Jonathan Maberry - Dead of Night

Doc Hartnup saw JT Hammond fighting for his life. He would have given everything to help this man, to save a single life. It would not repay all of the lives he’d taken … but it would give him at least a moment’s grace. However he had no control over the body. It staggered toward the officer, legs moving quickly as the hunger built to insane levels.

His white hands reached for JT, ready to grab, to rend and tear and expose all of that fresh meat.

Then JT turned toward him and raised the pistol.

Hartnup looked into the barrel of the black automatic. It was bottomless and as dark as forever.

“Sorry, Doc,” said JT Hammond.

There was a moment of intense white, brighter than the sun. Then everything went black. Hartnup felt his body falling.

Then he felt something else. Inside the hollow body he felt himself fall. Moving. Being pulled down into a well of darkness. He panicked and tried to fight it but it was like being pulled into the gravity well of a black hole. Hartnup fell and fell, and as he fell he could feel the connections to his stolen body snap and fall away, as if the scaffolding that kept him in position within the empty shell was collapsing.

He could not feel the body of the Hollow Man.

He could not feel anything. Not the hunger, not the pain. Nothing.

And soon, he could not think anything.

As his body fell to the bloody ground, Doc Hartnup fell into the black well of death and was truly and completely gone.

JT Hammond stood above the children, his smoking gun in his hand, the slide locked back, the gun empty. Searchlights swept across the sea of zombies and focused a burning ring around him. JT raised his arms out the side, letting the pistol fall. The living dead swarmed him.

The Black Hawks opened fire.

The heavy bullets tore into the zombies, punching through meat and shattering bone, knocking the dead backward and off their feet. Exploding skulls and tearing limbs from their sockets.

In the White House Situation Room, the president of the United States sat with his aides and Scott Blair, National Security Advisor, and watched the slaughter of the infected.

“What have we done?” whispered the president.

Blair took off his glasses and rubbed his face. “We did the right thing, Mr. President.”

The president shook his head. “No,” he said, “no we did not.”

Inside the school, huddled together on the floor, Dez and Trout held each other as the bullets hammered like cold rain on the walls. It seemed to go on forever. Pain and noise and death seemed to be the only things that mattered anymore. The barrage began chewing through the walls, showering them with debris.

And then … silence.

Plaster dust drifted down on them as the rotors of the helicopters dwindled to faintness and then were gone.

“It’s over,” Trout whispered. He stroked Dez’s hair and kissed her head and wept with her. “I won’t ever leave you, Dez. Never.”

Dez slowly raised her head. Her face was dirty and streaked with tears, and her eyes were filled with grief and hurt. She raised trembling fingers to his face. She touched his cheeks, his ear, his mouth.

“I know,” she said.

Dez wrapped her arms around Trout with crushing force. He allowed it, gathering her even closer. They clung to one another and sobbed hard enough to shatter the whole ugly world.

Goat looked out at the storm. The night sky was still black, but the rain had slowed to a gentle drizzle. From where he sat he could see the lines of red taillights and white headlights on the highway. He wondered how many of those travelers knew what was happening?

Probably all of them by now.

The story was everywhere. It was the only story on the news right now, and Goat suspected that half of those oncoming headlights were reporters trying to get to Stebbins while the story was still breaking. He had already seen ABC, CBS, and CNN vans come through.

He trolled the online news. FOX was the first to pull the word “zombie” out of the info dump of the Volker interview. “Zombie Plague in Pennsylvania.” Goat snorted. It sounded like an SNL skit. Wasn’t funny at all.

He looked down at the clock on his laptop. Ten minutes to one. It wasn’t even twenty-four hours since this thing started. It felt like a year.

The news feeds broke into the story to announce that the president was going to address the nation at 3:00 a.m. Goat wondered if he would pass the buck onto the previous administration, or to spooks within the intelligence community who still clung to the glory days of the Cold War. Or, would the president take the hit, be the captain of the ship? Either way, a lot of things were going to change.

Goat sipped his coffee and wondered when Billy would call. The last message from him said that they were going to take the infected outside. Since then … nothing.

Headlights flashed as a car pulled into the lot. Goat flicked a glance. A metallic green Cube. Ugly. Same make and color as the one in Aunt Selma’s front yard. It made him think of that, and how it all started.

Then his mind ground to a halt as the driver’s door opened up and a man got out.

A tall man. Bare-chested despite the cold.

A grinning man, with a tattoo of a black eye on each flat pectoral.

Goat wanted to scream but he had no voice at all. He wanted to run, but he was frozen in place.

The man walked the few steps between car and door in an awkward fashion, as if his knees and hip joints were unusually stiff.

Goat’s fingers were on the keyboard. Almost without thinking, his fingers moved, tapping keys as the bare-chested man pulled open the door and stepped into the Starbucks. The few remaining customers turned to look at him. The barista glanced up from the caramel macchiato she was making. She saw the bare chest and the tattoos. She saw the caked blood and the wicked smile.

The man stood blocking the door. Grinning with bloody teeth.

Goat’s fingers typed eight words.

The barista screamed.

Goat loaded the address of the press and media listserv into the address bar.

The customers screamed.

Goat hit Send.

Then he, too, screamed.

In Bordentown. Homer Gibbons. Quarantine failed.

It’s here …

This is how the world ends.

This is how the world ends.

This is how the world ends.

Not with a bang … but a bite.

The King of Plagues

The Dragon Factory

Patient Zero

Rot & Ruin (for kids)

Ghost Road Blues

Bad Moon Rising

The Wolfman

Dust & Decay (for kids)

Vampire Universe

The Cryptopedia

Zombie CSU

They Bite!

Wanted Undead or Alive