The devastation to the man was appalling. It was dehumanizing on a level that Trout had never witnessed … but it wasn’t the worst part of the grisly spectacle. Not by a million miles was it the worst.

The man’s eyes were open.

His mouth was moving.

Not trying to speak. Trying to bite. Destroyed as he was, the engineer was trying to raise his head and bite.

Trout stared down at Jock. “Oh … God, no.”

Jock’s teeth clacked together. His arms and legs were attached by a few strings of meat. Compelled by a twisted fascination, Trout leaned as close as he dared and stared into the engineer’s eyes.

Jock snapped the air causing Trout to flinch.

“Shit … um … Jock? Hey, buddy … are you still in there? Can you hear me?”

The dead eyes stared at him without expression. Trout bent closer still to examine the wounds, trying to make sense of animation and apparent life in the presence of so much physical destruction. He caught movement along the lines of torn flesh, and when he realized what it was he recoiled in terror. Jock’s blood had coagulated to a dark jellylike substance, and it was teeming with tiny worms. They looked like maggots, though much smaller and thinner.

He looked at the blood splashed on the floor. Some of it was bright red, some was as dark as Jock’s blood. All of the dark blood was pulsing with larvae. But where the black blood and the red blood intermingled he could see waves of even smaller larvae and tiny spots of white. Eggs and hatchlings. Had to be. But it was so fast. Insanely fast.

“Volker, you sick bastard.”

Trout backed away, looking frantically round the office, but, aside from Jock, the place was empty. He turned and ran down the hall to Goat’s editing room. Trout was moderately tech savvy from being around the equipment for so long, and he gathered up what he needed and shoved it into one of Goat’s big canvas rucksacks. Then he tiptoed to the door and ran through the rain to his car. The zombies raised their heads as the engine roared to life, but by the time they lumbered to their feet, Trout was back on Doll Factory Road, rolling hot and fast toward the school.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE

SWEET PARADISE TRAILER PARK

Byron Rempel sat on the floor next to the woman who killed him.

Fifteen minutes ago, Rempel was alive and so was the woman. She was Mrs. O’Grady, who had a modest trailer three pads down from the double-wide that served as Rempel’s office and home. Mrs. O’Grady was a quiet old lady who paid her rent on time and more often than not preferred to live with something broken rather than bother Rempel for a repair job. That made Rempel like her. Or at least tolerate her. Rempel didn’t like any of the residents of Sweet Paradise. They were all white trash losers as far as he was concerned. Half of them were on welfare or unemployment, and Rempel considered both of those institutions to be socially parasitic. He worked his ass off and he hated the idea that some of his tax dollars went into the pockets of lazy fucks who couldn’t hold a job, or who were too lazy to try.

There were exceptions, of course. There was that stuck-up waitress in 14-E. That broad never even gave him a free refill of coffee when he stopped in the diner. Bitch. And that Irish layabout writer, Kealan Patrick Burke, who just moved here from Columbus. Guy won some awards for some goofy horror stories and thought his shit didn’t stink. Thought he was Stephen-fucking-King, and as far as Rempel was concerned even Stephen-fucking-King wasn’t Stephen-fucking-King. Not anymore. Not since The Stand. Last good book that New England prick ever wrote.

Rempel had not read any of King’s books after that, and had not read a word of Burke’s, but he was positive the guy was an overrated Mick who was probably a drunk and a wife-beater, too. They all were. Every writer he ever met was a drunk, and every Mick he ever met was a wife-beater. Rempel was positive of this, so he disliked Burke on general principle.

The queen bitch of Sweet Paradise, though, was Dez Fox. Now there was someone who really thought that she crapped little gold bars and peed gin rickeys. And talk about stuck-up? Rempel had asked her over for coffee three times, and each time Dez Fox looked at him like he was a spitty place on the sidewalk.

Granted, she was hot. Bitch had a serious rack of bombs on her, Rempel admired that. Nice ass, too; but she knew that she was stacked and that’s why she treated Rempel like crap. Except when something broke in her apartment, then Dez was all sweet, saying “please” and “thank you” like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.

What made him unhappy was someone making a mess. Which is why he was very unhappy fifteen minutes ago, answering a call at Burke’s trailer in the middle of a rainstorm that would have scared the shit out of Noah. The writer called with some kind of hysterical rant about blood or something all over the floor. All over the carpeted floor. Rempel hadn’t been able to get a straight story from Burke. The idiot probably cut himself shaving while drunk. Serve him right to bleed to death, the frigging Irish sot. But he grabbed his tool kit, pulled on his yellow rain slicker, and slogged through ankle-deep mud to the writer’s trailer.

