“Shit!” Rempel rushed inside and dropped to his knees beside her, ignoring the blood that pooled around her. The old lady had been terribly brutalized. Some mad bastard had beaten her face in. Literally beaten it in. Mrs. O’Grady’s false teeth lay shattered and scattered around her, and from the bridge of her nose to her chin the skin was torn away and the bones smashed to pieces. Rempel stared in mute horror at the exposed splinters of bone that stuck up through the mangled flesh.
He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. This was the work of a madman, a maniac. Could Burke have done this? Rempel tried to imagine the soft-spoken Irish writer going apeshit like this. He didn’t like Burke, but this didn’t fit at all.
It was hard to imagine anyone doing this to a nice old broad like Mrs. O’Grady. Killing her was bad enough, but disfiguring her was …
Well, Rempel thought, it was just plain crazy.
Rempel got up and moved cautiously through the trailer. No sign of Burke. No sign of a mad killer, either. He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and punched 9-1-1. The phone went immediately to a “No Service” message. Not even a ring.
“Shit. ” He tried 4-1-1 and got the same thing, and he had no better luck with Burke’s home phone. It made a weird electronic beeping sound, but there was no dial tone. Rempel had two thoughts about that. The storm and the killer. In the movies it was the killer who disabled the phones, but that wouldn’t explain the lack of a cell phone signal.
He heard a sound behind him and turned, expecting it to be Burke.
It was Mrs. O’Grady.
She stood a few feet away from him, her eyes wide and dark and empty, and her face a ruin of jagged bone and ripped flesh.
Rempel stared blankly at her.
“What—” he asked.
She answered with a bite. Not with her old false teeth—they were destroyed—but with a new set of teeth formed by the jagged bones of her exposed jaws. It was a disjointed, improbable weapon, and he should have been able to block her, evade her, sweep her aside. Rempel was easily twice her size. Mrs. O’Grady wasn’t even particularly fast.
It was all about shock. All about impossibility.
Rempel stared in shock one second too long.
Which is how so many in Stebbins died that night.
And it was why so many of the dying spoke the same last word. A single
syllable, spoken with fear and wonder.
“No. ”
* * *
Dez slowed to a cautious walk as she approached the trailer park. Even from a hundred feet away she could tell that the wave of the infection had already reached here and swept through it.
Two of the trailers were burning.
Doors were open, cars stood idling and empty.
There was no blood, not in this rain, but she saw the glint of shotgun shells on the ground.
Dez wasn’t sure how to react to this. On one hand, the violence seemed to have rolled around her rather than over her. On the other, she felt like she was losing what little grasp she had on exactly what was happening.
How long had she been asleep in the back of the cruiser?
It was full dark, and she didn’t think it was an early dusk caused by the storm. This was night. The dead of night, she thought, and shivered at her own joke.
She moved into the park. The closest trailers were dark except for Rempel’s, but he wasn’t home. She wasn’t sure if she was happy or disappointed that he wasn’t the main course in a monster feast.
A moment later the implications of that thought hit her. It wasn’t another bad joke. She really had been disappointed that Rempel wasn’t dead, and that was really bad thinking.
I’m losing it.
As she continued deeper into the trailer park she tried to knock down that observation, but it dodged every blow.