AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He turned to Tom.
And smiled with bloody teeth.
Tom thought, “Oh … shit.”
Or maybe he said it aloud. He wasn’t sure, because after that he was screaming louder and more shrilly than Jeremy.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTEEN
THE SITUATION ROOM
THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
“Mr. Blair!” yelled a young officer, one of the sharpshooters from the military intelligence group. “You need to see this.”
Blair hurried over and bent to look at something on the officer’s laptop.
“What is it?”
“We were able to pick the IP address of Gregory Weinman’s computer from the files he uploaded to the Net. Well, sir, he just uploaded a new batch.”
“Is it more of Trout’s ramblings?”
“No, sir. There are several files, including what appears to be interviews with Homer Gibbon. The autodating on the video files say that the interviews were all done in the last few hours.”
“Christ!”
“And there’s more. Weinman posted a message, a plea that appears to be directed to us. To the military. He’s asking us to find him because he is with Homer Gibbon and Gibbon is spreading Lucifer.”
“Did he provide an exact location?”
The officer smiled. So strange a thing under the circumstances.
“Yes, sir, he did.”
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FOURTEEN
STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL
STEBBINS, PENNSYLVANIA
The pain was immediate and excruciating, and Billy Trout screamed. He thrashed and beat at the woman, trying to shake her loose. The little girl shrieked, too, her voice as shrill as a seagull’s, and she began beating her tiny fists all over Trout’s face. She smashed his nose and hit him in the eye.
And then another screaming, howling thing plowed into them. It hit the zombie with so much force that teeth snapped off at the gum-line and the creature fell away. Trout instantly rolled the other way, shoving the child from him. He flopped onto his stomach and saw Dez Fox sitting astride the infected woman, fingers knotted in what was left of the woman’s hair, lifting her head and slamming it down on the concrete over and over again until the back of her skull exploded and sprayed the wet ground with brain tissue and black blood.
The little girl shrieked again and tried to rush to her mother’s defense, but Trout caught her wrist and pulled her kicking and screaming down to where he lay.
Trout was screaming, too, trying to determine how bad the bite was, trying to wriggle out of his jacket to see how soon he was going to die. The hysterical little girl kept hitting him, making it impossible to do anything. Then suddenly Dez pivoted off of the dead zombie, plucked the little girl off of him and then started tearing at Billy’s sportscoat. She yanked it down and tore his arm from the sleeve, then pawed at his shirt to find the bite.
“Am I dead?” Trout cried. “Oh, God, Dez … am I dead?”
And she kept saying, “Don’t you leave me, Billy Trout, don’t you dare. Don’t you fucking leave me, too. I’ll fucking kill you if you leave me…”
The lightning flashed and Dez used its brief light to bend close.
“God, please don’t let me be dead,” he wailed.
Dez straightened, glared at him and slapped him across the face as hard as she could. It rocked his head sideways and he snorted blood from his broken nose. Then she grabbed two fistfuls of his shirt and half-hauled him off the ground.
