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He drank it anyway, standing in the doorway to the art room. The classrooms on this floor had been separated by partitions, but they’d all been pushed aside to create a space nearly as big as the auditorium. Even so, it was crowded. JT had estimated eight hundred survivors, but Billy had done his own count. The math was both more and less encouraging. There were eight hundred and forty-three people here. But that was all there was left of the population of Stebbins and its surrounding villages. Eight hundred and forty-three alive.
More than seven thousand dead.
Or whatever passed for dead now that the world didn’t make sense anymore.
“Infected,” he told himself. It was a much safer word than “zombie.”
He sipped the bad coffee.
Inside the combined classroom, hundreds of children were huddled into groups, their bodies wrapped in blankets or coats. The surviving teachers and other random adults—school staff, a few parents, and stray survivors—sat with them, trying to give comfort when there was no comfort left to give.
Everyone in that room, Trout knew, was in shock. Some were in denial. Some were completely broken. Across the room, by the teacher’s desk, a man in a business suit sat holding a little girl and rocked back and forth. Trout knew him. Gerry Dunphries. The little girl, though, was the youngest of the Gilchrist kids. Trout had no idea where Gerry’s daughter was. She attended this school, but she wasn’t here in the room.
She had to have been at the school, though. Or on one of the buses.
That thought, that knowledge, was dreadful.
He watched Gerry rock back and forth with the girl. His eyes were nearly unblinking and he kept murmuring the same snatch of song over and over again. A piece of a lullaby. Something old, but something that was as broken as he was. Only a piece of song, the lyrics mangled and mostly forgotten, the tune stretched thin by repetition, like a piece of old cassette tape that had been played so long the emulsion was wearing off.
Trout wondered if the girl heard any of it. Neither of her parents was here. Nor were her two brothers. Her eyes were fixed and focused, looking out at the world, but—he was absolutely sure—seeing and hearing none of it.
Broken, both of them.
Like so many others.
Even before the military had opened fire on them, these kids and the adults were teetering on the edge. The infected had attacked the buses, had dragge
d hundreds of kids out and torn the life from them. Parents and teachers had fought to protect their children, but as they succumbed to bites, they became the very things they’d tried to stop. They had become the monsters that preyed upon the children.
Trout prayed to God that no trace of the original personality was left in any of the living dead, though he knew that his prayer was a hopeless one. Yesterday he and Goat had interviewed Dr. Herman Volker, the former Cold War scientist—now working as a prison doctor—who had created the Lucifer 113 pathogen. Volker had told him that his latest version had been intended as a way of punishing convicted serial murderers. Volker’s sister and her children had been savagely killed by such a monster in East Berlin, long before the Wall fell. Volker had spent years working as a Soviet scientist—ostensibly serving the State but actually developing his ultimate revenge. The pathogen, based on genetically altered parasites and a witch’s brew of chemicals, kept the consciousness alive even after the body died. It was Volker’s desire that any prisoner executed for mass murder be conscious of his fate even while his body rotted in the grave. It was a horrible punishment, though had it only been used on its intended subjects—in this case the serial killer Homer Gibbon—Trout might have privately wished Volker all the success he could get.
But that’s not what happened.
Gibbon was infected with the pathogen during his execution by lethal injection, but instead of going immediately into a numbered grave on the prison grounds, a previously unknown relative had come to claim his body. Aunt Selma. Many years ago Selma had helped her heroin-addicted sister take the infant Homer to a shelter. At the time Selma considered taking the baby and raising him herself, even though she was the madam of a whorehouse. She did not, however, and instead Homer went into the system, going from one foster family to another. Some of those families cared for him, but others abused him. The abuse happened too soon, too early in Homer’s life to give him any chance of normalcy. In that meat grinder of a system, a true monster was born. Homer earned his conviction and his sentence, and no one was going to mourn him.
Except Aunt Selma. Driven by regret, by the last spark of her conscience, she claimed his body with the intention of burying him on the family farm where he might have some rest after a life in hell.
But the pathogen was already at work. Homer’s mind was alive in the dying body.
And the parasites that made up the substance of Lucifer 113 were alive, too.
Alive and hungry.
They kept his mind alive, they woke him up, and they awakened in him a hunger that was unlike anything nature could ever have created.
Trout was only now putting the pieces together of what happened here in Stebbins. He knew from Dez Fox that Doc Hartnup, the town’s mortician, had been killed along with Doc’s cleaning lady. Both of them reanimated, though, and from what Dez said, the first victims of Homer Gibbon did not demonstrate any awareness of self or recognition of other people. They were mindless monsters.
Zombies, to use Dr. Volker’s word.
And yet the doctor had insisted that the pathogen kept the consciousness alive, that in each of those zombies was a kind of helpless passenger. Aware of what his or her hijacked body was doing but totally unable to exert control. All it could do was feel the flesh rot and witness what the body did.
It was the most horrible thing Trout had ever heard.
And it was loose in Stebbins County.
It had consumed the town of Stebbins.
As he stood there looking at the traumatized man holding the traumatized little girl, he wondered what had broken each of them. Was it simply the shocking deaths of the people they loved? Certainly that would be enough.
