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They stared out the window, stunned, mystified, and deeply frightened by what they saw. The soldiers were scrambling to get into their gear and climb into vehicles. The roads leading away from the school were choked with Humvees and Strykers and an assortment of smaller and lighter armored vehicles. Then one of the big eight-wheeled M1135 Stryker Nuclear, Biological, Chemical Reconnaissance Vehicles rumbled through the gates, the decks crowded with armed men in hazmat suits. Its fifteen-ton mass made the windows rattle.
“Damn, it looks like they’re all going,” said Dez.
She snatched up the walkie-talkie and tried to raise General Zetter, but all she got was static. Trout tried the sat phone, and it was as dead as it had been all night.
“Something really bad’s happening,” muttered Dez.
Then the whole building seemed to rumble and they craned their necks to look up. A phalanx of helicopters flew over. Black Hawks and Apaches.
Trout counted thirty of them before the rain obscured his vision.
They were not coming to attack the school. They were not headed toward the center of Stebbins. They were all headed northwest.
Toward Bordentown.
Toward the edge of the Q-zone.
“Oh shit,” said Dez.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
TOWN OF STEBBINS
TWO MILES INSIDE THE Q-ZONE
Boxer turned off the farm roads and drove along the stretch of Mason Street, heading toward the center of Stebbins. According to the GPS, they needed to turn onto Doll Factory Road, and then veer off of that to follow a secondary road to the Stebbins Little School. The rain slowed to a desultory drizzle for a few minutes, but the thunder was closer and louder, and the lightning flashed like artillery fire.
“What’s that?” asked Gypsy, leaning forward from the backseat to point at something on the road ahead.
Boxer slowed as they approached a pair of wrecked cars that were little more than burned-out shells. The blacktop around the vehicles was littered with shell casings. Sam Imura rolled down his window to get a better look. A hunting rifle lay on the hood of one car. Beside it, its shape slowly distorting to pulp in the rain, was a box of .30-30 cartridges. A second gun, a military M4, lay sideways across the yellow line down the center of the two-lane. Near it was a Pittsburgh Pirates ball cap, and a dozen feet away was a blue wool women’s sweater.
“No bodies,” murmured Shortstop.
No one commented on that.
“Keep going,” said Sam, and Boxer gave the wrecks a wide berth.
They passed other cars, and once they saw a big eighteen-wheel Peterbilt that had gone off the highway and smashed its way through the y
oung maples that grew wild beside the road, until it crashed itself to silence against a massive old oak. The driver’s door stood open, the cab empty.
And that was the pattern of it. Wrecked cars and trucks with open doors and broken windows, houses and buildings with doors standing ajar, and miscellaneous debris, but no trace at all of the people of the destroyed little town.
No living people.
Several times they found bodies sprawled haphazardly on the road, on the verge, on porch steps, in parking lots. Every single one of them showed evidence of traumatic injury to their heads. A few lay with their heads hacked off.
“Somebody put up a hell of a fight,” said Boxer.
“Doesn’t look like they won.”
They reached a deserted gas station and made the turn onto Doll Factory.
And stopped before they went two blocks.
Slowly, all five of them got out of the Humvee and stood looking at the monstrous thing before them.
A Stryker armored combat vehicle sat at an angle in the middle of the street. It was a brute. Eight feet wide and twenty-two feet long, sitting on eight fat tires, with a big Browning .50 caliber machine gun mounted on the top—the same model as the one mounted on the deck of their Humvee. Thousands of empty brass shell casings littered the top of the vehicle and their curved sides peeked out from puddles. At least three hundred bodies clogged the street, many of them civilians, but there were uniforms of local and state police and even some soldiers.
