If this thing was a disease, Danny thought, maybe she shouldn’t be touching the corpses. Or be anywhere near them. But she wasn’t up to a hike through the woods. And if she wasn’t dead yet, the worst was probably over. Danny passed the first couple of houses in town without seeing them, dark and silent under the trees. No auto horns blaring in town. Maybe nobody had died in their cars here. Maybe someone had moved the corpses off the steering wheels.
Danny passed the first commercial building in town, the one with the real estate office and the VFW she’d never been into, although she was eligible. The whole place was dark, even the apartments upstairs. The street lights were working, so it wasn’t a blackout. Nobody had turned on the lights. All the way down the street there was darkness in the windows, except for a couple of shops and the gymnasium way down at the far end: Danny could see the side door was open, a rectangle of greenish fluorescent light.
Beneath the street lights there were more cars parked helter-skelter or abandoned where they stood, doors hanging open. And on the ground, everywhere she looked, more bodies. They lay under the lights and in the shadows, most of them face-down, most of them with their heads pointed to the north. They had died running. Danny switched off her flashlight and thought her boots had never sounded so loud on Main Street.
She was too late. She wondered what she could have done differently. It seemed to Danny these people were dead because of her, on some level—and not a level very far below the surface. If she had taken the Eisenmann thing seriously, or come up with a better plan of her own, could some of this disaster have been averted? These thoughts she stowed away in a compartment in her mind. Forget them for now. Maybe forever, if she was lucky.
She saw smoke billowing from the top of the doorway of the Wooden Spoon. The last thing this town needed was a structure fire. Danny climbed up on the hood of a car and crossed from one vehicle to the next to avoid the heaps of corpses, then jumped down in front of the café. Her bruised leg almost gave out, but she propped herself against the doorway until the pain dulled down.
It was dark inside the Wooden Spoon except for the exit sign at the back and the television over the counter, blank and glowing. There was an almost-delicious smell coming from the galley kitchen, but there was something else with it, too, that reminded Danny of something she would rather forget. She stepped over what looked like an entire family that had died on the threshold. More bodies under tables. There was a dead man slumped over the counter, arms flung forward. Danny moved to the counter and found Betty at her feet, the big woman’s face a mask of shock, a weird parody of the smiley face on her plastic nametag. The smoke was coming from behind the counter, where the cook, Mitchell Woodie, had collapsed on the grill.
Danny didn’t want to get any nearer the source of the cooking-flesh smell—or the hissing sound. Her stomach was leaping already, and her back prickled intolerably. But she couldn’t leave Mitchell there. She went around behind the counter, stepping over a number-ten can of jalapeños that had spilled on the floor. The stench of pickled peppers, burning meat, and scorched hair and fabric sent stinging bile into Danny’s throat, but she reached out and pulled hard on Mitchell’s apron strings. He was stuck firmly to the grill. Danny’s reason caught up with her gut reaction, and she realized the first thing to do was turn off the heat. This meant reaching around Mitchell, which meant she could see his face: It was blackened, with rivulets of melted fat running out and sizzling on the steel plate of the grill. His hair was reduced to tightly curled fluff. The eye nearest the heat was a hard, red knuckle protruding from blistered eyelids.
With profound misgivings, Danny reached down and tugged the spatula from the dead man’s hand. Then she grasped his shoulder, which was hot to the touch, and started scraping his face off the stove. It took something like thirty hard strokes before the weight of the body pulled the remaining skin away, and Mitchell flopped heavily to the floor. When his charred, smoking face hit the pepper juice, a puff of steam rose up into Danny’s nostrils and she had to run outside. She vomited on the curb in a small space not occupied by corpses. For a long minute she stood there with her head down, a headache pounding behind her eyes, watching a long string of bile stretch from her lip to the ground. Tears leaked from her eyes. What a crappy evening, all told. Then she forced herself to get moving again.
Danny crossed to the Sheriff’s Station, where there was faint light from inside. She stepped over a woman and two kids sprawling down the front steps. Several corpses in the dark front room. There was a light in the back, the partition door standing open, another couple of strangers dead on the floor in there. Danny wondered if Amy had run, or if she had held her post. If she was lying under the communications desk where the single light was burning.
