The Infection (29 page)

“Where are you taking this poor man?” a woman demanded.

“He’s Infected, Ma’am,” the Captain said. “Come on, Parker, get him up.”

The people nearest the man cried out and shrank away from him, leaving him to struggle weakly against the soldiers. He was obviously sick; his face was shiny and red with fever. Finally, one of the soldiers thrust the butt of his rifle into his head and he fell limp, moaning.

They began to drag him out of the garage.

“Wait,” Anne said. “Officer, wait! What are you going to do to him?”

The Captain replied, “Sit down and shut up, Ma’am.”

“I think she likes you, Captain,” the soldier named Parker said.

“Watch out, she’s going to report you to her PTA,” the other added, laughing.

“He’s just sick,” she pleaded. “He’s not one of them.”

The Captain raised his pistol and aimed it at her face.

“Maybe you’re Infected.”

A man stood behind the soldiers and approached the Captain. Anne could tell instantly from his black suit and white collar that he was a clergyman.

“Now, hold on a minute, sir,” the man said.

The Captain turned, gave the clergyman a quick once-over, and said, “Are you Catholic?”

The man blinked, caught off guard. “No, son, I am not.”

“Then I don’t give a rat’s ass what you have to say.”

The pistol flashed in the man’s hand, striking the clergyman in the face and knocking him to the floor. Anne, still standing, exchanged a quick glance with Sarge, who stood by his Bradley with his crew, wiping his hands with a greasy rag. The man shook his head slightly.

Anne swallowed her rage and returned to her seat on the floor as the soldiers dragged the sick man out of the garage and the clergyman lay groaning, cupping his face in his hands.

The roar of the gunshot penetrated the walls and rang in her ears.

Later that day, about half of the refugees packed their meager belongings and left the shelter after a long, bloody fistfight between some of the men who were leaving and those who were staying over whether the remaining supplies should be divided up. The Wal-Mart woman ended the dispute by announcing that there were no more supplies. Nothing. Not a crumb. Those who remained were broken people, lying on the cots staring at the ceiling, including Joshua, holding a dirty wet rag against his bleeding nose, one of his eyes almost swollen shut.

The following night was long and uneventful except for people sobbing quietly in the dark. The room stank with the ammonia smell of piss. They were doomed and they knew it.

The next morning, the doors burst open again and a group of men and women entered the garage carrying rifles and pistols and wearing a motley collection of military uniforms. The refugees shrank from them, screaming shrilly.

“Anybody here need a ride?” one of newcomers called out, grinning.

“Sam!” a woman cried, flinging herself into the man’s arms.

“I told you I’d find you,” he said, tears streaming down his face. “I told you.”

“We’ve got buses outside, enough for everybody,” announced another member of the gang, a woman with a bandaged head. “There’s a FEMA camp on the way to Harrisburg and we’re starting a convoy. If you want in, pack up your things now. We’re out of here in ten.”

The refugees crowded around asking questions. They must have been satisfied by the answers, because all of them grabbed whatever possessions they had and hurried out the door to the line of commuter buses idling outside.

As the last of the refugees headed towards the door, one of the them called out to Anne, “Last chance, lady!”

She shook her head.

The man waved and shut the door. Anne sighed with something like relief. The atmosphere, previously tense and stifling, became peaceful. The room suddenly seemed so much larger without the others filling it.

“Why didn’t you go?”

Anne noticed the clergyman had also stayed behind.

“It shouldn’t be that easy,” she said.

“You might be right. I’m not sure if I trusted them either.”

“No,” Anne said. “The others had no choice but to trust them. I have a choice. It should not be that easy.”

The clergyman nodded. He approached and sat on a nearby cot with a heavy sigh, touching the bruise on his face gingerly. Anne got a good look at him. He was a big man, with short, white, frizzy hair and a weathered, stubbled face. She guessed him to be in his late fifties.

“What about you?” she asked. “Why didn’t you go?”

He shrugged and said, “‘Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.’ That’s a fancy way of saying I agree with you.”

“I liked that. Was that the Bible?”

“No.
Paradise Lost
. John Milton.”

They introduced themselves. His name was Paul.

The Bradley commander approached.

“I think we’ve just about got the rig fixed,” he told them. “If you don’t mind, later on today we’d like to start her up and drive her around a bit. We’ll open the service door a little to ventilate, but it’s going to be loud and smell bad anyway.”

“It’s all right,” Paul said, wandering off to contemplate the rows of corpses, still in their body bags, which lay waiting for transport that would never come.

Anne said, “Sergeant, how could you be so callous when they were dragging that man outside to be murdered in cold blood? You knew he wasn’t Infected.”

The soldier shrugged. “I could give you a dozen reasons, Ma’am. Let me ask you a question. Why were you willing to risk your life to save him?”

She thought of several reasons—the man was innocent, his murder was immoral, a society is judged by how well it defends its weakest members—but all of them rang false and hollow in her mind. She snorted. “What was I really risking?”

Sarge smiled grimly and nodded. “That’s what I thought. In Afghanistan, when things got really bad, the only way we could get through was to accept the idea we were already dead.”

“Jesus,” she said, recoiling.

“Those people out there,” Sarge said, pointing. “The Infected. They’re pretty much the living dead. But us? We’re the dead living.”

“How can you say we’re already dead?” Anne said, panicking at the thought. She thought about it for a moment. “How could you do it? Doesn’t it change you?”

“Yes,” Sarge said. “It changes you. But.” He shrugged again. “You survive.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why survive if it’s not really you anymore?”

