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“Ah … jeez…”
“Our bioweapons people are scrambling to mass-produce a different parasite that might render the infected inert. Not sure if it’ll kill them or not. I don’t think they’re sure.”
“How soon will they try that?”
Sam shook his head. “Not soon eno
ugh. I told Scott that we’re heading to Asheville. He said he’ll call ahead to make sure we get an open door.”
“Can we trust him?”
“People should have trusted Scott from the jump.”
Trout took his point, and nodded. “They still want me dead?”
Sam gave a half-smile. “No, just the opposite. They want you to get out any information you can. Scott thinks it might help some people, especially if things keep going the way they’re going.”
“Sam…” Trout said tentatively, “how bad are things? No bullshit, how bad?”
“I wasn’t joking before when I said that we were losing this war. They may have to drop nukes to stop this.”
“Are you fucking crazy? Are they?”
“It’s being looked at as the scenario resulting in the lowest number of casualties.”
And it was then that the full enormity of it hit Billy Trout. Until then, despite everything he’d seen and all that he knew, it had been a local issue. It had been a Stebbins County thing.
Now he understood.
Now his own words came back to pummel him, to lash at him.
Reporting live from the apocalypse.
“Boss!” yelled Boxer. “They’re coming!”
They spun around and saw that a mass of them were at the fence, and the chain links and piping were starting to bow inward under the combined weight of more than fifty bodies.
“Can you really hold them?” begged Trout.
Sam unslung his rifle. “Tell your girlfriend to hurry.”
The Boy Scouts took careful aim, and fired.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED NINE
PITTSBURGH INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
“Did you hear?”
Captain James Yakima looked up from the flight log at his copilot for the nonstop to Paris.
“Hear what? The riots or the storm?”
“Both, I think,” said Beecher, the copilot. “They’re shutting us down.”
“Shutting who down? Our flight?”
“The airport,” said Beecher. “At least that’s the rumor.”
