The Infection ti-1 Read online

  “We all look up to you,” Paul says. “If things get really bad, we all look to you to tell us what to do. And even if we think you’re wrong, we still do it. Because we believe.”

  Anne clasps her metal canteen onto her webbed gun belt.

  Todd watches her closely. “Where are you going, Anne?”

  Paul says, “But there are some things you don’t get to decide. Like who stays and who goes. You don’t get to make that decision. It’s not up to you.”

  Todd adds, “Why can’t we get out of this ash and make some plans? We need a plan.”

  Anne squints up at Paul’s face, sizing him up.

  “I’m going to take a walk,” she says, picking up her scoped rifle. “You’re in charge.”

  She begins walking towards the distant trees.

  “I wouldn’t do that by yourself,” Paul says.

  “You’re not me,” she says.

  “When are you coming back?” Todd asks nervously.

  Anne ignores them, marching with a purposeful gait that takes her onto the highway. In the distance, coming and going, she sees tiny figures moving along the road. The only vehicles are abandoned wrecks, their doors hanging open. Her ears still ring painfully from the screaming monster that attacked them.

  She needs to be alone for a while. She relishes the sudden sense of space.

  They are all going insane one day at a time and each of them—at different times, depending on the individual—will crack under the stress, she knows. This can take many forms. And if one of them cracks, that person could put them all at risk. Like Ethan. He suffered some sort of breakdown and endangered all of them. The man already has a bad habit of firing his rifle with his eyes closed. He is simply not as cool as the others in a fight. Anne was willing to overlook these things, as Ethan has good instincts that warn them about obtuse threats such as the tank firing on them and the worm monster having a second head. He also came up with the idea of the Molotov cocktails. He makes a real contribution. But if he is cracking up, he will be a liability to them. He will take up space in the Bradley, consume scarce resources; worse, he will not cover their backs.

  Then they will have to make a tough choice as a group. Anne would rather not wait until people get killed before that decision is made. If it were up to her, the man would have been left behind at the hospital last night. Which would have been sad. But necessary.

  About a mile down the road, oily black smoke billows from a burning vehicle in the middle of the highway’s westbound lanes. She peers into her scope and sees a pair of olive green vehicles, one a Humvee with its headlights on and behind it, a military flatbed truck, its cab on fire and pumping smoke. Anne squints, trying to see more, but everything is blanketed in ash. Visibility is steadily diminishing. Across the landscape, tons of ash continue to flutter to the earth in drifting clouds of black snowflakes, rapidly turning into a hellish blizzard swirling through the trees and darkening the sky.

  Anne slings the rifle onto her shoulder, digs her hands into her pockets, and begins walking west.

  Sarge and Paul and the other survivors are getting sentimental, she knows. They are getting to know each other. Becoming friends, even. They are forgetting that being sentimental is a luxury at a time like this. They are forgetting that the only reason they have this luxury is because they have been tough as nails. Because they all pull their weight.

  She has a sense that the others are leaving her behind. But they are not moving forward. They are regressing. They are becoming what they were before the world ended.

  Anne cannot go back.

  As she approaches the Humvee, she shrugs the rifle into her hands and approaches more cautiously, the weapon held in the firing position.

  She almost trips over the first body. There are four dead soldiers sprawling on the ground amid broken weapons and scattered empty shell casings, coated with soot. Their heads are eerily missing. Something decapitated them and left the rest for the birds.

  Inside the Humvee, a tangle of voices compete for expression across the ether, gradually resolving into a single urgent female voice, Patriot 3-2, Patriot 3-2, this is Patriot, how copy, over? The radio blasts white noise for ten seconds. Then the message repeats.

  Something rustles in the trees, sighing.

  ♦

  Wendy tramps numbly through the ash along the road, surveying the hellish gray landscape warped by shimmering heat waves. The giant wall of smoke continues to rise over the smoldering ruins of Pittsburgh like a distant storm. Heavy particulates flow steadily up into the sky, riding pulses of heat. The highway races east in a long straight line that dissolves into the smoky haze. Figures toil in the distance—refugees, probably, fleeing the inferno. Tiny headlights glimmer in the ash fall. She wonders what it would be like to lie down in the warm soot in the gulley below the guard rail and surrender herself to the earth. Philip did that, she remembers. He was tough as nails but one day he saw a Wall Street Journal with the wrong date and sat in the ashes and that was that. He had become numb, too. He could not handle seeing his world die. When you find yourself envying the dead, you are not long for it.

  Stopping at the hospital was a mistake, she knows. They invested their hopes in its promises, believing they found a place where they could at last feel safe. But that is not the world they live in. All of those hopes—of living instead of barely surviving, of having some sort of future after the end of Infection, of being able to dream again—were blindly and cruelly crushed. In this world, giant faceless things haunt abandoned buildings and duel with armored fighting vehicles in the dark. In this world, entire cities burn to the ground and everything you ever knew and loved is converted into tons of ash floating on the upper atmosphere. In this world, the children are dead. It is best not to hope in this world. It is best to keep moving and never stop.

