The Killing Floor Read online

  “Where have you been?” he whispers.

  She does not answer; he wonders if he spoke the words or only thought them.

  “Going back and forth on the earth, and walking up and down it,” Anne finally says.

  “That sounds like a quote. Who said that?”

  “Satan,” Anne tells him. The angel of light who was cast out of heaven for hubris.

  Todd used to coolly remark the apocalypse beat high school, but now realizes how stupid it was to say such a thing to people who lost everything. For most of his life, he had intelligence but little experience; he envied the natural gravitas of adults, whose sense of themselves ran deep with time. Now he understands. He senses the pain behind Anne’s answer. She is no longer just a mother figure for him. She is a woman battling her own demons.

  “Why did you leave us?”

  Anne fought hard to get Todd and the others to the refugee camp, riding out of Pittsburgh in the back of a Bradley fighting vehicle, only to disappear just as they found it.

  “My family died,” she says. “They died because of me. I don’t get to come back.”

  “But you did. You found us at the bridge.”

  “Blind luck,” she tells him. “I was just passing through with some other survivors. I’m their guardian angel now. In any case, that’s not what I meant.”

  “I know what you meant,” he whispers.

  Something large collides with the bus, with a metallic boom followed by a flurry of screams. Todd clutches at Anne, wide eyed and gasping, his arteries turned into wires carrying electric current instead of blood. The monster snorts like a giant pig, grotesquely loud, its hooves clashing on the asphalt. The driver roars, stomping on the gas. Todd feels the sudden pull of gravity as the bus lurches hard to the left. The hooves strike the side of the bus, making the entire vehicle shiver. The boy buries his face against Anne’s shoulder, biting her jacket. Then the thing falls behind, its hooves clattering, shrieking in the dark.

  “What about me?” he cries. “Do I get to come back?”

  Anne shushes him and strokes his hair until he regains control of his breathing and his heart stops hammering in his chest. It’s all right, the voices shout in the dark. We’re all right now. What about the others? They’re still behind us, thank God. Someone else says, What was that thing? What was it? Nobody answers. Nobody talks about the monsters. To talk about them is to give them your power. You start a conversation ready to fight to survive and end it ready to give up. Todd smells tobacco burning as survivors light cigarettes in the dark. As the others settle into an uneasy silence, Anne tells him, in a warm whisper close to his ear, a story about a woman who was a simple housewife—a loving mother, a devoted wife, a respected neighbor—who had everything until suddenly she didn’t. When Infection arrived, she refused to accept what was happening. She sent her husband out into the storm of violence on a fool’s errand. She left her kids with a neighbor to go search for her husband and realized, too late, she had left them to die. The woman wanted to die herself but could not overcome her instinctive need to survive. And so she made her survival a mission—a mission of vengeance.

  Todd listened closely, his body slowly uncoiling as he relaxed, but now says nothing. He does not ask her if that is how she got the scars on her face. Her story makes sense to him. He spent two weeks with her in the back of the Bradley. She has the fury of Captain Ahab—if Moby Dick were a virus. Most people are just trying to get by these days, just trying to survive. Anne is at war. Her enemy is one of the tiniest forms of life on the planet.

  “Is that why you hate them so much?” he says.

  “Who?”

  “The Infected, obviously.”

  “I don’t hate them, Todd.”

  “Never mind,” he says, frowning.

  “Todd, those poor people deserve nothing but our sympathy.”

  “Then why do you like killing them so much?”

  “Is that really what you think?”

  “Well,” he says.

  “I enjoy nothing about it. But they’re already dead. The second the bug takes them, they stop being people. Everything that makes them who they are dies. As far as I’m concerned, they’re the walking dead. It’s not the people I kill. It’s the virus controlling them. That’s my enemy.”

  He does not understand. The Infected are evil, yes, he reasons, but they wear the faces of our loved ones. Perhaps there is something of those people left inside. Even if they only remember themselves when they dream, does this not still make them human?

