Then she and Sheldon broke through a screen of shrubs … and the day became even more impossible.

Officer Jeff Straus lay faceup on the grass at the far side of the clearing. His entire face was … gone. Torn away to reveal ragged red muscle and white bone. Blood oozed down the sides of his face. Strauss’s pistol lay three inches from his hand.

Much closer, just a few yards away, Officer Mike Schneider stood with his back to Dez and Sheldon. Schneider’s Glock was down at his side, clutched in a tight fist. Schneider’s whole body twitched and he jerked the trigger. The blast was sharp and loud and the bullet punched a bloody groove through the side of Schneider’s ankle bone before burying itself in the dirt. Then Schneider’s legs buckled and he dropped full-weight onto his knees, the jolt knocking the gun from his twitching fingers. There was a hissing sound and Dez saw a geyser of bright red blood shoot outward from below Schneider’s chin and splash the pale face of Andy Diviny. The blood struck him in the mouth and eyes and splattered the rubbery leaves of a big rhododendron. As Schneider canted sideways and fell, Diviny stared straight at Dez.

Purple lips peeled back from bloody teeth and Diviny hissed at her.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

HARTNUP’S TRANSITION ESTATE

“No…”

Dez heard the word, but she could not tell if she spoke it, or Sheldon. It could not have been Strauss. That much was obvious. He had no lips left with which to speak. His mouth and cheeks had been torn away, and his eyes stared in terminal astonishment up at the roof of green leaves.

The sounds of the forest were gone, washed out of the moment by another sound. That of Andy Diviny chewing a mouthful of flesh.

“No!”

This time it was Sheldon who spoke—who almost sobbed the word—and then his sob turned into snarl as he rushed forward and swung the stock of his shotgun at Diviny’s jaw. Dez watched, unable to react. There was a terrific crack! Bone shattered, teeth flew, and the young cop’s head whipped around so fast that his whole body was spun into an awkward pirouette. Diviny crashed into the rhododendron and fell almost out of sight except for his twitching legs.

Sheldon looked down at him and then jerked his head around to look at Schneider and Strauss; then he spun toward Dez. His eyes were huge and wild and he was breathing in and out with alarming rapidity.

“Fucking no!” screamed Sheldon.

Dez shook her head in mute agreement and denial.

There were sounds behind her. Yells, bodies crashing through the brush, and, as she turned, JT was there, and the others were right behind him. They hit the edge of the clearing and jerked to a stop as if there were a force field. It was impossible to them as well.

Three officers down. Two dead. One battered and twitching. Everyone looked around wildly for the perps, for the maniacs who had done this; and gradually those eyes focused on Sheldon and Dez.

“It was Andy Diviny,” said Dez woodenly. “When we got here Strauss was down and Andy was … biting Schneider. I don’t … I don’t…” She shook her head, unable to construct a logical end to that sentence.

JT stood blinking at the dead officers, his eyelids fluttering as if they could brush away the image that he was seeing. Then he took a tentative step in, and another, and then he ran the rest of the way to Dez. He took her by the arms and stared at her, his gaze flicking up and down, looking for injuries.

“Dez! Are you hurt?”

She half laughed. That was what he had asked her before. The answer was clear. The answer was yes.

She said, “No.”

He suddenly pulled her to him and gave her a fierce hug. Like a father would. Like a brother in arms would.

Chief Goss came waddling into the clearing, his face bright red and his uniform damp at the chest and armpits with fresh sweat. Dez pulled free of JT’s hug and turned toward him. She watched him as he tried to read the scene.

“It was Andy,” said Sheldon in a hoarse voice. “Andy Diviny … He … he…” He shook his head. Like Dez, he did not possess a vocabulary for this.

“He did what?” shouted Goss. “What are you trying to say?”

“It’s true,” croaked Dez. “Diviny, he … when we got here he was…”

“Hey!” yelled JT. “Sheldon … watch … He’s getting up?”

Everyone turned toward Diviny, who was struggling to get to his hands and knees in the dense tangle of the shrubbery. He snarled, exposing jagged rows of broken teeth. Then, with a savage growl, Sheldon Higdon stepped forward and grabbed him by the back of the belt and hauled him up, spun him violently around and then flung him face first onto the grass.

“Cuff that sick son of a bitch!”

The two closest officers hesitated. This was all so weird.

