The Killing Floor Read online

  “This is why we need to stay in our territory,” Moses says in his deep baritone. “Washington is an empty gesture. The fight is here. If we leave, there will be nothing to stop the bug.”

  “We are in our territory,” Russell tells him, scratching at his beard. “And we didn’t do nothing to stop shit. The camp was wiped out on our watch.”

  “There’s still the smaller camp at Mason,” Joe Hanley chimes in. “Camp Nightingale. They need protection, too.”

  “Cashtown couldn’t hold out,” Martha Grimes says in her raspy voice. “How can Mason hold out, shit for brains?”

  “They’re next,” Russell mutters. “You can bet your ass they’re next.”

  “We don’t know that. There are forty thousand there. They need us.”

  “Your country needs you,” Chase says, but it falls flat. Some of the men openly laugh at him.

  “My country is Ohio, boy,” Moses growls. “And we need to take it back before it’s too late. As for America, it can take care of itself. I don’t see it looking out for me and mine.”

  “America expects each man to do his duty,” the young officer grates. “I would expect all of you, being military men, to understand that.”

  “Dumb shit thinks this is the real Army,” someone snickers.

  “Who said that?” Toby roars, shutting them up. “We are, in fact, nominally an Army operation, which means we will give the LT real respect as an Army officer. Whoever disrespects him again will get my boot so far up his ass, he’ll be flossing with my shoelaces.”

  The men grumble, sizing him up. Wendy tenses, putting on her game face. There are dozens of commanders here, and just four soldiers. But nobody challenges them.

  “So what do you think, Sarge?” someone calls from the back.

  “This is not a local problem,” Toby answers. “If we don’t take all of America back, we’ll never be truly safe anywhere. We got to start someplace, and that place might as well be Washington. That’s where the Army is, and we should help if we can. Plus the LT says he’s going to get us supplies that we need. It’s a good deal. We should honor our end of it.”

  “Sarge, with all respect, I am sick of this man’s empty promises,” Russell says. “The Federal government promised help on the first day of epidemic, and it never came. They promised to protect us in the shelters, and those shelters didn’t last a goddamn week.”

  The fighters growl, remembering. The shelters became deathtraps.

  “They promised us a vaccine, and there was no vaccine, and no cure,” he continues. “They promised to send troops, and then sent them all to Washington.”

  The fighters glare at the officer with open resentment.

  “I’ll tell you what, sir,” Russell tells the Lieutenant. “If those supplies don’t show up by tomorrow morning, I’m taking my crew and going west.” He glances at Moses. “All right, Ackley?”

  “That’s fine,” Moses tells him.

  “What about Camp Defiance?” says Joe. “There could be survivors.”

  “We could split the NLA in two,” Fred White chimes in. “Half head west to Defiance, and half east to Washington to join the fight.”

  “And be too weak to do either one right,” Martha says.

  “Put it to a vote,” Fred says.

  “Vote for suicide?”

  “We’ll go,” Wendy says. “Me and Toby and Steve, with our shooters and the Bradley. We’ll backtrack to Morgantown and then go north to check out the camp. We’ll catch up with you in Washington.”

  The men glance at Toby, who shrugs. “You heard the lady,” he says. “All right, Fred?”

  “That’ll work, I guess,” Fred says. The other commanders nod at this, but reluctantly; they’d all rather have the Bradley riding along with them.

  “It’s on you, then,” Russell tells Chase. “All this talk is pointless if our resupply don’t show up here tomorrow. If it don’t, then, well, we’re all going west.”

  The mob breaks up. Toby and Moses exchange a nod of understanding. Wendy blows air out her cheeks and tries to relax; she feels like she could run a mile.

  “Wow, I thought they were going to crucify the LT,” Steve says, grinning.

  “By the way, Sergeant Wilson, thank you for supporting me,” Chase says.

  Toby shakes his head. “Next time you see a fire, LT, try throwing water on it instead of gas.”

