The Killing Floor Read online

  “I’ll wait for you,” she says, pinning it over his chest. “I’ll get us some lunch, okay?”

  Todd smiles. God, she’s beautiful. “That sounds perfect, Erin.”

  He steps outside and enters the mundane chaos of FEMAville. The air is so humid it is difficult to breathe. The smell of wood smoke sets off another coughing jag. Water glistens on the ground, evaporating in the sunlight. Hard rain came last night; he fell asleep to the sound of it drumming on the roof. His bare feet sink into soft, warm mud.

  First stop, latrine, then the showers.

  Paul flew through the air into the gaping mouth of the monster.

  Todd gasps, his heart racing. The dream, so vivid.

  He cannot figure one thing out. Why was Paul smiling?

  “Coffee?” says a voice.

  Todd is aware of everything. Dogs bark and military vehicles groan on the other side of the camp. A few boys play horseshoes, wagering cigarettes on the outcome, while a woman shouts at her children to be careful running. Someone chops firewood while someone else practices the harmonica. Two grinning men carry a large painting that Todd recognizes from the Andy Warhol Museum.

  “You want some coffee, buddy?”

  Todd focuses on the bearded man sitting on a plastic cooler, brewing a pot of coffee on a Coleman stove. His wife kneels on a tarp, filling plastic bottles from a rain collector.

  “Sure, thanks.”

  The man glances at his wife, who nods. “Want some sugar in it?”

  “That’d be great.”

  Todd accepts the mug of coffee and blows on it, savoring its aroma.

  “You look like you’re going somewhere,” the man tells him. “You can bring the mug back later, all right?”

  “Thank you,” he says again. The sweetened coffee is an incredible gift and this act of basic human kindness brings him close to tears.

  The bearded man nods to Todd’s ribbon. “No need to thank me.”

  “God bless you, boy,” the man’s wife says.

  God bless you, Kid—

  Todd takes a deep breath, gritting his teeth. His heart gallops in his chest. Is this what PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder—is like? The older survivors of the epidemic always talked about its symptoms, but he was never able to relate.

  Lying in the jaws of the beast, Paul stared into Todd’s eyes and smiled sadly.

  Even in death, he smiled. Why?

  Clouds drift in front of the sun, turning the world gray.

  ♦

  At the market, the traders give him new clothes and boots, rainproof poncho, handful of bullets, toothbrush, two packs of sugarless gum, three condoms and a plastic baggie filled with coffee.

  So this is what it’s like to be popular. Clean and clothed and eating cold spaghetti and meatballs from a can with a plastic fork, he starts to feel whole again. He always wanted to be popular. It’s a strange feeling.

  I wonder how fast it wears off.

  He remembers something Erin told him last night: We can make a life here. The hero fights the monster and gets the girl and the treasure. Perfect story, right? He wonders if Prince Charming also screams in the dark during the happily ever after, dreaming about his fight with the Dragon.

  His eyes wide with sudden knowledge—

  Paul knew he was going to die. The monster’s long, revolting tongue, studded with slimy suckers, had already gripped the Reverend’s ankle.

  And yet he smiled. In the air too. In the mouth of the beast.

  Paul: the man who loved God but feared death. Who loved his enemies as he killed them. Who tried to reconcile the forgiving, loving God of the New Testament with the apparent return of the judgmental, violent God of the Old. Who could not live without his wife even though Sara would have wanted more than anything for him to go on living.

  A fellow traveler of the thin line of survival, that limbo between living and dying. Torn between forces larger than himself, he gave himself to others, ultimately giving his life, and in doing so, welcomed death. With his wife now at last, either in heaven or oblivion; it did not matter which to him. Was this the peace the Reverend found? Could this be why he smiled? He had given up worrying whether he would ever see her again. All that mattered was they were together one way or the other. In the end, Paul welcomed his death.

  Todd wonders if he will ever love anyone as strongly as that. He wonders if he could ever love Erin so much. Before the bridge, he would have said he already did. After the bridge, he does not know. He doesn’t know much of anything. All he can think about is the road.

  He limps past dozens of shacks, each leaning on the next for support in the endless shantytown. People sit on lawn chairs watching over their children, cook, tend gardens, stack wood, stoke fires, hang laundry, gossip, trade. They fall silent as he passes. Chickens cluck in a series of pens, filling the air with the acrid smell of shit. Several men swear over a tractor coupled to a water tanker, both of which are stuck in the mud. A teenager pushes a wheelbarrow filled with plastic jugs, surrounded by smaller children splashing through puddles acting out the fight at the bridge, holding back the Infected onslaught while the engineers lay their charges.

