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Every step was screaming agony.
He took that pain and ate it. He fed on it. He devoured it whole and used its fiery heat to drive his legs and propel him off the dock and around the back of the bus to come up on the side farthest from the zombies. He jerked the door open and saw that the driver—the farmer who’d driven tractors all his life—was out cold. The airbag, designed to deflate after impact, was sagging. Trout grabbed the driver, hauled him out of the seat, shot the handle to close the door, and slid behind the wheel. Kids and adults were both screaming. Zombies were pounding on the cracked windshield. It was not going to last. He backed the bus up to get a better angle to go around the swarm.
There was a series of loud thumps on the side and then on top of the bus, and to his horror Trout realized that bodies were scaling the side of the bus. He started accelerating and was about to jam on the brakes to try and jolt the dead off the roof when he heard a fresh barrage of shots.
From above.
He looked to where Dez and the solders had been but they were gone. Then he understood. When the bus crashed, Dez and Sam and the Boy Scouts had clambered atop the bus, out of reach of the dead.
Could the dead climb, too? He had no idea.
He began moving forward again, but the dead were closing in and forming an impenetrable wall. With every few feet he had to slow down or risk another collision. The windows would never withstand another hit.
Then there was that engine roar again and the front-end loader came smashing through the wall of dead. The digging teeth of the big bucket crunched into the backs of the zombies, shattering spines, snapping their bodies backward. The dead still swarmed over the cab, but one by one they pitched off. Almost as an after echo Trout heard gunshots from above. Dez and the others were clearing the dead off the cab so that the driver could see what he was doing.
Trout felt movement beside him and Jenny DeGroot was there, staring out the window in astonishment, pointing at the driver.
“Uncle Jake?” she gasped.
Trout understood. The big, burly man in the loader’s cab was Jake DeGroot. He wore a fierce, strange grin as he worked the levers that brought the bucket up and down, up and down. From above Trout heard Dez screaming two words.
“Turn around! Turn around!”
Jake either heard it despite the din of gunfire, moans, and engine roars, or he simply grasped the need of the moment. He began backing and filling, backing and filling, making a big, bloody, bone-breaking, meat-burst turn amid and atop the milling dead. They were legion, but the diesel monster with the hydraulic bucket was unstoppable. It completed its turn and began rolling toward the front gate, crushing everything in its path. As more of the dead swarmed up onto the cab, Dez and the soldiers shot them down.
The gunfire from above was continuous.
The front-end loader roared out with a voice like a dragon; Jake lowered the bucket so that it scraped along the surface of the ground as the tons of unfeeling yellow-painted steel, splashed now with red and black, hit the wall of unfeeling flesh and bone. The front-end loader paused but for a moment as it pushed through tons of slack meat, then the bodies fell to either side, creating a chute through which twelve yellow buses passed.
When the loader reached the road it turned right, and Trout followed.
Trout caught a flash of red off to the far side of the lot and saw Charlie Matthias’s red Le Mans go rocketing out of the gate, turn left and head west. Within seconds the vehicle was dwindling into the distance.
In rumbling convoy, they left the warehouse behind. The dead followed in their hundreds, but even at the slow speed of the loader, the shambling mass of infected fell farther and farther behind.
Soon they were not following at all.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-EIGHT
THE SITUATION ROOM
THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
Scott Blair and the president stood side by side in front of the big screen. There were now dozens of smaller windows open to show live streams of ongoing battles, of troops moving into position, of swarms of the dead moving through towns and cities, of the mass exodus of whole populations trying to flee the outbreak.
The reports were coming in from all over.
The latest incidents were in Oregon and New Hampshire. Anywhere a car could drive or a plane could fly.
Which was everywhere.
There was even an unconfirmed report of an attack in Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris. A Delta flight from Pittsburgh touched down there. The news reports were erratic, wild. And probably true. England, Italy, Germany, and Russia had fighter-bombers on deck, waiting for go orders to make preemptive strikes.
Blair had no doubts that those orders would be given.
Just as new stories went viral on the Internet, infecting the world at the speed of social networking, so now could a biological threat spread globally at the speed of modern travel. Planes, trains, and automobiles.
And wind.
