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He moaned softly. An inarticulate sound. Like a dreaming person might make.
He pawed for her hand, though, and she let him take it.
“It’s okay, honey, we’ll get this taken care of.”
> Roger kissed her hand, and his tenderness, even this deep into the horrors of his own pain came close to breaking her heart. Fresh tears filled her eyes as she spoke soothing words to him. Meaningless words, more a sound of comfort than any promises she knew she could keep. The world beyond the windshield was wet and vast and dark and she had no idea where the closest hospital was.
She drove on, faster than anything that was safe or sane.
Roger put her fingertips in his mouth. Kissed them and …
Licked them?
It was such a strange thing. Like he was trying to nurse on her fingers, the way a child would at her breast. God, was he that damaged? Was he that far gone that he was reduced to a childlike state? An infantile state?
“Oh, Roger…”
A heartbeat later she screamed as Roger bit down on her fingers.
CHAPTER SEVENTY
STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL
STEBBINS, PENNSYLVANIA
Dez Fox knew that she should scream.
A scream would be good. It would punctuate this moment, seal it, send it into eternity.
People were supposed to scream when they died.
Especially when they died like this, trapped inside a nightmare.
Yet when she opened her mouth she said, “JT.”
In her ears the name sounded like “Daddy.”
It meant the same thing to her.
The dead shuffled forward, stumbling over the sprawled limbs of their dead companions. Some of them tripped and fell, but they got up again, mindless of cracked kneecaps and fractured wrists from their collisions with the unforgiving ground.
Dez backed away, but she knew that she had nowhere to run. There were zombies between her and the school. The lighted window was fifty yards away. It might have been a window on the face of the moon for all that it mattered to her.
She saw figures moving inside. Teachers, parents. Maybe even Billy.
It didn’t matter.
“JT,” she said.
And as if in answer to her speaking that name she thought she heard his voice.
This isn’t done, girl.
“JT…?”
Desdemona, you listen to me. You’re a cop and you’re a good one, but you’re not acting like one now.
“I … I can’t … I don’t…”
