Dez kicked one of the dead in the cheek and shot another through the eye. Then she grabbed JT and hauled. He kicked his way out and they flopped backward, both of them flat on their backs.

The dead came at them, and Dez took the Glock in both hands and fired, fired. JT blew the knee off of one, and, as it collapsed down, he put the next round through its forehead. He kicked that body back and fired at the one behind it, catching it in the chest and the shoulder and then the face.

The last zombie was an old woman, and Dez kicked her on the point of the jaw with all her strength. The woman’s head whipped up and back and her neck snapped.

Then it was over.

The two of them lay there, covered in blood and black muck and bits of flesh.

Dez recovered first. She saw the black mucus glistening on her thigh, and she screamed and scrambled over onto hands and knees and then shot to her feet. JT was up at once. He snatched the big steel fire extinguisher from the wall and turned it on her, using the compressed blast to whip the infectious goo off of her clothes. Then Dez tore it from his hands and did the same. Both of them were making small, almost feral whimpering sounds as they emptied the entire unit. Dez cursed and flung it away.

“We’re good,” JT said nervously, “we’re good, we’re good.”

But they were not good.

At the far end of the hall was a big set of windows that looked out over the parking lot. Until now that window was as black as the stormy night outside, but all at once it glowed with brilliant white intensity.

“Flares?” ventured Dez.

Then the whole building suddenly began to shake. Heavy vibrations rattled with the drone of huge machines. They bolted for the far end of the hallway and stared out the window as a line of Apache Longbow helicopters came tearing through the night sky over the line of pine trees, ghostly in the glow of the white phosphorous flares that drifted down on tiny parachutes. With them, flying close support, were four UH-60 Black Hawks.

The strain on JT’s face melted into a smile. “Sweet Jesus,” he said, “I think the cavalry just arrived!” He began waving to the choppers.

A moment later the side door on the lead Black Hawk rolled back to reveal the ugly multibarreled snout of a minigun.

“No!” screamed Dez as she grabbed JT and tore him away from the window a split second before hundreds of rounds chewed the whole wall into a storm cloud of flying glass, torn brick, and splintered wood.

CHAPTER NINETY-EIGHT

THE AUDITORIUM

Trout reached out to Goat. “I’m sending you a lot of stuff,” he said. “Get it on the Net.”

“Okay, but we’re doing this the slow way, Billy.”

“What do you mean?”

“The way you’ve been doing your bits—you know, ‘Live from the apocalypse.’ That’s the key. We should be doing a live stream. We don’t need to edit anything. We’re not waiting for a broadcast time slot, man. This is raw and immediate, so let’s go reality show with it.”

“Will anyone watch it?”

“Billy, every-fucking-body is watching this. The whole world is watching, but I don’t know how long we have before the feds find me and shut us down. I’m running this through a real maze of off-site bounce-around servers, but they will find me…”

“Then let’s go live.”

Trout began doing interviews in the auditorium. Everyone was in shock, a few were absolutely catatonic with fear or grief. Trout could only imagine what some of them had seen. Family members torn apart by the zombies. Friends and schoolmates dragged out of the buses. Teachers slaughtered while trying to protect the kids. Or, as some people quietly suggested, a few teachers and parents simply running away, so wrapped up in their own immediate needs that they were willing to leave the innocent to their fate. Some of the people, adults and kids, were ebullient with a kind of excitement that was too big, too hopeful, and spoke of a fractured perception. Those were the ones, Trout knew, that would shatter if one more thing went bad.

One little girl stared blankly into the camera and asked, “Mommy?” She said that one word, uttered that single plea, over and over again. At the same time that Trout was aware that this was broadcast gold he was also aware that his heart was breaking. He knew that the little girl’s face would haunt his dreams the rest of his life … if there would be more life to live.

He kept going, interviewing everyone.

No one was grandstanding, no one was spinning a tale simply because they were on TV. These people were far too badly shaken, their hurt was far too present in their minds for any artifice, and Trout knew that this would be evident to anyone who watched the video. Anyone who was unmoved would have to be more dead inside than the creatures who were laying siege to the school.

A few of the adults he interviewed—a disheartening few—seemed to have found some measure of dignity and courage. On the other hand, many of the kids were displaying genuine courage that bordered on heroism. One eleven-year-old girl in particular, Bailey, had gathered the littlest kids into a corner and was entertaining them with stories. However, Trout saw a broken field hockey stick standing against her chair; it was jagged and covered with blood. He bet there was a story there, and he hoped he would have a chance to see it told.

