Then suddenly the world was filled with bright light and noise. There was a huge crunch! as a black SUV slammed into the infected, splattering them and flinging their bodies away like rag dolls. The car slid three-quarters of the way around and its engine died with a broken rattle.

Dez stared up in total shock as the driver jumped out.

Voiceless with the impossibility of this, she mouthed his name.

“Billy?”

CHAPTER EIGHTY-FOUR

STARBUCKS

BORDENTOWN, PENNSYLVANIA

Goat trudged through ankle-deep mud for miles. He was not built for this kind of physical activity, and by the time he was halfway to the highway his muscles were screaming at him. He tried to buck himself up with images conjured from a thousand news stories he’d watched. Soldiers humping fifty pounds of gear through twenty-five miles of desert under relentless Arabian suns. Medical teams for Doctors Without Borders walking for days through malaria-filled jungles in order to bring medical supplies to remote villages. Stuff like that. It helped, but not much.

What really kept him going was Dr. Volker’s voice. He had his earplugs in and as he walked he listened to the recording Billy Trout had made at the doctor’s house. It had scared him then and it scared him worse now.

When he finally reached the highway he thumbed a ride with a guy driving a semi from Akron to Baltimore. Goat spun a story about his car breaking down. The driver didn’t care and seemed disappointed that he wouldn’t have company for longer than the five miles it took to get to Bordentown. The trucker had the radio tuned to Magic Marti, who said that the storm showed signs of weakening. From where Goat sat it was hard to tell. Well … maybe the rain was a shade less intense.

The trucker dropped Goat at the Starbucks, accepted a coffee for the road, and left.

Goat brought his coffee with him as he searched out the most isolated corner of the coffeehouse. He opened his laptop and went to work.

The first thing he did was to download the files from Volker’s flash drives and e-mail them to himself at several accounts. He copied the e-mail to Trout and their editor, Murray Klein. Then he updated his Twitter account with a “Breaking News Coming Soon” post. With that done, he downloaded the interview as MP3 files.

Then he waited for Trout to call.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-FIVE

STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL

Billy Trout had rehearsed this moment fifty times since bypassing the National Guard out on the highway and sneaking back into town. Not this exact moment—in none of his fantasies did he imagine that he’d swoop in and rescue Dez Fox—but the moment where they’d meet again. In most of his scenarios, Dez’s mouth would soften from the angry stiffness it wore since the last time they’d broken up; her eyes would glisten with unshed tears, and the two of them would fly into each other’s arms, realizing the rightness of them here at their darkest hour. He knew it was a chick flick ending, but he secretly believed that such tender moments could happen. In each scenario they would kiss. The kind of kiss Bruce Springsteen could get a number one record out of.

So he was already smiling and reaching for her when Dez stared up as he looped the equipment bag over his shoulder and got out of the Explorer.

“Billy—”

“Hey, Dez,” he said warmly. “I knew you’d be here … I knew you’d still be alive.”

She said, “What in the deep blue fuck are you doing here, you asshole?”

Trout’s smile faltered. “What? Um … I’m … rescuing you?”

“Oh, great. So what am I supposed to do now? Swoon into the arms of the big, strong ‘Fishing for News with Billy Superman Trout’ hero of the day? Give me a fucking break.” She dropped-out the empty magazine and slapped a new one angrily into place.

“Huh? No, Dez, I—”

“You should have gotten your ass out of town, Billy.”

“I was out of town,” he snapped, his own anger flaring, “but I came back for you.”

“Oh, please. With all this going on? You expect me to buy that shit? You came back for a Pulitzer and a ticket out of this shithole. The only thing you care about is your next byline.”

“You know that’s not true, Dez.” He shook his head in disgust. “Where’s JT?”

“He left me. Just like the others.”

“Left you? You mean he was infected?”

Her eyes shifted away from his. “I don’t know what happened to him. He just left.”

“Just like that? No mitigating circumstances?”

“No, not just like that, okay? They arrested us and put us in separate cruisers. His crashed. My driver got attacked. JT never came back to look for me.”

“Did you look for him?”

“I tried.”

“You try his house?”

“No … there wasn’t time.”

Trout took a step toward her. “Dez … JT didn’t abandon you. You do know that, right?”

“He left me alone. It always happens. The trooper, too…”

Trout came closer still. There was a strange light in Dez’s eyes that he’d caught glimpses of before. Now it burned like a torch. “The trooper didn’t leave you. He died. He was taken. It was something that was part of his life drama, and its effect on you, scary as it must have been, was a side effect. It had nothing really to do with you. Same goes for JT. You said his car crashed. Either he escaped from the backseat, injuring himself in the process, or he was taken. I don’t think that in either case he was thinking, ‘Yeah, this will really fuck over Dez. This will show her.’”

