The Killing Floor Read online

“I can’t believe it,” Ray says, blinking another round of tears.

  Tyler laughs. “Boy, that old hat of yours has seen better days.”

  Ray takes off his old STEELERS cap and puts on the new one.

  “How does it look on me?”

  “Like lipstick on a pig.” Tyler laughs so hard he starts coughing. “Lipstick,” he repeats, his face turning red. “On a pig.”

  Ray watches with mounting alarm as the veins in Tyler’s throat stand out hard and dark like wires. The man is choking. He grimaces and wheezes: “Pig.”

  Then he slams both hands on the desktop, stands and sprays a geyser of vomit from his open mouth. Ray lurches back in his chair as the old man’s breakfast splashes across the desk and onto the floor.

  “Tyler!” he roars, standing.

  The man collapses to the floor, convulsing.

  Ray kneels next to him, pressing down on his shoulders, trying to hold him still. “Aw, shit,” he says. He has no idea what to do. “Help! Help me!”

  Run, Tyler hisses just before his eyes roll back into his head.

  Ray jumps to his feet and races down the hallway to find most of the cops on the floor. The men still on their feet stare at them helplessly, their eyes wild, shouting at each other to do something.

  Outside the building, he stops in awe. Everywhere, bodies are flopping in the mud like fish while the survivors stand over them, crying for help. A man hobbles away on crutches, raising the alarm.

  “Infection! Infection!”

  A cop wrenches a pistol from his shoulder harness and fires into the face of a woman lying on the ground. People shrink away in revulsion from the roar of the gun. Even from two feet away, he misses two shots before the woman’s head explodes across the sidewalk.

  “They’ve got the bug!” a woman says, drawing her own gun and emptying half a magazine into another convulsing victim.

  Another woman screams at her: “We don’t know they’ve got it!”

  “Are you blind?”

  A man roars: “That’s my mother! Put that gun down!”

  The shooters raise their guns. Ray flinches at another round of gunshots. The cop and a bystander collapse to the ground. People are running, trying to get away.

  “Stop it!” a woman shrieks, hugging a wailing toddler against her chest. “Stop it!”

  The people on the ground stop twitching. They sit up, looking around in a daze. Slowly, they get back onto their feet.

  Ray’s vision shrinks to the size of a small circle.

  “Aw, shit,” he says.

  Screams rise up from all over the east side of the camp, an exciting wall of sound, like being in a football stadium during a dramatic play. The dogs go berserk, yelping and howling. The first gunshots follow within seconds, a random pattern that rolls into an avalanche.

  This is everywhere.

  The Infected stand with their arms at their sides, hands clenching and unclenching rhythmically, heads darting to follow the progress of the fleeing survivors. The voice droning over the speaker on the telephone pole stops and a deafening air raid siren begins to wail.

  The Infected are running.

  Two women drag a man down, one pulling his hair out in fistfuls while the other scrabbles at his clothes with her nails, looking for a place to bite. A fleeing woman runs into a plate glass window and bounces off it, stunned; a teenager in a hoodie lands on her back, gnawing at her scalp. A man’s pistol clicks empty just before a pack surges over him. A tow truck roars down the street, Infected swarming over it, running down anything in its path. A dozen people wrestle in a pile at the curb. A dog with bloody jaws hovers at the edge of the melee, snarling and barking, lunging in to bite and tear the flesh of the Infected.

  Ray pulls out his carving knife and turns in place, waving it vaguely at these threats.

  A man staggers past, blood trickling down his forehead, wearing the dazed, panicked expression of someone who has just been bitten. The man stops, turns and frowns at Ray, his face twitching. He begins to chew his lips.

  Move, bro, a voice screams in Ray’s head.

  He runs back to the police station but pauses at the steps leading up to the main doors. Dark shapes struggle inside. A shotgun blasts twice, and then goes silent. The shape of a man fills the doorway, hunched and snarling, blood splashed down the front of his shirt.

  “No,” Ray says, horrified. “God damn it, no!”

