“I’m clear, sir,” he said.

Major General Simeon Zetter sounded tired. “I was just on the horn to the president, Mack. This is bad and they’re looking to us to keep it from turning into a complete clusterfuck.”

“Seems to me this was a clusterfuck from the jump.”

Zetter and Dietrich were old friends who had served together through three wars and had transferred from regular army to the Guard as career moves, taking the promotions and taking to heart their orders to bring the Pennsylvania Guard up to a level of combat readiness second to none. They’d done that, despite having equipment that was mostly post-Iraq hand-me-down crap. The whole line of two-and-a-half-ton troop trucks was ancient, and there was not one of their gunships that would pass a civilian flight safety inspection. The troops were top notch though, and they would need these men to be sharp as knives for what they were about to face. Not just physically tough but emotionally and psychologically tough.

“My teams are in position,” said Dietrich.

“You’re going to need to keep a tight hand on them, Mack.”

Dietrich looked through the streaked windshield as sergeants handed white hazmat suits out of the back of a pair of trucks. Other NCOs walked among the soldiers, overseeing the process of transforming a thousand men in camouflaged BDUs into the cast of a big-budget science fiction movie. Hazmat suits looked scary enough at the best of times; but when the wearer is slinging an M16 and has fragmentation grenades jiggling on his belts, it became dangerously surreal.

“They’re professional soldiers,” said Dietrich, “they’ll do their part.”

“Don’t bullshit a bullshitter. This isn’t their ‘part.’ None of them signed on for something like this.”

“Well, hell, Simeon … neither did we.”

Zetter snorted. “And, you’ll love this … the governor wants our assurance that we can guarantee a secure perimeter around Stebbins County.”

“With a thousand troops?” laughed Dietrich. “During a hurricane?”

“I told him that. He authorized me to pull as many men as I needed away from flood control.”

Dietrich was silent for a moment. “That’ll mean married men, too.”

“I know.”

“The press is watching this storm, Simeon. They’ll want to know why.”

“I told the governor that. His people are preparing a story and a statement. Viral outbreak of a type and source unknown. It’s a stalling tactic until they build a prettier pile of bullshit.”

Dietrich grunted sourly.

Zetter said, “And, Mack … the governor’s going to pull the state police out and turn the county completely over to us. That order is being cut right now.”

“We could use the extra boots on the ground—”

“Not for this,” said Zetter tiredly. “A lot of these troopers are local boys. They know the people here.”

“Ah,” said Dietrich. He kept watching the process of transformation that was making spacemen of all of his troops. “So, how do they want us to play this? Containment is problematic under these circumstances and—”

“Mack,” said Zetter, and there was a note of deep sadness in his tone, “we’ve been authorized to go weapons hot. The Q-zone is a no-cross line. No exceptions.”

Mack Dietrich closed his eyes. He knew that this had been a possibility, but it was still absurd on American soil. Obscene.

“God almighty,” he said.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

HARTNUP’S TRANSITION ESTATE

Desdemona Fox stood at the edge of the lawn and watched hell itself unfold before her. She knew that the impossibility of the day had now become its defining characteristic, and that all hopes of normalcy had been consumed in a red banquet of unnatural hunger.

“God…” she breathed. A soft whisper, not a prayer.

The state police cars were scattered around, parked on the lawn and in the roundabout, interspersed with county cruisers, emergency apparatus, and unmarked cars. Thirty, forty vehicles. Three news vans. Two of the vehicles were burning, the smashed windows coughing black oil smoke into the still air. Most of the vehicles were pocked with bullet holes or peppered by shotgun pellets.

There was blood everywhere.

On the lawn, splashed high on the front wall of the mortuary, glistening on the driveway gravel. Everywhere.

“They’re dead,” murmured JT in a voice every bit as wooden and lifeless as hers. “They’re all … dead.”

Dez could only nod.

They were all dead.

She knew, though, that JT did not mean the bodies that lay scattered around, their eyes wide, skulls punched in by small arms fire, or skulls smashed by shotgun stocks. He was not speaking about those lifeless corpses molded into the crimson landscape.

No, JT spoke of the others—the black-mouthed, empty-eyed, shambling hulks who had all stopped what they were doing and turned toward them as JT and Dez had gotten out of their car. Their mouths opened and closed like gasping fish, or as if they were practicing chewing a meal that was not yet theirs.

