The Infection (15 page)

“I’m going to try to power up my cell phone,” Ethan says.

“There’s probably still no service, though,” Paul says.

Ethan shrugs with a sad smile.

“Sorry,” Paul adds. “That was a stupid thing to say. Anything is possible.”

“It’s all right. I just want to have the phone ready, just in case. I have to be ready.”

“I hear you.”

Todd says, “I’m going to juice up my iPod. Shazam!”

“Are there any windows we need to black out?” Anne asks Sarge.

“I think we’re good, Anne,” Sarge tells her. “We turned off the lights in all the rooms with windows.”

“Somebody should go out and check to make sure no light is leaking out of the building.”

Sarge blinks. “If you think that’s wise.”

“If somebody sees the light, we will not be safe.”

“True,” he admits.

“We’re acting like we’re safe here but we’re not. We’ve only explored a small part of the building. Today, we found a room infested with worm eggs. There could be more of those things, not to mention more Infected, right under our feet on the second floor, or right over our heads on the floors above. They could be crawling through the air ducts. We can’t worry about both them and other people coming in from the outside wanting to take what we have.”

“All right, Anne,” Sarge says, feeling sour, as if a fine party has been spoiled. “Who do you want to go out and check? The power will only be on for an hour and it’s starting to get dark, so whoever is going had better get moving.”

“I’ll do it.”

“Not alone. If nobody else wants to go with you, I will.”

“Thanks, but I’d rather go alone,” she says. “I’ll be fine.”

“I’m not at all sure that you are,” Sarge says.

“So it’s decided.”

Anne cleans her hands on her pants, gets onto her feet, and walks out the door. The survivors stare at the empty doorway in a stunned silence for a few moments.

“Are you really going to let her leave like that by herself?” Wendy asks Sarge.

The big soldier shrugs. “She don’t belong to me.”

“She wanted to go,” Paul says, shaking his head. “She practically ran out of here.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Ethan says, pouring himself another tall cup of wine.

♦

The television set’s large screen flickers to life, filled with snow. The soldiers wheeled it in on a cart and plugged it into one of the power outlets. Sarge fiddles with the antenna. An image begins to resolve: a military officer standing in front of a blue curtain and giant map of the United States mounted on an easel board. The image lurches for a moment, stretching like a funhouse mirror, then snaps back, snowy, as if perpetually on the verge of disintegration.

“Whoa,” Todd says, eating a chocolate bar. “This isn’t the usual emergency broadcast crap.”

The speakers roar white noise, under which they can hear the officer murmuring like a ghost behind the walls. Sarge gives up and finally turns the sound off, backs away from the TV gingerly, and sits in one of the lounge chairs.

“Who is that guy?” Wendy asks. “Do you know him, Sarge?”

Steve snorts. “He’s the chairman of the joint chiefs.”

“The who?”

Sarge explains, “The chairman is the highest ranking military official in the country, besides the President. That’s General Donald McGregor. Ran the show for a few years in Afghanistan. He’s a tough sumbitch.”

“Any idea what he’s saying?”

“It looks to me like he’s giving some type of press conference.”

The survivors stare at the unstable image raptly, their brains tickled by the sensation of watching television again. Drunk on the feeling that they are no longer alone.

Ethan finally gets up and stands next to the TV, pointing at the map. “It’s shaded. Like a weather map. See? Pretty much all of Pennsylvania is red.”

“I guess we’re in for some hot weather.”

“That’s not a good color,” Ethan agrees, squinting closely at the grainy image. “Philly and New York are shaded a really dark red. That can’t be good either. But eastern Ohio, outside the major cities, is yellow. Yellow’s better than red, right?”

The survivors shrug, but nobody objects either.

He adds, “If the chairman would move his ass out of the way, we could see what’s going on out west.”

“The chairman looks profoundly unhappy about the current state of affairs,” Todd says, his mouth full of candy.

“Washington, DC is shaded dark red,” Wendy says. “I wonder where the President is.”

“At Mount Weather in Virginia, most likely,” Sarge guesses. “The emergency bunker. Anybody in government who made it out of Washington when the screamers woke up, that’s where they’ll be now.”

“At least there’s still a government,” she tells him. “We’re still resisting. That’s something.”

Sarge nods. “Yeah, that’s something. We’re still in the game. I hope we’re winning it.”

The survivors pour fresh drinks, lean back on the couches, and watch until they grow bored.

“Is there anything else to watch?”

“When does Jon Stewart come on?”

They laugh.

“Thank you for coming to my important press conference,” Todd says in a nasal voice, watching the general talking on the TV screen and imagining aloud what the man is saying. “My strategic assessment is we’re all fucked. Any questions?”

♦

Before the end of the world, Todd wouldn’t be caught dead watching television, which he considered an opiate for the masses and a big waste of time besides. He grew up on the Internet. He would spend hours staring at his PC, flitting from one site to the next, engaging total strangers in obnoxious debates in message boards and chat rooms about weapons and tactics and rules in
World of Warcraft
and
Warhammer 40,000
, his favorite games. He called this nightly ritual “doing the time warp.” He would sit down at his computer screen after dinner and, after several hours that flew by as if only a few minutes, his mother would be nagging him to go to bed.

One night, seven months earlier, as he sat hunched over his keyboard dying to piss, his mother yelled his name from downstairs, which he dutifully ignored, as it was his policy to never answer his parents’ first call, only the second. Less than a minute later, she yelled again.