  “So if you go west and the rest of the NLA goes east, who am I going to ride with?”

  Wendy says, “Try to find the crew that hates you the least, sir. In the meantime, I’d lie low if I were you. A lot of people here still blame the Army for what happened to Defiance.”

  “But why?” Chase asks in a childlike voice.

  How to explain human nature? She shrugs. “Got to blame someone.”

  “So it’s going to happen?” Toby says. “You’re going to be able to deliver?”

  “I don’t know. Look, can I be honest with you guys?”

  “Please,” Steve tells him.

  “The policy is only the militias that make it to Washington get the supplies. Otherwise, there’s too much risk they’ll take the resources and do nothing, or get killed on the way to Washington and waste them. It’s supposed to be an incentive.”

  “Well, LT,” Toby says, “I’d say you have a pretty strong incentive to get on the horn with your people and convince them to cough up the gear, or they’ll get no help from the NLA and you’ll be hitchhiking to Washington.”

  “Assuming I can even convince them, will your people honor your side of the deal?”

  The tank commander shrugs and says, “Probably.”

  Wendy takes Toby’s hand.

  “Enough of this,” she says. “Come on.”

  Once they are out of earshot of the Lieutenant, Toby asks, “Why do you want us to go west?”

  “You know why. These idiots wanted to split the army.”

  Toby shakes his head; he doesn’t believe her, but it doesn’t matter. “Are you going to tell me why you’re pissed at me?”

  “I’m not pissed at you.”

  “Are you going to tell me why you’re pissed at the world?”

  They stop in front of their tent.

  “No,” she says, ducking inside.

  “Tell me,” he says in the dark.

  She whisks her T-shirt up and over her head, steps forward and kisses him. Minutes later, they make love on top of their bedroll. She clings to him fiercely, squeezing him so hard it makes him gasp. Come on, she says. Harder. She wants to forget everything. She wants to fall inside of him. That’s it. They grind against each other in a growing frenzy. Oh, fuck, yes.

  He climaxes just after she does and they fall asleep sweaty and panting.

  The next morning, she straddles him.

  “Sergeant Wilson, it’s reveille. I want you at attention, bud.”

  Toby awakes and grins, studying her face, the spill of her blond hair covering her left shoulder and breast. “Christ, you’re beautiful.”

  Wendy places her hands against his chest, covering his tattoo of a bear claw, the symbol of his dead regiment.

  “Shut up,” she says, maneuvering her hips, and then gasps as he enters her.

  She wants him to know that despite whatever she may feel about her life, he is her man. That every time he touches her, she feels safe.

  Outside the tent, the fighters cheer as a dull metallic roar fills the store.

  Toby and Wendy throw on their clothes and emerge from the tent to see the fighters streaming out of the camp, leaving their frying pans and coffee pots untended, and toward the parking lot, where a massive Chinook aircraft lands in the light of the morning sun.

  Anne

  As the sun pales the eastern sky, Anne steps outside the hangar doors and inhales the stench of wet decay. Trimble Airport features a forty-five-hundred-foot runway, now blanketed with fallen leaves and branches, as well as landing facilities and fueling, maintenance and other services for a variety of aircraft. P
rivate operators here once ran aerial tours, commuter flights to the big cities in the region like Cleveland and Pittsburgh, and weekend jaunts to private cabins around Tappan and Piedmont Lakes. Now the planes and helicopters are gone, the fueling station drained and idle, the facilities falling into rust and ruin, the ground covered in garbage and debris swept here by the storm. The world is starting to look more apocalyptic every day, she muses. Everything is falling apart. She finds it sad nobody will clean up the mess. Anne has always been a bit of a neat freak.

  The others huddle around the fire, staring at the flames in a daze. Todd tosses in one branch at a time and watches the sparks flutter into the air. Marcus gets the coffee boiling and calls to Anne, telling her it’s time to talk about what they are going to do next.

