And there it was.
Dez sagged against Trout, and he pulled her inside and held her tight as the door swung shut with a clang.
They heard the first blasts of the shotgun. Trout didn’t hear the next one because Dez was screaming.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWO
STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL
JT Hammond stood with his back to the line of bite victims, holding the shotgun by its double pistol grips, firing, pumping, firing. There was almost no need to aim. There were so many and they were so close. He emptied the gun and used it as a club to kill as many as he could before his arms began to ache. Then he dropped the gun and pulled his Glock. He had one full magazine left.
He debated using the bullets on the wounded, but then he heard the whine of the helicopters’ rotors change, intensify, draw closer; and he knew what would happen next. He just had to keep the monsters away from the children until then. Soon … soon it would all be over, and it would happen fast.
He took the gun in both hands and fired.
And fired.
And fired.
Then one of the dead came at him from his left and JT turned to see that it was Doc Hartnup. He almost smiled.
“Sorry, Doc,” he said, and fired.
* * *
Doc Hartnup saw JT Hammond fighting for his life. He would have given everything to help this man, to save a single life. It would not repay all of the lives he’d taken … but it would give him at least a moment’s grace. However he had no control over the body. It staggered toward the officer, legs moving quickly as the hunger built to insane levels.
His white hands reached for JT, ready to grab, to rend and tear and expose all of that fresh meat.
Then JT turned toward him and raised the pistol.
Hartnup looked into the barrel of the black automatic. It was bottomless and as dark as forever.
“Sorry, Doc,” said JT Hammond.
There was a moment of intense white, brighter than the sun. Then everything went black. Hartnup felt his body falling.
Then he felt something else. Inside the hollow body he felt himself fall. Moving. Being pulled down into a well of darkness. He panicked and tried to fight it but it was like being pulled into the gravity well of a black hole. Hartnup fell and fell, and as he fell he could feel the connections to his stolen body snap and fall away, as if the scaffolding that kept him in position within the empty shell was collapsing.
He could not feel the body of the Hollow Man.
He could not feel anything. Not the hunger, not the pain. Nothing.
And soon, he could not think anything.
As his body fell to the bloody ground, Doc Hartnup fell into the black well of death and was truly and completely gone.
* * *
JT Hammond stood above the children, his smoking gun in his hand, the slide locked back, the gun empty. Searchlights swept across the sea of zombies and focused a burning ring around him. JT raised his arms out the side, letting the pistol fall. The living dead swarmed him.
The Black Hawks opened fire.
The heavy bullets tore into the zombies, punching through meat and shattering bone, knocking the dead backward and off their f
eet. Exploding skulls and tearing limbs from their sockets.
* * *