answering. He found a connecting road and turned onto the blacktop. There were other cars there, some heading to the turn-off to Route 653. Goat wanted to yell at them, to warn them; but that was impossible.
Eventually Homer flicked on his headlights as he brought the Escalade up to fifty-five miles an hour. They crossed the line into Fayette County and found another road that headed north.
“Where are we going?” Goat asked again.
Homer grinned at him with bloody teeth.
“Back to where I was raised,” he said.
That confused Goat for a moment. Homer had been born to an addict mother and given up for adoption. He’d been raised in a series of foster homes scattered all over western Pennsylvania.
No, he thought suddenly. He’s going home. To the place where he became a monster. To the foster home where he was first abused by a sadistic man and his wife. To a small apartment in a big city.
“Pittsburgh…?” said Goat in a small, frightened voice.
Home shot him a look, then grinned again. It was not a man’s smile. Maybe not even a zombie’s smile. It was the smile of the Black Eye and the Red Mouth. It was the smile of a monster.
Homer Gibbon drove on through the night.
“Home again, home again, jiggity-jig,” he sang in a voice that was filled with such dark promise.
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
THE Q-ZONE
STEBBINS COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA
They moved across the quarantine zone alone and in packs. Some of them wore rags that had once been coveralls and jeans of farmers. Some wore ordinary shopkeepers’ clothes. A few wore the blood-smeared battle dress uniform of the Pennsylvania National Guard.
There were whites and blacks, some Latinos, a few Asians. There were adults and children. There were men and women.
None of those professional, cultural, racial, or gender identifiers mattered anymore. They were all of a kind now. All of the same species, and they were all unified by a purpose which, though not actually shared, was the same for each of them.
Hunger.
Age didn’t matter anymore. They were all as old as they would ever be.
They walked as fast as broken bones and torn tendons would allow them to walk. Some moved with the stick-figure gait of rigor mortis. Others loped along, low and feral and fast.
Most of them were leaving Stebbins County.
Not that they understood or cared where the county line was. They lacked the capacity for that kind of perception. They left because they could not smell food anymore. It had moved.
And so they followed it.
But not all of them.
Some stayed because they could still smell the fully blooded meat of the living. Those were the ones closest to the town’s only high ground.
The ones closest to the Stebbins Little School.
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
THE SITUATION ROOM