  Tyler Jones jogs down the steps and stops in front of Ray, his face bright with fever. Ray glances at the knife in his hand, but cannot make himself cut the old man.

  “Look at me,” he pleads. “I’m Ray Young. I’m your friend.”

  Something like recognition flashes in Tyler’s eyes.

  “That’s right,” he goes on. “It’s me.”

  Tyler’s head jerks as if trying to see something more interesting behind Ray, and lunges snarling after a screaming woman. Ray watches him go in amazement and realizes the street is filling with Infected.

  A military helicopter hovers low over the rooftops, its thundering rotors sending bits of garbage swirling through the air. Ray holds up his hand to shield his face against the wash, watching the Blackhawk turn in place until the machine gunner, crouched behind his M60, comes into view. Another soldier, crouched next to him, makes a chopping motion with his hand.

  A burst of smoke appears in front of the roaring gun. The air buzzes with flying metal. People collapse where they stand, large parts of them missing.

  A storefront explodes with a burst of light, raining the street with glass, as Ray throws himself onto the ground and covers his head with his hands.

  The Blackhawk stops firing and moves on, searching for fresh targets.

  Ray refuses to move. Lying on the road with his face pressed against the warm asphalt, he is going to stay right there and hide in plain sight for as long as it takes.

  Feet stomp the ground as people run past him with howls of rage.

  This is the last moment of your life, he keeps repeating in his mind, while praying it isn’t.

  Anne

  From a nearby hilltop, Anne studies the death throes of Camp Defiance through binoculars. A drifting pall of smoke hangs over it. Helicopters circle low, pulling the smoke into fantastic swirls, dropping missiles that burst on the ground in sudden flashes. Gunfire crackles along its length. Two Chinook transports rise above the airfield in a hard ascent, one of them wobbling unsteadily in the air, people cartwheeling out of the back in a swift return to the earth. The muffled screams never stop, rubbing her nerves so raw she has to fight the urge to join in.

  This has been going on for hours. FEMA 41, Camp Defiance, is devouring itself.

  Her Rangers stand in a line behind her, hands over their mouths, gasping as an explosion rips apart a patch of ground on the north side, hurling bodies and debris into the air. Jean, whom they picked up in Hopedale two days ago, cries hysterically in Gary’s arms, dressed in her wrinkled Chanel suit. Ramona and Evan lean against each other until standing cheek to cheek, watching. Marcus, the toughest of them all, wipes tears from his eyes. Anne spares a glance at Todd, standing ramrod straight and pale with his hands over his ears, watching the open gates with rigid hope as vehicles emerge singly and in groups, going south. One of the vehicles veers off the road, crawling over the muddy field, tiny figures struggling in the cab.

  The Chinooks pound overhead, heading east. The hum of their powerful rotors drowns out the screaming for a few minutes. Anne gasps with relief.

  Hundreds of camps have been set up across the country, she knows, possibly thousands. She tries to tell herself the human race can survive the loss of even this massive battle. That they can still win the war. But this corner of southeastern Ohio has just gone dark. It belongs to Infection now. And Anne and her team are in no man’s land, at ground zero. She knows they should already be back in their bus and moving. She returns the binoculars to her eyes and stays.

  “What are we going to do?” Marcus says.

 
“It isn’t over,” she says.

  “Can’t we do anything to help them?” Todd asks her.

  Anne shakes her head, watching a squad of soldiers emerge at the top of the wall and begin climbing down the other side to safety. Even the Army is bugging out.

  “Erin,” he says, and sobs, covering his face, giving in to the feelings he has been holding at bay all day. “What’s happening to her?”

  “It isn’t over,” she repeats, but it is.

  She tries not to think of the children. Everyone knows the Infected do not convert them. They eat them. Thousands of children are in the camp. Her hand flickers to her scars, where she scratched her face in grief when she discovered the dead bodies of her own children six weeks ago.

  As the endless day grinds on, the others drift away to process what has happened and mourn lost friends. When the sky dims toward twilight, only Todd remains with Anne, watching, hoping for his miracle.

