The Killing Floor Read online

  Something blocks the sun; despite the heat of July, he feels a slight chill on his back. He takes a final drag on his cigarette and tosses it into the wind before turning to squint at the woman standing over him, the sun glaring around her head like a halo. Pain lances across his ribs, radiating from his wound.

  “You must be Anne,” he says, wincing. “You’re Anne, aren’t you?”

  The woman nods. She is five-five and dressed in a black T-shirt tucked into dark blue jeans. Two large handguns are holstered snugly against her ribs. A black baseball cap rides low over eyes glinting like cold steel. Her face is disfigured with fresh scars running down her cheeks like scabbed tears. A cloth pad is sewn over the right shoulder of her T-shirt, put there to absorb the recoil of her sniper rifle. She carries herself like a soldier but he knows the truth, which is that less than three weeks ago, Anne Leary was a suburban housewife with three small children. She and her people showed up at the end of the fight, buying them enough time to finish the demolition.

  If the PTA were a bandit army, Ray thinks, she’d fit right in. As its general. “Todd told me about you. How is the little pecker, anyway?”

  “Todd will be all right,” Anne says.

  “Where is he?”

  “On the bus. Sleeping. He doesn’t know.”

  Ray nods, running his hand over his handlebar mustache and stubble. It’s better Todd doesn’t. “He’s a—” He almost said Todd is a better man than him. He probably should have. The kid fought like a maniac during the battle. “He’s just a dumb kid. Take good care of him.”

  Ann unholsters one of her guns and taps her thigh with the barrel. Ray frowns.

  “So that’s how it is,” he says.

  “It’s just an offer.”

  “Of what, exactly?”

  “Mercy.”

  He snorts with laughter; Anne does not strike him as the merciful type. The woman stares down at him as if he is a block of wood. She knows he is infected. To her, he is not a real person anymore. All she sees is the organism in his blood. For his part, all he sees is a cold-hearted bitch all too happy to put a bullet in his head.

  On the other hand, it would be a mercy. He has a few hours at most to live and they promise to be insanely painful, culminating in the final horror of being eaten alive by the thing growing inside him.

  Bone cancer would be a pleasant death compared to what I got ahead of me. But a few hours of pain is still life. And living is still better than dying.

  “So that’s what I get for what I done here today?”

  It’s not fair.

  Anne shrugs. All of that does not matter. The only cure for the bug is death. The one choice you have, if you get one at all, is how you want to go.

  “I don’t want to die,” he tells her.

  “You’re already dead.”

  Anger burns in his chest. She reminds him of the busybody neighbour who always gave his mom a hard time about her dog barking. The upright citizen type who called the cops on him when they found him sleeping one off on the bus stop bench. A lifetime of judging and now this, the final insult.

  “Yeah? What about Ethan? Was he already dead too, when you shot him?”

  The woman winces.

  He feels a brief moment of triumph. That’s right: When it’s your friend, it’s not so easy to call them dead, Miss High and Mighty. The moment passes, and he finds he no longer cares. He turns and regards the vast blue sky and remembers something Paul, the chain-smoking preacher, said to him: The earth abides. The thought makes him feel warmly detached.

  “Do it, if that’s what you want,” he says. “I can’t stop you. In fact, I’m honestly too tired to give a shit.”

  Do it now, he prays. Do it before I change my goddamn mind.

  Ray tenses and waits for the gunshot to split his head open. The sky has never looked so blue. The muddy river flows deep under his feet. Birds chirp in distant trees. The earth abides: He tries to hold that thought and make it his last but his scalp starts to itch. He can almost taste the metal of the bullet coming out the front of his face, taking his teeth with it. The more he thinks about it, the more it fills him with mindless, screaming terror. In a moment, he will enter oblivion.

  The dead don’t even dream. They don’t even know they’re dead. They are a person and then they are nothing. Just meat.

  “No,” he moans, sobbing.

  Behind him, boots splash among the dead. Anne is leaving without a word.

