The Infection (25 page)

“God damn you,” she sobs, tasting salt and soot in her mouth as they rapidly close the distance in great leaping bounds. “God damn you for what you’ve done.”

Anne raises her handguns in both fists and rains death upon them.

♦

Paul pulls a large sack out of the Bradley and curses loudly as it splits open in his hands and spills cans, bags of rice, water bottles, medical tape, hand sanitizer, tampons, mosquito repellant and a box cutter onto the gritty asphalt. Everything is coated in a sprinkling of soot. He can feel the ash settling on his hair and shoulders, finding its way under his shirt, mingling with his sweat and turning into a grimy paste coating his back. This project is converting him to paganism. Getting these supplies sorted is like something out of a Greek myth expressing the usual cruelty of the gods towards those who worship them.

He reenters the hot, dim interior of the Bradley, his back aching at having to walk stooped, and rummages through the three neatly rolled MOPP suits that he found earlier. The soldiers at the government shelter wore suits like this, and they had respirator masks. He finds one with the filter already attached and pulls it over his head. The inside smells like a men’s locker room and it feels mildly suffocating, but it seems functional enough. He no longer feels like he is breathing sandpaper. He raises the mask until it rests on top of his head, sits and lights a cigarette, tossing the match on the floor and coughing.

Where are you, God?

Paul has not prayed in weeks, ever since Sara came at him with her hands stretched into claws. He always found conversing with God directly a path to inner peace and unlocking the solutions to problems.

Why have you forsaken us?

He wonders if this is some type of test for humanity and possibly for him personally. If it is, it is not a fair test. Imagine a school where the students have to guess what the question is on a test before they give their answer.

Dear God, help me to remain your servant. I only want to serve you and glorify you through good works and spreading the good news of your son’s resurrection.

He thinks about that. What has he done to help, other than endless work with the shotgun? He wonders if he is still invited to Heaven. Jesus’ teachings do not appear to apply to this holocaust. Those who followed to the letter God’s prohibition against killing died fast.

He had been so close to giving up entirely. He remembers standing near a wall in the government shelter while the other refugees were being evacuated. The people crowded against the doors while Paul pretended to pray over rows of body bags lined up neatly against the wall. He intended to stay behind after the others left. He wanted to stay behind because he was going to zip himself up inside one of those bags and lie there, pretending to be dead, until God came for him.

Instead, Anne taught his hands to war.

God already ended one wicked age with water, a great heaping flood that covered the earth and drowned it. Then the waters gave and Noah, stepping down from his ark, saw the washed-away ruins of the great cities covered in rags of seaweed, the thousands and tens of thousands of bloated bodies half-buried in the mud.

Noah had been tested. And yet God had talked to Noah.

Speak to us, Lord. Tell us what you want.

He steps on his cigarette and thinks bitterly that perhaps there is a Noah out there, building his fortress for the righteous, and Paul is simply not invited.

He is no Noah. He knows that. He feels he has much in common with Job, however.

God asks Satan what he thinks of Job, a truly pious man. Satan answers that the only reason Job loves God is because God blessed him with riches, health and family. God gives Satan permission to test Job. First, all of his property is destroyed. Then a wind kills all of his children. Job continues to praise God, lamenting that as the Lord gives, so the Lord takes. Satan next afflicts him with boils. Sitting in cinders, Job laments but forgives God.

Finally, unable to endure, he curses the day he was born. He realizes his life has no meaning and believes there is nothing for him to do but die. He does not understand why God created man to suffer.

It is a good story. Paul can relate to all of it.

God comes in a whirlwind and tells Job that it is not for him to question God, as God is king of the universe, not accountable to his creations for anything, including their approval.

Paul had always thought that it was a cop-out, that God gave Job a terrible answer that basically boiled down to: I’m God and you’re not, so do not ask me to justify myself.

But at least it was an answer.

Talk to us, God. If you will not even talk to us in this time of darkness and sorrow, why should we give you any allegiance?

The Jews grappled with the Holocaust for more than sixty years, trying to reconcile their belief in a just and merciful God with the millions gassed and shot and fed to the ovens in the death camps. Paul wonders what humanity will make of God when and if this plague ever ends. If God does not need Man’s approval, he may sacrifice it.

The Old Testament God rewarded such waywardness in his creation with pestilence and slaughter. But as Job basically said, what else can you do to me that has not been done?

Paul dons the respirator mask and steps out into the early twilight created by massive smoke clouds slowly writhing across the sky, as if tormented. He spends several minutes watching as the green landscape continues its slow dissolution into a gray wasteland. He thinks of the other survivors wandering across this wilderness, alone and without hope. This is a place where people face themselves and learn what they really are. In war and adversity, we learn our true nature as humans. On our deathbed, our curse as earthly beings. In a place like this, we gaze into a mirror at our image rendered naked in cruel honesty—at who we really are as people.

His knees popping, he bends and begins brushing soot off of the supplies and organizing them for repacking into the Bradley. Lanterns, Coleman stove, propane tanks, rifle bore cleaner and lube, first aid, duct tape, cord, string, roll of sheet plastic, bags of salt, vitamins, toilet bucket, powdered lime, coffee pot, aluminum foil, soap, Ramen noodles, beans, waterproof matches, bolt cutters, energy bars, bedrolls, flashlights, his tattered copy of the Holy Bible.

Lord, would you have destroyed Sodom if I was there?

Abraham argues with God to spare Sodom and Gomorrah, saying he should not destroy the innocent along with the wicked. He asks God if he would destroy the city if fifty innocent people live there, and God says he would not. He asks God if he would destroy it if forty-five innocent people live there, and God says he would not. And so he bargains with God, forty, thirty, twenty, finally settling on ten. Paul always wondered why Abraham does not ask for mercy if even one innocent man or woman lived there.

