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A Carrie joke started forming in his head in the split second before the red-splashed man turned, grabbed the woman who’d screamed, hauled her to her feet, and …
And he dug his teeth into the hollow of her throat.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED ELEVEN
STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL
STEBBINS, PENNSYLVANIA
“Forget the supplies,” growled Sam. “Get the kids on the damn buses.”
He didn’t wait for Dez to respond. He laid his rifle atop a car hood and began firing slow, spaced shots. With each shot Trout could see the head of one of the infected fly apart and splash those around it with black blood. The other soldiers were nearly as good, and soon the bodies were piling up, clogging access to the fence.
But that was one attack point.
Dez vanished into the building but was back a moment later leading a line of children. The kids were all holding hands. Most of them were screaming as they ran. Adults ran with them, shepherding the kids toward the buses. It started as an orderly evacuation, but with each second it began to disintegrate.
Boxer yelled, “Hostiles at nine o’clock. Count seventy plus.”
He peered through a bus window and saw several tattered figures climbing awkwardly over the low chain-link fence. Boxer opened fire on them, but the wind was whipping up leaves and debris, spoiling his aim and warping the flight path of his rounds.
“Close on them,” bellowed Sam.
Boxer shot him a despairing look, then climbed down from the bus and began running across the playground toward that part of the fence. At twenty feet he knelt, put his rifle to his shoulder, and began firing. Now one after another of the dead pitched backward. The other Boy Scouts closed on other sections of the fence and began firing from closer range.
The children kept screaming, and the sound tore at Trout’s heart. It was a steady, unbearably shrill wail of total terror and total hopelessness.
“We’re losing the fence,” cried Gypsy, and even as she said it a fifteen-foot section of the chain link collapsed into the schoolyard. Infected spilled forward, falling over each other, piling up, writhing and scrambling to keep moving forward toward their prey.
Moonshiner and Gypsy began shuffling backward, yard by yard, while still firing.
“Reloading,” called Moonshiner. “Last mag.”
“Dez, hurry up goddamn it!” roared Sam.
Trout limped over to try and help, but there were already enough people. There simply wasn’t enough time. Six hundred children, many of whom were too scared to leave the school. Many of whom had to be dragged or carried out. Some of them broke away and ran back into the school, with teachers and parents chasing them.
There was no order left in the exodus.
Against all sanity, one of the children tore free from Mrs. Madison and went running directly toward the zombies who were getting to their feet. Trout could not understand it until he heard one awful, heart-wrenching word.
“Mommy!”
In the midst of the living dead, a woman with half her hair torn away and fingers missing from her left hand, reached for the child, her mouth splitting into a mockery of a mother’s smile, teeth bared to bite.
Trout realized that he was running. Pain shot up his back and down his legs. Cracked ribs grated beneath his skin. His breath burned in his lungs, but he was running, angling away from the bus, racing to intercept the little girl.
He reached her four paces before the zombie did.
With a cry of agony he snatched her up and tried to run with her.
But his legs buckled and he went down hard on his kneecaps. He twisted as he fell, hitting the ground on his back instead of crushing the girl under him. Then cold fingers were tearing at him, trying to rip the child from his arms. Black drool fell from ragged lips as the infected thing bent close to try and bite the child who had been her daughter when the world was a different world.
Trout rolled sideways and kicked out, felt his foot hit something, heard a bone break, and then the zombie fell next to him. It did not react at all to its broken leg, but immediately buried cracked teeth in Billy Trout’s shoulder.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWELVE
TRICKSTER’S COMEDY CLUB
