The Infection (39 page)

“What else you got?” she says.

She is still wondering why she wanted to come on this mission, but another glance at the man beside her in the gunner’s station reminds her. They are a tribe.

♦

Todd smiles at the almost surreal sense of déjà vu he is feeling at being back inside the hot, noisy, dim interior of the Bradley. He has butterflies in his gut, the humid air is dense with the smells of nervous sweat and diesel combustion, and he has to pee. Just like old times. It feels oddly right. The big difference is Anne is gone, Wendy is up in the front with Sarge, and there are two new faces in their unit—Ray Young, the rent-a-cop with the hard eyes and handlebar mustache, and Lieutenant Patterson, the combat engineer with the buzz cut and earnest, clean-shaven face.

“Once more into the breach, huh, Rev?” Todd says with a laugh, hoping to show off his easy familiarity with the group to the newcomers, but the two men either did not hear him over the Bradley’s engine or are simply lost in their own thoughts. As usual, nobody cares.

Paul smiles weakly and nods, but says nothing. Todd looks at him and realizes how grounded he feels being here with the other survivors. The Bradley feels like home. And yet he still does not know these people very well. He suddenly wants to talk to the Reverend about something important, something philosophical, man to man at the edge of the abyss—the nature of faith during war or whatever—but he cannot think of where to start such a conversation. A little more grounded, but he is still floating, away from others as well as himself.

The survivors’ role in the mission is to help clear the bridge and then keep Patterson safe because the Lieutenant is going to blow the bridge using more than two tons of TNT and C4.

The engineer told them that cable-stayed bridges are a little harder to blow a hole in. The cables fanning out from the towers pull to the sides instead of up like a suspension bridge, requiring a stronger deck to compensate for the horizontal load. That means more force will be needed to blow a hole in it that the Infected cannot cross.

What’s more, they will not have time to attach the charges under the bridge for a bottom attack. Instead, they will have to lay the explosives directly on the road deck, tamp it with a hill of sandbags, and blow off the concrete to expose the steel reinforcements. A second round of charges will cut the steel rods and beams. It will be a lot of work and take a long time.

Here is what will happen: After the bridge is secured, the trucks will pull up and workers will unload the explosives in piles across the eighty-foot-wide, six-lane bridge. These piles will be laid out in two lines covered in sandbags used as tamping to direct the force of the blast down into the concrete. The engineers will apply shaped C4 charges to the exposed steel elements.

Then, boom. The unsupported piece between the two blast lines will fall into the Ohio River and the resulting forty-foot gap will stop the Infected from crossing.

They have to do all this while potentially holding off a horde of Infected at both ends of the bridge.

“Hey,” Todd says to the combat engineer.

The glazed eyes flicker and focus.

“Hey, what?”

“Why forty feet?”

Patterson grins. The transformation this brings is almost alchemical. A moment ago, he looked like a hardened killer on death row waiting for his lawyer. Now he looks like a frat boy about to explain how he spiked the professors’ punch at the party.

“Mike Powell,” he says, his accept deep Louisiana.

“Oh yeah,” Ray says.

“Who’s Mike Powell?”

“He set the world record in the long jump back in the nineties,” Ray says.

Patterson nods.

“Almost thirty feet,” he points out. “We’re going to do forty—just in case one of those little Hopper sumbitches can beat old Mike Powell’s record.”

Todd grins with the other men, nodding, suddenly filled with awareness that history is being made today. It’s the end of the world but a new one is beginning. He cannot help but feel excited. It’s epic,
ninja
, like living in a video game.

He has already forgotten the brief, crushing sense of death he felt back at the hospital when Wendy held her Glock against his head and Ethan counted down to zero. You made it this far, Todd old man, he tells himself. You’re lucky. You’re good. Hell, you’re practically immortal. You are earning your place in the new world. There will be historians in this new world, recording the heroic deeds of people during the dark time of Infection for future generations to understand and respect.

The bridge they are blowing is the Veterans Memorial Bridge. What buildings and bridges and monuments will they build to honor our sacrifices? What day will they set aside for our memory? They will look at us as the Greatest Generation, the people who fought Infection and rebuilt the world. Every war has a turning point. Ours is here, now. He thinks about John Wheeler and Emily Preston and the ghosts of his high school. Most of them are by now certainly Infected or dead. But not me, he reminds himself. I was chosen for a reason.

Maybe this time he will reap the rewards when he returns. Maybe he will get a little more respect. Erin was impressed by his tales of survival and the wound on his arm but ripped him off anyway. Inside the camp, he felt powerless, small, his life reduced to stories nobody could truly believe even in these times. Out here, he feels powerful, somehow more real, part of something again. He would never say such a thing out loud to the other survivors, but he is here because he wants to find himself.

♦

Paul signed up for this mission on impulse, but he is old enough to know that nothing happens purely that way. There is always a reason.

It is not loyalty to the others. He feels safer with them, but not really safe, and certainly not very safe out here, in the lion’s den. He loves them in his own way with whatever love he has left to give anyone, but they can make their own decisions and take care of themselves.

It is not disgust with Pastor Strickland and his ministry of bitterness and regret. He does not approve it, but he also has no interest in fighting it. Strickland still loves the Infected that he lost but hates people he does not understand. A kingdom divided will be ruined and a house divided cannot stand, as Jesus taught. There have always been lost sheep like Strickland and McLean, and there always will be.

It is not even a simple desire to find a better place to live. If he continues on with Ethan to Camp Immunity near Harrisburg, it will be as filthy, hungry and violent as Defiance. When they were leaving, the people were cheering and blowing whistles and shooting into the air. The rumors that the Army was coming had achieved a critical mass. But nobody cared about the convoy of vehicles leaving the camp, filled with troops ready to sacrifice everything to save them all.

