Fall of Night (Dead of Night 2)

She fired every round in the magazine. Released it, let it fall, swept another magazine from her belt, slapped it into place. The process was absolutely automatic, as orderly and efficient as the functions of a machine. A robot.

The dead kept coming out of the rain.

Ten of them.

Fifteen.

Thirty.

The gun was heavy in her hands, the recoil sending jolts of pain into her palms and wrists, her trigger finger burning with overuse, her skin tingling with powder burns.

When she had come leaping out of the window Dez had been screaming. A primal war cry, something like a cave woman might have bellowed as predatory animals stalked toward her own mewling children in the dark of a prehistoric night. But as she fired and fired, the scream burned away, leaving only the rasp of her panting breath and the thunder of her gun. She could feel her face lose expression. It wasn’t a calmness settling in her muscles. It was a deadness, a nothingness.

The dead wore no expressions either, and the battle became strangely dreamlike.

Dez dropped an empty magazine and fished for her last one.

And did not find it.

Suddenly the deadness was gone.

Panic returned in a terrible rush as she realized that she had miscounted the number of magazines she’d carried. That she’d used every last bullet.

There were at least a dozen of the dead still on their feet, and four or five more crawling along, trailing broken legs behind them.

She turned toward the school and with a cry of horror realized that somehow she had moved away from it, that she had walked into the schoolyard, leaving the building fifty yards behind her.

She was trapped out in the storm, surrounded by the dead, and there was not even a bullet left to take her own life.

The dead closed around her.

CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

STEBBINS–FAYETTE COUNTY LINE

EAST OF THE BORDENTOWN STARBUCKS

Ross Cruickshank staggered away from his burning car and ran for the woods. Steam rose from his clothes and he could feel a dangerous heat spreading on his skin. His mind was filled with mad images that were fractured and strange. Pale-faced people with black mouths. Blood-splattered people reeling out of the storm and throwing themselves at the crowd that stood watching in numb horror as helicopters fired on the lines of stopped cars. And then something else.

A screech from above the dark clouds.

Streaks of bright yellow light.

And then fire.

Fire.

Everywhere.

Cars leapt into the air and exploded.

People ran screaming, their hair and clothes ablaze.

People flying apart; each separate piece of them igniting as the heat blooms spread out from the point of impact.

The shimmering wave of hot air moved across the road like an attacking mirage, surreal and deadly.

Ross was at the extreme edge of the blast zone. His car was more than two miles back from the Starbucks on Route 653, and until the blast he stood on the edge of the median, hands cupped around his eyes so he could see through the rain as he tried to make sense of what looked like a soccer riot there on a rural highway in Pennsylvania. The radio had been weird all night, with local news talking about virus outbreaks and rumors of people being killed in Stebbins.