  Camp Defiance is dead. A convoy of military vehicles shot their way out an hour ago, and then the entire camp fell silent.

  Anne rubs her stiff and tired arms. A lone figure emerges from the camp gates and moves south. She raises the binoculars to her eyes and swears under her breath.

  In her magnified view, the man runs splashing through the mud, looking over his shoulder with blank terror. She would recognize that mean face anywhere, even without the ballcap.

  “Do you know him?” Todd says. “Who is it?”

  “It’s Ray Young.”

  “But you said he got stung. The hoppers got him. Nobody can survive that.”

  “It’s flat out impossible, Todd, but there he goes.”

  She chews her bottom lip, wondering how he survived both the hopper sting and the sudden fall of the camp.

  “Look,” Todd says. “More people are coming out.”

  She turns slightly, giving her a view of what he is pointing at. Infected are pouring from the mouth of the camp. Scores of them, walking hesitantly, hands pressed against their chests, heads cocked to study Ray’s retreat.

  One by one, they trickle after him.

  “Are they survivors, Anne?”

  She understands. It is a miracle, true, but not all miracles are good. Some miracles are evil. Some miracles, like Infection itself, can end the world.

  “Do you see Erin?”

  She lowers the binoculars and spits.

  “Anne?”

  “I should have killed that motherfucker when I had the chance.”

  Part II. Endgame

  Ray

  They are gaining on him.

  Ray stumbles through the cornfield crying and laughing and screaming. He flails blindly against the cornstalks with sticky, stinging hands, driven by memories: The Infected raced into gunfire time and time again, some of them taking a dozen bullets to put down, overrunning scores of last stands. Military helicopters screamed low to the ground in high-speed strafing runs, heavy fire striking down both the normal and the diseased. People clawed screaming at the base of walls that once protected them. Officials evacuated the burning school that housed the government, trying to push their way out as the Infected forced their way in, the air filled with burning posters reading, ASK ME ABOUT RESETTLEMENT.

  Choking on smoke, Ray fled across the camp, searching for sanctuary until the last strongpoint fell. Realizing the camp was finished, he ran headlong through the slaughter, ignoring screams for help and mercy alike, until he reached the eastern wall. Hours after he entered the camp, he ran back through the gates and disappeared into the woods from which he came.

  A massive human pile writhed like worms in the bloody mud. A woman engulfed in flames walked past without a sound until collapsing in a burning heap.

  Now he runs through this endless cornfield, his exhausted body driven solely by blind terror, as insects shriek in his ears and the thrash of pursuit grows steadily closer. The sun dips toward evening, bathing the corn the color of blood as the dark closes in.

  A running mother, bleeding from multiple bite wounds, suddenly turned against her child, eating him while he cried and struggled in her arms.

  Ray bursts gasping from the field and staggers into a large yard. He pauses to catch his breath, his heart thumping at an alarming speed against his ribs, and scans the area for weapons, a place to hide, anything that can help him. They are close behind.

  A farmhouse stands with its back door open and inviting. An aboveground pool stinks like rotting plants near a clothesline. An old swing set rusts among the dandelions between a vegetable garden and a barn. A solitary wooden baseball bat leans against an apple tree. Ray lopes to the tree, scoops up the bat and turns to face his pursuers.

  The backyard is empty. Insects rip the air like distant chainsaws.

  Still gasping, he slaps corn dust and tiny bugs from his T-shirt, wondering what happened.

  People were chasing me. Where did they go?

  A flock of birds flutters into the air, swirling around the sky before falling into formation and heading east. In the twilight, the wall of corn is dark and impenetrable. As his eyes adjust to the light, he realizes the stalks are trembling.

  People are moving across the cornfield.

  Ray stands his ground, sure he is being watched. Slowly, his muscles uncoil. He lowers the bat. If they were Infected, they would have attacked by now.

  “Hey,” he says. “Who’s there? Come on out of there. It’s all right.”

  The movement stops. The ring of cicadas crescendos and ebbs. Please, he thinks, pleading. Don’t go. He needs people right now. He doesn’t want to be alone again.