  When he shot Sheena X in the face on the first night of the outbreak, he was not killing a virus, he was killing his friend. When Anne executed Ethan on the bridge at the end of the battle, how could she not see the man, but just the virus controlling him?

  “Thank God,” the driver shouts back at the survivors, switching on the headlights. “It’s the camp! We made it!”

  Todd tightens his hold on Anne. “Are you coming this time?”

  “For a while,” she tells him.

  “Can I stay with you?”

  “Todd, I’m going to get back on the road as soon as I can scrounge up a few things. You know what it’s like out there. There is no life. It’s no place for you.”

  I want to be safe, he wants to tell her, but does not know how to explain how he feels. He knows he will be safer in the camp. But he feels safer on the road, close to his fears.

  Even after everything, he already feels its call to stay out here among the monsters.

  Get on the road and keep moving, and they will never get you.

  He remembers Sarge, the battle-hardened commander of the Bradley, falling apart during the orientation session at the camp. He stopped moving, and it nearly broke him.

  Even the strongest sometimes are not strong enough to fight themselves.

  Anne shakes her head. “All right, Todd. If you don’t feel right tomorrow, come and find me and we’ll talk.”

  Todd nods and sits up, sniffing and wiping his eyes with the palm of his hand.

  “Camp Defiance,” the driver says, pointing.

  The sprawling camp looms ahead, the ragged outline of its makeshift walls and watchtowers silhouetted by the warm glow of searchlights and thousands of cooking fires. The warm breeze carries the sound of cheering crowds. Random snatches of machine gun fire. The smell of wood smoke. Overhead, helicopters roar through the night.

  Home, Todd thinks. I want to go home. Where is home?

  ♦

  The convoy grinds to a halt in front of the gates, churning dust that swirls like angry ghosts in the headlight beams. A machine gun rattles on the wall, tracer rounds spitting toward the distant trees. The sound of cheering grows in volume, responding to a voice squawking through a megaphone. The bass line of a pop song vibrates through the vehicle. Despite the notes of celebration, at night the camp has the atmosphere of a siege slowly being lost. Blinding white light floods the bus and then fades out. The gates open with a bang of gears.

  “Show time,” Anne says to Todd, nudging him with a wink.

  Todd smiles at the inside joke. Sarge always said that before a scavenging mission.

  “Welcome to FEMAville, Anne,” he says.

  This is the place he fought the horde to save. The place for which Paul and Ethan died.

  The vehicle rolls into the compound and comes to a stop, the rest of the convoy stacking up behind it. The driver turns off the engine and opens the door, allowing the omnipresent camp smells of cooking food and open sewage to waft in. Bulbs on wires strung between wooden poles light the area, surrounded by moths. Music blares from a speaker mounted on one of the poles in a tangle of thick wires: Queen’s “We Will Rock You.” Todd peers out the window and blinks in surprise at the cheering faces. Holy crap. They’re cheering for us.

  A military officer climbs aboard the bus and speaks to the driver, who shakes his head, turns in his seat, and points at Anne. The officer approaches, introduces himself as Captain Mattis, and fires questions
, his voice barely audible over the roar: Lieutenant Patterson? Sergeant Hackett? Sergeant Wilson?

  Dead, dead and trapped on the other side of the river, Anne tells him.

  “Too bad about Wilson.”

  “He’ll make out all right,” Anne says. She knows Mattis is noting the loss of the Bradley more than its commander.

  “So who are you, then?”

  “Just passing through with some other people. We heard the shooting and helped out.” She tilts her head toward Todd. “He made it. Some engineers, some National Guard. That’s it.”

  “The mission was a success, though,” Mattis says.

  Anne nods. “The Infected won’t be crossing that bridge.”

  “Outstanding.”

  “Is that what all this is about?”

  The Captain sighs. “Not exactly. The good citizens are celebrating because the military has arrived. Army units are dropping at refugee camps around the East Coast. A single company showed up and now everyone thinks it’s going to be over in a few days and they can go home.”

  “It’s about time the Army pulled its weight, in any case,” Anne says.

