The wave of the infected pressed forward, and the soldiers abruptly yielded ground to them. Maybe they were low on ammunition, or maybe this kind of butchery was becoming intolerable for those poor young men in the hazmat suits, Trout didn’t know which; but the Humvees began rolling backward, and then in the parking lot of a Burger King they turned and raced off along a side road.

Heading where? Trout wondered, though he already knew.

There was only one thing down that road.

The school.

He cursed, threw the car into gear, spun the wheel, and headed down a small side street.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-THREE

SCHOOLHOUSE ROAD

STEBBINS COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA

As she drove, Dez listened for news on the walkie-talkie. None of it was good. Squads and platoons were encountering pockets of the dead, and several of the teams were overrun. Dez knew that each soldier who died would rise as one of the dead, adding to their numbers.

The chatter between NCOs and officers was increasingly hysterical. Some of the soldiers were refusing to gun down innocent civilians. These weren’t terrorists. They didn’t look different from the soldiers, which made it even harder. No difference in skin color, no difference in dress. No way to separate us from them, Dez knew. The soldiers were looking down the barrels of their guns and seeing men, women, and—worst of all—children. Pulling the trigger on them, whether or not they were infected, was simply not something every man could do.

The officers were alternating between trying to sound inspirational with a lot of “God and Country” stuff and using flat-out threats. Dez knew that it was all breaking down. The only chance to maintain control was to pull everyone back to the perimeter. The Q-zone. Pull back and wait for the rain to end so they could bring in helicopters. It was so much easier to kill from five hundred feet in the air. Hellfire missiles and Sidewinders didn’t have hearts that could break.

Dez was tempted to cut in and say something on the radio, to beg them to protect the school, but some of what she heard made her doubt that civilian protection was any part of the operational plan. She heard the phrase “contain and sterilize” several times, and that sent chills down her spine.

She busted through some backyard fencing and drove completely off the street grid, angling toward the school. Schoolhouse Lane was the only road that went to the school, but not the only way to get there. Dez broke through a white picket fence and was on the ninth hole of the Stebbins Country Club. The grass was still green despite the cold, but the Tundra’s wheels tore apart the perfectly maintained lawn. Fuck it. She agreed with Mark Twain that golf was a “good walk spoiled.”

Over the next rise she could see the upper floor of the school. There were columns of smoke rising to meet the black storm clouds, visible only by reflected firelight, but they were in front of the school, and as she bounced over the hill she saw trees, buses, and cars on fire. The school was untouched.

She rolled to a stop and considered what to do. Schoolhouse Lane and that part of the fence line was completely blocked by National Guard vehicles. It was hard to see through the rain to tell what they were doing, but it looked like they were erecting a sandbag barrier. Muzzle flashes were continual and in their glow she could see the thousands of dead in the school compound.

Dez’s heart sank. So many?

There were fewer than eight thousand people in the whole county, and it looked like at least half of them were down there. Then she realized that it wasn’t just the county folk, but kids from neighboring counties who were bussed in to attend the regional schools. And the families of those kids who’d come to the shelter to fetch their children. Lambs to a slaughter.

There was an army of the dead inside the gate, and an army of the living outside.

And her.

The only possible way in was to smash through the side gate.

The upside was that she’d get to the school and maybe help save whoever was still alive inside.

The downside was that she’d open a door for the dead to escape. Not that there weren’t plenty of the bastards out here, but …

Even while she was debating it, she began rolling down the hill toward the gate. At first she let the car coast, picking up speed through gravity, and as she did this she picked up the walkie-talkie and keyed the Send button. She’d listened long enough to pick up the key names.

“Break, break, break, this is Officer Desdemona Fox, Stebbins PD calling for Lieutenant Colonel Macklin Dietrich. I know you’re on the line, sir. Please verify that you can hear me, over.”

There was a confusion of voices and Dez repeated her call. And again. Finally Dietrich’s gruff voice responded.

“Who is this?”

“Already told you that, sir. Officer Fox, Stebbins, PD.”

“This is a military line and—”

“Excuse me, sir, but cut the shit. Far as I know I’m the last surviving police officer in Stebbins, and I am going to enter the Stebbins Little School to look for and protect survivors.”

“The hell you are, officer—”

“Pardon, sir, but the hell I’m not,” she barked. “There are a couple of hundred kids in there.”

“Everyone in that compound is compromised, Officer Fox. You need to report to a checkpoint and—”

“And get shot? No thanks, sir. Besides, I see muzzle flashes coming from the second floor of the school. Those dead sonsabitches can’t shoot a gun, so someone’s alive in there.”

