The Infection (28 page)

After several moments of retching and gasping to catch her breath, Anne was able to look again at what had been hiding in plain sight.

The bodies were arranged on the floor by the fireplace. Trudy had died wearing an odd smile, her neck cleanly broken. Peter and Alice and Little Tom surrounded her legs.

Something had mangled them. Torn pieces out of them. There was blood everywhere.

They had huddled around Trudy for protection. They had wanted Trudy to protect them because their mother and father were not there.

No, Anne told herself. Peter still held the poker from the fireplace. They were protecting her. That’s my kids. This is just like them. To put somebody else’s safety before their own. So brave. My big, grownup boy is so brave. My good Peter. Just like his daddy.

Anne screamed, clawing at her face, until she passed out.

♦

She found herself wandering in the middle of the street coughing on smoke. Paul Liao was calling to her from the driveway of his home as his wife hustled their kids into an overpacked station wagon. Across the street, a body lay on the sidewalk at the end of a long smear of blood. Somebody far away was screaming. Somebody close by fired a gun, shattering a window.

A van approached and stopped. The doors opened.

“I got her,” somebody said. “Cover me.”

A cop in riot gear appeared in front of her, flinching at the sight of her face.

“
Crazies
,” she said thickly, her voice sounding alien to her ears.

“You’re safe now, Ma’am,” the cop said. “Step right this way.”

Another cop stood nearby, sweeping the area with his shotgun.

“Jesus, look at her face,” he said. “I thought for a second she was one of them.”

Moments later, he began firing, the gun’s roar filling the world.

“
Chase them out
,” she insisted. She wanted to tell them something else important but could not remember what it was. The noise had scrambled her thoughts again. She was having a hard time thinking. She was fading in and out of consciousness, making hours blur into minutes. She remembered burying her children in her backyard. She remembered the power going out. She remembered digging a grave for herself. She became angry. She wanted to yell at the big cop, but he was gone. It was dark—inside, not outside. She became aware that she was in some type of big room, sitting with her back to the wall, her face stiff and stinging from an alcohol wipe and the wounds on her cheeks throbbing under thick, bulky bandages. A blanket was draped around her shoulders and she pulled it tighter protectively. She sensed the presence of hundreds of people in the room, coughing and whispering and snoring. As her eyes became accustomed to the darkness, she saw their bodies lying on cots and sitting huddled on the ground like her.

“Tom,” she said, trying to find her voice. She called out: “Tom? Tom, are you there?”

“Oh Jesus, not another one,” somebody groaned.

“Please shut the hell up!” another voice roared in the darkness. “We’re trying to sleep here.”

“Big Tom!” she cried. “Answer if you can hear me!”

“You’re not the only one who lost somebody, lady,” another voice answered. “Give it a rest.”

There were people sobbing in the dark, talking to loved ones who were not there. Somebody coughed loudly. Nearby, a couple made love on a cot. A man masturbated loudly under a blanket. The tips of cigarettes glowed in the dark. Another man lay on the cool hard floor twenty feet away, huddled around a handful of photos he studied endlessly with a flashlight.

Anne could not remember when she last got some real sleep. She recalled that the last time it happened, she dreamed of a single baby tooth resting on Trudy’s mantle. She had not truly slept since then. She stared at the man’s flashlight until her vision washed out in a flash of white and she became aware of two men arguing loudly. One of them said it was only a matter of time before the food and water ran out and then they’d be killing each other over the crumbs. The other said the world was ending outside and only a fool would try to make plans that lasted longer than a day.

Anne blinked at the voices. It was daytime, she realized; time had blurred again. Beams of morning sunlight streamed through a row of punched windows near the ceiling. The room was a vehicle service garage. People milled around aimlessly, bartering candy and cigarettes, settling disputes with swift and furious beatings, emptying their waste into a row of portable toilets, washing themselves with sponges and tepid water poured into plastic bowls. The air smelled like old motor oil and human waste and fear. People huddled around radios and argued over the news, then drifted away. Colorful public health notices plastered the walls, orange and red and yellow, reminding her to wash her hands and avoid the Infected and approach law enforcement and military personnel calmly, without sudden movements, and with her hands over her head.

She realized that she was not in some type of government fortress but instead an old-fashioned refugee camp, and a temporary one at that. How long had she been here? How long had it been since her world ended? She felt lightheaded, like she had not eaten in days. She thought of a blueberry pie sitting on a kitchen counter, covered in flies.

“The authorities are in control,” a voice said. “Help is coming. Don’t give up hope.”

The skinny, shell-shocked kid was some sort of government official and he was handing out lists of evacuation centers printed on clean yellow sheets of paper.

“This one’s been overrun,” somebody said in a disgusted rage. “I was fucking
there
.”

“The next one on the list is five miles from here.”

“Might as well be on the Moon.”

“The only safe place is right here. I’m not going anywhere.”

The kid ignored them, continuing to hand out his yellow sheets and deliver his simple mantra of hope with an unconvincing smile.

He held one out until Anne accepted it. His dead face warped into his plastic smile and he said, “The authorities are in control. Help is coming. Don’t give up hope. Report any suspicious behavior.”

Nobody else seemed to be in charge. The cops who’d brought her here were gone. Even the kind woman wearing a blue Wal-Mart apron who eventually brought her rations appeared to be some sort of volunteer. Then she saw several men working the room, shaking hands and looking concerned and writing things down in a notebook. This ad hoc leadership committee gradually grew close enough for her to hear one of them, a gentle-looking overweight man wearing large glasses, tell people that they had to get organized.