When he got there he started cursing at once. The door to Burke’s trailer was wide open and the rain was pouring in. But as Rempel approached the trailer he slowed, frowning in consternation. The runoff that dripped out of the trailer was tinged a rust red. Christ, what the hell did Burke do? Cut his own head off?

Rempel mounted the three metal steps to the open door and peered inside.

Burke was nowhere to be seen. However, Mrs. O’Grady was lying flat out on the floor just inside the door.

“Shit!” Rempel rushed inside and dropped to his knees beside her, ignoring the blood that pooled around her. The old lady had been terribly brutalized. Some mad bastard had beaten her face in. Literally beaten it in. Mrs. O’Grady’s false teeth lay shattered and scattered around her, and from the bridge of her nose to her chin the skin was torn away and the bones smashed to pieces. Rempel stared in mute horror at the exposed splinters of bone that stuck up through the mangled flesh.

He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. This was the work of a madman, a maniac. Could Burke have done this? Rempel tried to imagine the soft-spoken Irish writer going apeshit like this. He didn’t like Burke, but this didn’t fit at all.

It was hard to imagine anyone doing this to a nice old broad like Mrs. O’Grady. Killing her was bad enough, but disfiguring her was …

Well, Rempel thought, it was just plain crazy.

Rempel got up and moved cautiously through the trailer. No sign of Burke. No sign of a mad killer, either. He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and punched 9-1-1. The phone went immediately to a “No Service” message. Not even a ring.

“Shit.” He tried 4-1-1 and got the same thing, and he had no better luck with Burke’s home phone. It made a weird electronic beeping sound, but there was no dial tone. Rempel had two thoughts about that. The storm and the killer. In the movies it was the killer who disabled the phones, but that wouldn’t explain the lack of a cell phone signal.

He heard a sound behind him and turned, expecting it to be Burke.

It was Mrs. O’Grady.

She stood a few feet away from him, her eyes wide and dark and empty, and her face a ruin of jagged bone and ripped flesh.

Rempel stared blankly at her.

“What—” he asked.

She answered with a bite. Not with her old false teeth—they were destroyed—but with a new set of teeth formed by the jagged bones of her exposed jaws. It was a disjointed, improbable weapon, and he should have been able to block her, evade her, sweep her aside. Rempel was easily twice her size. Mrs. O’Grady wasn’t even particularly fast.

It was all about shock. All about impossibility.

Rempel stared in shock one second too long.

Which is how so many in Stebbins died that night.

And it was why so many of the dying spoke the same last word. A single syllable, spoken with fear and wonder.

“No.”

* * *

Dez slowed to a cautious walk as she approached the trailer park. Even from a hundred feet away she could tell that the wave of the infection had already reached here and swept through it.

Two of the trailers were burning.

Doors were open, cars stood idling and empty.

There was no blood, not in this rain, but she saw the glint of shotgun shells on the ground.

Dez wasn’t sure how to react to this. On one hand, the violence seemed to have rolled around her rather than over her. On the other, she felt like she was losing what little grasp she had on exactly what was happening.

How long had she been asleep in the back of the cruiser?

It was full dark, and she didn’t think it was an early dusk caused by the storm. This was night. The dead of night, she thought, and shivered at her own joke.

She moved into the park. The closest trailers were dark except for Rempel’s, but he wasn’t home. She wasn’t sure if she was happy or disappointed that he wasn’t the main course in a monster feast.

A moment later the implications of that thought hit her. It wasn’t another bad joke. She really had been disappointed that Rempel wasn’t dead, and that was really bad thinking.

I’m losing it.

As she continued deeper into the trailer park she tried to knock down that observation, but it dodged every blow.

God … how far gone am I?

How do I even know if I’m crazy or just in shock?

At the corner of Rempel’s trailer she paused. Her own double-wide was sixty feet across open ground. No cover except for some flower gardens that had withered in the cold and were now beaten flat by the rain. She was about to sprint for it when she saw a figure come walking out from between her trailer and her neighbor’s.

It was a teenager. One of the Murphy twins from the F-section of the park. He was dressed in jeans and a white sweatshirt. No shoes or coat. Even from twenty yards Dez could tell that he was dead. The realization drove a knife into her heart.

The twins were thirteen. Still kids.

She raised her pistol and aimed. The distance was far too great for an accurate shot, but she suddenly found herself running forward, the gun leading the way, her feet making the quick, small steps she was taught in the military. Large steps jolt and jerk the body, spoiling aim; small steps roll the body forward, keeping the gun level. She ran toward the boy and, as he turned toward her and began to reach, Dez fired a single shot from eight feet away. It took the boy in the forehead, blowing an apple-sized chunk out of the back of his head as the impact snapped the child’s neck.