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Dez followed Jenny into the stairwell and Trout could hear their footfalls as they raced up to the second floor. The thought of climbing stairs was intimidating, but Trout forced himself to stagger into the fire tower and climb the stone steps, one at a time. It felt like to took a hundred years and the version of Trout that emerged from the tower was hobbled and hunched and gasping for breath.
Dez Fox nearly ran him down as she tore back toward the stairs.
“What?” he gasped as he flung himself out of her way.
“The soldiers,” she said. “They’re back.”
She took off running with Jenny and a few of the others at her heels.
Trout didn’t immediate follow. He couldn’t face the steps, not yet. Instead he limped over to one of the classrooms, went inside and peered out the window. Down in the lot a pair of soldiers was walking purposefully toward the school. They wore dark hazmat suits and had guns in their hands. They stopped at the corner of the building and one of them raised
a walkie-talkie and spoke into it for a moment, listened, then lowered the device. Then, weapons raised and ready, they began walking slowly along the east side of the building.
Were they walking the perimeter or looking for a way in?
A sudden and alarming thought jolted Trout. Where exactly was Dez hurrying to? He thought he knew the answer and it scared him to death. He set his teeth against the pain and hobbled toward the stairs as fast as he could.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE
THE NORTHERN LEVEE
FAYETTE COUNTY
On the other side of the county from his niece, Jake DeGroot wondered if he was dead.
Everyone else seemed to be.
Jake was a construction worker from Bordentown who volunteered to work all night in Stebbins, and he and his crew had been at it for nearly twenty-four hours.
Until everything went crazy in Stebbins, just over the county line.
Now he lay in a shallow pit, half-drowned, shivering, and terrified; hidden from view beneath the lowered bucket of a yellow front-end loader. His machine, the one he drove every day. Big Bird.
Rain hammered down on the machine. The bucket was half-filled with dirt from the trench in which he lay, and water filled the rest of the steel cup. It spilled over and ran down the sides, dripping onto him, touching him with cold fingertips. Rainwater had filled the pit nearly to the top and the cold was like a thousand knives stabbing over and over again into his flesh. He could barely feel his feet and his fingers felt like they were each being crushed in a vise. Cold was a beast that crouched over him, wrapped around him, bit like a vampire into him and sucked away his warmth.
Jake was afraid to crawl out of the dirty pit of cold water.
He had no idea what time it was. His cell phone was in his pocket and his pocket was under water. The only other clocks were the one in the office—a small travel-trailer parked at the edge of the construction site that might as well have been on the dark side of the moon—and the steel diver’s watch strapped to the forearm of Burl Hansard, the shift foreman.
Burl lay thirty feet away.
What was left of him.
His body was mostly hidden by mud and the front wheel of Burl’s Expedition. All Jake could see was half of Burl’s face, his shoulder, and his right arm.
Or rather what was left of the supervisor’s right arm.
Two fingers and a thumb. Some meat on the wrist, part of the upper arm.
Tendons and bone. Visible now that the rain had washed away the blood.
That was it.
And the face.
He had no face at all. All Jake could see were the ends of broken bones and lumps of meat he could not and would not try to identify.
Jake lay there, shivering, staring at his dead friend.