If God can appear cruel and hypocritical and vindictive, well, we are all made in his image, he reminds himself. God should have told Job that he had no right to question him because as bad as God is, people are even worse. When the chips are down, the best and worse is on full display.

The funny thing about the story of Job is that Job never questioned Satan. In Hebrew, Satan has two meanings. One is the Adversary. The other is
ha-Satan
, the Accuser. In either case, he is an Angel of the Lord. Maybe Job did not question Satan because he did not have to do so. If God is everything, he is also Satan. The Adversary. The Accuser. Creator of Heaven and Earth.

The fact is Paul hated leaving only a little less than he hated staying. Perhaps that is why he is here. Anne had the right idea, he tells himself: Just keep moving. He feels like he finally understands her decision to abandon them.

If you keep moving, they can never get you. You might even outrun yourself.

Stay still, and curse the day you were born.

We try to live with as little pain and as much pleasure as possible. But pain makes us realize we are alive. We truly live one moment to the next when we live with pain. When pain stops, we become afraid. And we remember things we do not wish to remember that are themselves painful.

Long is the way and hard, right, Anne?

The Catholics believe there is Heaven and Hell and between them a place called Purgatory, in which souls are purified and made ready for Heaven through a period of punishment. Similarly, there is a state of existence between living and dying: survival.

These days, God has no use for charity and good works. God demands everything now. These days, the Lord only calls those who have been baptized in blood.

And that, he realizes, is why he has come. Not to be tested, but to put an end to these tests.

“I came naked from my mother’s womb, and I will be naked when I leave,” Job said upon hearing that his family died and all his earthly possessions were destroyed. “The Lord gave me what I had, and the Lord has taken it away. Praise the name of the Lord!” Sara, I will be with you soon.

♦

Ethan remembers holding Carol’s hand while she pushed Mary out into the world, counting between pushes, trying to pour all of his strength into her by will alone. He had always wanted children but felt ambivalent about the amount of responsibility they entailed. He wanted kids to be like Blockbuster videos, rentable and returnable within a week. Something he could manage over time, not maintain every single hour of every single day. The idea of wiping shit and vomit and changing diapers for the next few years was overwhelming. Mostly, he was worried about his relationship with his wife. They had a good life and he did not want to see it spoiled.

“It’s a girl,” the doctor told him.

“It’s a girl,” he said to his wife, his heart bursting with pride.

Carol cried with relief and joy, still holding his hand.

Later, the nurse asked him if he wanted to hold his daughter for the first time.

“Yes,” he said without hesitation.

The woman handed him the tiny swaddled creature and his heart opened. A visceral, almost painful love surged through him, pouring out into the child in his arms.

Change diapers? He would
eat
this kid’s shit, he realized.

Anything, he pledged. Anything for you.

This person will die without me. But more than that: Everything I do to this child from now on will reverberate through the rest of its life. He never felt so needed. So responsible.

“Your name is Mary,” he told her in a singsong voice, not caring how it sounded.

From that point forward, nothing mattered except family.

They are going to the bridge to blow a hole in it and then he is going to travel two hundred miles to Camp Immunity near Harrisburg. He is going to have to get there on his own this time and it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to do it. Carol and Mary might as well be in Australia. And yet he has not felt so close to them since Infection started. There is a chance
they exist
.

The operation itself appears equally difficult. Two school buses loaded with troops will lead the way. The buses are forty feet long, which is almost exactly the span of each set of lanes on the bridge. They will drive to the end of the bridge and block it, creating a wall of firepower against the Infected. The Bradley will follow at a walking pace with the survivors and another squad of soldiers, clearing the bridge and setting up the charges while another pair of buses parks behind them, sealing both entrances against the Infected.

The combat engineer and his people will set up the charges, strip the concrete, plant the next round of charges, and then begin the countdown. The soldiers in the buses will make a run for it. Machine guns will cover their retreat. The final charges will blow.

Mission accomplished. Bravo, bravo.

Impossible.

A million things can go wrong, not the least of which is that the Infected might brush them off the bridge with ease. Monsters walk the earth now. The bridge might be packed with giant worms, swarming with malevolent little Hoppers, or even worse, occupied by the terrifying Demon that kicked the crap out of the Bradley and almost burst their ear drums with its wailing.

He will not even be able to launch his journey to Immunity on the West Virginia side of the river. He is going to have to find a boat. Even that seems impossible to him. But he will do it.

He will do anything, kill anybody, sacrifice everything, to find his family again.

♦

Sarge is glad to be back in the Army doing his duty, although he is not sure who he is actually working for at the moment. Captain Mattis is regular Army but got the operational orders for the mission from the provisional government of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The Federal government nationalized the Guard while Ohio claimed control of Federal troops currently fighting on its soil. The refugee camp is run by FEMA, at least nominally, with people from different levels of government claiming jurisdiction over everything.

Even here, in the field, things are not perfectly clear: Sarge is in charge of security, but Patterson, the combat engineer and a first lieutenant, is nominally in charge of the entire operation. Mattis gave him a half-strength, watered-down National Guard infantry company for the mission, two-thirds under Sarge’s direct command for the assault on the Veterans Memorial Bridge, the remaining third to be deployed for a separate operation to destroy the smaller Market Street Bridge a few miles to the south. The northward Fort Steuben Bridge had already been demolished the summer before the Screaming, apparently. The soldiers are weekend warriors for the most part, supplemented by volunteers from the camp, but most of them are well trained, disciplined and equipped, and some have even done time in Iraq.