  The only thing giving her strength is that brief moment of contact she experienced with Sarge last night. The memory of that contact is still burning in her chest. She had gone into his room on impulse intent on dropping a hint, maybe flirting a little: I see you, she wanted to let him know. You see me and I see you, too. She found herself kissing him and falling into blissful nothingness. She told herself that the world was ending and love was in very short supply and so you had to grab it where and when you could find it. Wendy and Sarge were made of the same stuff, she thought; that is what attracted her to him. He is a soldier without an army, a centurion still fighting even though his legion is dead; she is a cop in a lawless land. Then she slept in his arms for a short time and had never felt safer. It amazes her how just a simple man could make her feel that safe in a world this dangerous.

  Wendy begins to pass a motley group of refugees, mostly young men and women, some of them wrapped in blankets, others carrying backpacks and umbrellas, some decked out in goggles and respirators. All of them are armed with knives and crowbars and baseball bats and even makeshift spears. The soot is beginning to form a paste in her mouth, a grit between her teeth. She spits and wishes she had thought to bring along a canteen.

  “Hello,” she says, eyeing them curiously. “You all right?”

  The people ignore her, walking by in a daze, their hair and shoulders covered in gray-white ash.

  “You’re going the wrong way,” a man says, flashing gray teeth.

  One of the women notices her badge and belt and asks her if she is a cop.

  “Where are we supposed to go?” the woman says.

  Wendy pauses to spit out her gum, which has become gristly with dust. The woman watches it fall into the cinders with longing.

  “My advice would be to keep going west,” Wendy tells her. “Get as far away from Pittsburgh as you can.”

  “You mean there’s no rescue station on this road?”

  A man with a bleeding ear shouts, “ARE YOU FROM THE FEMA CAMP?”

  “I don’t know of any FEMA camp, sir.”

  “WHAT?”

  “If it’s not on this road, where is it?” the woman says, her
voice edged in panic.

  A small crowd is gathering. The people stare at her with a mixture of hope and resentment and shock, shivering in the heat. The man who shouted stumbles, briefly disoriented, and then shouts again, “THERE’S NO HELP AHEAD? WE’RE ON OUR OWN?”

  “I don’t know of any rescue station or FEMA camp anywhere. I’m not here in any official capacity. I’m with another group of people leaving the city after the fire.”

  “We lost everything,” the woman pleads. “We have no food. Some guys with guns back there on the road took the last drop of water I had. Where am I supposed to go?”

  “Where were you cops when those monsters were ripping my family apart?” a woman says, her eyes glazed with fever. Most of her hair and eyebrows have been burned off and the right side of her face is covered by a filthy, bulky bandage. “That’s what I want to know. I called 911 and nobody came. Nobody came and now Edward is dead. Edward and Billy and Zoe and little Paul. Now you show up and try to tell us what to do? Where the hell were you, lady?”

  The crowd presses in, angry, its slim hopes dashed and its resentments stoked.

  “I’m sorry,” Wendy says. She wants to explain her situation—that her precinct was overrun, that she is on her own, that she cannot help them—but these people do not care. She is a symbol to them. They look at her with hungry, feral eyes gleaming from the folds of bundles of rags tied around their heads. They cough into their fists loudly, struggling for enough air to scream.

  “Give me something,” a woman hisses, reaching out for Wendy’s face.

  Wendy takes a step backward and places her hand over her pepper spray dispenser. She senses a dangerous line forming—knows it is there because it is about to be crossed. The crowd closes in, muttering.

  A man wearing a cowboy hat and carrying a walking stick marches past and yells, “Hey, now! What are you bugging that girl for? There ain’t no rescue coming and there ain’t no police. She ain’t no cop. Get over it.”

  Wendy bristles, but before she can say anything, she hears the echoes of gunshots back in the smoky haze. All of them turn toward the noise, flinching. A moment ago they were menacing her but the fact is they are terrified and running on fumes.

  “There you go, officer,” the man says, still walking. “There are a couple of guys back there with a truck robbing people and shooting anybody who fights back. You want to be a cop? Do something about it.”

  ♦

  Ethan follows Sarge past the Bradley and pauses with his mouth hanging open in awe. The rig looks like it lost a brick fight. The welded aluminum armor is pockmarked with dents and scratches. Several plates on its side are missing.

  Sarge turns and sees him lagging behind.

  “You sure you’re okay?”

  “I could use a drink of water.”

  “I’ll get you water after we do this thing, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Anne can be a little rough.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Ethan says, meaning it. The truth is he feels completely numb. He does not feel pain. He does not feel anything. “What happened to your tank?”

  “Those plates are explosive reactive armor,” Sarge tells him. “It protects the vehicle by exploding outward when something comes at it trying to explode inward, canceling it out.”

  What could have hit the Bradley with that much force?

  “What happened last night?” Ethan says.

  “There was a fire,” Sarge tells him. “See all the ash starting to rain down on us? That’s what’s left of Pittsburgh—west of the Monongahela and the Ohio, anyhow.”

  “What happened to the vehicle?”

  “The gates of hell opened. If we hadn’t dropped smoke, I don’t think we would have made it. That thing was kicking the shit out of my rig. Come on.”

