Then she wrapped the belt around her hips and cinched it tight. She’d used up her pepper spray on Andy. Didn’t matter, the shit didn’t work on those dead sons of bitches anyway. She dropped the magazine in her Glock. Nine bullets left and one in the chamber. That was the bad news. The good news was the shotgun attached by aluminum clips to the underside of the trunk lid. It had beanbag rounds, though. Good for knocking them down; no good at all for killing them.

The keys to the cruiser were—where?

She went back to the driver’s side, but the ignition slot was empty. Saunders had been a dutiful little trooper and had taken the keys with him. Shit.

Dez turned and surveyed the road, hoping to see the keys glinting on the asphalt. No such luck.

She knew in theory how to boost a car, but she needed a screwdriver or some tools, and her fingers were so numb with cold that she wasn’t even sure she could pull a trigger.

Dez looked around, considering her options. Her car was parked at the station, four blocks from here. But her car keys were in her briefcase in her own cruiser, and that was back at Turks’s. Miles away.

And, if the staties thought she was a mad psycho killer—if the actual truth of what was happening hadn’t yet come to bite them on the ass—then going to the station was a quick way to get arrested again. Dez knew that she wouldn’t let that happen, even if it meant kneecapping a couple of troopers.

Would she kill one of them if she had to?

She weighed the shotgun in her hand. Beanbag rounds might be a way to muscle through them.

Or, just avoid that whole can of worms and figure something else out.

She looked up the road. The elementary school was two miles from here. A long, cold run in this rain. Her trailer home was the same distance but off to the southwest.

It was way out of her way, but she could feel the old place pulling at her. There was a locked trunk in her bedroom. In it, Dez had two hunting rifles, a shotgun, a Sig Sauer nine, a Raven Arms .25, and enough boxes of bullets to start a goddamn war.

Her landlord, Rempel, had a big Toyota Tundra, too. That thing could drive through a brick wall. If Rempel wouldn’t lend it to her, then Dez had no problem at all knocking him on his ass and taking it. Or kneecapping him, if it came to that. He really was a prick.

She could change into warm clothes, grab her leather jacket and riot gear, put all the guns and ammo into the Tundra and then smash her way right up to the doors of the elementary school. She chewed her lip. That wasn’t a great plan—it wasted time—but it was the only plan that sounded like it ended with her alive. And the kids alive, too.

The wind howled and the street remained empty.

Where the fuck is everyone?

For that matter, where was JT? Was he in lockup, sweating this out in a cage? Or had his driver stopped, too?

“Damn it, Hoss,” she said to the wind, “don’t you leave me, too.”

There was a catch in her voice as she said it. And it made her mad.

“Fuck it,” she told the storm. “It’s only rock ’n’ roll.”

Dez turned and ran down the road toward her home. Toward her guns.

CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

BIXBY ROAD

STEBBINS COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA

Homer Gibbon drove the back roads away from Aunt Selma’s house. He had no idea where Selma was. Homer had dropped her off on a neighbor’s porch, rang the bell, and was a quarter mile down the road when the screams began. He dropped the church lady outside the church. Seemed fitting. He was laughing as he drove away.

The church lady’s ugly little car bounced and rattled along the rutted roads and nearly got stuck twice in mud. Homer took it in stride. He had the radio tuned to WNOW, listening to Magic Marti talk about the storm and then hearing her voice change as she began reading news reports about outbreaks of violence in Stebbins County.

That confused him for almost a full minute, and then he got it.

As he drove, he tried to put it all together, to connect the chain of events that stretched from the execution chamber at the prison to this moment in the church lady’s car. He remembered the needle and he remembered going to sleep.

Then he remembered waking up and seeing the man at the mortuary. And the ugly Russian lady. Homer remembered fighting with them. Biting them.

That had been the first real taste.

It wasn’t really his first taste of human flesh—he’d bitten parts off a diner waitress once—but it was the first time he’d tasted it out of need rather than curiosity.

And, oh, how he had needed it.

Waking up in that bag—that fucking body bag!—had been awful. Dark and terrifying, like being inside a womb or a coffin. Worse still had been the hunger. It was so deep, so massive that he almost bit his own skin, and he would have, too, if the mortician hadn’t unzipped the bag and bent close. Deliciously close.

He wondered if the mortician and the Russian lady had come back. Like Aunt Selma and the church lady.

Yes, he decided, they had. They’d come back as slaves of the Black Eye, and now they were probably out there somewhere, spreading the truth of the Red Mouth.