  She accepts the coffee and sips it, savoring its rich taste and trying to commit it to memory. She knows it is the last of their supply and that it will be hard to get more. Soon, she believes, people will eat only what they can grow locally, behind walls topped with barbed wire. She has gotten used to living out of an old backpack and does not really care what she eats, as long as it gives her the calories and energy she needs to survive another day. But she will miss coffee.

  Its loss reminds her of the loss of so many people at Camp Defiance, which reminds her of the loss of her husband and children. My good Peter. My big, grownup boy, so brave, just like his daddy. She closes her eyes and sees a bloody baby tooth resting on the mantle of a fireplace in a dark suburban living room while a bright TV blasts the Emergency Alert System signal. Her hand flickers around the scars on her cheek, feeling the damaged skin.

  Anne suppresses her feelings until they boil back up as rage. Rage, she can use.

  ♦

  She sets out a cloth, makes sure her pistols are unloaded, and field strips them for cleaning: frame, rod and spring assembly, barrel, slide. Her Springfield nine-millimeters don’t have the stopping power of her sniper rifle, an old military-issue M21 with telescopic sight. They are light and have little recoil, however, and with nineteen bullets in the magazine and one in the firing chamber, she can punch holes in any Infected that get too close with a fair degree of accuracy.

  “We need to figure things out,” Marcus says, gazing at the fire as he feeds it another branch. “Unless someone has a better idea, I think we have two choices. We can either go to Camp Nightingale, or stay here until things cool down, and then backtrack to Defiance.”

  “Why Defiance?” says Gary, his arm around Jean. “They’re all dead or Infected.”

  “There’s a huge amount of food and equipment just sitting there now.”

  “Sounds dangerous,” Evan says. He is a small, wiry man who has survived for so long because, like Ethan Bell, he is able to think several moves ahead; that is why Anne chose him for the team. In the time before, he was an electrical engineer.

  “The Infected will migrate,” Marcus points out. “They’ll leave a giant stockpile of gear we can use. We could pick up enough supplies to keep us going for months. If we grab another decent vehicle, even longer.”

  “That’s right,” Evan counters. “There are possibly a hundred thousand Infected, and they’ll be migrating everywhere. And all those dead bodies are going to attract monsters looking for an easy meal.”

  Marcus glances at Anne to gauge her reaction, but she ignores him, dipping her bore brush into her bottle of solvent and running it through the barrel with the cleaning rod.

  Normally, she and Marcus act as a team. After leaving Sarge’s band of survivors, she found Marcus alone, bloodied and wild and liable to be mistaken for Infected himself, wandering the wasteland killing with bat and axe. The willpower involved in killing another human being, face to face and with a blunt weapon—not to mention the strength and stamina required to survive long bouts of hand to hand combat—amazed her.

  He recognized in Anne a kindred spirit, and decided to follow her. But while they share a vision of wiping the Infected from the earth, they are doing it for different reasons. Motivated by hate, Anne kills for revenge against the organism that destroyed her life. Marcus kills to release lost souls enslaved by the virus; he kills for compassion. For him, it is about mercy.

  While they have never touched, they are something like lovers. More feelings to suppress. Anne knows Marcus would follow her off a cliff if that is what she wanted.

  Today is different, however. Today, Marcus must make up his own mind. Anne is planning her own mission, and it is not up for debate.

  “Some of us have people back at Defiance,” Todd says. “I want to go.”

  “You know what the odds are,” Evan says. “I’m sorry to say it like that, but we’re making decisions that will affect our survival. Even if she survived, by the time we go back, she will probably be long gone.”

  “I have to see,” Todd says.

  “And you’re willing to put our lives on the line for that.”

  “Yes,” the boy says, glaring back at him.

  Anne smiles, pushing a cotton swab through the barrel.

  “He doesn’t have to justify his vote,” Marcus says.