  Mattis smiles and shrugs. As a military man, he can say no more.

  “People at the camp know what you did, though,” he tells her. “Word’s been going around all night about it. It’s a day of wonders.”

  “It’s the worst day of my life,” Todd says.

  “You saved all of us,” Mattis goes on, holding out a box. “You’re giving these people hope, son. That’s an important thing. Make sure you get your ribbon.”

  Anne holds one up and laughs, startling Todd, who never heard her laugh even once in all their time together.

  “It’s a dog show ribbon,” she says.

  “Best of breed, to be exact,” Mattis admits with a smile.

  Todd stares at the purple and gold ribbon clutched in his hand. He can hardly speak; it’s ludicrous. “What the heck is this?” he demands.

  “We can’t pay you. We don’t have anything to pay you with. All we can do is try to honor you. Everyone at the camp knows about what you did and that you are wearing these ribbons. You’re going to have a hundred and thirty thousand people treating you like a hero for the next few weeks. Extra food, extra showers, you name it.”

  Anne takes the ribbon from his hand and pins it to his T-shirt. Mattis stands back and salutes.

  “Welcome home, son.”

  One by one, the survivors stagger off the bus and are welcomed by the cheering crowd. They huddle together, blinking tears. The more the people applaud, the more the survivors cry. Someone whistles and Todd flinches. He keeps seeing gray faces lunge out of the crowd. Faces of the Infected howling for his throat, spraying spittle rich with virus.

  No, no, no. You’re way too young to be this screwed up, Todd old man, he tells himself. Yet it takes every bit of mental energy he has not to yank out his pistol and start shooting.

  “If you don’t feel right in the head tomorrow, come and find me,” Anne says. “I’ll be here.”

  “Wait,” Todd says, scanning the crowd. “Where’s Ray Young?”

  He turns back, but Anne is gone. And Ray is nowhere to be found among the sea of empty, grinning faces. Someone presses a warm can of beer into his hand and tells him to drink up.

  “Ray!” he cries.

  A girl walks out of the crowd. He catches a glimpse of her blue eyes and wild red hair before she cups his face in her hands and kisses him. The crowd applauds heartily and whistles, the sound blending with the roar of blood rushing through his ears.

  “Erin,” he gasps. “It’s you.”

  “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

  She takes his hand and leads him through the clamoring mob. Hands clap him on the back and seek out his to shake. He gives someone the can of beer. As they reach the rear of the crowd, they disappear into the darkness, navigating by the dim light of cooking fires. Erin appears to know the maze by feel alone.

  Todd can smell her on the breeze. His hand sweats against hers. She leans against him as they walk through the warm, humid night, and he becomes aware of her chest pressed against his arm. He remembers she does not wear a bra.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I’m taking you home, baby.”

  He wonders if he is hallucinating. He feels like he could sleep for days. Just a few hours ago, he was standing on the bridge in the sunlight, screaming for his friends, as it exploded in a blinding white flash. The monster charged, a giant thing covered in flailing trunks, each bellowing its deafening foghorn call. He and Ray stood their ground among the piles of dead, emptying their guns at the thing until it fell through the bottom of the world.

  “What’s wrong, baby?”

  Then he is back at Camp Defiance, walking among the shanties with this beautiful creature he thought he’d never see again.

  She asks him again if there is something wrong.

  “I don’t know,” he says.

  “You’re not hurt, are you?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I had to ask. You may not know this, but you’re, like, covered in blood.”

  “Oh,” he says, touching his chest. His shirt feels stiff as cardboard. His entire body hurts, but he does not believe anything is broken. “I didn’t know.”

  “You also smell like smoke and sour milk,” she laughs. “Come on.”

  Erin leads him into the small shack and lights two candles, revealing a bucket of water and a stack of towels on a blanket.

  “Take off your clothes,” she says.

  “I don’t have anything,” he tells her. “You took it all already.”

  “Do as I say, mister.”