Paul decides that he must make himself a righteous man to save the world from God’s wrath, but he does not know how. This is a world where the righteous are easily culled.

He prays for guidance, but again, God does not answer.

♦

“Oh Lord,” Ethan says.

He remembers seeing stories on the news about poor kids from the developing world who were flown to hospitals in the United States to have giant benign tumors removed. The kids were grotesques, carrying twenty to third pounds of flesh on their faces. The tumors were large masses of tissue forming as a result of cancer cells reproducing at an abnormally accelerated rate.

Ducky has something similar growing out of his hip, but it is not a normal tumor. It is a monkeylike creature curled up into a fetal ball, breathing, apparently asleep. Ethan can see where the driver cut the pants of his uniform to release the constantly growing creature. Now he understands why the soldiers were carrying the driver here, away from the other survivors. They do not want the others to see Ducky like this.

Sarge asks the driver how he is feeling. Ducky’s gaze shifts to Sarge but otherwise his expression does not change.

The gunner shakes his head. “He barely has enough energy to breathe right now,” he says.

Sarge looks at Ethan pointedly. “So. You’re the smart one. What do you think?”

Ethan examines the thing growing out of Ducky’s hip, careful not to touch it. It is like cancer, but more than that: a parasite. He cannot believe his eyes; it appears that the man’s entire body has been completely rewired to give everything it has to the growing creature. The thing has apparently reorganized Ducky’s organs and is pressing on his bladder, making him piss himself nearly continuously, a sickly, foul-smelling pink fluid.

Fascinating, almost miraculous, from a purely scientific standpoint. Horrific, and utterly revolting, from a human standpoint.

“We don’t have much time,” the gunner says.

“Time’s up, doc,” Sarge says. “Can you fix him?”

“I don’t understand what it is exactly you expect me to do here.”

Sarge extends his service knife to Ethan.

“Can you fix him?”

Ethan almost laughs, but stops himself. Sarge is not the kind of guy you laugh in front of when one of his people is dying.

Sarge adds, “I sterilized it. It’s clean. And we got plenty of alcohol and gauze.”

“He can’t survive an amputation.”

“Ducky’s a tough sumbitch.” He smiles weakly at the driver. “We’ll booze you up good, Ducky. You won’t feel a thing.”

“Sarge, I’m sorry about your man,” Ethan says carefully. “But there’s nothing anybody can do.”

“Did I make a mistake hauling your ass out of that hospital?”

“Sarge, you’re not really thinking straight. A procedure like this would take a team of real doctors something like half a day in a real hospital. I’m a
high school math teacher
. I am just smart enough to know that anything I do will kill this man. Look at this small wound here that’s still weeping; he must have tried to cut it off himself in the Bradley, and the pain stopped him. At some point, I assume the parasite will detach, as you can see legs forming here, but right now there is an entire system of veins supplying blood to it. I cut into this mass and even if Ducky’s heart didn’t fail from the shock, the loss of blood would surely—”

“Holy shit,” Steve hisses, pushing himself away from the driver, falling sprawling on his ass.

The parasite’s eye is open, studying them each in turn. The head, fused to the rest of the body-shaped mass of tissue by a thin film of clear mucus, begins to stir. The men gasp with revulsion. Ducky looks down at it, his eyes wide with helpless terror.

The creature is becoming aware. It is literally being born right in front of their eyes.

“It ain’t nothing, Ducky,” Sarge says, his voice fragile. “Don’t even look at it.”

Ethan points to the thing’s face and says, “See how it’s able to move, but Ducky isn’t. The parasite is now stronger than its host, and is—”

He leaps to his feet and bolts across the asphalt screaming.

♦

Sarge chases Ethan under a darkening sky, calling his name, coughing on the smoke and ash that is now falling in a blizzard and almost blinding him. The tiny green figure flickers like a candle fifty yards ahead. The screams ring out across the blank, empty spaces.

Suddenly, Ethan collapses to his knees, gasping. The soldier catches up and drops heavily to one knee next to him, still coughing.

“Let me see it,” he says.

Ethan moans, shaking, cradling his bloody hand.

Paul and Todd come running, looking down at him in surprise.

“Is he in shock?” Paul says.

“No,” Sarge says. “Not physical shock, anyhow.”

“You need help?”

“What the heck happened to him?” Todd asks him, his eyes gaping.

Sarge leans close to Ethan’s ear.

“You’re okay now,” he says calmly and quietly. “Now let me see it.”

He is still doubting what he saw until Ethan slowly unravels his trembling hand and shows the bloody stump where the tip of his index finger used to be.
The fucker bit it off. Ate it with a crunch. Its little black eye gleaming with hate.

Ethan is looking at his hand, his face pale and surprised.

“Somebody, get me the med kit,” Sarge says.

“I’ll go,” Paul says, and starts running for the Bradley.

“And plenty of water, Reverend,” Sarge calls after him. He tears a strip from the teacher’s shirt and winds it tightly around the wound. “We’re going to take care of this,” he tells Ethan. “You’re going to be okay. We’ll put some pressure on it for now, all right? Then we’ll clean it real good and I’ll sew it up.”

Todd drops to one knee next to Ethan and says, “You’re alive, man. You’re
alive
.”

“You’re fine,” says Sarge. “It ain’t nothing.”

Ethan whispers something. Sarge bends closer to hear.

“
Kill. Him
.”

“The hell you say!”

Ethan winces, his eyes clenching shut against the pain.

“
Not murder.
Mercy. Quickly, before—
”