Trout was still in his thirties, but he’d seen his share of life’s awful moments as a reporter—first in Pittsburgh after college and then here in Stebbins. Nothing he’d seen, however, ever filled him with anything approaching the
fear that was screaming in his head. He had always considered “terror” to be more of an abstract political concept rather than an actual state of human experience. That was before Volker and Lucifer 113. Now he was truly and completely terrified. He wanted to pull off the road, curl up in the back, and pull his coat over his head. Or drive to Pittsburgh and buy a ticket for the first flight out of the state. Maybe out of the country. For once that wasn’t a joke.
What if he ran into Homer Gibbon?
That thought made Trout want to scream.
It was one thing seeing that maniac in leg and waist chains in a courtroom or strapped to the execution table behind reinforced glass. It was something totally different thinking about meeting him out here. Meeting a Homer Gibbon who was free, insane, and infected. A Homer Gibbon who was a zombie.
Zombie.
The word was still so unreal.
Suddenly something broke from the foliage on his left and ran across the road. Trout stamped on the brakes and skidded through mud, fishtailing as he rocked to a stop.
He flicked on his brights and stared.
The lane was empty. Whatever it was had cut into the woods on the right.
And then the same shape moved back into the road, standing there in the glow of the lights, head swiveling in fear and panic.
A deer. Only a damn deer. On a deer path. Who’d have thought? Trout began to smile, but then he bent close to the windshield and took a closer look at the animal, and his smile bled away.
The deer was covered with open wounds that bled sluggishly in the rain.
Not bullet wounds.
Bites.
Clearly … bites.
The deer kept looking from one side of the road to the other, ignoring the car completely. It was a doe, maybe two or three years old. Lean and strong, but dying on its feet, its sides heaving with exertion or panic.
Trout put it all together. It wasn’t hard. Everything Volker had said was burning in his mind like words written in fire.
“No,” Trout said. “Come on … no. ”
Then a figure stepped out of the woods and stopped in the middle of the road, ten feet from the hood of the Explorer, thirty feet from the doe. A woman. Raven black hair, pale skin. Ample curves in a velvet and lace dress and spiderweb pattern stockings. The heart-shaped face stared at him, ruby red lips parted in a soft “oh. ” A Goth look. Heavyset but sexy.
And heartbreakingly familiar.
“Oh … no,” whispered Trout, and the ache in his chest became ten times worse.
The woman’s face was totally unmarked. The rest of her was not. Her arms and legs, her generous breasts and stomach … every other part of her was torn.
Bitten.
“No. ”
Trout knew every line and curve of the woman’s face, from her liquid green eyes to her full-lipped mouth. Eyes that always twinkled with wicked fun; a mouth on which a thousand variations of a saucy smile flickered. Now those eyes were as empty as green glass; that mouth slack. Her expression was a total blank. No pain. No fear. Not even the wry, self-aware humor that perpetually defined her. There was nothing.
“God,” said Trout as tears broke from his eyes. “Marcia. …”
Another figure stepped out into the lane. A young man in mechanic’s coveralls and a baseball cap twisted sideways on his head. A stranger. His lower face and throat had been savaged, and even with the rain the whole front of his coveralls was dark with blood. He shambled into the path, turned awkwardly toward the headlights for a moment, and then wheeled around toward the deer. Without hesitation he lunged at the animal, but the deer pelted away down the road, uttering the strangest cry Trout had ever heard a deer make. The mechanic lurched after her.
Marcia, however, stood her ground, her head tilting first to one side and then the other as if she were trying to see past the high beams; but as she did that her expression maintained its bland vacuity. It was as unnerving as it was grotesque. This was the secondary infection that Volker described. Bodies totally enslaved to the parasites. Hosts without conscious control.
But where was the consciousness? Volker had intended for Gibbon to retain consciousness while in the grave. Unable to move, but able to feel and experience. Was that what he was seeing here? Was Marcia trapped in there?