The Infection (6 page)

By the time he glanced back at the road it was too late to avoid the small mob running directly at him from the front. The car plowed into their bodies and flung them over the car like ragdolls. One became stuck like a nightmarish ornament, flailing with its one good arm, the crumpled hood spraying scalding water onto the body and the windshield. Ethan gunned the engine, half blinded, until the man, writhing and shrieking, detached and became caught in the right wheel hub, which ground and broke up the body with an awful cracking sound. The car jerked to the right and everything went black.

Ethan awoke on the sidewalk, stumbling away from his car that rested half-smashed against the wall of a department store. He tried to run, holding onto his backpack, and fell to his knees vomiting. People howled behind him. He heard the tramp of feet. One of the department store’s display windows was broken and he climbed in, then began limping through the store past selections of men’s ties and belts and leather shoes. Several men clawed their way in behind and gave chase at a loping gait, hunting him as a pack through the cosmetics department.

They steadily gained on him, yelping. They almost sounded happy. He ran blindly now, dropping his pack, seeing stars and gasping for breath. He had left the baseball bat in the car. One of the men appeared at his side, snarling. Moments later, he lunged and tackled a mannequin Ethan just passed and began beating and biting it. Another pushed over a second mannequin and began stomping on its face. The rest snapped at Ethan’s heels. Inspired, he saw a mannequin at the end of the aisle and ran straight for it, his legs burning from a lack of oxygen.

The mannequin’s fists belched flame and smoke. Ethan threw himself onto the ground as his pursuers toppled around him.

Ethan lay on his back, dripping sweat and gasping, unsure of whether he was going to laugh or cry when he finally caught his breath. He felt like his adrenal glands had been wrung out to the last drop. He looked up at his savior, a petite brunette dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans, her hair cropped in a military-style buzz cut. She had a hard look about her, as if she had been born to kill people and had been doing it for years. Her face was disfigured by fresh scars. Her eyes looked old.

She helped him onto his feet and handed him one of the pistols. She pointed at the wounded men who writhed and keened on the floor in widening pools of blood.

“Finish them and you can join us,” she said.

That was how Ethan met Anne.

THE HOSPITAL

The Bradley mounts the steel cantilever Liberty Bridge and begins crossing its five-hundred-foot main span over the Monongahela River at a careful pace. There are few abandoned cars cluttering the four-lane bridge but Sarge does not want to take any chances. He knows that a National Guard artillery unit destroyed several bridges in the area in a misguided effort to contain the spread of Infection, and does not want to drive through a big hole and plummet more than forty feet into the muddy waters below.

The density of vehicles thickens as they approach the other side of the river, blocked by abandoned makeshift barricades. Piles of stiffening corpses draw flies in front of a machine gun mounted behind a heap of sandbags. The Bradley speeds up and drives through the scene, popping skulls under its treads.

The Bradley enters the South Hills neighborhoods. Sarge opens the hatch for a look around in the open air and sees more barricades and piles of corpses. Some of the barricades apparently held; some were overrun. Either way, it did not matter. Even if they held, Infection was everywhere, eventually making barricades meaningless. Plastic bags and bits of garbage dance in the air, carried on the wind. A shredded T-shirt hangs on the branches of a tree, waving bye-bye at him, while another tree burns energetically like a giant torch, scattering heat and sparks and ashes. A pair of military jets fly high overhead, reminding him that the government is still fighting its own people.

The houses here are covered in graffiti. After the Screaming left more than a billion catatonics twitching on the ground all over the world, volunteers in these communities worked with local authorities to search each house for people and get them to a place where they could receive care. Orange posters are still taped to streetlight poles encouraging citizens to call tip lines to report SEELS for pickup. Black Xs are still sprayed on many doors marking houses that have been searched and cleared of victims of SEELS. The tragedy is that by helping the screamers avoid starvation and dehydration, these good people unwittingly aided in their own destruction. Some houses have other graffiti on them; as people fled their homes, they sprayed messages, and other refugees added their own, using the houses for communication. Names and dates. Missing persons. Directions and wayfinding.
Going south. Avoid the police station. Bill, I’m going to get grandma.
Other messages warn travelers of infestations, give opinions on everything from purifying water to effective killing methods, or offer trade. Some of the graffiti are simple tags. Newly formed militias claiming territory. Boasts of kills and time served. Totemic symbols scrawled by people in a hurry. Arrows. Biohazard signs. Skulls and crossbones.

The Infected stumble and hold their heads, wailing in a constant state of metaphysical pain. They glower and bare their teeth at Sarge as he drives by in the armored vehicle.

♦

The survivors find the tall, muscular man on his front porch wearing a bathrobe and boxer shorts, shouting and waving a pistol in his right hand and a battered, folded-up umbrella in his left. All of the neighboring houses have a large black X painted on their front doors; the Screaming apparently wiped out this community and left this man as its sole survivor.

“This is my neighborhood,” he says, firing off a round with his pistol and killing a running Infected, who falls sprawling on the sidewalk, joining another draped over a fire hydrant and a third crumpled in a fetal position on the hood of an ancient Cadillac. “You ain’t welcome here!”

The Bradley’s gunner, sitting next to Sarge inside the vehicle, sizes up the man through the periscope and says, “I think we found somebody who might be big enough to take you, Sergeant.”

Sarge snorts and says, “I like his spunk. He’s a fighter.”

“Spunk as in crazy,” says the gunner. He has the square jaw of an action movie hero and wears a Dora the Explorer Band-Aid on the left cheek of his stubbled face. “Crazy as in a threat to all of us.”

“If crazy disqualified membership, there’d be no club in this rig. Ha.”

“I thought the plan was we want ‘survivors, not fighters.’ That’s what you said.”