  He obeys, peeling off his grimy shirt and tossing it into the corner. Then his boots and socks and pants. None of it is salvageable. He is going to have to burn all of it, and find more. Last, he tosses his gun belt and pistol on top of the pile.

  “Now lie down.”

  He stretches out his long, gangly body on the blanket. Erin dips a sponge into the foamy bucket, wrings it out, and gently rubs him down. Pure bliss.

  “Why did you come back?” he asks her. “You really hurt me.”

  Todd arrived at the camp with a bag full of DC-powered electronic gear, hoping to use it as capital to set up a trading business. Erin marked him, seduced him and robbed him. Reeling from the blow, he sought out Sarge and Wendy and signed up for the mission to destroy the bridge.

  “I’m sorry for what I did to you,” she says, blinking tears. “I didn’t know. What you did, going to that bridge. . . You’re an amazing boy. I really hoped you would make it back.”

  “My friends are dead,” he says.

  “Tell me about it.” She pulls her shirt up and over her head. “Tell me everything.”

  ♦

  The Infected shriek down at him, kicking and clawing with faces twisted by rage. The shotgun roars and their bodies explode in a shower of blood and smoking entrails.

  The deep voice booms: “Don’t you touch that boy!”

  He opens his eyes. Paul, the old reverend, stands over him, chambering another round and firing again. The Infected squeal and crumple in a wave in front of the blast.

  “Don’t you touch that boy, I said!”

  BOOM. Reload. BOOM. Bodies splash in piles onto the bloody roadway.

  The boy looks up at the Reverend through a blur of hot tears. The man’s grizzled face looms large, frowning. He grips the boy’s hand in his own, his eyes burning with worry and love.

  “You’re all right now, son. I’ll get you out of here.”

  A rumbling sound fills the air, the monster purring deep in its throat. The boy can feel it deep in his chest. The Reverend gasps, his eyes wide with sudden knowledge.

  “You all right, Rev?”

  The Reverend smiles sadly.

  “God bless you, Kid—”

  Paul lurches thirty feet into the air and into the chomping mouth.

  Todd screams.


  “I’ve got you, baby,” the girl says, hugging him from behind.

  Todd sits naked on the floor of his shack, arms wrapped around his knees, screaming.

  “It was just a dream,” Erin tells him. “Just a dream. You’re okay. See? Everything is fine.”

  He stops, panting for breath. Tears and snot stream down his face. His skin is slick with sweat and Erin’s body feels like fire against his back. Sunlight streams through cracks in the walls, illuminating the dust. The small shack feels like an oven.

  “What was your dream about?” she asks him.

  “I was being saved,” he says hoarsely, barely recognizing his voice as his own. He wipes his face with the back of his hand.

  “That sounds like a good dream.”

  His face twitches. He notes the symptom.

  “Not for the guy who saved me.”

  Todd tries to stand and sits back down with a grimace. Every muscle in his body is stiff and sore. His lungs seize from the smoke he inhaled during the fighting on the bridge, and he coughs loud and hard into his fist, just trying to breathe. His throat feels like it has been burned raw from smoke and screaming.

  “I’m glad I’m not alone,” he rasps, pulling on his glasses. The left lens is cracked.

  “Oh baby, I’m right here,” Erin tells him, squeezing hard.

  He did not mean her, but says nothing.

  “I have to go see Anne.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “One of my friends who made it.”

  Erin kisses the back of his neck. “Let’s stay in bed all day.”

  “No, I have to go.”

  “Come on, baby.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Then I’ll come with you.”

  “Erin, please.”

  She pushes away from him and pulls on her jeans. “Fuck it. I thought you liked me.”

  “I do like you,” he says, watching her nudity disappear with longing.

  If he had more energy, he would try to please her in some way, but he has none to spare. He stands, pulls on a clean pair of boxers, and buckles the gun belt around his waist.

  “You’re going out like that?”

  He drapes the blanket over his shoulders. “My clothes are contaminated with Infected blood. They shouldn’t even be in the camp. Put the ribbon on for me, okay?”