“Wait … what are you saying, Shel?” said the older of the two. “You’re all screwed up here. Andy got here the same time we did. He couldn’t have attacked Doc and—”

“Open your eyes! He just killed Mike Schneider and Jeff Strauss, goddamn it. We saw him do it,” yelled Sheldon, and he aimed a savage kick at Diviny’s backside, knocking the young cop down as he tried to get up. “Throw some cuffs on that motherfucker before I pop a cap in—”

Diviny twisted around on the ground. His eyes were wide and dark and empty. His shattered chin was bearded with blood, and his throat was a junkyard of torn flesh. His mouth was a feral snarl. With another unnatural hiss, he threw himself at the older cop, but the officer jerked away, backpedaling ten feet. Every gun swiveled around and pointed at Diviny.

As Diviny rushed at Sheldon, Dez stuck a leg out and tripped him. The deranged young cop fell hard, but again he began climbing to his feet, showing no signs of pain or fear.

“What the hell’s wrong with him?” demanded Goss.

Dez began moving around the edge of the circle of cops, waving them back. “I don’t know. He just went crazy.” She grabbed Goss’s sleeve. “Chief, listen to me … Natalie Shanahan’s down, too. I think Andy killed her, too.”

“Holy Jesus.”

Andy Diviny’s body swayed and trembled. Black drool trickled from his mouth. Dez remembered that same ooze coming from the lips of the Russian cleaning lady. She didn’t know what it was, but just the sight of it filled her with an atavistic dread.

“Be careful!” yelled Dez. “Don’t let him spit on you.”

Everyone was yelling at him. “Andy! Get down on the ground. Arms out to your sides. Do it now! Do it!”

If the young officer was able to understand the shouts there was no sign of it on his snarling face. He suddenly rushed at Chief Goss, reaching for him with clawlike fingers.

JT and Sheldon raised their shotguns and fired. The Mossbergs were loaded with small fabric pouches filled with #9 lead shot weighing about an ounce and a half. They were nonlethal but each one kicked like a mule and the rounds caught Diviny on both sides of his chest. He was plucked backward like he’d been pulled from behind by a chain and crashed to the ground. By all rights he should have been dazed, coughing, and nauseous; instead he immediately rolled onto his stomach and got up again.

“No fucking way…” breathed Chief Goss.

Someone yelled, “Pepper him!” But Dez already had her pepper spray in her hand. She slapped Diviny’s reaching arm aside and blasted him in the eyes.

He did not cough or choke or even blink. Instead he tried to spit at her.

Dez hit him again and again, but now she was backpedaling away from those bloody fingers, away from that black mucus.

“Christ!” she cried. “Somebody drop this crazy son of a—”

Five officers fired their Glocks at once, the bullets punching into Diviny, slamming into the Kevlar and shattering bones beneath the vest, making the officer dance and judder like a puppet. The barrage sent him sprawling backward against a tree trunk, and he hit it with enough force to knock pinecones from the branches. But even as they rained down, Diviny rebounded from the trunk and made another run at Goss.

“Andy, for the love of God, stop!” cried JT, but the officer flew at the chief, bloody spit flying from his mouth. JT pointed his gun at Diviny’s head.

“Hold your fire!” bellowed Dez. She threw down the pepper spray, whipped out her baton, stepped forward and smashed Diviny across the shins with it. The shock vibrated a line of hot needles up her arm, but the blow swept Diviny’s legs out from under him and he crashed onto his chest. Before he could roll over, JT was there, dropping his knee down hard between Diviny’s shoulder blades, and then six pairs of hands were at work, grabbing Diviny’s hair to hold his head down and his snapping mouth toward the dirt, fishing for the flailing arms, twisting them behind the young man’s back, snapping cuffs around the wrists. His weapons were removed and his utility belt unbuckled. JT kept his weight in place. They didn’t have leg shackles.

“Christ, what’s wrong with him?” Goss asked over and over again, but no one had an answer.

Dez looked around. “Anyone have a spit hood?”

“I got one,” said an officer from Martinville. He opened a small pouch on his belt and removed a disposable spit sock hood. Dez shook it out and pulled it over Diviny’s head. The elastic throat band would keep it in place but wouldn’t choke the officer. There were better devices, including plastic bite masks, but none of them carried one on them or in their cars.

“Got to do something about that throat,” advised JT. He fished in his pocket and produced an Izzy, tore open the plastic cover and handed it to Dez, who had the best angle to apply it.

She quickly wound the bandage around Diviny’s throat. The dressing—formally called an Israeli bandage as a nod to where it was developed—had a built-in plastic tension bar that applied continuous pressure to a wound, allowing the bandage to act as a stand-alone field dressing. All soldiers carried them and they had become very common in domestic law enforcement. Diviny spit at Dez as she worked, but the spit hood caught the spray of black blood.