“Why me? Why you? Somebody’s got to live, Ma’am. Somebody’s got to carry on. That’s all we need to know. That’s all we’re ever going to know. Somebody’s got to live or the whole thing is pointless.”

“What is?” Anne wondered.

He blinked in surprise. “The human race, of course.”

“That’s a lot of responsibility.”

“If we don’t accept it, we might as well let them win now and get it over with.”

He cleared his throat and told Anne how he had taken his unit into the field to test a non-lethal weapon, and how radio dispatches suggested some type of disaster. He and his crew subsequently lost contact with the Army. They were on their own. They had a new mission in mind for themselves. They wanted to return to the mission site and try to locate their lost boys.

“We won’t survive out there long on our own,” he explained. “We need infantry to protect us. In return, we offer protection. The Bradley’s mobility, its armor and cannon.”

“What are you saying?”

“Well, I guess I’m saying I want you to join up with us.”

“I want to help you, I really do, but I’m not a soldier,” she said. “Never been one either.”

“I want you to pull together some civilians and run them as a squad. We have weapons. I will teach you how to use them. If we find our guys, then two days, max. Maybe three.”

“What about him?” Anne said, looking at Paul praying over the bodies of the dead.

“I think he’s suicidal,” Sarge said. “But if you want him, you can have him. See how this works?”

“But why me?” she said. “If you knew me, you wouldn’t pick me for something like this.”

“I am picking you based on what I know. You don’t fear death. You’re tough; you’re not looking for easy answers and for everybody else to take care of you. And you’ve got a good head on your shoulders. You sat down instead of getting yourself killed helping that man, so I don’t have to worry about you welcoming death or even actively seeking it.”

“Well,” Anne said in amazement. “I can see you’ve thought this through.”

She realized she wanted this. Had, in fact, been sitting here for days waiting for something like it to present itself. The chance to really do something. The chance to fight back and stop the plague in its tracks.

The chance to kill every one of these monsters for what they did to her kids.

“You’re a survivor, Anne,” Sarge said. “I need survivors.”

FEMAVILLE

The refugee camp appears over the next rise, a sprawling mass of people and buildings covering the land as far as the eye can see. Distant helicopters buzz like flies in the still, hot air. Tiny figures swarm among the houses and public buildings and trailers and tents, a seething ocean of humanity partially obscured by smoke drifting from thousands of cook fires.

The Bradley grinds to a halt and the survivors emerge from its dim interior at a crouch, weapons at the ready. Acting like a combat infantry unit is now second nature to them.

One by one they join Sarge on the cracked road that plunges downhill and straight to the gates of the camp. Their weapons slowly sag in their hands as they forget themselves, overwhelmed by the view. Jaws drop as Sarge passes around a pair of binoculars. They stare at the camp in a mounting daze. It is literally tiring just to look at it.

The camp easily holds more than a hundred thousand people. At its core is Cashtown with its private houses and stores and public buildings and parks packed with rundown FEMA trailers. Beyond the core, the camp encompasses outlying farms, the fields filled with campers and vehicles, even a giant circus tent. And beyond that, entire forests leveled to make room for this teeming horde and its miles of camping tents and shanties. Massive clouds of dust hang over the land like a brown veil. The camp surges against mountainous walls of heaped sandbags, tractor trailers, vehicles, piled office furniture and box springs, all wrapped in miles of barbed wire and buttressed with wood guard towers. The air is filled with the white noise of thousands of people and vehicles, occasionally startled by the distant popcorn pop of gunfire. In the east, a small band of Infected makes a run at the wall through the haze and is cut down by snipers in the towers.

Just two weeks ago, this camp did not exist.

“There it is,” Wendy says, her chest heaving with emotion. “The FEMA camp.”

“I can’t tell if I’m dreaming or having a nightmare,” Ethan says.

The sight almost defies belief. It is beautiful. Beautiful and horrifying.

“It’s incredible,” Paul says, his voice loaded with awe.

Wendy glances at Sarge. “This is good for us, right?”

“Maybe,” says Sarge, running his hand over his stubble.

“I can smell it from here,” Ethan says.

“We’re Americans,” Todd says. “We’re all on the same side, right?”

“We can’t be sure of anything,” Sarge tells him.

Steve whistles. “I wish Ducky could have seen this.”

To the survivors, the camp represents the Time Before. If they drive into that place, they will rejoin the human race. They will be like astronauts returning home after years in space. But the world will not be the same. The Time Before is gone and anything resembling it is a mirage and possibly a trick. The truth is if they go down into the camp, they will surrender their liberty in return for protection, and they are worried about the cost. Right now they are being chased hard by the devil, but it is the devil they know.

Sarge sighs. “It’s a chance. Anybody got any better ideas where to go?”

Nobody does.

“Anne would know what to do,” Todd says.

“Anne ditched us, Kid,” Sarge says bitterly. “We waited around for two days and she didn’t come back. We barely made it out of there alive. She’s either dead or on the road. Either way, she already made her decision and has no say in ours.”

“
Okay
,” Todd says.

“So that’s it, then,” Paul says, nodding. “We’re going in.”

Wendy snorts. “We have no choice.”

♦

The Bradley cruises down the road past fields filled with the stumps of cut trees and burning piles of cleared brush. Scores of pale department store mannequins wearing designer fashions strike surreal poses across the smoky wasteland, their torsos tied to stakes and old street signs planted at regular intervals, some lying in the dirt among rags and scattered plastic limbs. A hundred yards from the road, several figures in bright yellow hazmat suits load bodies into the back of a municipal garbage truck, pausing in their work to stare at the armored fighting vehicle as it zooms past.