The Living Dead 2 (The Living Dead, #2)(93)

He looked up at her—a hard, dignified look that stopped her in the doorway. The side of his neck had been torn away, leaving shreds of muscle, exposed tendons. His voice was hoarse and liquid. “Are they dead?”

She did not know if he was referring to their makeshift squad or to the recent barrage of smirkers. “Yes, sir.”

“What do you think those Washington f*cks are doing right now?”

Dead, of course, all dead. Except the ones still shambling around smiling to themselves. Giggling their high-pitched giggles.

“They don’t pay me to think, sir.”

Whitaker laughed at that, a wet, clotted sound. “No one’s paid us to do a damn thing in months. Maybe you could take up thinking as a sideline. It wouldn’t have to be on the clock.”

He laughed again, viscous, close to choking. The stripes on his sleeve were the brightest thing in the room. The gold looked almost white in the failing light. The blood was seeping out of him, leaving his face gray. Infection imminent.

“You should’ve made corporal,” he said, and it sounded watery. “I’m sorry for that.”

“Don’t worry yourself, sir. I don’t imagine I would have cared for it.”

“You never know. Look at you now—you’re the one who’s going to walk out of here tonight.”

Blood and foul yellow seepage were running down the side of his throat, soaking into his shirt.

“Do you want me to take care of it?” she said, jerking her head in the direction of his sidearm.

He smiled at her, a slow, complicated smile. “No, I got this.”

She did not disbelieve Whitaker, even at the last. He was a good man, dependable. Already holding the 9mm to his temple. But she stood in the doorway to make sure. The report made her flinch. When he slumped forward and his hand let go, she turned and started back through the house.

A wooden pull-down ladder stood spindly and erect in the hall. It was fixed to the ceiling by a hinge, and led up to an open skylight. The angle of the ladder was stark, surprising. In the past weeks, the world had taken on an increasingly surreal cast and the ladder did not seem disconcerting now, but only natural and right.

“I’m coming up,” Grace said, to no one in particular—to whomever might be at the top, waiting to put a bullet in the first person to stick their head through the opening.

On the roof, Jacobs the medic was sitting with his legs drawn up and his elbows resting on his knees.

“How do they always know?” he said, staring off over the hillside, the dark trees. The sky was deep purple, already speckled with stars. “We go along, covering our tracks, moving in the daytime. And still, they always know.”

Grace nodded, because his assessment was true. Not a thing you argued with, but how it was. They would always find you. It was what they did.

“There aren’t any bugs up here,” Jacobs said.

“No,” said Grace, taking a pack of cigarettes from her pocket. “No, I haven’t seen any.”

“It’s the air. It’s thin.”

She wondered if he was cracking up. He didn’t seem the type, but still, with these smart ones, it was hard to say. Sometimes they fell apart, just from thinking too much.

“They’re not hunting people,” he said.

“What do you call it then—what they’re doing?”

“I mean, they’re not hunting people exclusively. They’re not strictly cannibals. We saw eviscerated deer when we were coming up—and rabbits—but they’re not picked clean. They never eat the dead.”

Grace pulled a cigarette out of the pack with her teeth, lit it. Her hands were steady, but felt light and disconnected.

When she breathed out, Jacobs coughed and fanned at the air. “How does something like this just happen?”

Grace observed Jacobs, his raised head, his profile, hard against the velvety sky. She assumed he must be talking in some broad, abstract sense, because the how-and-why of it was far from mysterious.

The methodology was simple. Escalating reports of a blood-borne pathogen carried by insects, high fatality rate, drug-resistant. The government had been frightened of pandemic. They had pushed immunization, pushed it hard, and in the end, they got their pandemic, all right. A vector that began at vaccination and exploded outward, extravagant. Uncontainable.

It had begun on the West Coast, vaccination facilities popping up in grocery stores and shopping centers. And everyone lined up. It had taken approximately six hours to ascertain that something was wrong, but in that time, the event had affected nearly half a million people. And it spread like fire. In a way, it was good the infection came on fast. Otherwise, they might have all had the shot, every last one of them, offering their arms to the needle without the slightest indication that anything was amiss.

“What if it’s a signature,” Jacobs said, turning to her.

“I don’t follow.”

“A carbon dioxide signature. Blood-seekers—they know to come after you. They follow a trail of chemicals, a stamp. Mosquitoes can sense living blood from almost forty meters.”

Grace nodded as he spoke, not comprehending his train of thought exactly, but not needing to. The words sounded round, fat, reassuring.

“We could verify it,” he said. “All we’d need is a controlled environment, some preliminary tests. We could keep going, get to Rosewood. They’ll have everything we need. It would only take a few trials. I mean, then we’d know. And Rosewood’s only four miles out. If we run—”