The Infection (40 page)

In the end, it does not matter to him where he got his orders. The mission is sound and he is simply happy to be back in the field commanding troops. Out here, ringed by death on all sides, appears to be the only place where he can feel truly calm. He is terrified by what this means. He is glad Wendy came along because he is not sure he is going back when this is all over.

“Identified,” Wendy says, adding, “What the hell is that thing, Sarge?”

The giant hairless head totters on spindly tripod legs. It suddenly stops and drops a load of dung that falls onto the highway like a wet bomb. Grimacing with a wide mouth and oversized, bulging eyes, the thirty-foot-tall monster leers down at the Infected streaming around its legs.

“
Shaw chonk
,” it says, its deep voice booming through the air.

Suddenly, a long, thick tongue lashes out, wraps around the torso of an Infected woman, and pulls her up into its cavernous, gobbling mouth. Chewing loudly, the thing chortles deep in its throat, the heavy bass sound vibrating at its edges like an idling motorcycle.

“
Shaw chonk roomy lactate
.”

“Jesus Christ,” Wendy says.

In any other time, the vision of this monster tottering down Route 22—its skinny legs supporting a bloated, improbable sphere of mottled flesh with its grotesque, almost human face—would have suddenly and irreparably damaged Sarge’s mind. Today, it only fills him with instant revulsion and hatred. The thing is a trespasser on his planet and must be destroyed. Anne used the perfect word to describe these things: abominations.

Sarge gives the general order to halt the convoy and tells Steve to stop the Bradley.

“What are we going to do?” Wendy says, her voice quiet and breathless.

Sarge switches to high magnification for a closer look at the thing. The monster’s grinning face fills the optical display. Revolted, he quickly switches back to low magnification.

“
Roomy lactation!
” it bellows across the landscape, eyeing the vehicles.

“We’re going to kill it,” Sarge tells her.

He estimates the range to target at two hundred meters using the rule of thumb method of picturing a distance of a hundred meters and ranging to the target in hundred-meter increments. He adjusts the RANGE-SELECT knob.

“Two,” he says absently.

He presses a switch on the weapons box, illuminating the AP LO annunciator light, indicating selection of the twenty-five millimeter gun with armor-piercing rounds firing at a low rate of fire, about a hundred rounds per minute.

“Line up the shot, Private Babe,” Sarge says.

Wendy presses the palm switch on her joystick with her fingers, activating the turret drive and releasing the turret brakes, then puts pressure on the stick. The turret responds immediately, beginning its rotation. The reticle centers on the monster’s legs.

“Now give me elevation to center mass on the thing’s hideous goddamn head.”

She feathers the stick until the reticle is centered between the monster’s eyes.

“Got it.”

“You’re drifting.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t say sorry; stabilize.”

She pushes the drift button, stabilizing the turret.

“Good job.”

“Sarge, if something should happen—”

“Nothing’s going to happen,” he says, his eyes glued to optical display. He presses the arming switch for the cannon. “But if you really want to know, I love you.”

“So we’ll be together no matter what.”

“No matter what, if you want me,” he grins, adding: “
On the way.
”

He depresses the trigger switch and the Bradley’s main gun begins firing.

“Tell me what you see,” he says.

The rounds arc up the highway, the path illuminated by tracers. The thing is moving again.

“Um, lost?” she says, meaning she thinks the rounds are passing over the target.

“Correction,” he murmurs. “I’m taking over the turret.”

He corrects the elevation and starts shooting again, leading the lethal fire into the beast using the tracers. Giant cigar-puffs drift lazily away from the rig. The rounds, designed to penetrate Soviet tanks and concrete bunkers, enter the monster’s skull and burst in flashes of light, sending geysers of blood and brain rocketing high into the air.

The Towering Thing screams shrilly and stumbles, weeping and groaning, until it topples to the ground trailing black smoke, the remains of its head splashing across the lanes and into the median. One of the legs twitches briefly, and then it is still.

Despite the noise of the Bradley’s engine and systems, they can hear the soldiers in the buses cheering. Sarge’s heart pounds in his chest. These things die just like anything else.

“Target destroyed,” he says, turning his head to smile at Wendy, who beams back at him.

“Holy crap, that was exciting,” she says. “I think I’m addicted. And I think I love you, too.”

“We’re going to get through this,” he tells her, smiling. “We’re going to win.”

His smile suddenly fades. The truth is a part of him hopes that they never win. The truth is he wants the war to go on and on and on, because he can never return to peace.

♦

The Bradley hums, idling after the shooting stops. Sarge gets on the intercom and tells them they just destroyed one big, ugly monster. Ray glances across the smiling faces and wants to scream at them for being complete morons. They are driving to a place where the big, ugly monsters will be thick as fleas. They are going there by
choice
; they are idiots.

The idea of driving onto that bridge and being greeted by the entire Infected population of Pittsburgh fills him with pure, bowel-evacuating terror. America has become a killing floor and there are things out there that want to eat you. They will eat you while you are still alive and then you will be dead and you will never see the sun again or kiss a girl or laugh at a joke or drink a beer. Ever again. Forever.

And nobody will give a shit about your famous last words. These days, if you’re lucky, your friends will burn you in a pit. If not, then you’re food.

Only a crazy lunatic would want to put himself into that situation.

These motherfuckers are crazy.

