“That guy in the Poison shirt, he’s trying to kill you, man!” Tommy shouted at Rebel Flag. Tommy pointed at the biker in the Poison shirt, who was walking up behind him. “Protect yourself! Fight back!”
“What?” Rebel Flag turned on his friend and punched him in the nose. “You ain’t gonna kill me! You ain’t gonna touch me!”
“I didn’t do nothing!” the Poison T-shirt guy yelled, but Rebel Flag kept punching him, so he started fighting back.
While the two of them struggled, Tommy noticed Beater, proprietor of the red-gargoyle Harley, easing back toward the front door of the bar.
“Wait,” Tommy said to him, and Beater froze. “Stay right there. Stay.”
“Okay.” Beater held up both hands. “I’m not doing nothing to you, okay?”
“Right. So just wait there a while. And forget about me. Forget what I look like. Just remember you sold some guy your bike and blew the money.”
Beater broke into a goofy smile. “Hell, yeah, man. I’m happy to do that.”
Then Tommy took the man’s bike and rode across Georgia, and into South Carolina.
Now Tommy approached the town of Fallen Oak. He missed the turn-off onto Esther Bridge Road, but it was a good thing. He saw some kind of roadblock down that way. Not just police, either. It looked like the Army or something.
Tommy kept going. He couldn’t risk being identified as an escaped convict, especially when he was so close to her.
He couldn’t give up his obsession with Ashleigh Goodling, either. His dreams about her grew more powerful, even addictive, so he couldn’t wait to sleep and dream about her. She would know things about him, he thought. She would have the answer to the insane riddle of his life. His intense dreams had convinced him of that.
There was only a small voice, somewhere in the back of his head, suggesting that he might be crazy for letting his dreams control his waking life. He ignored that voice.
He drove on. Nobody was going to stop him. They might block off the roads, but they couldn’t block off every field, pasture and deer path in a place this rural. He had a flashlight and a stack of Google maps in the bike’s saddlebag. He could find his way to Ashleigh Goodling’s house, even if he had to ditch the bike and do it on foot.
Chapter Eleven
Heather sat crossed-legged on her bed at the Lowcountry Inn, facing two laptop screens, her scribble-filled notepad, and an increasingly uneasy sense of dealing with the unknown.
After three days, laboratory studies had yielded nothing. They couldn’t find anything like a common cause, even though most of the cases had symptoms of extremely damaging infection throughout the skin, muscle tissue, internal organs, and even skeletal structure.
The voluntary phase of the screening had brought no suspected cases, either. They might find more when they pushed out into the community. For now, everyone who exhibited signs of the disease had already died in that singular incident. No source had been identified.
Heather was beginning to suspect a bioweapon. Any wild virus or bacterium with such a powerful effect would have been teeming all over the deceased bodies. Humans, on the other hand, had an incentive to engineer deadly bacteria with a programmed cell suicide clock. Something that could quickly sweep through a population, and then break itself down so that it left no trace, would be a powerful weapon.
That was only speculation, though. The pathogen would have to be programmed, not just to die, but to decay into undetectable components. And that sounded like science fiction. She couldn’t begin to suspect a motive, either. But something had swept through those people and left them in that condition.
Neither Heather nor the other investigators had turned up any clear explanation of what all those people might have been doing there, on the town green, on a Sunday night. It didn’t seem like any planned event, such as an Easter evening church service, had been happening. Nobody, not even the immediate relatives of the deceased, seemed to want to offer any reason why two hundred people had suddenly converged in the middle of town a few nights ago.
Based on their medical records, the two hundred and seventeen deceased had a statistically normal distribution of minor and major illnesses, their ages ranging from teens to the elderly. Only one African-American case had been identified, a teenager named Neesha Bailey. The town itself was forty-five percent African-American. Heather wondered at the discrepancy. Maybe it indicated some geographical division.
The other big anomaly was the teen pregnancy rate, which was far above the statistical norm. With a few exceptions like Darcy, there was a cluster of expected due dates near the end of July, indicating a cluster of conceptions in late October. Heather wondered if there was a single event involved there.