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“Captain Imura was one of the top three snipers in U.S. Special Forces. The other two men are superb shots and they are in positions of concealment. They can drop nine of your people in under four seconds, including you.”
“I’m not afraid to die,” sneered Dez.
“If we wanted you dead, Officer Fox, we’d have taken you as soon as you stepped outside of the building. This isn’t about who’s brave enough to die. It’s about who’s smart enough to live.”
CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE
ON THE ROAD
PITTSBURGH SUBURBS
Goat whimpered when he saw what Homer Gibbon did inside the 7-Eleven; however, he kept the camera rolling.
There were five people there. A family of three, a man who dressed like a bartender, and the young man working the cash register.
The store’s employee lay where he’d been dropped, his chest on the floor and his feet still hooked on the counter. That’s how it had started. Homer walked in, reached over the counter, grabbed the kid, dragged him up, and took a bite out of his throat.
Then Homer dropped him.
The other people in the store screamed and panicked.
The woman pushed her ten-year-old son behind her as she backed into an aisle. Her husband tried to drag Homer off the cashier. Homer wheeled on him and drove a savage kick into the man’s crotch that sent him crashing into a display of chips and pretzels. The other man, the bartender, apparently knew some karate, because Goat saw him throw his own kick, catching Homer in the gut. The blow staggered Homer, but the killer folded around the bartender’s leg, clutching it to the point of impact. He bent all the way over it and Goat suddenly realized that he was bending to take a bite.
The bartender screamed and pounded on Homer to let go.
Homer did. Abruptly. He whipped the trapped leg up into the air, which caused the bartender to flip backward. He crashed down on the wire rack, scattering brightly colored bags of Utz pretzels, Lay’s potato chips, and Snyder barbecue pork rinds. The man lay there, back arched over the twisted wire, writhing and hissing between gritted teeth.
That’s when the woman began throwing things at Homer.
Cans of Spam and Campbell’s soup struck the killer’s back and shoulders. He threw an arm up to protect his face as he waded toward her. He never once stopped grinning. Homer was as dead as the other monsters, but he wasn’t like them. Not entirely. Because he was the first infected person in this plague, because the purest form of Dr. Volker’s Lucifer 113 pathogen had been directly injected into his veins, the parasitic reaction was different. His mind did not die along with his flesh. Goat knew this. Understood it. And it terrified him. It made Homer into a kind of monster that was so much greater, so much more dangerous than anything else.
Goat watched Homer grin, heard him laugh, as he swatted the cans out of the air like someone playing a game.
A game.
It was a mercy—for Goat, not for the woman and her child—that Homer tackled them and they vanished between the aisles. Blood shot upward, though, spattering the top rows of canned goods and stacks of plastic-wrapped Stroehmann bread.
Goat never once looked at the door handle.
He never once seriously thought about running.
He understood that he was trapped inside this drama and that there was no exit cue on his script.
After several minutes, Homer rose from between the rows, his face painted with a new coat of red. He wiped his mouth, though he was still chewing something. He looked across the bloody tops of the bread toward the window, and through the glass to where Goat sat behind the dispassionate camera.
And he gave Goat a cheery, buddy-buddy thumbs-up. Like a football jock after a successful play.
The bartender was struggling to rise, but Homer stepped over him and walked in a casual swagger toward the door. Then he paused, turned, went to the cooler and took out two cold bottles of Coke, and plucked a handful of candy bars from the rack. He nodded to himself and left the store.
When he opened the driver’s door he held the Coke and candy out to Goat.
“Guess you got to eat, too,” he said.
It took a lot for Goat to accept these things. It cost him an expensive chunk of his soul.
Homer got behind the wheel and started the car.
Inside the store, the mother and child, both of whom had been savaged, were on their feet. Her husband was only now struggling to his feet, his hands still cupped around his crotch, face purple with agony. Goat had never seen a man kicked that hard in the groin before, and from the awkward way the man stood it seemed obvious that bones had to have been broken. He raised his head toward his family.
