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“It didn’t break the skin you stupid motherfucker.” She shook him hard enough to rattle his teeth. “I could fucking kill you, you stupid son of a bitch.”
Then people were crowding around them, pulling her back, lifting him to his feet, taking the little girl away from the horror that lay on the ground. Trout saw Sam there, firing a pistol instead of his sniper rifle. Moonshiner was with him, too. Firing, firing, firing.
There was an awful sound behind them and Trout turned to see another section of fence collapse and a wave of the dead come rushing into the lot. At least a hundred of them. Some fell with the fence, but the others climbed over them, shambling or running. Screaming their hunger, moaning louder than the storm. Sam fired and fired. There was no time to aim now.
Moonshiner yelled for them to get back. He dropped a spent magazine and reached for a replacement.
Which he did not have.
There was one terrible moment when his questing fingers spider-walked across his belt and harness and found nothing.
“Shit!” he said. He reversed his rifle in his hands and swung it like a baseball bat as the mass of zombies came swarming at them over the fence. Another section fell. And another. Hundreds of the dead were closing in on them.
The bus engines roared and fists pounded on the horns. Children screamed somewhere behind them. Trout kept swimming in and out of consciousness, aware that he was being half-carried, half-dragged along, but with no idea who was helping him. He saw Dez and Sam standing shoulder to shoulder, firing into the onrushing sea of the infected, trying to buy Moonshiner time to retreat.
And then the dead were on him.
“Noooooo!” howled Sam.
The big soldier swung the rifle once more and two zombies staggered back with shattered faces, but a dozen more launched themselves at him. Sam fired over and over again, killing an infected with every shot. So did Dez.
It did not matter at all.
Moonshiner vanished beneath a tidal surge of the dead.
“Get onto the bus!”
Someone was yelling that over and over again, but Trout couldn’t tell who it was. It might even have been him.
Hands reached out and grabbed Trout, pulled him, lifted him, and then he was out of the rain, inside the bus.
But where was Dez? He began thrashing, fighting the hands, struggling to get to the window to see if he could find Dez. Guns were still firing. The dead moaned like demons.
“Go, go, go!” yelled a voice.
Sam Imura.
Where was Dez?
God, thought Trout as the darkness began to drag him down, where was my Dez?
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FIFTEEN
TRICKSTER’S COMEDY CLUB
PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA
Lydia Rose was too short to see over the milling crowd.
She saw the bloody man enter the club and saw Tom throw a bottle at him, but then everything went totally to hell. People screamed and screamed as they ran for the exits. They collided with one another and tripped over tables and chairs. Lydia was buffeted back by the crowd and fell hard against the corner of the stage. Five feet in front of her a frat boy in a Pitt sweatshirt lay sprawled like a starfish, eyes open, mouth slack, as at least forty people ran over his body. Not leaping across it, but stepping on the college kid’s stomach and legs and chest. Then a skinny white woman with beaded dreads hooked a foot in the frat boy’s armpit and pitched face forward to the ground. A dozen others fell atop her, wrenching a terrible scream from her collapsing lungs.
Lydia crawled onto the stage, where Jeremy was yelling at the crowd to get out, which they were already trying to do, and alternately yelling at the bloody man to stop biting the woman.
It seemed to Lydia to be such a strange thing to yell.
If the guy was biting someone, then how likely was it that he’d be reasonable enough to take Jeremy’s suggestion to heart? What was he supposed to do? Let her go, spit out what was left of her throat, give a rueful apology and buy a round for the house?
She got to her feet and from the stage platform was able to see what was actually happening t