“Show me what?”

“That you should be abandoned. That it’s what people do to you.”

“That’s bullshit. I’m not making this shit up. I mean … you left me.”

“Really? This is the conversation you want to have right now? Fine, ’cause God knows we have nothing else pressing. So, here’s the truth, Dez: you left me the first four times, and the only reason I bailed that last time was because you were screwing that biker. Maybe I read that wrong, but it seemed to have ‘fuck off’ written pretty clearly on it.”

She said nothing.

“God knows this isn’t the time for you to try and catch up on fifteen years of very heavily needed therapy, Dez, but you have some serious issues. You always think people are abandoning you. Your mother did it…”

“She had cancer…”

“And your father did it.”

“He was killed in the war.”

“I know, Dez. I’m the guy who does know this stuff. Maybe you told JT, too, but I doubt there’s anyone else you opened up to about it.”

“You think I’m crazy?”

“Of course you are. You’re crazier than a barn owl on meth, and you damn well know it. Look at your lifestyle. There’s nothing about your daily habits that doesn’t speak of self-loathing. You drink too much. You’ll screw anything with even a high school level pickup line and a tight ass. You’re a bitch of legendary proportions. And you’ve done just about everything you can—which is saying a lot—to make sure that nobody likes you. And definitely that nobody loves you. What makes it all so cheap and dime-store is that it’s pretty much textbook stuff. Child abandonment issues played out with sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll here in backwoods Stebbins County. Tell me if I’m wrong.”

Dez did not tell him he was wrong. She glared at him for a two count, and then she drew her Glock and pointed it at his face.

“You better run, Billy.”

“Jesus Christ, Dez … let’s not go totally over the edge here…”

“Run!” she screamed, and fired. The bullet burned through the air an inch from his ear. Trout heard a wet thwack behind him and turned to see a zombie pitch backward with a neat black hole in the center of its pale face. Behind it were a dozen more, and at least a hundred of the things were coming around the sides of the building.

“Oh … shit!”

Dez shoved him hard to one side and fired again and again. “Get the duffle bag!”

Trout looked around and saw the canvas bag on the ground. He ran at it and bent to scoop it up, but it was far heavier than he expected and the weight jerked him back. He felt sudden pain flare in his lower back.

“Stop fucking around and get the bag!” Dez yelled.

“I’m getting the bag, Officer Hitler,” he muttered under his breath as he bent and used his knees to lift the bag. He slung the strap over the same shoulder that was supporting Goat’s equipment, hugged the bulky bag to his chest, and looked around.

“Go wide,” shouted Dez, pointing.

Trout nodded and went left, cutting a wide line around the closest mass of zombies. The way Dez was indicating would take him behind the line of parked faculty cars. There were no dead visible over there. He understood her plan. Run wide around a big obstacle, get the dead to follow, and then cut between the cars and head to the open door. Good plan, except that with every step pain shot down the back of his left leg. He realized that he must have pulled his sciatic nerve when he grabbed the bag.

“Well, that’s just peachy,” he growled, but he kept going, gritting his teeth against the pain.

Dez was right behind him, walking backward while she fired at the oncoming wall of the dead. Trout kept looking over his shoulder, watching with horror as Dez brought them down, one at a time. The girl who worked at Mario’s Pizzarama; Archie from the Allstate office; the school’s vice principal; Melissa Crawford, mother of new twins; and others. Trout knew almost every face, could put a name to almost every one of them. He knew that Dez did too, and he knew that this must be killing her. Just as it was killing him.

The rain was thinning more and more, and Trout could see all the way to the wrought iron fence. The National Guard were there in force, and they had to be able to see what was happening … but they did nothing.

Bastards! Trout thought, but his real rage was not directed at them but at the insect-brained generals and policy makers who were so willing to accept a scorched earth policy rather than find a solution that would save American lives. Trout was moderate enough, even as a liberal, to accept that military power was necessary and that even some wars needed to be fought. He wasn’t a fool. On the other hand, he didn’t like the obvious disconnect between the human element and most military theorists and the generals who paid them. Year after year he lost ground to the cynical view that humanity was far less important than either tactical advantage or financial gain. When he heard politicians use the phrase “in the best interests of the American people” he knew that it was always a profit-based decision. And it wasn’t just in war. The cold detachment was evident in the mishandling of Hurricane Katrina, the hesitation to provide financial support for the health needs of the Ground Zero workers, and the apparent abandonment of returning U.S. vets, especially those wounded and requiring expensive medical treatment.