  Ethan shakes his head in amazement. That thing, Sarge said. This was not the average Infected and probably not a worm either. The commander obviously had no idea what he had been fighting in the dark. As Ethan suspected, there are other children of Infection, probably an entire family of monstrosities. If there is something out there that can take on an American armored fighting vehicle, Ethan believes, the human race might have to give up its claim on the planet.

  He has often speculated about what could have caused the pandemic. As an educated man, he refuses to believe the cause is supernatural. Infection is spread by a virus, but a virus does not explain these bizarre mutations. In the days following the Screaming, scientists were speculating about a nanotech weapon that escaped the lab. Could nanotechnology create such monsters?

  Ethan once again finds himself entertaining an alien colonization theory. Consider an alien race on a distant world that wants to propagate itself across the galaxy. Instead of spaceships, it sends seedlings out across the cosmos, which eventually rain down on Earth to colonize the resident species’ DNA, mutating the natives into adaptations of the alien species and its ecology. The creatures are at first sickly because they are still adapting to Earth’s environment. They eat the dead but are starving because their alien digestive systems cannot extract nutrition from it. While they turn the dominant species against itself through Infection, they burrow into the darkest spaces in abandoned buildings and adapt and multiply. Over time, they grow stronger until they eliminate the dominant species and complete the conquest of their adopted world. It makes sense, he reasons. Why else would they target our children for immediate extermination?

  Or perhaps the aliens are indeed coming in spaceships, but they are terraforming the planet before the ships arrive, eliminating the resident species in the process. Which means humanity is not fighting aliens, but the wildlife of the aliens’ home world. These things are repulsive but they are not evil in the sense that they want to hurt humans purely out of malice. They are hunting people for food. In one sense, they might as well be millions of hungry lions roaming the streets, hunting and eating people simply to survive.

  The worst part is the human race will probably never truly understand what killed it.

  His family needs him more than ever. He will keep looking for them. He wonders if this is why he is so calm, that he has surrendered what is left of his sanity to the delusion they are alive.

  I’ll keep searching for you, Mary. I’ll never stop looking.

  They approach a figure sitting on the ground propped against a gas pump. The man is pale, underweight, his cheeks sunken, his eyes dark and bruised. His arms rest withered and useless at his sides. Ethan suddenly recognizes him as the driver—what is left of him, anyway. The gunner kneels next to him, trying to give him water.

  Sarge is saying, “You’re smart, Ethan. I’m betting you can figure out a way to fix him.”

  Ducky Jones lost thirty pounds since Ethan saw him the night before. The man is almost visibly wilting in front of him, coughing feebly, his breath rapid and shallow. His dark, intelligent eyes flicker at Ethan with a mixture of fear and hope. There is still a man in there.

  Ethan holds his gaze respectfully for several seconds, then looks down at the revolting thing that protrudes from his hip like something out of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not.

  ♦

  Todd enters the truck stop cautiously, violating Anne’s standing rule of never going anywhere alone. Something could attack him and he would be vulnerable. Anne’s rules suddenly mean a whole lot less to him today, however. The monster changed the game last night. How can they hope to survive with horrors like that out there hunting them? Like most victims of bullies, Todd is highly sensitive to what other people are feeling, and the best word he can think of to describe the mood right now in the group as a whole is deranged. Deranged and black, raw, angry. In other words, morale is shit. They are becoming people who do not care, people who are losing hope and otherwise have nothing left to lose. Damaged goods.

  They are close to giving up.

  Inside the lobby, he has a choice of restaurant, convenience store or public restrooms. As much as he would like to take a privat
e dump on a real toilet, there is no way he is going into a public restroom by himself. The store looks interesting. The shelves have been rifled but whoever did it left most of the stuff behind. He might find some good loot in here. He remembers that Wendy wants a pair of toenail clippers.

  His nerves are crawling with the oppressive feeling that the group is falling apart. Anne and Wendy wandered off to who knows where, Paul is emptying the Bradley’s guts into the ash under the pretense of organizing their supplies, and the driver is dying at the fuel island. Anne was ready to blow Ethan’s head all over the pavement. What about Todd? Nobody wants to listen to him. They obviously think of him as just a kid. But he will not abandon the group. He feels a very strong loyalty to it. Groucho Marx once quipped that he would never want to be a member of a club that would have him as a member. Todd wants to be a member of the club almost entirely because they offered him membership. America feels like a distant dream. This tiny tribe is his nation now. These people are not mere tools used to help collect food and stand guard while he sleeps. They are much more than that. They are something like family to him.

  It is true that as individuals, while he trusts the other survivors and feels comfortable with them, he does not know them well, even after days of fighting together against terrible odds. All anybody talks about is how they plan to survive the next ten minutes. It is not like people are going to open up during the apocalypse about their hobbies or where they went for vacation last summer or their favorite flavor of ice cream. They have intense flashbacks, but never talk about their separate pasts from the Time Before. The past right now seems less real than the demon that attacked them last night. The past is also too painful to recall willingly, bringing to mind too many lost things. Todd likes the other survivors, but his interactions with them, while intimate, have been largely superficial. He feels his deepest connection with the group itself—feels safest, in fact, interacting with the others through the medium of the group.