  “I ain’t dangerous or anything. It’ll be safer if we stick together.”

  A man appears, bugs and bits of cornstalk clinging to his hair and clothes, followed by two women.

  “It’s all right,” Ray tells them. “My name’s Ray. I was at the camp too.”

  The people pant, watching him. Dozens more appear. Then a hundred. Behind them, hundreds more stream into the yard. The cornfield ripples with the movement of a horde.

  Ray laughs with relief. He can’t believe how many. He takes several steps forward and then stops, his lungs constricting.

  Can’t be.

  He turns toward the house. The open door now seems impossibly far away.

  Can’t be.

  The people continue to gather, staring at Ray. Some of them reach out to him, moaning.

  Can’t be, can’t be, can’t be.

  They’re Infected. All of them.

  Todd

  The bus rumbles along the road toward Trimble Airport, a tiny commuter airfield outside of what used to be a small town called Appleton. Anne’s Rangers converted one of the hangars there into a safe house. Harsh red light flickers through the metal-slatted firing ports, fitted where the windows used to be, as the sun bleeds into the horizon. Todd is too preoccupied to worry about being caught in the open at night. They’ll reach the safe house soon enough. He does not care what happens in the meantime.

  The Rangers sit scattered around the bus, each taking a seat as far as they can from everyone else to be alone with their thoughts. Hugging his assault rifle, Todd tries to process the horror of what he saw today. Jean cries in the back while Gary tries to console her. The Rangers rescued the pair from an art gallery in Hopedale two days ago. She is taking it the worst. Her wailing scatters Todd’s thoughts until he begins to hate her.

  We have all suffered, lady. We’ve all lost people.

  Todd knows he will never see Erin again. The best he can hope for is somehow she survived and is on her way to a safe place. He shuts his eyes and pleads with God to let her live.

  Spare her and I’ll do anything. Just name the price.

  He wonders if this is how the Reverend felt when he prayed. Bargaining with a God who does not answer. Who may not even be listening. And yet it feels good to bargain.

  I should have tried to save her. I did nothing. I just watched.

  If you tried to save her, you’d be dead by now.
Dead or infected.

  I could have tried.

  Around and around his mind goes.

  The Rangers lived on the road, searching for survivors and bringing them to the camp. Defiance was their port—a place to rest, retool and resupply. Without it, they are adrift, anchorless, in a sea filled with monsters.

  Erin was Todd’s port.

  Everything he’d enjoyed doing as a troubled, geeky teenager before the epidemic was gradually forgotten along with the millions of other things people liked doing, such as going to the movies, ordering takeout from a Chinese menu, buying flowers for a date, catching up on reruns of a favorite series. Even the things Todd found exciting about the epidemic—the boyish thrill of living without school or parents, shooting guns, living life dangerously, the freedom of the apocalypse—had all turned sour with repeated use. Todd was growing up in a world filled with risk and death. A world he looked at with the resentment of a boy cheated of his inheritance. Erin was the only thing in that world offering him any real happiness, and now Infection has taken her from him, just as it took his parents, Sheena X, Paul, Ethan and so many others.

  The vehicle shudders as it drives over rubble and shards of timber. Unknown to the people of Camp Defiance, the storm that lashed the camp several days ago was the northern front of a small tornado ripping through southern Ohio. Most of the buildings here took damage; some of the weaker structures were crushed flat. The road is blanketed with leaves and branches, wires, furniture, soggy books, broken plates, shattered electronics, the bloated bodies of people and cattle.

  The bus drives over it all with a crunch.

  ♦

  The Rangers would visit Camp Defiance for a day or two and then return to the road for as long as a week. The more Todd stayed away, the more Erin wanted him. Each time he left, she cried and screamed and called it quits. After sex, he studied her body, feeling helpless. His happiness with her felt as fleeting as life itself, and just as doomed. He believed someday she would leave him not because of his separate life on the road, but because he was not who she thought he was. Todd believed she was too good for him, and would one day realize it.