  “We should be logical about this,” Evan tells them. “The smart move is to go to Nightingale. They’re picky about who gets permanent citizenship, but we know people there who will vouch for us. Once we get in, we could organize a scavenging expedition to Defiance.”

  “If they let us in, we’d have no say in what we would do,” Ramona says. Slim and athletic like Anne, she sits cross-legged near the fire, eating Spam from a can. Overweight people are rare these days, at least outside the camps; they either dropped the pounds due to exercise and change in diet, or died out. “They run a tight ship at Nightingale. They have people at the top making all the decisions. They might break up our unit and make us scrub toilets. That’s how it is.”

  “We formed this unit so we didn’t have to be citizens of anything,” says Marcus. “We’ve always worked on the outside. I think it’s best if we keep it that way. We’re better off on our own.”

  “We might have to rethink some things,” Evan answers. “The fall of the camp changes everything. We need to be flexible. I’d rather scrub toilets than throw my life away.”

  Anne pauses in her work to squint at Evan. If you value your life so much, what are you doing here at all?

  “What about us?” Gary says, staring at Jean, who gapes wide eyed at the fire, shivering. “Don’t we get a vote?”

  “Fine,” Marcus sighs. “That all right with everyone?”

  The others murmur their assent. Gary and Jean are refugees, not part of Anne’s Rangers, but the situation is unique, with extreme stakes.

  “We need to get to the other camp,” Jean says, struggling with the words, her face and voice straining with effort. Anne studies her briefly, noting the symptoms. “Can’t you see that? Are you blind? We’re out in the open here. We’re all going to die if we don’t get somewhere safe.”

  At one time Jean was a beautiful woman, Anne believes, and this is the person Gary sees when he looks at her. Now her hair is disheveled, her eyes puffy and glazed, her mouth twisted into a grimace. They locked themselves inside the Wild Arts Gallery in Hopedale during the first days of the epidemic, and survived there for weeks. People will do whatever it takes to survive. The only problem is they have to live with what they’ve done afterwards.

  They do not know Anne found the trash can in the back office, next to the gas grill, filled with human bones.

  “So that’s three for Defiance, three for Nightingale,” Marcus says quickly, obviously regretting agreeing to give the refugees a vote. He turns to Anne, who rubs a drop of gun oil across the slide of one of her reassembled Springfields. “Anne, it seems you’re the tie breaker.”

  Anne loads the pistol and holsters it.

  “Anne?”

  “I’m going south.”

  The survivors glance at each other. Marcus clears his throat and asks why.

  “I’m going to kill Ray Young.”
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br />   The Rangers watch her in stunned silence.

  “This is the guy you think is some kind of Typhoid Mary,” says Evan.

  “He murdered a hundred thirty thousand people,” Anne says. Most of them are not dead, are in fact Infected, but it is all the same to her. “He’s a walking neutron bomb. He needs to die.”

  “Even if he did what you believe,” Evan ventures, “what’s the point of revenge?”

  “If he goes to Washington, he will infect the soldiers fighting there,” she tells them. “The military is our last hope. If they can’t retake the city, it will be over for us. The war will be over.”

  “How would we even find him?” Todd wants to know. “He could be anywhere.”

  “He’s heading southeast,” she says. “That was his heading when he left the camp. He knows the Army is in Washington, and might go there thinking someone can help him.”

  For the next hundred miles, a single east-west road cuts through the Cherokee Valley, linking up with the highway system just east of Morgantown. They will need to move fast, and hunt and catch him on this stretch of road.

  The survivors grow quiet, considering this.

  “We don’t know that for sure,” Evan says.

  Anne stands, wiping the gun oil on her hands onto her camo pants.

  “I’m leaving,” she adds. “You can do whatever you want.”

  The survivors shift uncomfortably at this news.

  “Anne, we need to talk about this,” Marcus growls.

  “No, we don’t,” she answers. “If you’re coming with me, we’re leaving on the bus in fifteen minutes. If none of you are, I’ll leave now and track him on foot on my own.”