Dozens of bullets hit the front-end loader and went ricocheting off into the storm. Jake could hear men shouting.
Richie came splashing through the puddles, still moaning, still hungry, and then he was falling backward, bits of flesh and bone exploding from his chest, his throat, his face, his skull.
Then one of the girls fell with a big hole in her lower back. As soon as she hit the ground she began to crawl, as if the pain she had to be feeling didn’t mean a goddamn thing to her. She saw Jake and began crawling toward his hiding place. She made it halfway there before a bullet struck her in the side of the head and blew brain matter five feet across the mud.
Jake saw it all from his hole.
The shouts were louder now. Men calling to each other as they came running across the construction site. Men in white hazmat suits and combat boots. Men with rifles and belts hung with grenades.
Soldiers.
Jake frowned, unable to understand this. Why were the soldiers in hazmat suits like on TV? That was the stuff they wear when there’s some kind of toxic spill. Only this was a hurricane, not a spill. Or whatever they call a storm this bad this far inland. Supercell. Something like that. It wasn’t any toxic spill. At least not as far as Jake knew.
Unless …
He blinked rainwater out of his eyes. Suddenly a lot of things tumbled together into a single pattern. Ugly, but glued together by some kind of logic.
What if there was a toxic spill?
The radio had been crazy all day with weird shit. Something about a riot out at Doc Hartnup’s funeral home. Something else happening at the school.
Jake only caught bits and pieces of it because you can’t really listen to the radio while operating heavy equipment. Too much noise.
Now he wondered what he’d missed.
And he wondered what kind of trouble he was in.
He almost called out to the soldiers.
Almost.
It was not his lizard brain that made him hold his tongue. No, it was the civilized part of his brain. The part that believed that if things were this bad—if they were sending in soldiers in germ warfare gear and letting them kill people this randomly—then things were already in the shitter. Those soldiers never called out a warning. They never checked to see if Burl and the others needed help.
They’d simply opened fire.
“Oh, God,” he breathed. But he did it very, very quietly.
As the soldiers hunted down the last girl and Jake’s other friends, he sank down into the water until just his eyes and nose were out. He breathed as shallowly as he could, and he closed his eyes.
In order to try and stay alive, he did his level best to pretend to already be dead.
CHAPTER NINETY
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STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL
STEBBINS, PENNSYLVANIA
Dez looked as if she wanted to either throw up or punch Sam Imura’s teeth out. Either way, Trout wanted to grab the moment and pull it out of the fire.
“Captain Imura,” he said firmly, “I hear what you’re saying, and as a newsman I appreciate the urgency of your story, but if this thing is already out, then why does it matter if I have a copy of Volker’s research? Go find Volker. He has all of it. Hell, he’s the science. Go waterboard him, I’m sure he’d be happy to tell you anything you want to know. Coming after me seems kind of a waste of—”
Sam’s eyes were cold. “Herman Volker is dead. He committed suicide.”
Trout bowed his head and slumped into a chair. “Christ. Why the fuck didn’t you say so? You assholes always have to drag everything out. Shit.”
“We just found out about it,” said Sam. “Until now he’s been MIA and you were the only known source of intel. Now do you understand why those drives are so important? They are the only known record of Volker’s work. We have plenty of research on Lucifer but no one has a clue about what Volker did when he modified the disease into Lucifer 113. Initial analysis of the infected indicate that the disease is radically different from the old Cold War version. We don’t know if we have the time necessary to deconstruct and analyze Volker’s version. Mr. Trout … where are the flash drives?”