It took Simons almost forty minutes to find someone who was lucid enough to tell the story of what happened, but the story turned out to be impossible, j
ust a psychotic delusion.
Monsters, vampires, and zombies. The witness was a big man, a blues singer who identified himself as Mem Shannon, who was in town for a Festival gig, and though the man didn’t appear to be as dazed or stoned as some of the survivors, his story was ridiculous. By the time Shannon described how he beat a vampire’s head in with his electric guitar, Simons had already tuned him out and was looking for a more credible witness. But everyone who could talk told the same story, or some version of it.
Two SERT Tac-Teams entered the hospital as if they were entering a combat hot zone, which was not far from the truth, although by dawn there was no heat left. Inside the hospital everything was cold: the building, the bodies, the blood splashed high on the walls. The team made their way in through the ER entrance, past a wrecked car that had been driven right into the building. They saw spent shotgun shells and 9mm casings; they saw bullet-riddled bodies. They followed the trail of bloody footprints that led away from each successive battle site, down the hall, into a stairwell choked with the dead, up the stairs and unerringly to where they found a room filled with patients and injured staff members.
Until that point Jonatha had been in control of her emotions, but when she saw the first SERT officer appear in the doorway to the examination room, she lost it. She laid her head down on Newton’s lap and wept like a child. Newton, his eyes dreamy with the morphine one of the surviving nurses had given him, feebly stroked her hair.
The SERT team swept the hospital and found fifty-six living people and three times that many dead; many more were unaccountably missing. Some of the survivors had barricaded themselves in storage rooms or utility closets in remote corners of the hospital; ten were in the chapel, clutched together behind the altar; and the rest were the survivors of Jonatha’s group. The stories they told were frantic, chaotic, and often contradictory except for those people who had been with Jonatha. Everyone in her group talked about terrorists.
Jonatha had conjured the story and coached them all in the specifics, clearly explaining what the consequences would be for their lives and credibility if they even breathed the word vampire. After everything that had happened, the people were more than willing to buy her fiction and by the fifth or sixth retelling, most of them actually believed it. It was easier to believe.
Newton was evacuated along with a handful of others who were seriously wounded. A Medivac chopper flew him to Doylestown Hospital and he was in surgery fifteen minutes after touchdown. The doctors had to sew up and rein-flate his left lung, reset four ribs, more or less rebuild his sternum, and treat him for countless abrasions, contusions, and a dangerous dose of shock. When they asked him what had happened, he muttered dazedly about vampires taking over the world, and the staff all smiled to each other about that.
Jonatha stayed in town and tried to explain how important it was to send a team immediately out to Dark Hollow. She was ignored at first, but then she found the right spur and dug it deeply into their collective flanks. She told them that Dark Hollow was the base camp of the terrorists, and that the leader of the group might still be there. She told them that a local policeman had gone out there with a detective from Philadelphia, and that a second Philly cop had been murdered out there the day before. They had uncovered the terrorist plot, but by the time they knew what they were up against, the lines of communication had been cut.
It was a good story, something to react to, something to get behind. The SERT teams saddled up, eager for the chance to actually find some of the sick bastards who had committed the atrocities, to rescue some fellow officers, and maybe even to get a little payback.
Seventy minutes after the first choppers had landed in town, three helicopters lifted off—the two SERT Bell Rangers and a heavier medevac bird—and flew southeast at top speed. Fire planes were already ordered from every field in three counties, but the Tac-Teams had to go in while the forest was still ablaze. The closer they got to the fires the more the rescue team began to lose hope of finding anyone alive.
They found a big field by a dilapidated old house and set down there. The front porch was charred and as they moved past they saw the remains of a corpse on the porch, and Lieutenant Simons knew that, from Jonatha’s description, they had just seen the body of Detective Sergeant Frank Ferro.
The Tac-Teams were trained to move fast and they passed down the forest trail at great speed but with almost no sound.
Night-vision glasses painted the landscape a lurid green, but as they neared the burning swamp area they switched back to standard eyesight—the fires provided more than enough light.
As they enter the clearing, Simons stopped, his troops fanning out to either side of him.
“Oh my God,” he whispered. His shock was reflected on the faces of each officer and medic. This was like nothing any of them had ever seen.
The fires in the clearing had died down from lack of fuel, the bushes having burned down to the mud and sizzled out.
Wisps of smoke drifted up from charred corpses and mingled with the predawn mist to create a surreal landscape.
There were thousands of corpses. Thousands.
And in the middle of it all, there were four living people.
Val was the only one conscious. She sat in a huddle, clutching a broken and bloated arm close to her body. Crow had passed out and his hands were icy and slick with sweat.
Sarah Wolfe looked like she was sleeping, but as soon as the medics touched her she began to scream—her eyes were still closed, but she screamed and screamed for nearly three minutes. Mike was in worse shape. His body was crisscrossed with many deep cuts, each of which was caked with blood and dirt; some of the cuts were already red and hot with infection. His eyes were strangely discolored—blue, flecked with red, ringed with gold—and the pupils were fixed and dilated, his breathing shallow and rapid. One of the boy’s hands was badly broken, and there was evidence of bleeding from his ears.
The medics worked like heroes and two-man teams hustled everyone out on stretchers, running through the woods as fast as safety would allow toward the waiting choppers.
“Will he be all right?” Val begged one of the medics.
“I’m sure he will,” the medic lied.
They found the body of Philadelphia police detective Vince LaMastra lying in a bloody pool, his dead hand clutched tightly around the ankle of another corpse. Simons stared down at the big detective’s body and tried to understand how such a huge hole could have been torn through the man’s muscular stomach. The wound did not look like any kind of gunshot wound, but it was too rough for a knife. Val was standing beside him and she surprised Simons by kneeling and bending forward to kiss LaMastra on the forehead. She did it gently, as if she were saying good night to a sleeping child. The act touched Simons and his eyes burned with tears.
The man whose ankle was caught in LaMastra’s grip had obviously been killed by some kind of weapon, and Simons was startled to find a broken Japanese sword hilt near the body. His surprise doubled and then tripled when he took a closer look at the face of the dead man. As impossible as it seemed, he looked exactly like Karl Ruger, the man who had been the focus of the manhunt the month before, but whose body was stolen from the Pine Deep morgue. Simons had to force himself to shelve his wonderment so he could continue with the search.
When it was clear that there were no additional survivors to discover or identify, Simons ordered a stretcher for Val.
“I’m pregnant,” she said as they secured her to the board.
They promised to be careful.