“Fighters are useful, too,” Sarge says cryptically. “We can’t do job interviews, Steve. Let’s invite him on. If he blends, he blends.”

“You’re the boss, Sergeant,” the gunner says, shrugging.

The man roars: “Kids used to play on this street!”

crack crack

Sarge says, “Something about him reminds me of Randy Devereaux. Remember Devereaux?”

“Not really, Sergeant. I hardly knew him.”

“Right,” Sarge says. “You’re right. That’s my bad.” Steve and Ducky, the driver, are new to the Bradley, replacements for the previous crew, who fell down during the Screaming nearly two weeks ago. Two weeks and an eternity. The replacements barely had any contact with the Bradley’s infantry squad, the boys who survived the Taliban and the Screaming and then flew all the way back from Afghanistan to die in a Wal-Mart parking lot in Pittsburgh.

“This is a nice place to live!”

Sarge calls out to him, but the man ignores him. If he does not trust the military, maybe one of the civilians can coax him. Anne volunteers to get out and do the inviting. While the Bradley stands idling, she approaches with her hands up, palms out.

“What’s your name?” she asks.

The man glares at her sideways, frowning, then waves her off. “Aw, you don’t live here neither.”

“My name is Anne. There are five of us plus the crew—”

The pistol cracks in the man’s hand twice, dropping two distant running figures.

“I am making my stand!” he announces to the sky.

“Come on, get in,” Anne says. “You can come with us.”

“I said, step off, bitch!”

Sarge laughs, shaking his head, while the gunner grins.

“But we want you to come with us,” Anne says.

“Too dangerous out there,” the man tells her, waving his umbrella. “It’s raining zombies!”

crack crack

He fires again several times at distant figures running down the street. At long range, barely looking, and does not miss. One of the kills, Sarge saw it clear, was a headshot. The Infected’s head snapped back and he was dead in the blink of an eye.

Steve says, “Is he actually hitting anything with that pea shooter?”

“Yeah, he is. In fact, every shot hit a separate moving target and brought it down at between twenty-five and thirty meters.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m not a kidder, Steve.”

“With a handgun, though? Wow, this guy is amazing.”

“No, you’re right,” Sarge says. “He’s crazy. Radioactive.”

He calls out to Anne, who jogs back to the vehicle.

“This is my home! My land!”

crack crack crack

Sarge lowers the telescopic seat and closes the single-piece hatch.

“How long do you give him, Sergeant?”

“I don’t know, Steve. Longer than most. Not long enough.”

♦

Paul runs his hand over his salt-and-pepper stubble and takes in the massive hospital looming against the graying sky. The air is cooling and he can feel the tickle of tiny drizzling raindrops on his face. Dull thunder grinds in the distant ether, as if God is moving his furniture across the floor. Now this is good weather for an apocalypse, he tells himself. A gray sky against which black birds swarm. He found the past two weeks of May sunshine jarringly discordant with the end of the world. The diseased walking blindly past flowers in bloom. (Earth abides.) The dead rotting away on lush green grass and overgrown gardens, slowly eaten by bacteria and insects and birds and animals. By the very soil. (Yes, the earth abides.) Paul wonders if God, who also abides, is as impervious as the weather to all of mankind’s horrible sufferings or if, like the grass and the animals and the insects, his creator is getting something out of it.

♦

The wind picks up and the drizzle turns into a spring shower. The survivors set out buckets to catch the water and decide to wait out the downpour inside the hospital instead of the Bradley. They navigate a cluster of abandoned ambulances and dead bodies and enter what is supposed to be the emergency room but what instead looks like a burned-out slaughterhouse. Signs of extreme violence are everywhere on this place. The floor is littered with charred bodies under a thick layer of ash and dust. The walls are painted with dried blood.

“When the first Infected woke up and spread out into the city, the first responders brought the victims of the violence here, to the hospital,” says Ethan. “Gift-wrapped for the rest.”

“It looks like some concerned citizens then showed up and firebombed the place,” Wendy says, kicking at the ash and raising a small cloud of black dust.

The place gives them the creeps. The hospital seems eerily deserted except for the charred dead. It is not hard to imagine doctors and nurses hurrying across this noisy room to greet hardworking first responders bringing in broken and dying people for life-saving treatment. But this is where Infection started. After the Screaming, the people who fell down were brought here and to the ad hoc clinics. Three days later, they woke up and slaughtered and infected the people who had been working around the clock to keep them alive. They slaughtered and infected their own families coming to visit. Then they went out into the city in the early morning hours, driven by the virus’ simple programming: Attack, overpower, infect.

Now it is a killing floor. A dead place. Sarge regards a wheelchair crumpled in a corner, the walls above it riddled with bullet holes. Wall-mounted electronic medical devices hang uselessly. Disturbed by movement, black ash swarms in drifts in the air, acrid to the nose and bitter on the tongue.

Ethan studies the faces of the other survivors, searching for encouragement and finding none. The others look as damaged as he feels. The place has an almost supernatural aura about it. As familiar as the hospital is in some ways, in many ways it feels like the unknown.

♦

Paul wishes the dead had come back to life to eat the living. That there was truly no room in hell anymore and the end of days had come. Because then there would be evidence of a supernatural cause instead of just a bug created in a lab by men to kill other men. There would be evidence of a hell and true evil and Satan. And if there is a Satan, there is a God, and if there is a God, then death is not the end, but the beginning. Man’s suffering over a lifetime is nothing compared to an eternity of bliss in God’s direct presence. To see the dead rise is to see the end of days and with it, the end of faith—the beginning of certainty. With such certainty, Paul would willingly walk into the embrace of the dead and let them tear him apart and eat him. Did Christ not suffer more on the cross? What use is this old fleshly cage when paradise awaits the spirit?