Doomsday was no longer an abstraction.
Blair made a series of phone calls to get the latest on the hunt for Volker. With each call his heart sank lower in his chest.
The bastard had vanished. He’d walked out of his house, got in his car, and disappeared from the face of the earth, taking with him the greatest hopes of understanding his variation of the pathogen. Lucifer 113, the version loose in Stebbins, did not precisely match the profiles of the old Cold War version. It was much faster, much more aggressive, and the reanimation of the “dead” victims took place in seconds.
Seconds.
It would mean that in any confrontation with a group of infected, the newly bitten victim would become an aggressive vector—a combatant, in a twisted way—while the fight still raged. Apart from the obvious tactical disadvantages, that scenario created a devastating psychological component. When soldiers would be required to suddenly fire upon their fellow soldiers, doubt and hesitation would be born. And many more would die.
It was a nightmare.
It was surreal.
His secretary tapped on the door, poked her head in, and waggled a sheaf of papers at him. “Mr. Blair? The speechwriters have a draft of POTUS’s address. They want you to take a look at it.”
“Good, let me see it.”
She crossed to his desk and handed him the speech. “This is unusual. Asking for your input on a speech.”
“‘Usual’ was last week, Cindy.” He bent over the speech.
But Cindy lingered. “Sir … the word is that they stopped this thing. That’s true, right? I mean, this is just winding down now?”
Blair raised his head and looked at her for a long time, saying nothing. She finally retreated from him and fled. He wished he had something comforting to say to Cindy. However, he liked the woman and didn’t want to lie to her.
Blair read through the speech, making disgusted sounds at the end of nearly every paragraph. The speech—written by well-intentioned people who lacked a clear perspective on the problem—took the wrong tack, focusing on a response to Billy Trout’s impassioned and ill-considered Internet tirade. Blair felt the president needed to go in a radically different direction. And not only in terms of the speech. General Zetter in Pennsylvania kept trying to convince the president that the devil was back on the leash, that the situation was contained. Which, as Blair viewed it, was a criminally distorted view of the facts. He grabbed a red pencil and began hastily redrafting it.
CHAPTER NINE
STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL
STEBBINS, PENNSYLVANIA
Billy Trout went to the auditorium to find his camera. It lay on its side among the debris. Less than an hour ago the big multipane windows that lined the east wall had been obliterated by machine-gun fire as attack helicopters fired on the school.
Trout looked at the damage and shivered.
Tens of thousands of rounds had torn the window frames apart, showering the big hall with millions of fragments of glittering glass and jagged wood. The bullets had carved away at the bricks, leaving a gaping maw through which cold winds blew the relentless rain.
The kids were all gone now, moved to other rooms so their wounds could be tended to. It was a freak of happenstance—the only real luck Trout could remember in that long, bad day—that none of these kids had been shot. He couldn’t even work out a scenario that explained it. A quirk of physics, a bizarre collision of angle, the storm winds, uncertain targeting, the slanted floor with its rows of seats, and who knew what else.
But the kids were alive.
Not okay, not all right. Merely alive.
Trout skirted the main floor, which was nothing but bullet-pocked detritus, and made his way to the stage, where he’d left his camera and satellite phone. They were beaded with rain, but when he tested them they still worked.
Another stroke of luck, and it made him wonder about the perversity of whatever gods there were that small luck was afforded them while on the whole the fortunes of Stebbins County seemed to have gone bad in the worst possible way.
Shaking his head, he took his gear backstage and found a small office with a desk. Trout cleaned the camera lens, wiped off every last trace of moisture, and set the camera’s tripod on the desk. He tested the mike and the signal.
Then he called Goat to make sure that this message would go out as smoothly as the others. The satellite phone was routed directly to Goat’s Skype account.
The phone rang and rang.
Goat never answered.
Trout checked all of the connections. Everything seemed to be in order.