  Ray exhales. He realizes he was not breathing. Mercy, indeed. He wonders why she did not go through with it, but it does not matter why. All that matters is he has a little more time. Time for what? He pulls another cigarette from his crushed pack and lights it with a cough. Time enough for one more smoke. Funny how he used to worry about lung cancer.

  Gunshots echo across the bridge, sending his heart lunging into his throat. The others who’d gotten infected are taking Anne up on her offer of mercy. He hears the rest of the survivors piling their gear and casualties into the truck beds. They will not let the monsters take their dead. The bodies will be buried in a special place where nothing will be able to dig them up and eat them.

  Soon, Ray will be alone with the hundreds of Infected still crowding the edge of the shattered bridge, growling and reaching for him with outstretched hands. Behind them, smoke blackens the horizon, where heat waves ripple into the sky as Pittsburgh continues to give up its ghost.

  Everything is busy becoming something else.

  For him, the change will happen soon.

  ♦

  The convoy of heavy vehicles drives away. Ray wanted them to leave, but now feels tired and lonely. Around him, the dying have stopped moving, congealing into a single rigid mass. It is hard to distinguish individuals among the piles of torn and mangled bodies. He sees a hairy wrist with an expensive watch, and suppresses the urge to lift it. It has no value to him now other than to remind him he is running out of time.

  The sun hangs low in the sky. Tonight, the real monsters will arrive, sniffing the air, and eat the dead. He wants to be somewhere else when they come. His instincts tell him to seek out a private place to curl up and die.

  He works his way onto his hands and knees, gasping at the pain in his side. The puncture site has swollen to the size of a grapefruit, waiting patiently to be born. Behind him, the Infected on the other side of the torn bridge stop clawing and hissing and begin to moan. He reaches his feet through sheer willpower, hugging his throbbing ribs, and sees the Infected reach out to him as if pleading.

  “What the hell?” he says. He finds this raw display as unnerving than their constant rage.

  A distant monster bellows like a foghorn, reminding him that not all of the children of Infection wear human faces.

  Get out of here, his instincts warn. Even now, he obeys the will to survive. If the juggernauts find him, they will grind him into paste and suck the blood from the remains.

  Ray staggers among the bodies, trying to keep his footing. He finds a rifle lying on the ground, picks it up and peers through the scope, aiming at a woman wearing the shreds of a nightgown. He wonders if it still works.

  One way to find out—

  The rifle fires with a metallic crack. The back of the woman’s head explodes, splashing the Infected behind her with smoking pieces of bone and brain. The shell casing rings on the asphalt. The woman crumples to the ground, rolls in a tangle of limbs, and tumbles into the river.

  “That was for Ethan,” he says, certain now he is holding what was the teacher’s rifle. Ray hardly knew the man, but they fought together on the bridge, and Ethan became infected covering him and the others as they fell back to fire the charges and destroy the bridge.

  He detaches the magazine and counts three bullets. He hopes it will be enough to get him to Steubenville and into a nice soft, clean bed to lie on and die. He sneezes on the puff of gun smoke and swears at the shock of pain arcing through his chest.

  “Kill all you bastards,” he mutters.

/>   His mother’s voice: You do what you think is best, Ray.

  “Damn straight.”

  The Infected reach out to him, moaning and wailing, their eyes glimmering in the growing twilight. Come back, they seem to say. Don’t go just yet. Ray coughs and spits a gob of black phlegm. It is easy to forget sometimes they were once average people. That they were loved.

  The foghorn call booms across the dead landscape, closer now, sending a jolt of adrenaline through his system. Time to go. Now.

  He starts walking. It is difficult to move; the right side of his ribcage feels like a giant fishhook is stuck in it and someone is trying to reel it in. The cancerous grapefruit throbs hotly, continuing its relentless growth.

  He carries a special strain of the bug. He was not bitten; he was stung.