“Officer Fox, I am ordering you to stand down.”

“Sir, I’m calling to inform you, not to ask permission. And to tell you to secure the hole in the west gate.”

“What hole?”

Dez answered with a rebel yell as she gunned the engine and sent the Tundra smashing through the wrought iron at seventy miles an hour. The windshield cracked, metal crumpled, and glass flew into the air and was whipped away by the wind. The engine coughed but did not die and Dez fed it gas all the way across the lawn and up the far hill.

There was a new crackle of gunfire and she looked in the rearview mirror to see a Humvee with a top-mounted .50 caliber come racing along the fence line. The gunner was firing in her direction, though the range was too great and more than half the bullets hit the fence.

Trying to get my attention, she thought. Okay, dickheads, you have it. Now let’s play.

She gunned the engine and raced across the parking lot, swerving only enough to avoid smashing into living dead who staggered toward the sound of her roaring engine. Dez recognized faces and could put names to a few of them.

Behind her, the army Humvee was inside the fence now and continuing to fire. Dez cut in and out between parked cars, letting them soak up the rounds from the heavy .50 caliber. A few of the dead went down, too, their bones shattered by the foot-pounds of impact as the bullets pounded them.

Dez circled the building to see what was what. She didn’t like what she saw. There were thousands of the living dead in the parking lot. Littered among them were at least fifty corpses who lay unmoving in the rain. Somebody knew how to kill these things. As she shot past the crowd of monsters, they surged after her, and that effectively blocked the pursuing Humvee. She could hear the constant machine-gun fire as she rounded the corner again.

The real problem, the thing that drove nails of ice into her flesh, was what she saw at the back of the school. There were far fewer dead back there—fifty or so—but the back door of the school was open.

As Dez watched, two zombies shuffled inside.

“You bastards!” she yelled and angled toward the door, then suddenly thought better of it and cut left in a tight circle, coming up behind a parked school bus and stopping. The engine idled roughly, the sound like the throaty growl of a wrestler waiting for the next round. She looked from the knot of dead milling near the back door to the corner of the building. “Come on, come on…”

The Humvee roared around the side of the school and then slowed as the driver tried to spot the Tundra. From where she sat, Dez was sure she could see them but they would have a hard time spotting her. The dead near the back of the building turned toward the Humvee, which was fifty yards closer to the building than Dez’s Tundra was, and they began moving toward the soldiers. A few moved at a loping run, the rest tottered on clumsy legs. The soldiers immediately began firing at the living dead.

“Perfect,” Dez said, grinning. She grabbed the stick shift, stepped on the gas, and shot out from behind the bus, driving at full speed in a straight line toward the Humvee. The driver and the gunners never saw her coming.

Dez gave the truck all the gas it could take and the huge pickup slammed into the Humvee with the force of a thunderbolt. With that much momentum and the rain-slick ground, the Humvee was slammed sideways. Dez kept her foot pressed to the floor, driving the other vehicle across thirty yards of asphalt. Then the Humvee’s far-side tires collapsed and it canted down to the blacktop. It slammed everything to a teeth-jarring halt, and the Tundra’s airbag deployed hard enough to punch Dez to the brink of unconsciousness.

But her mind was racing now, revving with fear and need. She struggled to remain conscious as she fished in her jacket pocket for a knife, flicked the blade open, stabbed the airbag, and slashed it down to ribbons. She kicked the door open and staggered out. The world took a few sickening sideways steps and she followed with it, then she grabbed the crumpled hood to steady herself. The closest dead were thirty yards away and closing.

The Tundra was a wreck, but she didn’t care. It was Rempel’s anyway. The Humvee was also a pile of junk. The driver was slumped over, dead or unconscious. Dez could not afford to pare off a slice of compassion. She knew they were following orders, but that cut no slack with her. The gunner had been flung out of the vehicle and was on the ground, groaning and clutching a broken arm. A third man, a rawboned guy wearing sergeant’s stripes stenciled on his hazmat suit, was struggling to get out of the Humvee through the shattered window. Dez ran around to his side, grabbed him by the neck, and hauled him out. He thumped down on the ground and looked up at her face from behind the plastic mask of the biohazard suit. He reached for his sidearm and Dez kicked it out of his hand as the weapon cleared the belt holster. Dez reached out and tore off his hood, mask and all, and screwed the barrel of her Sig Sauer in the man’s eye socket.