“Why?” a man said belligerently.

A woman sitting on a cot said: “You’re just like
them
.”

The overweight man blinked, adjusted his glasses and said, “Them?”

“The government.”

“But we’re all alive because of the government,” he reasoned. “They brought us here and gave us food and water, blankets, medical supplies. We’re trying to get organized in case the supplies run out and the government can’t send us anything else.”

“Like I said,” the woman said triumphantly.

Anne shook her head in mild disgust. At least these guys are doing something, she thought. She recognized something of herself in them.

“But I
could
use some batteries if you got any you could spare,” the woman went on.

Anne noticed an armored fighting vehicle parked at the far end of the garage and decided to take a closer look. Wrapping the blanket around her tightly and hiding her half-full water bottle in her back pocket, she wandered through the dense smells and noises of the camp until she found an empty spot where she could sit and put her back against a concrete pillar with a clear view of the impressive war machine. Three soldiers stood hunched over the engine, arguing in language so technical it was almost foreign. Anne thought they looked more like mechanics than soldiers. She watched them while she slowly sipped her bottle of water. They cleaned engine parts with rags and occasionally studied the crowd around them like engineers looking for cracks in a dam.

She planned to stay close to them. It was obvious to her that the man she’d heard arguing this morning was right: This place would not last very long. If anything happened, the safest spot in the room would be behind the soldiers and their weapons. She hated herself for thinking this. Anne cursed herself for wanting to survive.

She watched them work on their vehicle for the next three days. During that time, the refugee population rapidly dwindled to less than a hundred souls. The cops never came back to bring in more people, and as food and water began to run out, the portable toilets filled to overflowing, and petty crime escalated, many people left to take their chances trying to make it to one of the evacuation centers.

On the third day, the Wal-Mart woman brought Anne her daily ration—this time only a bottle of water and an energy bar.

“Sorry it’s a bit meager this morning, love,” she said. “But don’t worry. We’re expecting another shipment later today, I’m told. The government promised.”

“So things are getting better outside?”

An expression of fear flashed across the woman’s face, quickly replaced by a sunny smile.

“Of course!” she said.

The mood was tense in the shelter. People were furious that the rations had been cut to almost nothing, and were looking for somebody to blame. Mothers demanded milk for babies that screamed in their hunger. Rumor spread that several women at the far end of the room had been raped in the night. Most of the refugees wanted the portable toilets cleaned and the corpses, zipped up in shiny black body bags arranged in nice neat rows against the east wall, removed. Some of the men were threatening each other over accusations of using more than their fair share of supplies. People were crowding around the leadership committee demanding answers. Eventually, the overweight man with glasses fought his way through the mob and approached the soldiers timidly.

“May I speak to the commander?” he said, his voice tight and thin.

“I’m Sergeant Toby Wilson, sir,” one of the soldiers said in a booming baritone, extending a large hand. “You can call me Sarge.”

The man shook the commander’s hand with enthusiasm, beaming at the warm reception.

“Nice to meet you, Sarge. I’m Joshua Adler.”

“So what can we do for you, Mr. Adler?”

“Me and some of the other guys, we’ve been trying to get things organized.”

“Uh huh. We’ve been watching you do that.”

“Well, you must know that our supply situation is getting bad. The government said they would be coming back with more. Now, I’ve drawn up a list of supplies . . .”

The man fumbled with a notebook until Sarge held up his hand.

“Mr. Adler, we have nothing to do with that. We don’t know anything about it. We’re just here to get our rig working again. It needs professional civilian maintenance. Seeing as that’s not going to happen, it’s on us to fix it using whatever we can find around here. That’s taking time.”

“I see. . .”

“We almost got it figured out and we’re hoping to return to the field as soon as we can. Getting back where we can be useful is our top priority.”

“All right, I understand, uh, Sarge, but maybe you could tell me if you have any news of things on the outside—”

“It’s bad,” said Sarge.

“Bad?”

“Bad as in really, really bad. Bad as in we are losing this fight.”

“So who’s in charge?”

Sarge shrugged. “I guess you are,” he said.

At the other end of the garage, the doors opened, letting in a blast of cool, clean air and three soldiers armed to the teeth and wearing bulky MOPP suits complete with goggled respirator masks that gave them a vaguely buglike appearance.

“Stay where you are,” one of the soldiers announced, his voice muffled by his mask. Anne could not even tell who was speaking from where she was sitting. “Please stay calm.”

The first soldier appeared to be the leader. Gripping a pistol in his clenched fist, he walked through the people crowded among the cots looking into their faces, as if searching for something, while the other soldiers followed toting automatic rifles.

Joshua excused himself, signaled to the other men in the leadership committee, and worked his way through the crowd to the soldiers.

“Captain,” one of the soldiers said.

The leader turned and raised his pistol. “Sit down, sir,” he commanded.

The soldiers standing behind him swept the room slowly with their rifles.

“But we’re—”

The Captain slid the bolt back in his service weapon, chambering a round. “Now, sir,” he added.

Joshua abruptly sat on the ground with the other men, paling.

The soldiers continued to walk through the crowd, the Captain leading the way, looking each of them in the face before moving on. Everybody was quiet, watching the soldiers, except for a few babies that cried softly in their mothers’ laps.

Finally, the Captain pointed at a man and said, “I got one here.”

One of the soldiers reached and grabbed the man by the arm, pulling him.