  Some of the Infected do not look like people. The only way to describe them is to call them monsters. One particularly horrible species of these things, called a hopper by most people because of their oddly articulated legs allowing them to leap high into the air—but also going by the names jumper, imp, goblin and humper—stung him during the fight on the bridge. He imagines trying to explain it to Tyler Jones back at the Camp Defiance police station, where he worked as sergeant of Unit 12.

  Well, Tyler, think of a whining hairless monkey the size of a German shepherd tearing you a new asshole and then fucking it with a syringe full of acid.

  And that was just the beginning. The injected material immediately got busy converting his cells to start another hopper growing right out of his rib, like Adam making Eve.

  Congratulations, Ray. You’re going to be a daddy. And when it’s born, it will eat what’s left of you. At that point, you’ll be so drained, all you will be strong enough to do is watch.

  Is this really worth surviving for?

  Breathing hard, he staggers off the bridge and stares blankly at the outskirts of Steubenville: several white buildings, houses, gas stations, distant smokestacks and church steeples under a dimming sky. From here, the town has no visible scars from the epidemic. No charred homes half burned to the ground, no abandoned wrecks of vehicles, no piles of corpses drawing flies in the heat. The only oddity is the eerie quiet, the lack of any living human. Nonetheless, he feels watched. The waning summer sun casts long shadows across the features of this ghost town. He hobbles along the street, passing under dead traffic lights, tears streaming down his face, driven by a need to survive he no longer understands.

  Goodbye, sun.

  The blue house calls to him. It reminds him of his mother’s house back in Cashtown. This house, he decides, will be a good place to die.

  ♦

  Ray tries the front door. Locked. The garage stands open, but its door is also locked. He limps to the side of the house, stumbling over a garden hose sitting in the tall grass like a patient snake, and finds an open window over an overgrown flowerbed. All he has to do is tear out the mesh and pull himself up and over—something he’s done at least a few times during his long career as an asshole—but he wonders if he has the strength to do it now. As if sensing his ambition, the monster growing from his side pulls against his ribcage, warning him to stay put.

  Don’t rock the boat, mister, he can picture it saying, or I’ll suck one of your lungs through your ribs.

  “Shut the fuck up,” he tells it.

  Ray returns to the garage and drags out a short ladder, which he props against the window. Even with its aid, his progress is slow and agonizing. By the time he steps gingerly onto the floor of the house’s kitchen, he is drenched in sweat and has given the growth in his side a full-fledged malevolent personality, something other than God to bargain with.

  He needs water. The tap in the sink produces nothing but a single constipated groan. He eyes the refrigerator warily and decides not to open it. Its door is plastered with kids’ drawings, a shopping list and a calendar filled with scribbled appointments and X’s leading up to the day of the epidemic. The day all calendars stopped.

  “Damn it,” he says, rubbing his eyes. He left his rifle outside, propped against the wall, like the idiot in a horror movie that everyone yells at. There goes his suicide option. His face feels hot against his hand. Fever. His body trembles as his energy drains out of him and the simple act of standing becomes tiring.

  “Ray?” a voice calls from behind the wall. “Is that you home?”

  “Who’s there?” he whispers.

  “Ray?”

  “Whoever you are, please don’t mess with me.”

  The ghostly shape floats out of the gloom of the dining room, a giant woman in a white nightgown, her short hair mussed from sleep.

  Ray blinks. “Mom? What are you doing here?”

  “I’m so glad you’re home, sweetie.”

  “Are you a ghost?”

  His mother laughs. “Of course I ain’t a ghost.”

  “Mom, you’ll never guess what I did.”

  His mother checks out the kitchen, wearing a sad frown. “Does it smell musty in here? This place needs a good cleaning. So much dust.”

  “I’m a cop now. A real cop.”

  “So much work to do—did you say you’re a police officer now?”

  “That’s right, Mom. At the refugee camp.”

  “Oh,” she says with a worried expression. “Well, you do what you think is best.”

