The screaming began.
“Holy Christ!” Ratcoff yelled, and Jefferson Jericho’s infamous member peed into his jeans. Ethan saw the Gray Man—Gray Child, in this instance—climbing through the window, still grinning to show sharp little rows of serrated teeth.
“Somebody shoot it!” Dave shouted. He drew his Uzi but there were too many people in the way. “Shoot it!” he shouted again, as the thing reached out and grabbed Carmen Niega by the hair.
A .45 automatic cracked twice and the Gray Child shuddered, two holes in its chest, but still it drew Carmen, screaming, towards its open mouth. Then a piece of rusted rebar smashed the thing across the face and Joel Schuster followed JayDee up by shooting the creature a third time in its bony head at point-blank distance. The Gray Child fell backward through the window, hissing, and took a handful of Carmen’s hair with it.
Something hit the back of the bus with a force that bent the emergency exit inward and cracked the middle of the three rear windows like another gunshot. Hannah yelled, “Shit!” and stomped the gas pedal, no matter what obstacles lay ahead.
The gnarled hands of another Gray Man gripped the bottom of the window broken out by the child and pulled the body up. This one was a stocky, muscular beast with curved red spikes growing out of its head, naked shoulders and chest. It made a low, rasping noise and flung itself into the bus even as Joel and Paul Edson shot it, and as the jammed-in passengers tried to get away from it the thing leaped upon Gary Roosa, impaling him on its chest spikes. A savage set of fangs ripped Gary’s throat open and began to chew through his neck until a Hispanic man with a white-streaked beard put a shotgun to the side of the monster’s head and gave it both barrels.
Another creature, thin and wiry with a grotesque and misshapen face that was nearly all mouth with an eye just off the center of its forehead and the second on its right cheek, was clambering in through the window. Clinging to its back was a gray-haired female with a face like an axeblade and another female head growing out of her left shoulder. The passengers were trying to get away but there was nowhere to go. Those without weapons were crushing themselves up against the far side of the bus. Handguns and rifles were firing, combined with the screams a tremendous noise, but before these horrors were killed another man’s arm was nearly chewed off at the elbow and a young woman’s face gnawed to bloody tatters by the Gray Woman and her ingrown sister.
Hannah swerved the bus wildly back and forth. Dave was trying to get back to the broken window and Ethan had gotten out of his way. Olivia stood beside Ethan, her back to the three new arrivals. Suddenly the handsome man with the brown beard gritted his teeth and started forward, his hands reaching out as if to grasp Ethan’s forearms, and in that moment Ethan looked into his eyes and saw behind them what he could only describe as a whirlpool of terror.
“Jesus Christ!” Hannah shouted. She hit the brakes.
Jefferson Jericho stumbled past Ethan, who had dodged aside and grabbed the back of the seat nearest him. One of the preacherman’s hands grazed the boy’s left arm and the other closed on empty air. He crashed into Olivia and fell to his knees in the aisle. The single headlight showed Hannah dozens of Gray Men swarming toward the bus, a tide of monstrosities flooding across the highway…not dozens, she realized in another moment, but hundreds. They ran and crawled and hobbled, some with jellied and hanging skin and others mutated into killing machines with clawed hands and flesh like spiny plate armor.
In a matter of seconds they were all over the front of the bus and climbing up toward the windshield. Ratcoff had fallen to the floorboard, whimpering, while Vope stared impassively at the onrushing mass of inhuman humanity.
“Go!” Olivia shouted at Hannah, as she saw the bus’s yellow snout being covered over by gray bodies.
Hannah floored the thing. Bus number 712 backfired a blast of black smoke and lunged forward like a whipped horse. Gray Men tumbled off the front of the bus and the wheels jubbled as if running over a dozen speedbumps. The bumper and front grill slammed into more and more bodies and the tires slipped over their slime, but ahead there was a solid wall of horrors. Two of the larger and stronger Gray Men had kept their holds on edges of metal and one of them crawled up to slam a knotty fist against the windshield. The fist came through in a shower of glass and Burt Ratcoff screamed like a woman.
“Get off my bus!” Hannah shouted. She followed that demand with two booming shots from her six-gun that pierced the windshield and sent the mutant flying backward off the hood. She shot the other Gray Man in the head before it could use its fists, but the bullet left a hole almost in front of her face and cracks snaked across the windshield.
Olivia realized there were too many, just as Ethan did. The things were running at the bus from all directions, and it seemed that hundreds of them were directly ahead.
“Keep going! Keep going!” Dave yelled as he pushed his way up front. Jefferson Jericho had crawled out of the aisle on his knees, curling up on the floorboard to seek some kind of safety among the other bodies, but there was still enough of him exposed for Dave to step on the man’s right hand as he passed. There was a crunch of knuckles breaking beneath a hard-soled workboot, and in the burning flare of pain that followed the super salesman and fiend of the night realized he had just lost the use of all his fingers.
Hannah was trying to keep going, but the bus was jamming itself up on Gray Men beneath the wheels and the undercarriage. The engine shrieked as the tires lost traction over jellied flesh and crushed armor. More were climbing up over the hood, and one with hands like bludgeons and two stubby extra arms was coming up to finish the job on the windshield.
In the chaos, Ethan looked back to find one person.
He saw Nikki, crushed in with others who had gotten as far away as they could from that broken window and the still-twitching bodies of the Gray Men. At least she was all right, but this battle was far from—
A blinding white light flooded the bus.
It was followed almost immediately by the chatter of double machine guns, and first hit were the Gray Men on the hood. Red tracers zipped through the air in front of the windshield, and now Hannah did slam her foot on the brake pedal because those slugs were just too damned close. But whoever was shooting knew their business, because the Gray Men fell away and the one with the bludgeon-hands had its head half shot off, yet no bullet hit the glass or the hood. The machine guns kept firing, mowing down the Gray Men in rows. They began to turn and run, climbing over each other to get away, while the bullets continued to tear them to pieces.
Squinting into the harsh glare, Ethan was able to make out a vehicle coming up from the right, huge tires crunching over the guardrail.
“Good Christ!” Dave breathed. “An armored car!”
The vehicle’s dazzling searchlight turned to follow a knot of ten or more Gray Men running for the cover of a burned-out Yellow Cab. The double-barreled machine guns, firing from an armored turret, caught eight of them but the others scurried into the shadows on the far side of the cab. There was a hollow-sounding whump! and about three seconds later the Yellow Cab blew up into a fireball and burning gray body parts were tossed into the air.