Read Fall of Night (Dead of Night Series) for Free Online Page B

all the success he could get.
    But that’s not what happened.
    Gibbon was infected with the pathogen during his execution by lethal injection, but instead of going immediately into a numbered grave on the prison grounds, a previously unknown relative had come to claim his body. Aunt Selma. Many years ago Selma had helped her heroin-addicted sister take the infant Homer to a shelter. At the time Selma considered taking the baby and raising him herself, even though she was the madam of a whorehouse. She did not, however, and instead Homer went into the system, going from one foster family to another. Some of those families cared for him, but others abused him. The abuse happened too soon, too early in Homer’s life to give him any chance of normalcy. In that meat grinder of a system, a true monster was born. Homer earned his conviction and his sentence, and no one was going to mourn him.
    Except Aunt Selma. Driven by regret, by the last spark of her conscience, she claimed his body with the intention of burying him on the family farm where he might have some rest after a life in hell.
    But the pathogen was already at work. Homer’s mind was alive in the dying body.
    And the parasites that made up the substance of Lucifer 113 were alive, too.
    Alive and hungry.
    They kept his mind alive, they woke him up, and they awakened in him a hunger that was unlike anything nature could ever have created.
    Trout was only now putting the pieces together of what happened here in Stebbins. He knew from Dez Fox that Doc Hartnup, the town’s mortician, had been killed along with Doc’s cleaning lady. Both of them reanimated, though, and from what Dez said, the first victims of Homer Gibbon did not demonstrate any awareness of self or recognition of other people. They were mindless monsters.
    Zombies , to use Dr. Volker’s word.
    And yet the doctor had insisted that the pathogen kept the consciousness alive, that in each of those zombies was a kind of helpless passenger. Aware of what his or her hijacked body was doing but totally unable to exert control. All it could do was feel the flesh rot and witness what the body did.
    It was the most horrible thing Trout had ever heard.
    And it was loose in Stebbins County.
    It had consumed the town of Stebbins.
    As he stood there looking at the traumatized man holding the traumatized little girl, he wondered what had broken each of them. Was it simply the shocking deaths of the people they loved? Certainly that would be enough.
    Or was it worse?
    Had they looked into the dead eyes of their own family members—wife, children, siblings, parents—and somehow saw the screaming ghost of the people they knew. Trapped like victims behind the windows of a burning building.
    Had they seen that?
    Billy Trout prayed that was not the case.
    He knew that if—God forbid—anything happened to Dez, if she was infected and became one of those things, and if he looked into her beautiful blue eyes and saw the person he loved there, trapped in the body of the monster she became …
    He didn’t know how to even think about that without screaming.
    But he knew what he would do if such a thing happened.
    He wouldn’t run. And he certainly wouldn’t—couldn’t—take the headshot that would bring her down.
    No, Trout was absolutely sure he would simply drop whatever weapon he held, that he would stop fighting, that he would let her take him.
    Slowly, slowly, Trout backed out of the doorway and turned away. He wandered down the empty hall, careful not to step in any of the pools of disease-blackened blood, mindful of the tiny larva that wriggled in the mess. He kicked shell-casings away with shuffling feet.
    When he reached the end of the hall he stopped and leaned against the wall. The satellite phone hung from his belt and he removed it and once more punched in the number for Gregory “Goat” Weinman. The phone rang.
    And rang.
    Goat did not pick up.
    From down the hall, through the open doorway to the art