  His smile falters. “No, Ma, listen. We just blew up the Veterans Bridge. The Infected were coming out of Pittsburgh because of the fire, and we had to blow the bridge to stop them from crossing over and coming after the camp. I volunteered. I was one of the few who survived.”

  “Oh,” his mother says again, touching her face. “Whatever you think is best, Ray.”

  “Stop saying that!” he roars. The creature inside him awakens and turns over, pulling at his internal organs. The shock strikes his body like lightning. He wakes up on the floor curled into a ball, still screaming. “Don’t say that to me anymore!”

  Several monstrous foghorns blast in unison outside, one of them close. The house trembles from the vibrations. The windows shiver in their frames. Glasses and plates rattle in the cupboards. A distant car alarm honks.

  His shouting expended the last of his energy, but broke the sudden delirium. Mom’s not here. They put her in one of those mass graves outside of town. Mrs. Leona Young died during the Screaming, drowning in the bathtub as Ray slept one off downstairs in his basement apartment. So many people died during the Screaming that nobody could give his mother a proper burial. The public health department came to pick up her body for disposal in one of the mass graves the county dug outside of town. The health workers were unable to lift her three hundred pounds, and settled on dragging her from the house on a mattress. We’re going to need a bigger hole for this one, ha ha. Even in death, Leona could not find dignity.

  “Don’t give up on me, Momma,” he says, crawling out of the kitchen.

  Whatever he thought was best was never any good, but she loved him anyway. All that mother’s love, unconditional, abundant, wasted.

  The couch in the living room looks deep and inviting. Gritting his teeth, Ray starts his journey across the dusty-smelling carpet, pausing often to rest. He tries to spit, but his mouth is dry. Maybe I should just give it up. What does it matter where I die? But he makes it. He may have lived like a dog, but he does not intend to die like one. He pulls his body up onto the couch and sits gasping, his face burning with fever as his immune system wars against the invader in his blood. Outside, the light is failing fast. Night is falling for the last time on Ray’s world. Time enough for one last smoke, and then good night and good luck. He puts a wilted cigarette between his lips and lights it, staring out the big picture windows at the empty street outside.

  Ray looks around, surprised to see no TV. He notices an unopened can of beer on the end table, hiding in plain sight, and blinks away a tear.

  “Merry fucking Christmas,” he says.

  He opens the beer and smells it. Sips it. Pours so
me on the bulge in his shirt.

  “You like that, you little bastard?”

  The growth throbs in response.

  The brew is warm and a little flat and not his brand but it is the best beer he ever drank in his life. Finding an unopened beer is almost enough to make him believe in a kind and merciful God. After savoring a few sips, he chugs half of it and belches.

  The can falls from his hand to spill foaming onto the carpet.

  “Get out of here,” he whimpers, waving his good arm. “Go. Git.”

  The picture windows are filled with Infected. They stand motionless, peering in with dark eyes, their breath steaming the glass.

  Why don’t they attack?

  “Leave me alone,” he cries. “Just let me die in peace.”

  Are they real, or am I seeing things again?

  Ray curls into a ball on the couch and closes his eyes, pressing a pillow against his face.

  Lord, have mercy, he prays. Don’t let them eat me.

  As he loses consciousness, he begins to change.

  Outside, the Infected scream in the dark, slapping their hands against the glass.

  Todd

  The convoy grinds west along U.S. Route 22 with the headlights off, navigating by moonlight. Near the front of the battered yellow school bus leading the convoy, the boy huddles against Anne’s shoulder, her leather jacket draped over his body, lulled into a gentle doze by the droning engine. Three weeks ago, he was acing tests and dodging bullies in high school; now he is a veteran fighter in a war that is just getting started but has already changed him. Some of the other survivors weep in the dark. Outside, the Infected suffer their own pain. He can hear them wailing in the trees, mourning the lost world, until falling silent one by one as sleep overtakes them.

  Pressed against the warmth of Anne’s body, Todd feels safe.