Joe started, took two or three uneasy steps back.
There wasn’t a man in the world that truly frightened Joe.
Even in prison where there’d been some truly malicious, degenerate sadists who’d slit your throat for a cigarette, he’d never known fear. But at this moment, staring down at this little old man with his yellow, crocodilian eyes, Joe was frightened.
The guy was just standing there, scrawny pencil arms extended, palms up, fingers wiggling crazily like maybe they were full of electricity. Great dripping gouts of foam and mucus ran from his mouth.
“How about it?” he said with a voice like a gurgling drainpipe.
Joe had the .357 on him. “How about what, asshole?”
“How about it?” he said again and then said something else, but a rancid clot of mucus slopped from his lips and it became unintelligible.
Joe kept watching him, figuring what an amusing, harmless creature this guy must have been before the germ did him—probably sat on the porch telling war stories, bounced babies on his lap, fished trout in the creeks (knew the best spots, too, like all the old timers). Someone’s grandpa for sure.
But now… now the damage was done and this old man was dangerous.
He took a step forward and it wasn’t the step of an elderly man; there was a smooth cat-like grace to it.
“Take a walk,” Joe told him.
He came on.
Joe pulled the trigger and the muzzle flash turned the shadowy shop to daylight.
The old man caught a round square in the chest.
It flung him back four feet, right into an unmolested rack of baseball bats. He and the bats went clattering to the floor. He moaned and writhed and then went still.
Joe figured he’d blown his heart right across the fucking street.
“Nothing personal, old man,” he said.
Ruby Sue came rushing out, Browning in hand.
“Get your ass wet?” Joe said.
“Fucking right,” she said and saw the dead man. “Let’s go. Place is giving me the creeps.”
Outside, they moved up Chestnut, armed to the teeth and ready to do some damage. There was a sudden loud whooshing sound overhead and both of them went down low automatically.
“What the fuck was that?” Ruby Sue said.
“I think it was a helicopter.”
And a fast one at that.
It got him to thinking.
A helicopter with no lights on it. Was that legal? He’d be the first to admit that he knew as much about choppers as he knew about tampons, but there had to be laws, right? For civilians, anyway. And this chopper was no civilian model. It had been jet-black and sleek-looking, definitely a military model.
Which made him start to wonder just what sort of people were about to crash this little party.
24
Lisa found it almost funny in some pathetic way how, during the action back at the church, she’d had no interest in shoveling any powder up her nose. But now that things had cooled off relatively… the need was back. It had been maybe two hours or so since her last fix and she was burning down like a pile of dry kindling. Her nose was running, her head was aching, and her guts wanted to crawl up the back of her throat.
She needed a taste and she wasn’t going to get one.
That was not only depressing, it was downright criminal.
And if all that wasn’t bad enough, Johnny was acting strange. The twins back at the church… it had been bad. Lisa decided she was lucky, maybe, that she had the junk habit. Go without it long enough and pretty soon, the monkey started jumping on your back, clawing at your brain, pretty much blotting out everything else. It got so she didn’t even care about the guitar she’d left at the church.
Addiction, true addiction, fucked you that perfectly.
But Johnny didn’t have even that.
They were walking again. She didn’t ask where. She was simply overloaded by it all; functioning completely on auto-pilot. She saw the faces of her mother and father. She saw the faces of those she’d come to know in these past few hours. And she saw the faces of the residents of Cut River. The only thing they all had in common was that they were all dead.
All dead.
Yes, all of them.
Just like me.
Johnny was walking ahead of her. He paused, stuffed a plug of tobacco into his jaw. He chewed it, spat. “I’m going to get you out of here. I told you I would and I will or die trying. That’s that.”
“How?”
“We’re not taking the roads. We’re just going to walk out, through the woods, the fields. It’s the only way.”
“But Lou said he tried that. He said—”
“I don’t care what he said. He’s dead. They’re all dead.”
Lisa didn’t have the strength to argue. The weight of the .357 in her fist was like a brick. Her own body weighed only slightly more. Her eyes were blank and her belly was sick and she had the shakes. If she didn’t a get a taste pretty soon, she was afraid of what might happen.
Afraid that she’d run off and make for the church and her stash.
Use your head. There’s too many of them—they’ll get you, make you like them. You don’t want that, do you?
She started wondering if it would really be all that bad.
Then she started thinking about Nancy, what it had done to her before she died. Horrible. Far worse than withdrawal… wasn’t it? At least Nancy was dead now, though, and didn’t feel the pain.
Or was she?
Lisa kept wondering that, too.
She’d looked dead… but maybe she wasn’t, maybe she’d be waking up soon.
Thinking these things only made the shivering worse.
“Listen,” Johnny said to her in a whisper.
She sighed, thinking maybe he was hearing gunfire and helicopters again. She’d heard the first, but not the second. He, however, swore he’d heard it. It seemed to worry him much more than the rabids or what they could do. Maybe he was ready to have a breakdown. Maybe the war was coming back—
No, not gunfire or helicopters.
This sound sent chills up her spine, yanked her mind out of the fog. It was a baby crying. Wailing pitifully. It woke some maternal instinct in her she hadn’t known existed… and it also, for reasons she couldn’t explain, filled her with a gnawing, relentless terror.
Johnny shrugged, spat. “Some kid,” he said.
“Who needs help,” Lisa said angrily, tired of apathy.
He laughed. “You think kids haven’t been affected by this, rock star? Is that what you think?” he said, eyes bulging. “What is it you think I shot back there at the church? What do you think that was?”
Lisa stared at him. “I’m going to find that kid. Help her or him. You can go fuck yourself for all I care.”
She stalked off into the darkness, zeroing in on the crying. The closer she got to it, the more her habit withdrew its clutches. She was pumped with adrenalin now, on a mission from God here, and nothing was going to stand in her way.
She found herself on a block of houses.
A few were lit up, but most were dark. Odd as it seemed, the darkness was gradually holding less and less threat for her. Maybe it was the gun. Maybe it was that she knew those bastards could die now. And maybe it was just experience. After awhile, they said, you could get used to anything.
She stopped before a simple two-story frame house.
A working streetlight on the boulevard washed it down in pale illumination. It had bad windows, old cedar siding. The lawn was overgrown and there was a Ford pickup in the driveway with a flat tire. The body of a woman was twisted-up in the grass, a swath of darkness where her face had been. The sight of her didn’t even faze Lisa.
There was another body in the street.