Something
was under the desk. There wasn’t any reason Danny could come up with to suggest Amy should be alive, when so many others had died. Danny moved through her silent domain past the corpses, stopped breathing, and looked under the desk. It was the chair overturned beneath it. Amy wasn’t there, but she could be anywhere, growing cold on the ground with the blood settling into the lowest parts of her body, stiff in death.
Danny drew a long, stuttering breath. The voice in her head was working overtime: She could remember the first runner now, a woman. Maybe she should have fired the shotgun at that woman, scared some sense into the rest of the runners. But it was impossible. And it wouldn’t have worked. There were too many of them. Thousands. And these people were crazy, running like maniacs. Maybe it was one of the symptoms or side effects. They wouldn’t have stopped even if she shot every second one.
Then again, she could have formed a defensive line with some vehicles, created a physical barrier. Or even set some fires across the road. There were all kinds of ways to shape panicked people’s behavior, and Route 144 was a natural bottleneck. If only there had been time to think.
Now that there
was
time, though, beating herself up wasn’t going to help. If she was alive, other people were alive. She had to find them, organize them, and see about cutting any further losses. Then take a little rest. Her head hurt. And her leg. And the scars were prickling. Danny looked around at the station, probably the only living member of her force, and tried not to feel the grief and remorse that were coming at her out of the shadows. It was so quiet she could hear the ticking clock on the wall.
And then a voice like crushed gravel came from the darkness:
“Lemme out.”
It was Wulf Gunnar, forgotten in the back cell. Danny jumped, but controlled the reflex to go for her gun. Wulf saw it, though.
“Don’t like surprises, right? I know the feeling. And loud noises, and people raising their voices.”
All true, but Danny wasn’t in the mood to chat about the personal legacy of combat. She flipped the switch for the ceiling fixtures, rows of sickly tubes pinging and flickering before they flooded the interior with cheap government-issue light. Her eyes contracted painfully.
“You’re the only other person I seen alive since this afternoon,” Danny said, and found her keys in their snap-down pouch. She unlocked the cell and threw the door open. “How come you’re not dead?”
Wulf scratched his chin, considering the question as he strolled out of the cell. He looked around at the corpses.
“Lemme have one of them rifles you got. The Winchester Model 70.”
“No.”
“I heard a whole shitload of screaming and running around. Then your buddy the dog doctor said she had to go find you. She run off out the back. That was when it was still daylight, sun over that way. These ones
run in and fell down a minute later. It got real quiet after that. What the hell happened?”
“Come on.”
Danny led the way toward the back door. Wulf crossed over to the communications desk and picked up a pile of loose paper.
“Your buddy said this here was yours. She read it, and she said you better ought to read it yourself.”
He handed the paper to Danny. It was Kelley’s note. Danny’s eyes unexpectedly stung with tears. Her lip trembled. This wasn’t the time. Not now. She took a few hard breaths, stuffed the feelings down, and carefully folded the pages until they would fit in her breast pocket. She buttoned the pocket, careful not to look at the note, careful not to see the looping Kelley handwriting. She went straight out the back door, where the exterior area light was blazing down on the dumpster and the parking spaces. Nick’s motorcycle was there, and some civilian’s car with the door open. No bodies. Danny was holding her breath again. She focused on breathing, on denying the madness of the situation.
It was like a raging river. She had to stay on the shore. If she went in past her ankles, it would sweep her away. Wulf trod along behind her, impassive. With the bush of hair and beard and his barrel chest with drooping, crooked shoulders, he did look like a bear. And smelled like one. She’d smelled worse on occasion, though, and Danny would take his company over a carpet of corpses any time. So she welcomed the old ruin of a man that followed her down the alley, then up Pine Street past a heap of bodies that had accumulated at the corner. The whine of distant horns was fainter. Maybe the batteries were dying. Danny noticed there were no dogs barking. You could always hear a dog or two in Forest Peak. They must have fled earlier in the day. She remembered seeing dogs running up Route 144.
