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The weapon came free of its holster. The Nova SP-5.
The stun gun had a five-shot magazine.
Open a door and go home, said JT.
She brought the weapon up, activating the laser site. Found a target a yard from her. Fired.
The flachettes whipped through the air and struck the dead flesh high on the chest. The charge surged through the wires and instantly the infected body arched back, all four limbs trembling like a puppet hanging in a stiff wind. The eyes bulged wide and the mouth opened and it tried to scream.
Scream.
Oh God … it actually tried to scream.
Two other infected were behind it, pressed against it to try and get to her. The rain and the intensity of the charge flashed from one to the other and the three of them were suddenly falling.
Falling.
Opening a hole in the wall of charred flesh.
Dez released the first cartridge and chambered the second, moving now, running through that hole. She fired again and a woman with no eyes suddenly juddered to a stop and then fell away, a whistling shriek rising from between her burned lips.
The scream was the first human sound any of these monsters had made.
It chilled Dez Fox all the way to the core of her soul.
The screams were so—normal. God … did that mean the people who had been in those bodies before the infection took over were still in there?
Don’t think about it, bellowed JT. Run. Run!
She ran.
She released the second cartridge. Fired a third, heard another tearing scream of human pain.
The zombies tried to close in on her, but she smashed into them, driven now by panic as much as need. She elbowed them and jump-kicked them in the stomachs, and rammed them with her shoulders.
Two shots left and twenty yards to go.
The air around here was suddenly split apart by thunder.
Small thunder. Not from the sky but from …
Gunfire rippled from the windows of the school.
All of the windows. A dozen barrels cracked. Four of the zombies went down. Two stayed down, two others began instantly to climb back to their feet, their bodies absorbing anything except headshots.
“Dez!” called a voice, and this time it wasn’t the ghost of JT Hammond hollering in her fractured mind. It was Billy Trout. “Run! The side door. Go … go … go!”
She saw it then, the staff entrance door stood ajar and five men were clustered there. Piper was among them, a shotgun spitting fire in his hands.
Dez fired her fourth shot and a man she recognized—Albert Thomas, who owned a tattoo parlor on Buckley Road—staggered back, a human cry torn from his dead throat. It sounded like Albert, too. But there was a quality to it, a rising note of panic as if in that one instant the man she knew was able to give voice to all the horrors that had been done to him. And it was then, with perfect and dreadful clarity, that Dez Fox realized the true and full extent of what Dr. Volker had unleashed on humanity.
Lucifer 113 was intended to make Homer Gibbon be aware of every moment, every sensation of what was happening to him as his dead body rotted in a coffin and was consumed by maggots. This was a punishment intended for a serial killer to make him pay for what he had done to the innocent.
And now it was doing that to every single infected person.
They were all in there. Their consciousness trapped in the hijacked bodies. Aware, connected to nerve endings, and totally unable to prevent their stolen flesh from committing unspeakable things.
Only in the moment of intense electric shock from the stun gun were those people able to give voice, to cry out. For mercy. For forgiveness. For release.