“WHAT?” he roared in a blind rage.

“Come down!”

“I’ll
never
finish this post,” Todd complained, sighing loudly.

He trudged downstairs and froze in his tracks. Sitting on his living room couch was April Preston, wearing jeans and a sweater and glasses.

April was a senior. April was popular. April was beautiful, even with her glasses on.

“Hey,” he said, recovering.

“Hi,” she said, smiling awkwardly.

“I thought you might want to say hello,” Todd’s mom said. “You go to the same school.”

“Different grades,” Todd said.

“Right,” April said.

“April’s car broke down,” his dad said. “We just called AAA.”

“Excellent,” Todd said, nodding.

“Do you want a Pepsi or something, April? Something to eat?”

“I’m all right. Thanks, Mrs. Paulsen.”

“Do you need to call your parents?”

“I already did, thanks. My dad’s coming to get me.”

Todd studied April while they talked, feeling nervous. While she personally had never done any harm to him, he considered her an enabler to those who had. She certainly hung out with them. Apparently, she found total jerks irresistibly attractive, because she also dated them.
You’re abusive to people who are younger and weaker than you,
and
you play football? Wow, you’re so hot!
Now she was in his house. Should he consider this an invasion? Even his home was violable, apparently. They could just walk right in. He pictured her telling everybody at school what a dorky house he had, what dorky parents. She would imitate them:
I just called AAA. Want a Pepsi?

She did not look particularly threatening, however. In fact, she looked even more nervous than he was. He suddenly felt an overwhelming need to do something chivalrous. Maybe he could impress her and she would tell everybody how cool he actually was.

He realized his parents had left the room and April was staring at her hands in her lap.

“Must be great to be a senior,” he said.

She smiled again and nodded.

“Um. Are you going to college?”

“I’d like to go to college,” April said. “I’ll probably end up at Penn State. You?”

Todd blinked. “Me? I’m not sure yet. I mean, I’d like to go, I definitely will go, but I haven’t chosen a school yet. Graduation seems like an eternity to me.”

“Well, you’re smart. You’ll probably get your pick of schools.”

Todd did not know what to say. April had violated the first law of the jungle, which is you never praised above-average intelligence. You could be a great athlete, a great musician, a great consumer of twelve-ounce beers, but never a great student. He began to see her as outside the game, operating by different rules. In her last year of high school, she already seemed like an adult. His ears were ringing and his entire being felt warm and flushed at the compliment. He was used to being complimented, but only by authority figures—his parents and teachers, mostly—never by other students. Never by his peers. He began to see himself as outside the game as well, entering a world where a reputation for smarts would be an asset instead of a source of embarrassment and fear. For the first time in a long time, Todd actually felt hopeful about the future.

He suddenly wanted to talk to her all night.

Just then, his dad returned to tell April that her father was outside waiting for her.

Todd looked at her hopefully, looking for more, but the spell was already broken. Tomorrow, they would both return to the same building that defined their lives, and they would have no relationship. He felt like he had been given an unexpected gift, while at the same time cheated.

“Well, I’ll see you around, I guess,” April said.

“Good talking to you,” Todd said formally, meaning every word.

Months later, the game of high school ended with the Screaming. April was one of the majority that did not fall down. Todd still wonders sometimes what happened to her. He hopes she made out okay. She was one of the good ones.

♦

The survivors drift away one by one. Wendy goes back to her room to clean her Glock and refill her magazines with bullets. Sarge wants to work up a sweat with some exercise. Ethan, drunk and slurring his words, scoops up two unopened bottles of wine and announces that he is going to his room to recharge his cell phone. Todd shows Steve and Ducky his crudely stitched forearm and asks them if they ever heard the story of how he got wounded. He asks them if they had to choose between a pistol with thirty rounds and a
katana
, which would they want to fight a zombie horde with?

The crew shake their heads in irritation and excuse themselves to check on the emergency generator, which they are supposed to shut down in fifteen minutes.

After they leave, Todd grows even more bored. He begins listing all of the things he misses the most. A big, fat, juicy steak, for starters. French fries. Buffalo wings. Anything cold to drink. His PC and his X-box game console. Friday nights at the hobby store.
World of Warcraft. Warhammer 40,000
.

“I wonder how much time we spend each day doing things and not actually knowing we’re alive,” Paul contemplates, draining the last of his wine.

“So what do you miss the most, Reverend?”

Paul grimaces, shaking his head, and leaves Todd to watch the crumbling, snowy image of the tired general by himself.

♦

Sarge mentally counts his pushups—
twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two
—his shirt off and his thickly muscled torso slick with sweat. A medallion engraved with the image of Saint George, the patron saint of soldiers and Boy Scouts—and the victims of plague—dangles from his neck. He has been sitting reclined in the Bradley for over a week, which is like being forced to sit on a tiny couch playing a violent video game, one in which people actually die, for ten days straight. His brain is exhausted while his body has been going soft. Exercise will reboot both. Rest means refit.

His mind wanders to mountains looming over a sprawling base built of sandbag bunkers and huts and tents surrounded by timber walls and concertina wire.
Chinook helicopters pound over the valley with their Apache escort. A patrol toils over distant hills. Soldiers laugh and clean their gear and piss into PVC tubes stuck into the ground. This is Afghanistan.

“Forget it,” he thinks aloud. “Just forget it.”

The first Chinook falls out of the sky and crashes into the mountain, breaking into pieces and spilling bodies as it rolls down into the valley.