Fall of Night (Dead of Night 2)

“Jesus,” said Ruddy.

“As protocol blunders go,” said Blair, “it boggles the mind. Naturally we are looking for Dr. Volker. Forensics teams are tearing apart his office at the prison where he worked and his home.”

“Where is he?” asked the president. “Can’t we find the man?”

“We are looking, Mr. President. Every possible resource is in play.”

“Will we find him?”

“I have no doubt we’ll find him,” said Blair. “However, we should consider the obvious alternative.”

“Which is?”

“Getting those drives from Billy Trout,” said Blair. “By any means necessary.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

BORDENTOWN STARBUCKS ON ROUTE 653

BORDENTOWN, PENNSYLVANIA

Goat looked through the windows at the storm. The night sky was still black but the rain had slowed to a gentle drizzle. From where he sat he could see the lines of red taillights and white headlights on the highway. He wondered how many of those travelers knew what was happening?

Probably all of them by now.

The story was everywhere. It was the only story on the news right now, and Goat suspected that half of those oncoming headlights were reporters trying to get to Stebbins while the story was still breaking. He had already seen ABC, CBS, and CNN vans come through.

He trolled the online real-time news. FOX was the first to pull the word “zombie” out of the info dump of the Volker interview.

Zombie Plague in Pennsylvania.

Goat snorted. It sounded like an SNL skit.

Wasn’t funny at all.

He looked down at the clock on his laptop. Ten minutes to one in the morning. It wasn’t even twenty-four hours since this thing started. It felt like a year. The night had been so goddamn long.

As soon he’d gotten to the Starbucks, the first thing Goat did was to download the files from the flash drives Volker had given Billy and emailed the contents to himself at several accounts. He copied the email to Trout and their editor, Murray Klein. He wanted to send the stuff directly to the other media. Huffington Post, Daily Beast, Rolling Stone, all the others. But Billy had suggested holding off on that. It was their only hole card in case the feds tried something.

Which they would inevitably do, mused Goat. He wondered what he would do if he was in their place. Would he kill to make the situation go away, to hide the blame. Would that protect the public and prevent a panic? Goat wasn’t sure. Ethical issues like that seemed clear until you were standing up close, then all perspective became skewed. He hoped he would have the moral courage to do the right thing, but that opened a door to concepts of “greater good” and what that might actually mean.

It was so hard to think it through and come up with a workable plan.

The president was scheduled to speak soon. Originally the word was that POTUS would address the nation at three thirty in the morning, but the speech was moved up to one thirty. On any other day that alone would be highly weird for a presidential address. A lot of people here on the East Coast would be asleep; the West Coast would be in the last hour of prime time. However Goat didn’t think anyone but the most abjectly stupid, indifferent, or uninformed would be sleeping or watching sitcoms. And it wasn’t just the nation watching this story. The Net proved that the whole world was watching.

A couple of hours ago most of the world—hell, most of the state—had never heard of Stebbins. Now Goat knew that it would become a part of the common language. You’d be able to say “Stebbins” the way you said “the Towers” or the “Boston Marathon” and everyone would know what you meant.

Stories like this changed the world. If not in fact then in perception, by gouging a marker into a page of history. Days like this, events like this, were hinge-points on which history turned.

This story was about to blow up even bigger. The president and everyone in his circle had one chance to win this thing back and that was to own it, take the bullet, and while they were still in office do what they could to prevent further spread of Lucifer 113. Essentially, they could save the world without filtering that through their own political self-interest.

Goat didn’t believe in Bigfoot or the Easter Bunny, either,

so he figured that wouldn’t be the way the White House would play it. It made him wonder where the line was between cynicism and clarity of vision.

Goat sipped his coffee and smiled at what was about to happen. Despite all of the pain and loss, and the deaths of so many people he knew, there was a dark and dirty part of Goat’s mind that murmured disappointment that things didn’t go completely south at the Stebbins Little School. Billy’s previous speech, which Goat had streamed live to all of the news services, had made it impossible for POTUS to allow the National Guard to destroy the school and sterilize the town with fuel-air bombs. From here on, the story would roll forward on wheels greased by the political blood of everyone whose head would roll, and on the public outpouring of grief over the thousands who’d died from the infection. But the story was becoming past tense. The kids at the school, now rescued, would become a symbol, a talking point, a voting influence at the next election. On the other hand, a couple of hundred kids being shot to death and then burned on national TV—that story would keep going, keep running, keep shouting for everyone to pay attention and react. And he, Goat, would be the conduit for that story to get out to the world. He was already part of the story, but if they wiped Stebbins off the map, then he would be the story. The only survivor. The fearless cameraman who’d gotten the truth out, getting footage while the world burned around him.

He would be the most famous journalist on earth. Immediately and irrevocably.