She could change into warm clothes, grab her leather jacket and riot gear, put all the guns and ammo into the Tundra and then smash her way right up to the doors of the elementary school. She chewed her lip. That wasn’t a great plan—it wasted time—but it was the only plan that sounded like it ended with her alive. And the kids alive, too.
The wind howled and the street remained empty.
Where the fuck is everyone?
For that matter, where was JT? Was he in lockup, sweating this out in a cage? Or had his driver stopped, too?
“Damn it, Hoss,” she said to the wind, “don’t you leave me, too. ”
There was a catch in her voice as she said it. And it made her mad.
“Fuck it,” she told the storm. “It’s only rock ’n’ roll. ”
Dez turned and ran down the road toward her home. Toward her guns.
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
BIXBY ROAD
STEBBINS COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA
Homer Gibbon drove the back roads away from Aunt Selma’s house. He had no idea where Selma was. Homer had dropped her off on a neighbor’s porch, rang the bell, and was a quarter mile down the road when the screams began. He dropped the church lady outside the church. Seemed fitting. He was laughing as he drove away.
The church lady’s ugly little car bounced and rattled along the rutted roads and nearly got stuck twice in mud. Homer took it in stride. He had the radio tuned to WNOW, listening to Magic Marti talk about the storm and then hearing her voice change as she began reading news reports about outbreaks of violence in Stebbins County.
That confused him for almost a full minute, and then he got it.
As he drove, he tried to put it all together, to connect the chain of events that stretched from the execution chamber at the prison to this moment in the church lady’s car. He remembered the needle and he remembered going to sleep.
Then he remembered waking up and seeing the man at the mortuary. And the ugly Russian lady. Homer remembered fighting with them. Biting them.
That had been the first real taste.
It wasn’t really his first taste of human flesh—he’d bitten parts off a diner waitress once—but it was the first time he’d tasted it out of need rather than curiosity.
And, oh, how he had needed it.
Waking up in that bag—that fucking body bag!—had been awful. Dark and terrifying, like being inside a womb or a coffin. Worse still had been the hunger. It was so deep, so massive that he almost bit his own skin, and he would have, too, if the mortician hadn’t unzipped the bag and bent close. Deliciously close.
He wondered if the mortician and the Russian lady had come back. Like Aunt Selma and the church lady.
Yes, he decided, they had. They’d come back as slaves of the Black Eye, and now they were probably out there somewhere, spreading the truth of the Red Mouth.
That was … He fished for a word that was grand enough, glorious enough.
That was perfect.
It was delicious. And it was fun.
He hit the button to roll the window down, leaned his head out of the Cube as the rain stung him, and screamed at the storm, “Fuck you, Volker!”
Homer laughed for the next five minutes. The old fuck doctor at the prison hadn’t punished him, or damned him, or any such bullshit. Volker had given Homer the keys to the goddamn kingdom. He had empowered him.
Homer liked the word “empowered. ” He’d learned it from a Dr. Phil episode.
“Empowered. ” It tasted good to say it.
The only thing that bothered Homer was the fact that Aunt Selma and the church lady seemed a little—again he fished for a word. The only thing that seemed to fit was “dumb as shit. ”