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Dez shook her head. “No, you won’t.”
She backed away from the car and turned in a slow circle to look through win
dshields at the other drivers. The shotgun was in her hands, barrel sweeping along at the level of headlights and grills.
“We’re getting off this road,” she said, pitching her voice very loud. “This car is going to pull off to let the buses out. Anyone else in the way needs to do the same. Once we’re out of here, you can all fill in, but the cars that move get their places back.”
Trout thought it was one of the most surreal things he’d ever heard. It was like Dez was announcing the rules before a school-yard game of dodgeball. It was all done in an otherwise absolute silence.
Dez seemed also to realize how absurd it was and Trout saw different expressions war on her face. Dez took a breath and in her best cop voice, her voice of officialdom and authority, said, “This thing isn’t here. No one in these cars is infected. If they were we’d know it already. You’re safe. Your families are safe. Stay in your cars and when the road clears out keep heading south. There’s a big safety camp in Asheville, North Carolina. Head there. You hear me? Head there.”
No one said a thing. The windows stayed up. Hands gripped steering wheels. Eyes were fixed on her.
“You’ll be okay,” shouted Dez. “Everyone will be okay.”
Nothing. Not a word, not a toot of a horn, not even a nod from the watching people.
In a quiet voice, Trout said, “Come on, Dez. You did what you could.”
Behind her the Tundra revved its engines and began a turn between the tightly packed cars. At first it looked impossible in the nearly bumper-to-bumper crush. Then the car in front of it rolled forward a couple of feet; and the car behind it did the same. Even with that it was still tight, but the Tundra began the turn. Dez walked past it to the forest service road. She swung the shotgun up, aimed it at the lock and blew it to shiny metal splinters. The chain fell away and the sound of the blast echoed along the road.
Trout watched people flinch, but otherwise they sat in their eerie, watchful stillness.
The shoulder was blocked with cars, too, but with Dez calling directions and banging on hoods with the shotgun, the cars shifted by slow, painful inches forward and at angles until after ten excruciating minutes there was a lane just big enough for the bus. She waved to Jake, who put it in gear and crept with infinite slowness around the wall of cars on his right. At one point his bumper scraped the trunk of a VW, but if the driver of the car cared about it, he kept it to himself.
“Come on, come on,” Dez said between her teeth as she walked backward, guiding Jake’s turn. Trout had gotten out of the bus to watch the other side.
The stillness of everything else except the big yellow bus continued to gnaw at his nerves. As the first bus finally cleared the road and rambled through onto the access lane, he realized what it was. Nothing about this fit into any workable scenario for a world he understood. This slow-motion panic, the absolute fear of human contact, the weight of the disaster that pressed down on them, the terror of what might be behind them—all of that was new. Sure, there were corollaries to different elements of it, but as a whole this was a new thing. A new pattern. And he greatly feared that it was part of a new world.
Or, perhaps, a new world order.
A new age of the world. He was sure it was something like that, though his mind rebelled at a specific definition because it all felt too big, too grandiose.
Except that it wasn’t.
It was unprecedented.
This was no longer the world he and Dez and the children on the bus and the people in these cars knew.
Since the release of Lucifer 113 it had become a different world. And in every bad way that mattered, it seemed to him that this new world did not belong to these people. Or to any people. This world now belonged to the Devil.
Maybe it wasn’t the biblical Devil, he told himself, but he wasn’t sure if that distinction even mattered.
Lucifer, by any definition, in any form, owned this world now.
“God help us,” he murmured as the line of buses moved slowly past. He saw the pale faces of terrified children, and the blank and vacant eyes of those for whom terror was a minor milestone left behind in a distant country. “God help us.”
But if anyone listened to that prayer, no voice offered even the ghost of a promise to Billy Trout.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-THREE
HUNGRY MOTHER STATE PARK
SOUTHWESTERN VIRGINIA
They bumped and thumped along the access road for nearly five miles until they came to a forest service station near the crest of the mountain. There was a small building and a large parking lot with various pieces of heavy equipment. A road grader, flatbeds for hauling downed trees, a dump truck piled with gravel.
There were no people and no personal cars.
