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“With the very best intentions.”
Dez considered him for a moment. “Guess you do. And I guess I don’t burn up a lot of calories giving you credit for it.”
They looked at the trophies and listened to the hammering. Echoing down from the second floor they heard Uriah Piper and the teacher, Clark, yelling at each other.
“Billy?”
“Yeah?”
“What happens if we can’t get in touch with Goat?”
“We will.”
“No, what if we can’t. What if something’s happened to him? I mean … if the stuff on those flash drives is that important…”
“I don’t think it matters,” said Trout.
“Why not?”
“When I interviewed Dr. Volker yesterday, he seemed to be pretty sure that Lucifer 113 was unstoppable. If there was a cure, or even notes about a possible treatment on those drives, I’m pretty sure he’d have told me.”
“Then why’d he give them to you at all?”
“So someone would have a record.”
She turned. “A record of what?”
Trout didn’t want to answer the question.
“Of what, Billy?”
He could see the ghost of his own reflection in the glass of the trophy case. “A record of how it all ended.”
“How what all ended?” she demanded, and then she got it. She grabbed his arm and squeezed it hard enough to hurt. “Jesus Christ, are you saying that Volker thought this was going to spread? I mean, really spread? Like a pandemic and shit?”
“That’s what he was afraid of. He thought Homer Gibbon would go right into the ground, buried in a numbered grave behind the prison. Volker planned it that way. The parasites that drive the plague would consume him and then die off for lack of food. It would have ended right there. But when Homer’s aunt claimed his body that changed the dynamic. What should have been some kind of sick punishment for a serial killer became something that kicked open the door to an outbreak.”
Dez’s eyes were as wide as saucers.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
ROUTE 653
BORDENTOWN STARBUCKS
They had no names.
Not anymore.
There were names on cards and licenses in wallets and purses, but those things no longer related to the things that moved and milled inside the coffee shop. Even the faces no longer matched the pictures on the cards. On the driver’s licenses and university IDs, none of the faces was missing flesh, none of the smiles showed broken teeth. None of the clothes were torn and splashed with blood. These figures weren’t those people anymore.
The feeding was done, the hungers shifting from the flesh at hand to the potential of fresher meat elsewhere. The parasitic urges that drove them lost interest when it could no longer detect the signs of life. Breath and rushing blood and a beating heart. Genetic manipulation had ensured this, built it into the organic imperatives that drove these things. Just as the brain chemistry and nerve conduction was repatterned to kill and infect, to feast quickly but not completely, to spread the disease.
That was the only goal.
That was everything.
Though the body ached for food. The minimalized brain moaned in desperation for it, even though there was meat right there. But there was not enough intelligence left even for frustration at the collision of immediate need and driving force.
