He thought about it some more, not liking that. It seemed disrespectful. Not dumb. Empty. Like a hollowed-out gourd. Nothing inside except the hunger. Auntie didn’t even seem to know her name. Granted, without a face she couldn’t speak, but she didn’t even respond to her name. Church lady still had a face, but she couldn’t talk, either. They just “were. ”
Would that be how all of them were? He was pondering that when a figure staggered out of the brush and walked right into the middle of the road. Homer stamped on the brakes and had to steer like a madman to keep the Cube from spinning and crashing into the rainswept trees.
“You stupid fuck!” Homer yelled. But then he stopped and peered through the windshield as the wipers slapped back and forth. He knew this man, and Homer grinned. “Holy shit…”
The man turned toward the car, staring with eyes that were dark and empty of everything except hunger. He wore the remains of a blue smock over street clothes. The smock, the clothes, and the man were covered with so much dried blood that even rain this heavy could not wash it away. The face that peered through the windshield at Homer was the same one that had bent to peer at him when the body bag had been unzipped. The mortician. Homer got out of the car and the man suddenly staggered toward him, taking two quick steps as if preparing to attack.
Homer knew that he wanted to attack. He was hungry, after all—Home knew that on a gut level.
Then the man stopped and stood in the rain, looking lost. Looking … empty.
“Guess I’m not your Happy Meal, sport,” said Homer.
The dead mortician lifted his head at the sound of Homer’s voice and the barest shadow of perplexity flicked across his dead features. Then he turned and began staggering in the same direction he’d been going before Homer stopped. On the other side of the road was a farm field, and beyond that … a farmhouse.
“Nice,” Homer said wi
th approval. There was more movement up the road, and he saw a cop step out of the woods. His shirt and throat were ripped away, his eyes dark and dead. The cop crossed the road and headed in the same direction as the mortician. “Very nice. ”
Homer got back into the car. He felt satisfied. He’d wanted an answer to his question, and the universe had given it to him, no muss, no fuss.
The empty ones, like Aunt Selma and the mortician, were no different than the worms under his skin. They did what they did but there was no one at the wheel except the will of the Red Mouth.
“Kind of perfect,” he said, nodding to himself. “That’s right on the fucking money. ” He pounded the side of his fist on the steering wheel. Then he rolled up the window, put the car in gear, and kept driving. A mile down the road he came to a crossroads. Turn left and the road would take him into the town of Stebbins. Turn right and he could pick up Route 381, heading to the county line.
In the rearview mirror a military-style Humvee materialized ghostlike out of the rain, and a moment later a troop truck appeared. And another.
Homer waited for the Red Mouth to tell him, but there was silence inside his head. Then he remembered that he was the Red Mouth now.
Beneath his skin the larvae wriggled and in his stomach the hunger howled.
The crossroads waited. Left or right?
Smiling, he made his turn. He even used his turn signal, just for the hell of it.
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
MAIN STREET
TOWN OF STEBBINS
Dez Fox ran along the side of the road. Main Street was empty and on any other day Dez would have blamed the storm. Today, though, she could no longer take anything for granted.
The downpour reduced visibility to a dozen yards. Everything beyond that was a confusion of gray. Threatening shapes seemed to materialize out of nowhere and Dez suddenly tensed, bringing the shotgun up, finger slipping inside the trigger guard, only to take two more steps to reveal them as mailboxes, a stand of corn stalks left over from Halloween, a sheet-metal cutout of a smiling car salesman outside of Dollar Bill’s Used Cars. Nothing. None of them.
A mile and a half from her trailer park, she found three dead bodies lying in the middle of the road. Two men and a woman. Civilians. Each of the bodies had been virtually torn to pieces by automatic gunfire. Multiple head wounds.
The ground was littered with brass. 5. 56 x 45mm NATO rounds. M16s.
Dez looked around and saw muddy impressions from truck tires and boot marks from at least a dozen men.
The National Guard. Had to be. Hope flared in her chest. If the Guard was here, then someone was using their head. Someone asked for some serious backup and the Guard had come in here to kick ass and take names.
She kept moving and as she ran questions filled her head. How much did the government know? Did the government know anything? The Guardsmen could have been here to sandbag the riverbanks or evacuate the townsfolk. They might have fired as a response to an attack. If so … did the Guard take any injuries? Were any of them bitten and possibly infected?
That was the ugliest thought of all, because they went everywhere in the state. It would be a real bitch if the good guys riding to the rescue were the ones to spread this.
She realized with a sinking stomach that she had already seen that. That’s what happened to Andy Diviny and the others. And Chief Goss. Probably Trooper Saunders, too.