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Burl and the girls.
Even Vic.
Oh, God. Vic.
He sat up and swiveled his head around on his ruined throat.
Richie saw him, too, and he reached out with a bloodstained hand. “Jake … oh, Christ … Jake!”
It was a mistake.
The girls, broken and disfigured, crippled into shambling wrecks, turned away from Jake and began limping after Richie. He tried to crawl away from them.
Didn’t.
Couldn’t.
Burl and Vic did not go after Richie.
Vic got to his feet and, nearly shoulder to shoulder with Burl, began moving toward Jake.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-THREE
THE SITUATION ROOM
THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
“Mr. President,” said Scott Blair, “Captain Imura’s team is on-site at the Stebbins Little School. I’m waiting now on word about the drives.”
“How soon can Imura get those drives to us?”
“He won’t need to. He’ll upload them to his tactical computer and send them via burst transfer to us. We’ll have them five minutes after he has them.”
“Thank God,” said the president. “Thank God.”
Sylvia Ruddy covered the mouthpiece of the phone into which she’d been speaking. “Scott … how much stake are we placing on what’s on the drives? I reviewed Trout’s broadcasts and it seemed clear that Volker regarded his variation of Lucifer as unstoppable. He said as much to his CIA handler. I have transcripts of all of this and there’s nothing in anything Volker said to indicate that there’s a silver bullet on those drives.”
Blair placed his hands flat on the table. “Have you not been following, Sylvia? I never said that there was a cure on the drives. We need them for our people—Dr. McReady, Dick Price at Zabriske Point, the team at the CDC. They are the most talented bioweapons people on earth. It’s always been our hope that they’ll find a weakness in Volker’s variation.”
“That’s a long damn shot,” said Ruddy.
“It’s the shot we have.”
The president got up and walked over to the big screen on which the satellite images were shown, with the thermal signatures of hundreds of people scattering through the storm. He touched the screen at the outer edge of the dispersal pattern.
“All the science in the world isn’t going to help us if we can’t contain the outbreak.”
No one spoke.
He nodded to General Burroughs. “Amistad, give me the numbers.”
Bur
roughs punched some keys that overlaid a red circle around the troubled area. “The only thing working in our favor right now is that the infected are unable to drive vehicles, and most of them are slow, moving at a fast walk or slower. So, by estimating the potential distance traveled by foot since the quarantine break, we have extended the Q-zone to cover this area.” He hit keys and the line jumped outward so that it covered an area with a sixty-four-mile diameter, with Stebbins in the exact center. “Even if an infected person was traveling on foot at a rate of four miles an hour—which is virtually impossible because of terrain, weather, and, er, the nature of the infection, we estimate that the maximum distance from Stebbins would be thirty-two miles. Therefore we need to designate everything inside this extended area to be our new hot zone.”
The president nodded very slowly. “How many people live inside that zone?”
“It’s mostly farm country…”
