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Then Jerry pulled Tom into a fierce, brief hug. He pushed him back, spun, and ran for his parked car. Soon other cadets were pushing their way out of the building, running, running.
Then Tom was running, too. Into the building, down to his locker where his clothes and weapons and ke
ys were. Then back out of the building, catching only seconds of the TV broadcast in the muster room.
“… I can see the city. Oh my God … Pittsburgh is burning…”
He had no memory of reaching his car, of starting it or driving it. But the radio … that he remembered.
“… LAX is under siege. SWAT and TSA agents have been overrun…”
Every account was hysterical.
Every account was worse.
Another wave of helicopters thundered overhead.
As he drove, Tom tried to call his parents.
No one answered the phone.
Not the house phone, not their cells.
“Please,” he begged as he slammed the pedal all the way down, pounding the horn, tearing along the shoulder of the road, running red lights, spinning the wheel to avoid collisions with a handbreadth to spare, forcing other drivers to careen into each other to avoid him.
“Please.”
Tom was not a deeply religious man.
Not until then.
All the way from the police academy to the gates of Sunset Hollow he prayed with his whole heart and every shred of need, begging whatever powers there were to take this back, to make it not real.
Los Angeles was three hundred miles away from where his parents lived in their quiet home behind high walls in Mariposa County.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-SEVEN
SAPPHIRE FOODS
ROUTE 40
FAYETTE COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA
They worked in frenzied silence.
The bodies of the infected Charlie had killed had been dragged into a corner and covered with a tarp. Big rolls of plastic had been spread over the bloodstains so that nobody tracked black blood onto the buses.
Charlie went up and down the aisles with Dez, with Trout limping along behind. It irritated him that Charlie was suddenly so helpful and conciliatory. Trout knew that the big man was trying to make up for his moment of weakness outside, and maybe for being crazed out of his mind when they arrived. Trout could easily forgive Charlie for that part of it—under the circumstances anyone who had the good sense to go completely mad was doing themselves a favor. What Trout didn’t like was Charlie being Mr. Friendly.
He knew about the man, and about the whole Matthias family. Some folks liked them because they were funny and, in their own strange way, charismatic. A lot of people feared the Matthias clan because they were every bit as dangerous and unpredictable as they appeared. Trout detested them and always had. He’d done too many news stories in which one or another of that family were suspected of a crime, and those crimes ranged from domestic violence to grand larceny to murder. Lots of arrests but never a single conviction.
And yet Dez not only liked Charlie, she used to date him—if one can actually date a simian subhuman. Other, less polite, words occurred to Trout than “date.”
Even with that, Trout had to admit—however grudgingly—that Charlie was a big help. His knowledge of the warehouse and its contents shortened the process tremendously.
Then Jenny DeGroot came running to find them.
“Dez!” she cried as she tore along one of the rows.
