“So what are we dealing with here, Sergeant?” Rod says. “Do you know the extent of his influence over the Infected?”
Wilson and Wendy exchange a glance.
“We had to shoot our way through two towns,” Wilson tells him. “The Infected attacked us, with weapons. Some of them had guns.”
“Fascinating,” Dr. Price says.
“I was thinking, horrible,” Rod says. “If Mr. Young has that kind of command and control over the crazies, he could be a hell of a lot harder to deal with.”
“After Mechanicsburg, we stopped being attacked, so our guess he went to ground between there and Spring Lake, probably up in Milford, which is around a ten-minute drive off the road.”
“The man is close, then,” Rod says, nodding. “Assuming he’s still coming east.”
As if to confirm his assumption, Arnold’s voice buzzes in his ear.
Hellraisers 3, this is Hellraisers Eyes. Contact, west. Repeat. We have contact.
Dr. Price
Travis catalogs his symptoms: shaking, loss of peripheral vision, lips tingling, heart racing and eyes and mouth feeling dry, which he knows is a result of stress inhibiting the lacrimal gland. Sergeant Rodriguez was right; when it comes to fight or flight, you may end up fighting your own body.
As they wait for the vehicle to approach the roadblocks, Travis remembers what he felt his first day at the White House, and the last, when he fled the building in a helicopter. That sense of history in the air. He glances at the men next to him. Their eyes are gleaming. They can feel it too. The Berlin Wall coming down. Fireballs erupting from the World Trade Center. The Screaming, the first days of the Wildfire epidemic. Fulcra around which history bends. The sense that after today, nothing will ever be the same. After today, everything, everywhere, will be different.
And now this. Bringing Ray Young to a special facility, where they will capture a pure sample of Wildfire and save the world.
He remembers Sandra Forbes swooning in the grip of the Secret Serviceman just before the man flung her into the crowd like so much garbage. I’m sorry, Sandra. But I did it for this. I have a responsibility to the human race far greater than to any single individual.
He turns and studies Fielding’s profile. The man is grinning. He feels it too. For this one moment, these enemies are like brothers, united in common cause.
I owe you an apology as well.
I’m sorry, Fielding, but you won’t be able to come with me for what I must do.
Anne
Anne stands hunched and gasping over the hot machine gun, her dead comrades crumpled at her feet. She and Marcus say nothing for several minutes, just watching the road. They are approaching another town. Anne tenses, but it appears to have been burned off the map. A charred ruin that smells like ash, utterly dead.
The bus jolts over a pothole and Marcus moans in pain.
Anne stares at him with growing horror. The large man hugs the steering wheel, gritting his teeth, his face pale and waxy. Marcus looks like a corpse.
Blood drips from his seat into a dark puddle on the floor.
“You stupid—” She drops the machine gun and hunts for the first aid kit. “How bad is it?”
“Bad,” he manages. The simple act of speaking appears to give him pain. “Shot.”
“Stop the bus.”
“No.”
“Marcus.”
“Can’t. If I stop, don’t know if I could drive again.”
“Then don’t,” she says simply, surprising herself. “I’ll get you patched up, and then take you to Nightingale.”
“The mission. . .”
Anne shakes her head. “I don’t care. I can’t let you die.”
“Not up to you,” he says, his eyes a fiery blue in his pale face. “Saw what this guy can do. Understand now. Have to stop him.”
She chokes back a tear, conquering the urge to weep by sheer force of will. Crying is like death, a threshold. Once she starts, she knows, she may never stop.
“I don’t want you to do anything for me anymore.”
“It’s not about you, Anne. Always my choice.”
She probes him with her eyes, looking for the gunshot wound, and finds it in his hip—a small hole with charred edges, the surrounded area blackened with blood. Probably a ricochet, or one of the Infected shot him point blank from the hood. She checks for an exit wound but finds nothing. The bullet is lodged in his pelvic bone.
While Marcus focuses on the road, Anne uses her knife to widen the hole in his jeans, and studies the ragged, broken flesh around the wound. It is still bleeding, but the bullet missed the arteries. She opens a bottle of alcohol.
“This is going to hurt. Get ready.“
She pours the alcohol onto the wound, making Marcus gasp with agony. Anne marvels at his endurance. He has strength of a bull. She wipes away the fluids and pushes a bandage against it.
“I can put a dressing on it but the bullet is still in there. You need a doctor.”
“After,” he says.
“We could go to Nightingale, get you fixed, and then we could live there together, you and me,” she offers. “I could be your wife.”
Marcus does not speak for several moments. Anne studies his face hopefully. Finally, he shakes his head with a tight smile. “Now you ask. Too late for that.” He gestures to the bodies on the floor, the smile turning into a grimace. “Otherwise, they died for nothing. Besides, unless Ray dies, nowhere safe. Must give him mercy.”
“I don’t know if we can get him,” Anne says. “He’s too well protected.”
“Find a way. Always do. Ranger way.”
“We’re not real Rangers, Marcus. I’m just a—”
Anne pauses, surprised she cannot recall what she was before. Instead, she remembers the cries of children washing over her like waves from the distant burning ruin of Camp Defiance. In her mind’s eye, a military helicopter lunges into the sky, wobbling unsteadily, people tumbling out of the back and falling screaming to the ground.
“All right,” she says. “This time, I need you to get me close. We’ll wear gas masks. We’ll drive straight into him. I get out, I shoot him in the head. All or nothing. Then I get you to Nightingale.”
“Can get you close,” Marcus tells her. “Can do that.”
Anne runs her hand along his heavily muscled arm and wonders at the life they might have created together. She kisses it, tasting blood. Presses her scarred cheek against his bicep.
This is her way of saying goodbye.
“Look,” Marcus says. “The road.”
She stands, facing the wind rushing through the open windshield, and sees the billboard looming in a grassy field. The board is plastered with a wilting ad for a gun store and shooting range in the next town, five miles ahead. Morgantown.
The content of the ad barely registers with her. Someone has spray painted over it in bold black capitals:
DEFIANCE? FIND SOLDIERS IN MORGANTOWN
“I think things have just gotten more complicated,” she says.
Ray
The old truck lurches down the road, careening around abandoned wrecks, its driver feeling terrified and elated, still riding high on the adrenaline rush. The ferocity of Anne Leary’s pursuit makes Ray shiver even now.
She was one tough broad. But I took care of that, yes sir. I got her, I’m sure of it. Her and her entire crew, all dead or infected now, and good goddamn f’ing riddance.
“No more Mr. Nice Guy, honey.”
He glances right for a reaction but the seat next to him is empty. French, Anderson and Salazar are in the back, clinging to the sides of the truck, and Lola is dead, her brains splashed across a motel parking lot like so much litter.