Bruised and battered and bleeding, they helped each other from the bus, wading through the wreckage of the department store. Carefully, quiet as they could be with glass crunching under foot, they stepped out into the street. The chill night air stank not only of gasoline, but of cordite and smoke.
They could see the glow of the expanding fire in the east.
They hobbled up the block
They ducked into an alley and collapsed there, waiting.
The helicopter did not return. The pilot must’ve figured (wrongly) that he’d hit the bus, sent it careening into the storefront. They could still hear gunfire, occasional booming explosions.
“What the fuck’s wrong with those bastards?” Lou wanted to know. He slipped a cigarette between his lips and Lisa lit it with badly trembling hands.
She shook violently, pulled in a ragged breath. “Maybe… they think we’re rabids.”
Johnny was watching the streets. “I don’t think it matters to them by this point,” he said grimly. “I don’t think those boys are from a conventional unit. Some sort of emergency response group, a containment unit, NBC. Sort of troopers that are trained to crush and quarantine an area in the wake of a biological or chemical attack.”
“So we’re fucked?” Lou said.
“Maybe. As far as they’re concerned, we’re all infected. Whether this whole clusterfuck was on purpose or by accident doesn’t matter now. Nobody’s coming out of here. They can’t have that.”
Lou shook his head. “They can’t get away with that.”
“Sure they can. They’ve been planning and preparing for an emergency like this for years.”
“The media, though,” Lisa said. “If they get a hold of this…”
Johnny smiled. “And they will, but they’ll only learn what the feds want them to know. Cut River? Attacked by terrorists, maybe. Militias. Some bullshit like that. We can only be sure of one thing—they’ll have every eventuality covered.”
“They can’t. It’s too big.”
Johnny shook his head. “They do it every day, Lisa. Every time you hear about a a political scandal or an act of terrorism… you can be sure that what you are told and what really happened are not the same thing. Perception management. That’s why nine out of ten people surveyed prefer bullshit. It makes it easier to sleep at night.”
Lou grunted. “Johnny is like our own Jesse Ventura.”
“It must be spooky in your head,” Lisa said.
“You have no idea,” Johnny said. “I’ve seen things that would turn your hair white. If we had the time, I’d tell you what really was behind Watergate.”
Lou found it easy enough by this point to accept everything Johnny said. He didn’t argue. “We have to contact the outside world,” he said. “That’s what we have to do.”
Johnny shook his head. “No phones. Even if some were working, they’d cut the lines. They’ve isolated us, people. They won’t let us out. Even CBs and Ham radios will be jammed, I bet.”
Then Lou thought of it. “The municipal building. The police cruisers there. They have radios.”
Johnny was going to object, but didn’t. “Damn straight,” he said. “Even if we don’t make it out, we can broadcast, tell the world what’s going on here.” He seemed very happy suddenly. After all these years, he’d finally found a way to fuck the government that had fucked him.
They made their way out into the streets.
The municipal building was about a half mile from them, they could see its cyclopean girth squatting on the hill, overseeing the entire town. It was a long way in a warzone, but it was the only way.
“Let’s do it,” Johnny said.
29
“Oh my God… oh Christ…”
Ruby Sue was kneeling next to Joe.
A bloody smear marked his progress to this unremarkable spot on the street, his deathbed. His face had been scraped clean of meat from the friction. He had died only a few moments before, living long enough to tell her he was sorry about it all, bringing her here.
And now, he was dead. Crushed and broken.
She trembled in the night. First with terror and loss and violation, then with rage. “I’ll get ’em, baby,” she told Joe’s raw face. “I’ll make those sonsofbitches pay for this.”
His corpse was unconcerned.
Warmth bled from it into the cool September air. He had finally found a way out of the asylum that was Cut River. He was at peace.
Ruby Sue kissed his dead face, her own washed by tears.
Something in her had died with Joe.
What was left was hard and mean and pissed-off. Her left wrist was sprained, she figured, but her right was just fine. She was scraped and bleeding, but very much alive. Back at the car, she got her Browning .380 and stuck it in her coat pocket. She took Joe’s Colt Python and left the shotgun behind.
Then she went to kick some ass.
She walked towards Chestnut. A pair of rabids—teenage boys, hideous imitations of the same—came at her slithering and snapping their jaws. She killed both of them and continued on.
The town was burning, gunfire everywhere.
Much of it was very close now.
She hid behind a row of bushes as a group passed.
But they weren’t rabids.
Soldiers dressed out in white hooded suits. The sort guys wore on TV when there was a nuclear accident or something. They looked like invaders from Mars. They were all carrying M-16s except for the guy in the back who had tanks strapped to him, a short pipe in his grip.
She was just willing to bet it was a flamethrower or something.
She let them pass and continued on.
The air was thick and acrid with rolling black smoke now as the fires she and Joe had set ate up the town.
Gunshots.
Just ahead.
She cut between two houses and saw a group of rabids (ten or more) assault a squad of soldiers. Lead was flying in every direction, but still the rabids came on, smothering the soldiers with their superior numbers. She saw white suits being shredded, heard screaming and enjoyed it all maybe too much.
A lone solider, weaponless now, was encircled by rabids, mostly women. He was pressed against a brick wall, a solid line of them approaching him. He tried to climb the wall, ran to the left, the right.
Slowly, inexorably, they pressed in, making awful hissing sounds, hands held out before them.
Ruby Sue watched until his screams subsided and then slipped away into the night.
A pack of rabids found her on Chestnut.
She faced them fearlessly.
They tried to ring her in and she squeezed off shots with the Browning semi-auto until they were all down. Then she used the .357 on them. Most were dead, but a few were only gutshot, crawling at her through tangles of their own viscera.
She left them like that. Let them suffer.
In the distance, she saw the municipal building.
She remembered Lou telling her that was where the police were headquartered. She had one speedloader left for the Colt, about eight rounds for the Browning. She would need more ammo before she was done.
Eyes fixed and determined, she made her way towards the towering building.
The night was still young.
Plenty of darkness to kill by.
-GENOCIDE-
30
They made it maybe thirty feet into the rambling confines of the municipal building when one of the crazy bastards came stumbling out of the shadows to meet them.
Lou and Lisa hung back while Johnny faced the psycho dead-on.
Something he didn’t mind too much, considering he’d gotten his shotgun back now.
The rabid was a big, ugly man that could’ve passed for Joe’s twin brother, save that he was balding and beardless. He was shirtless, wearing stained jeans and rubber boots. There was something almost profane about that jiggling mountain of ashen flesh before them. Drool hung from his chin like stalactites. He had something in his filthy right fist that at first looked like a club but upon closer inspection could be nothing but a human femur, dyed dark with old blood. A cord of gristle hung from the hip ball.