In silence the two survivors continued toward the gymnasium, picking their way through the carnage on Main Street. How could
nobody
else have survived?
Hours earlier, Patrick and Weaver had been arguing in the motor home about whether to stay in Forest Peak or try the back road. Then the screaming began. They stopped bickering to watch a very tall man sprint past the windows, his arms held up almost straight over his head. The locals scattered at his approach. The tall man ran full-tilt into the low fence at the far
end of the parking lot and did a spectacular forward flip, landing on his back. Then he lay there motionless. Patrick almost laughed, but it would have been a laugh of hysteria.
The screams were coming closer. Weaver went for the door of the motor home to see what was going on, but Patrick had, for once, held him back by sheer force of will—and by the sleeve, which he pulled on until the stitches began to pop. Weaver stayed where he was, and they watched the terrified people rush past in ever-greater numbers, charging nowhere at top speed, then falling. Many of them didn’t fall, but ran into the woods or down the road. But again and again someone would flash by, full of life and animation, then abruptly crash to the ground like a cast-aside rag doll, where he or she would lie twisted and motionless.
Patrick at first thought they were being shot, maybe by a gunman on one of those flat Old West–style roofs on Main Street. But there wasn’t any blood, no jerk of impact—these people simply
dropped
. There was no human expression in their faces as they ran, only animal terror, mouths stretched open. A man in jeans that hung almost to his knees ran for the side door of the RV, yanking on the handle as if to tear it off the hinges. But his mind was gone. He didn’t even attempt to work the latch, but clawed at the door until he fell dead. Patrick thought that he personally was going to have a seizure and die himself: His heart was racing and sweat poured freely down his back and sides. His mouth was so dry he could hear his tongue rasp against his teeth.
“It’s like there’s an invisible hammer hitting them on the heads,” Weaver said. He locked the door and set the chain and went around securing all the RV’s windows and the front cab doors. Then he pulled all the curtains except the windshield and suggested they move back to the lounge area and wait for the screaming to stop. They waited there in the overstuffed captain’s chairs, in the dark, with the air hot and still inside the motor home. There was a fly buzzing around, making a circuit from the windshield to the back bedroom in long looping courses. Its outboard-motor hum could be heard when there was a lull in the cries outside.
Every few minutes someone would run right into the RV, clapping against the aluminum skin. The glassware in the bar racks would jingle. Patrick didn’t know if these runners were falling dead or scrambling back up to keep on going. A million thoughts swarmed through his mind, none of them about Weaver, which was rare. Maybe all he’d needed was a
real
crisis to stop him fretting about the petty insecurities in his life. This would make a
great movie of the week, he found himself thinking. Talk to the people he knew at Lifetime, maybe.
Weaver was sitting there looking timeless and rugged and strong, eyes reflecting the light. He could have been watching a bluejay instead of the end of the world. Patrick was determined not to think out loud, just in case Weaver snapped and left to join the running and screaming and Patrick was left alone in the dark motor home. So he studied the custom baseball stitching that ran along the arms of the captain’s chair. The sun was slanting toward the trees on the mountain ridge above them when Patrick fell asleep.
It was dark when he awoke, and the side door of the RV was standing open. Patrick could see the dim blue rectangle of moonlight on pavement. He got rushed by panic; his heart went through the roof. He clattered down the steps and out into the world, forgetting his fear of the dead, the maniacal running people.
But it was so quiet. There was no screaming, no thunder of feet slapping the asphalt. Nobody except him.
This is it. This is really alone
, he thought.
There were dark blotches on the ground all around the parking lot. The dead. It was like one of those dim Civil War photographs of the aftermath of battle they used in Ken Burns documentaries.
“Weaver?” Patrick called, but so softly he could barely hear his own voice. Then he heard a scraping sound. Held his breath. It was the sound the Mummy’s feet would make, dragging across the stone floor of his tomb. Patrick backed away from the RV. The sound was coming from behind it.