Come on, you idiot, growled his inner voice, you’re wasting time.
He opened his eyes and studied the building. From where he was parked he could see in through the open front door, through the glass vestibule, and into the reception area. There was no movement inside.
Trout licked his lips. Volker’s pistol was a cold weight on his thigh, and Trout touched it with trembling fingers. He expected the solidity of it to comfort him, but it did not. To kill these things—to really kill them—Volker said that you had to destroy the motor cortex or the brain stem. Trout didn’t like his chances with a head shot. He’d be lucky to hit the body let alone a target as small as the motor cortex. Not unless he was almost face-to-face with them, and that thought was unbearable.
He got out of the car very carefully. The zombies did not look up from their meal. None of them appeared to notice the dome light come on in the Explorer. The rain was still an effective screen. Even so, every sloshing footfall, every ragged breath seemed insanely loud to him as he crept from the side of his car to the side of the building. It felt so strange to carry a gun and, despite everything, Trout felt vaguely foolish, like a kid playing cops and robbers.
He paused at the entrance, looked inside and looked back, and cursed himself. That quick look into the lighted building spoiled his night vision. Taking the pistol in both hands, Trout sidled in through the vestibule and hip-checked the door so that it swung shut.
The reception area was empty, and he cautiously crept into the newsroom. Trout bit down on a cry of horror. The station engineer, a gray-haired man named Jock Spooner, lay on the floor. The dead had been at him. The man was like a scarecrow with all the stuffing removed. His arms and legs were spread like a starfish and were strangely intact … but the rest of him—chest, stomach, organs, and meat—had been torn away. And eaten. Trout was sure of that.
The devastation to the man was appalling. It was dehumanizing on a level that Trout had never witnessed … but it wasn’t the worst part of the grisly spectacle. Not by a million miles was it the worst.
The man’s eyes were open.
His mouth was moving.
Not trying to speak. Trying to bite. Destroyed as he was, the engineer was trying to raise his head and bite.
Trout stared down at Jock. “Oh … God, no. ”
Jock’s teeth clacked together. His arms and legs were attached by a few strings of meat. Compelled by a twisted fascination, Trout leaned as close as he dared and stared into the engineer’s eyes.
Jock snapped the air causing Trout to flinch.
“Shit … um … Jock? Hey, buddy … are you still in there? Can you hear me?”
The dead eyes stared at him without expression. Trout bent closer still to examine the wounds, trying to make sense of animation and apparent life in the presence of so much physical destruction. He caught movement along the lines of torn flesh, and when he realized what it was he recoiled in terror. Jock’s blood had coagulated to a dark jellylike substance, and it was teeming with tiny worms. They looked like maggots, though much smaller and thinner.
He looked at the blood splashed on the floor. Some of it was bright red, some was as dark as Jock’s blood. All of the dark blood was pulsing with larvae. But where the black blood and the red blood intermingled he could see waves of even smaller larvae and tiny spots of white. Eggs and hatchlings. Had to be. But it was so fast. Insanely fast.
“Volker, you sick bastard. ”
Trout backed away, looking frantically round the office, but, aside from Jock, the place was empty. He turned and ran down the hall to Goat’s editing room. Trout was moderately tech savvy from being around the equipment for so long, and he gathered up what he needed and shoved it into one of Goat’s big canvas rucksacks. Then he tiptoed to the door and ran through the rain to his car. The zombies raised their heads as the engine roared to life, but by the time they lumbered to their feet, Trout was back on Doll Factory Road, rolling hot and fast toward the school.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE
SWEET PARADISE TRAILER PARK
Byron Rempel sat on the floor next to the woman who killed him.
Fifteen minutes ago, Rempel was alive and so was the woman. She was Mrs. O’Grady, who had a modest trailer three pads down from the double-wide that served as Rempel’s office and home. Mrs. O’Grady was a quiet old lady who paid her rent on time and more often than not preferred to live with something broken rather than bother Rempel for a repair job. That made Rempel like her. Or at least tolerate her. Rempel didn’t like any of the residents of Sweet Paradise. They were all white trash losers as far as he was concerned. Half of them were on welfare or unemployment, and Rempel considered both of those institutions to be socially parasitic. He worked his ass off and he hated the idea that some of his tax dollars went into the pockets of lazy fucks who couldn’t hold a job, or who were too lazy to try.
There were exceptions, of course. There was that stuck-up waitress in 14-E. That broad never even gave him a free refill of coffee when he stopped in the diner. Bitch. And that Irish layabout writer, Kealan Patrick Burke, who just moved here from Columbus. Guy won some awards for some goofy horror stories and thought his shit didn’t stink. Thought he was Stephen-fucking-King, and as far as Rempel was concerned even Stephen-fucking-King wasn’t Stephen-fucking-King. Not anymore. Not since The Stand. Last good book that New England prick ever wrote.
Rempel had not read any of King’s books after that, and had not read a word of Burke’s, but he was positive the guy was an overrated Mick who was probably a drunk and a wife-beater, too. They all were. Every writer he ever met was a drunk, and every Mick he ever met was a wife-beater. Rempel was positive of this, so he disliked Burke on general principle.
The queen bitch of Sweet Paradise, though, was Dez Fox. Now there was someone who really thought that she crapped little gold bars and peed gin rickeys. And talk about stuck-up? Rempel had asked her over for coffee three times, and each time Dez Fox looked at him like he was a spitty place on the sidewalk.
Granted, she was hot. Bitch had a serious rack of bombs on her, Rempel admired that. Nice ass, too; but she knew that she was stacked and that’s why she treated Rempel like crap. Except when something broke in her apartment, then Dez was all sweet, saying “please” and “thank you” like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.
What made him unhappy was someone making a mess. Which is why he was very unhappy fifteen minutes ago, answering a call at Burke’s trailer in the middle of a rainstorm that would have scared the shit out of Noah. The writer called with some kind of hysterical rant about blood or something all over the floor. All over the carpeted floor. Rempel hadn’t been able to get a straight story from Burke. The idiot probably cut himself shaving while drunk. Serve him right to bleed to death, the frigging Irish sot. But he grabbed his tool kit, pulled on his yellow rain slicker, and slogged through ankle-deep mud to the writer’s trailer.
When he got there he started cursing at once. The door to Burke’s trailer was wide open and the rain was pouring in. But as Rempel approached the trailer he slowed, frowning in consternation. The runoff that dripped out of the trailer was tinged a rust red. Christ, what the hell did Burke do? Cut his own head off?
Rempel mounted the three metal steps to the open door and peered inside.
Burke was nowhere to be seen. However, Mrs. O’Grady was lying flat out on the floor just inside the door.