They were on all sides of them, the closest about twenty yards away. Dez recognized that one. Not a statie. Paul Scott, the forensics officer. He only had one eye and patches of his scalp had been torn away. Over to his right, standing half-obscured by the smoke of a burning cruiser was Natalie Shanahan, her Kevlar vest hanging open, her blouse torn, and gaping holes where her breasts should have been. There were others. Sheldon Higdon stood by the open mortuary door, his chest marked with a line of bullet holes. There were four people—a civilian, two cops, and a trooper—with their hands cuffed behind their backs, but their faces were just as empty and pale as the others.

A sound made Dez turn and, closer than all of them, moving slowly out from behind an ambulance, was Chief Goss. One half of his face was gone, exposing the sharp angles of bare white bone and stringy muscle laced with yellow fat. The chief reached for her and she could see that most of the fingers were missing from his right hand. Bitten off, leaving a palm and one fat pinkie.

“Dead,” echoed JT.

Dez felt her arm move and she looked down to see her right hand rise. She was not aware of any conscious choice or deliberate intent. The hand rose, and the arm with it. The gun was a thousand-pound weight in her fist.

I could end it now, she thought. Under the chin, against the temple, or maybe just suck on the barrel and go meet Jesus. Ask that fucker for an explanation. Say good-bye to this shit. This isn’t right. This isn’t how the world’s supposed to be. I can’t live in a world like this.

The chief was ten feet away. Three shuffling steps and he would have her.

I can’t.

The gun rose.

Goss stepped closer. She could smell him. Open bowels and an outhouse stench.

Just do it! screamed her inner voice. Just one trigger pull and a wake up in the big hereafter. If they weren’t lying in Sunday school then it was a ticket to heaven. Mom and Dad would be there. If it was all a lie, then there was nothing at all. Even that option was better than this shit.

The chief’s half of a face wrinkled in a snarl of predatory lust. Hunger flickered like matchstick flames in his eyes as he stepped so close that he could touch her. The fingerless hand pawed at her, leaving smears of red on her vest. The other hand scrabbled to grab her shoulder, to pull her close as his mouth opened wide.

Chin, temple, or mouth. Do it!

She chose the temple.

The barrel pressed in against the skin until it stopped against the hardness of bone.

“Daddy,” she whispered. “Help me…”

And pulled the trigger.

The blast was huge. The bullet punched a big red hole through two walls of bone and blew brain matter twenty feet across the lawn.

Chief Goss fell.

And Dez Fox became alive again.

“JT!” she screamed as she spun and aimed, firing at Gunther, hitting him square in the center of the chest. A certain kill shot. He went back and down to one knee. Then he climbed to his feet and kept coming forward. She fired again, a double tap, one to the sternum—which only slowed him—and one to the bridge of the nose. Gunther’s whole body rocked back, paused for a moment as if he was going to recover and keep coming, and then fell.

The other things around them moaned and hissed and snarled as they came. They all came.

Dez turned and fired at Natalie and blew away most of her throat.

Natalie kept coming, red drool dripping from her lips.

“Fuck!” Dez yelled and fired again, and again, the bullets hammering into Natalie’s body. “Fucking die, you ugly cow!”

Natalie kept coming.

Dez took the gun in two hands and aimed. Her next shot blew out the light of Natalie’s left eye and blew off the back of her head. Natalie’s next step was meaningless and she collapsed down, making no attempt to catch her fall.

Dez whirled toward JT, who was still frozen and immobile. Dez shifted her gun to her left and with her right slapped him as hard as she could across the face. Again and again, forehand and back.

JT staggered back, his lips exploding with blood.

She saw the precise moment when the vacant space behind his eyes suddenly filled again. Just as the gunshot had brought Dez back from her brink, her slaps had dragged JT back from his.

“Watch!” he barked and shoved her aside as he brought the shotgun up and fired a blast at Paul Scott. The beanbag round hit Scott in the chest and spun him in a full circle, but Scott bared his teeth and lunged again.

The second beanbag caught him on the bridge of the nose and his head snapped back so fast and so far that Dez knew that his neck was broken. Scott fell backward and sprawled like a rag doll. He did not move again.

The others were coming now.

They were not fast, but they kept coming. Lumbering, some of them limping on damaged legs, a few—those with head injuries—staggering more awkwardly. Dez fired into them, hitting everything she aimed at. Punching hollow-points through hearts and stomachs and thigh bones and groins.

“Why won’t they go down?” she bellowed.