Tears streamed from his fever-bright eyes. “I tried to save her, Ledger. God help me, I tried. Please… please… I tried.”
I hauled myself to my feet. The room swung around me, refusing to settle. There was thunder in my head and blood in my mouth. “What the hell are you talking about?”
He tried to answer, but he simply could not. Instead he stretched out his arm and with a hand that shook with the palsy of absolute terror, he pointed to something behind me. I did not want to turn. No fucking way. Whatever was happening here was all wrong. I’d hit my head, I knew that. Nothing was probably what it seemed. Everything was suspect. Nothing that I’d done since Gateway was to be trusted. I knew that. The mycotoxins. The viruses. They were messing with me. Rudy said so. Hu said so. I was delusional. Everything was a bad dream.
That’s what I told myself as I turned to follow the direction of his pointing finger. No matter what was there, no matter what it was that had torn Toys down like this, no matter what horror my concussed brain wanted to show me was going to be a lie.
I turned.
I saw.
I screamed.
She was there. Across the room. Against the wall. High on the wall. Heavy iron spikes driven all the way through the precious, familiar flesh. Bloody spike-heads sticking out from wrists and ankles and stomach and breastbone. Long, tangled blond hair hung in sweat-soaked twists down her naked body. Her breasts, empty of blood, sagged. Her head hung down so that I could not see her face. I didn’t need to. I knew those lines, those curves. I was more intimately familiar with the landscape of that woman than with anyone I’d ever known. The pale flesh, the paler scars. Each freckle and mole.
“I’m sorry,” said Toys, his voice filling with fresh tears. “They needed a sacrifice and I had no choice. No choice.”
My scream drowned out his words. I did not scream at him. I did not scream his name, nor did I howl out a denial. No, the shriek torn from my chest was a single word. A name. Her name.
Junie.
On the other side of the room the God Machine pulsed.
And the God Machine pulsed again. A fresh wave hit me.
Someone shook me awake and as I came up out of blackness a hand clamped itself over my mouth and a voice whispered directly into my ear.
“Quiet. They’ll hear you. They’re right outside.”
A female voice. Not familiar, no one I knew, and yet…
Somehow I did know her.
I opened my eyes. We were inside a school bus. A big damn yellow school bus. Small, pale faces peered in silent horror over the backs of seats. Dozens of them. Scuffed and dirty, some of them streaked with blood. So many young eyes, each filled with bottomless horror. In some I saw the dangerous vacuity that spoke of shock and trauma that may already have run too deep.
The woman who spoke removed her hand from my mouth and shifted to help me sit up. She was a cop, but no one I knew. A big blonde with lots of curves and a beautiful face that was set into hardness. Blue eyes and a tight-lipped mouth. Blood and dirt smeared on her clothes.
“You good?” she asked, her voice low but not a whisper. Whispers carry. Cops and soldiers know that. She was a cop, but she had the soldier look. Battle horrors leave a certain stamp on a person, a particular light in the eyes, and she had that. There was a small black ID badge pinned to her breast. It said FOX.
“What’s going on?” I asked, pitching my voice low, too. “Where am I? Who are these children? And who are you?”
I saw doubt flicker over her face. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, don’t tell me you got some kind of amnesia bullshit. You didn’t get hit that hard, you pussy.”
There was a dull ache on my forehead and I touched it. My fingers came away red with blood. “What happened?”
Officer Fox took a single short breath before answering, as if she needed the moment to control her anger. “How much don’t you remember? Do you know who the fuck you are, at least?”
“Captain Ledger,” I said.
“Captain? You demoting yourself?”
“What?”
“Last I heard you were a full bird colonel,” she said. “But we can run with captain. Whatever. I don’t fucking care as long as you know who you are.”
“It’s captain,” I said. “You’re Officer Fox?”
“Then you do remember?”
“I read your name tag.”
“Balls. We’re trying not to die and you’re checking out my tits.”
“Your name tag,” I repeated. “Who are you and what’s happening?”
“What’s the last thing you remember?”
There were sounds outside. The distant chatter of automatic gunfire, a few hollow pops of small arms. Growls.
Growls?
“I was in the Playroom,” I said. “Got hit with a God Wave and—”
She punched me. In the chest. Hard.
“No,” she snapped. “Don’t go getting stupid on me. I don’t know what the shit a God Wave is, but that’s not part of what’s happening. This is here and now. This is Stebbins County and we are in deep shit. Can you remember anything about that? About Lucifer 113?”
Yeah, I knew about that microscopic monster. It was the bastard child of a Cold War bioweapons program. But all that knowledge was from a report. One of thousands I had to read over the years to keep track and get perspective. Nothing from an active case.
“It’s the God Wave,” I insisted. “It’s screwing everything up.”
“Come the Christ on, Ledger,” growled Fox. “Sam talked about you like you had the biggest dick in Special Forces and you’re babbling about some religious surfer bullshit? I need you to get your head out of your ass and get back in the game, because we are in deep shit.”
“Sam? Sam Imura? Is Sam here?”
A shadow crossed her face. “He… was. I told you what happened at the food depository. He fell… they…” She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. We’re here and we need to do something.”
The gunfire was trailing off. There were fewer shots but the growls were getting louder. Closer.
“They’re coming back!” cried one of the children, and they all started crying. Too much, too loud. I could hear the way those sounds changed the noises from outside. The growls got louder, more insistent.
No. They weren’t growls. They were moans. And that fast I knew what they were. Even though it was impossible, I knew.
I caught Fox’s wrist in a tight grip. “Listen to me,” I said urgently. “I have a head injury and I can’t remember much. But if those are walkers out there, then you need to bring me up to speed real damn quick. I need a sitrep and don’t paint it with pretty colors.”
She gave me a strange look. Almost a smile. A little relief, maybe. A small warrior’s smile. She nodded.
“Short version of a bad story,” she said. “I’m Officer Desdemona Fox. Dez. We’re south of Roanoke and we’re trying to get to Ashville. We have three school buses. Used to have more but…” Tears glistened in her eyes, hard as diamonds. She pawed at them and plunged ahead. “Sam and his team helped us get out, but we lost most of them. We had to go off the main roads because of the traffic jams. A whole wave of those dead bastards hit us two hours ago. You and your boys came out of no-fucking-where and we made it ten more miles down the road. Then we got hit by another surge of them and you got nailed by debris when you didn’t duck fast enough when the grenade went off. What’d I leave out that you need to know?”
“How bad is it?” I demanded. “How far has it spread?”