No, he tells himself.
You’re
the looney. You’re here because you made a promise, which you actually did not literally make, to a lot of dead people, who are, well,
dead
, to make things normal again, which means asshole cops back being asshole cops, and if it’s one thing you hated from the Time Before almost as much as credit card debt, it’s
asshole cops
.

These maniacs don’t know any better, apparently; you do. Which makes you an even bigger fool.

He swallows hard, fighting the urge to retch.

Todd leans towards him and says charitably, “It’s going to be okay, man.”

“Shut up, kid,” he says.

Just because you’re suicidal does not make you any braver than me, he thinks. In my time, I started fights over anything from noble causes to petty grievances, and more often than not I ended them. I fight to win and I fight dirty. Bravery has nothing to do with this. This is about living and dying. There is nothing in between. You make a choice and that is your choice.

Cashtown had so many ne’er-do-wells like him that the few upright citizens were hard to tell apart from everybody else unlucky enough to have been born there. Once, the town prospered in steel and timber, but like so many places in America, it fell into ruin due to overseas competition and decades of betrayal of the American worker by big business and the country’s politicians. People passing through left with impressions of rusting, abandoned steel mills, smokestacks and rail yards. Deteriorating housing drenched in American flags. For years, it was just one town in a depressed region where people lived check to check with as much pride as they could muster.

Ray worked as a rent-a-cop for a self-storage facility and frequently got into trouble with real cops. He drank, he smoked, he brawled, he broke things, he screwed anything with two legs. He lived in his mom’s basement and broke her heart with bad behavior and odd jobs and general lack of a future. Probably the only decent thing he ever did was volunteer for the local fire department.

When the Screaming happened, he was sleeping one off. He found his mother dead hours later. She had caught the Screaming while taking a bath and drowned, all alone. There were so many dead that the mortuary could not bury her. The county zipped her up in a shiny black body bag, tagged her, and drove her away in a truck for burial in a mass grave—to be dug up later and buried properly when things returned to normal. Of course, they never did.

During the morning of Infection, he was driving home from his shift when he saw a pack of lunatics in pajamas tackle and tear apart a child fleeing on a bicycle. Suddenly, there were people fighting everywhere. The people who ran the bakery were looking out the window of their store, pointing and murmuring to each other and trying to call somebody on the phone. As Ray drove by, he saw another pack of pajama-wearing lunatics crash through the window, lunging for them.

All Ray could think at the time was,
I don’t want that to be me.

The truck radio shouted at him until he turned it off.

He drove home and loaded his rig with everything he could get his hands on. Food, beer, liquor, cigarettes and dip, jugs of water, packets of Kool-Aid, burritos and TV dinners. He restarted his truck, turned on the radio and flipped across the shouting voices until he found the local AM news station, which promptly began emitting the emergency broadcast signal.

He turned off the radio. It’s better this way, he told himself. I don’t want to know.

He drove back to the storage facility, locked the chain-link fence behind him, and then sealed himself inside one of the storage sheds with somebody else’s dusty furniture.

Ray stayed in there for five days until he ran out of booze, the last set of batteries failed in his flashlight, and he could no longer stand the stench of his own waste.

He opened the garage door and emerged into a brave new world.

The camp was already sprawling, bursting out of Cashtown until it reached the self-storage facility. Some of the storage units were being plundered to make room for refugees. He stood there for fifteen minutes, blinking in the sunlight with his mouth open, trying to understand it, his head pounding with the worst hangover of his life. After what he had seen on the first day of Infection, he had thought he would find the town abandoned by the living. Instead, he found a thriving refugee camp with the population of Boulder, Colorado.

Not a very noble way to survive that first deadly week of Infection, but the point is he
emerged
. The point is he
survived
.

There is no honor in survival, but life goes on and life is everything. Nothing else matters. And anybody who thinks differently is a fool—a fool who probably won’t live very long.

Most of his friends were dead. The town had five governments. Four families were living in his mother’s house, which had already been looted top to bottom. Some of them he recognized as his former neighbors. Many of the locals had tried to cash in, selling land to the government and basic necessities to the refugees at outrageous prices, trading everything they had for a pile of paper money that rapidly declined in value until it became virtually worthless. Some of the more important and civic-minded locals, however, became entrenched with the government. They knew Ray and trusted him and they needed to beef up community policing fast.

So Ray became a lawman and, in the process, a true believer in making the world right again. He was good at it. His only regret was that his mother was not alive to see him do it.

When he found out Wendy was a Pittsburgh police officer, it had been like meeting an angel. The news of the burning of the city had hit the camp like a thunderbolt. People walked around in a daze, unable to comprehend it. By the time Wendy showed up at the police station, the fire had already become a legend. That made her something of a miracle, rare and precious.

Which is why he came, to protect her. The part of Ray Young that he has been finding out is good believes that if he can protect her, he can help make the world right again.

As for the part of him that is bad, the part he knows all too well, that part also wants to see the world return to normal. Ray is tough and morally ambivalent, he can be a bully and violent on a whim, but he has no wish to live in a world in eternal fear of being wiped out by a horde of diseased, homicidal maniacs. He longs for the day when he can get drunk on payday, throw a bottle through a window, and take a swing at honest cops who come to arrest him. He was a loser back in the day, that is true, while he is an important man now. But he was a loser who was certain to live a long life of petty amusements in a town he loved. He wants the world to get back to normal: a world where beer is manufactured and sold cheaply in mass quantities, tobacco farmers are free to harvest their crops unmolested, and women are loose and have easy access to birth control.

He came for reasons both selfless and selfish, but none of that matters now.