That was … He fished for a word that was grand enough, glorious enough.

That was perfect.

It was delicious. And it was fun.

He hit the button to roll the window down, leaned his head out of the Cube as the rain stung him, and screamed at the storm, “Fuck you, Volker!”

Homer laughed for the next five minutes. The old fuck doctor at the prison hadn’t punished him, or damned him, or any such bullshit. Volker had given Homer the keys to the goddamn kingdom. He had empowered him.

Homer liked the word “empowered.” He’d learned it from a Dr. Phil episode.

“Empowered.” It tasted good to say it.

The only thing that bothered Homer was the fact that Aunt Selma and the church lady seemed a little—again he fished for a word. The only thing that seemed to fit was “dumb as shit.”

He thought about it some more, not liking that. It seemed disrespectful. Not dumb. Empty. Like a hollowed-out gourd. Nothing inside except the hunger. Auntie didn’t even seem to know her name. Granted, without a face she couldn’t speak, but she didn’t even respond to her name. Church lady still had a face, but she couldn’t talk, either. They just “were.”

Would that be how all of them were? He was pondering that when a figure staggered out of the brush and walked right into the middle of the road. Homer stamped on the brakes and had to steer like a madman to keep the Cube from spinning and crashing into the rainswept trees.

“You stupid fuck!” Homer yelled. But then he stopped and peered through the windshield as the wipers slapped back and forth. He knew this man, and Homer grinned. “Holy shit…”

The man turned toward the car, staring with eyes that were dark and empty of everything except hunger. He wore the remains of a blue smock over street clothes. The smock, the clothes, and the man were covered with so much dried blood that even rain this heavy could not wash it away. The face that peered through the windshield at Homer was the same one that had bent to peer at him when the body bag had been unzipped. The mortician. Homer got out of the car and the man suddenly staggered toward him, taking two quick steps as if preparing to attack.

Homer knew that he wanted to attack. He was hungry, after all—Home knew that on a gut level.

Then the man stopped and stood in the rain, looking lost. Looking … empty.

“Guess I’m not your Happy Meal, sport,” said Homer.

The dead mortician lifted his head at the sound of Homer’s voice and the barest shadow of perplexity flicked across his dead features. Then he turned and began staggering in the same direction he’d been going before Homer stopped. On the other side of the road was a farm field, and beyond that … a farmhouse.

“Nice,” Homer said with approval. There was more movement up the road, and he saw a cop step out of the woods. His shirt and throat were ripped away, his eyes dark and dead. The cop crossed the road and headed in the same direction as the mortician. “Very nice.”

Homer got back into the car. He felt satisfied. He’d wanted an answer to his question, and the universe had given it to him, no muss, no fuss.

The empty ones, like Aunt Selma and the mortician, were no different than the worms under his skin. They did what they did but there was no one at the wheel except the will of the Red Mouth.

“Kind of perfect,” he said, nodding to himself. “That’s right on the fucking money.” He pounded the side of his fist on the steering wheel. Then he rolled up the window, put the car in gear, and kept driving. A mile down the road he came to a crossroads. Turn left and the road would take him into the town of Stebbins. Turn right and he could pick up Route 381, heading to the county line.

In the rearview mirror a military-style Humvee materialized ghostlike out of the rain, and a moment later a troop truck appeared. And another.

Homer waited for the Red Mouth to tell him, but there was silence inside his head. Then he remembered that he was the Red Mouth now.

Beneath his skin the larvae wriggled and in his stomach the hunger howled.

The crossroads waited. Left or right?

Smiling, he made his turn. He even used his turn signal, just for the hell of it.

CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

MAIN STREET

TOWN OF STEBBINS

Dez Fox ran along the side of the road. Main Street was empty and on any other day Dez would have blamed the storm. Today, though, she could no longer take anything for granted.

The downpour reduced visibility to a dozen yards. Everything beyond that was a confusion of gray. Threatening shapes seemed to materialize out of nowhere and Dez suddenly tensed, bringing the shotgun up, finger slipping inside the trigger guard, only to take two more steps to reveal them as mailboxes, a stand of corn stalks left over from Halloween, a sheet-metal cutout of a smiling car salesman outside of Dollar Bill’s Used Cars. Nothing. None of them.

A mile and a half from her trailer park, she found three dead bodies lying in the middle of the road. Two men and a woman. Civilians. Each of the bodies had been virtually torn to pieces by automatic gunfire. Multiple head wounds.