Another kid, a hulking sixth-grade boy, whom puberty had hit like a runaway train, wore most of a set of football pads over his street clothes and carried an aluminum baseball bat. Trout interviewed the boy, Bryan, who told him about how he’d been chased into the gym by a couple of the dead and found five girls already there, hiding in the big wire cage where they stored the sports gear. Bryan had run into the cage, put on as many pads as he could, including a football helmet, then grabbed a baseball bat and left the cage to attack the zombies. It was a wild story, and Trout might have doubted Bryan’s word if not for the five girls who sat nearby giving the boy adoring stares.

Trout did as many short interviews as he could. Some were stories of combat and victory, some were narrow escapes, but most were about terror and loss. And in the case of many of the children, the stories were about abandonment—either by cowardice or, more often, because the parents and teachers had died during the fight. To a terrified child, though, it amounted to the same thing. And that made him think about Dez. She was the same age as most of these kids when her parents died, and even though she knew—with all of her considerable adult intelligence—that those deaths had been beyond the control of her parents, Dez was still caught up in abandonment issues to this day.

As he set up to interview a librarian who had been rescued by a cheerleader, the whole auditorium suddenly froze into a listening silence.

Trout spoke quietly into the mike. “We’re hearing gunshots. It sounds like … yes, they’re coming from upstairs. That’s the Stebbins police officers, Desdemona Fox and JT Hammond. They’re hunting the last of the infected in order to ensure that this building is safe and secure.”

He paused and aimed the mike at the ceiling. The shots continued and Trout wished that he felt as confident about what was happening up there as he sounded. But he needed to convey the message that the school was under control.

“The shooting has stopped,” he said and panned the camera to show that every one of the eight hundred faces in the auditorium was tilted upward, eyes wide, expressions showing mingled hope and dread.

The silence in the big room held and held, and then the whole building began to vibrate.

“Helicopters!” said one of the men in the back. “The army’s here!”

Wild cheers erupted throughout the hall. Trout goggled at this, but then considered that these people were here in the school long before he got here, so they may not have seen the ruthlessness of the National Guard.

“Listen to this,” he said in the mike. “People are cheering because they hear helicopters. They’re hoping that the military is coming to rescue them. I had that same hope when I crossed the quarantine zone. And, call me crazy, folks, I still hope that the guys in the white hats do come along and save our butts, because I’d love a happy ending here.”

He tilted the mike up again, and waited with the others, muttering, “Come on … come on … come on,” under his breath as the heavy throp-throp-throp of the rotors beat closer and closer.

And then the miniguns opened up.

The cheers instantly turned into a shrill chorus of screams as the windows exploded inward in storm clouds of glittering glass. The shards swept across the packed crowd, slashing and tearing. Children dove under the seats, adults tried to shield them with their own bodies. Bullets buzzed above the massed people like a swarm of furious hornets.

Billy Trout dove behind an upright piano used for school shows and the bullets coaxed a mad, disjointed tune as they ripped the instrument into kindling. Despite the madness raining down around him, Trout punched the Record and Send buttons and aimed the camera at the windows.

CHAPTER NINETY-NINE

STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL

The Black Hawk hovered in the air like a nightmare, the minigun growing like a dragon, spitting hundreds of rounds at the top floor of the school. A second helicopter coasted with monstrous slowness past the far side of the school, firing at the row of lighted windows. Below them, the living dead moaned and reached with aching fingers toward the sky, trying to tear the machines down to tear them open for the meat inside. But the choppers were too high and the dead could not reach them, and the intensity of need within those moans rose to a horrible shriek.

“This is Billy Trout reporting live from the apocalypse!” he yelled. “I don’t know if you can hear me, but we are under attack. Please … if anyone can hear me, we need help!” He turned up the gain on the lavaliere mike clipped to his lapel so that his words could be heard over the din of screams and automatic gunfire. “We’ve been begging for help from the government … and this is how they respond!”

Dez was curled in a fetal crouch, her arms wrapped around her head, her body bleeding from dozens of cuts. Her eyes were squeezed shut, but her mouth was open as a continual, red-raw scream tore itself from the deepest part of her. A dozen feet away, JT Hammond was curled into a similar knot, trying to shrink into himself. He, too, screamed.