  “On me!” one of the kids cries. “Come on, we’ll make our stand here!”

  Todd smiles at them, idly swatting a mosquito on his neck.

  “Are you one of those people from the bridge?”

  He turns and sees the teenager pushing the wheelbarrow, staring at him with something like awe. The kid is only younger than Todd by two years at most, filthy and dressed in rags. One of the many orphans of Infection.

  “No,” Todd says. “You are.”

  He unpins the ribbon, gives it to the surprised boy while the smaller children howl in disbelief, and walks into the compound adjacent to the gate, a hive of constant activity: salvage coming in, waste going out. A five-ton driven by men in bright yellow hazmat suits rolls through the gate, carrying corpses stacked in shiny black body bags. A squad of tired National Guard in olive green rainproof ponchos watches the truck leave, smoking and yawning and rubbing their eyes. Workers unload salvaged goods from a white pickup scarred with hundreds of tiny scratches made by fingernails and jewelry. Men fill out paperwork and hand over receipts. A large American flag hangs wetly from an overhead wire. This land is still the USA.

  He finds the bus parked between a Brinks armored car and a pickup truck with a cobwebbed windshield. Dressed in greasy gray coveralls, Anne bends over the engine, talking to a mechanic. Another man paints camouflage colors over the bright yellow skin. A woman scrubs the V-shaped snowplow mounted on the grill, a retrofit enabling the bus to slam into human beings and toss them broken into the nearest ditch. Todd notes the metal plates welded over the windows, creating slits useful as firing ports.

  Looks pretty ninja, he decides.

  Anne senses his approach and turns to watch him limp stiffly, like a zombie, across the mud. The mechanic, a giant of a man with long blond hair, tightens the grip on his wrench, scowling at him. He takes a step forward but is halted by Anne clicking her tongue.

  “Hello, Todd,” Anne says, wiping her hands on a rag.

  “Who are these guys?” he asks her, glancing nervously at the mechanic.

  “I guess you could call them my crew. Marcus here I brought with me. Evan and Ramona heard about me and came here. They don’t want to stay. They want to go back out.”

  “They call us Anne’s Rangers,” the mechanic tells him.

  Todd likes the sound of that. “I thought you said there’s nothing out there.”

  “I made a deal with Mattis,” Anne explains. “The Camp will supply us with diesel, weapons, some other things. We’ll find more survivors and bring them here. Run supplies and mail to the other camps. That sort of thing.”

  Todd nods. “That’s a good job for you.”

  “What about you? You staying, then?”

  “I want to go home.”

  Anne gives him a grim smile. “All right.”

  “
Is that okay with you?”

  “Marcus will get you some gear. Then rest. Tomorrow, we go back out. We can use you.”

  “Thank you, Anne.”

  The blond giant nods and extends his hand in welcome.

  Todd smiles as he shakes it and thinks, I always wanted to belong somewhere.

  Marcus

  He was a good mechanic and this got him steady work at auto repair shops. Mufflers, brakes and shock absorbers, mostly, plus body repair and painting. After his wife died, leaving him with two growing boys, he quit Sears Auto Center and got a job closer to home as a service technician at a Toyota dealership. He was welding when the Screaming swept through town.

  After hours of starting and stopping, swearing and leaning on his horn, Marcus pulled into the high school parking lot and lunged sweating from his truck. Inside, he pushed through the roar of red-faced parents and teachers and into the gym, where the survivors had laid the bodies of the fallen, students and teachers alike, in rows on the floor. Both Jack and Michael lay on their backs, their bodies still jerking in tiny spasms. He swept them up, one boy over each shoulder, and carried them to his truck. A teacher approached to challenge him but dodged aside after seeing the terrible expression on his face and his hands clenched into fists.

  On the way home, he listened to the radio. They were calling it a syndrome because nobody knew what the hell it was. There was a lot of talk about exploding head syndrome, frontal lobe epilepsy, nanotech terrorism. None of it made any sense. A doctor said some of the victims exhibited echolalia, the automatic repetition of sounds. His ears perked up at that. After arriving home and getting his boys into their beds, he told them he loved them, hoping to hear it said back to him.

  His cousin Kirsten, who worked as a nurse at the hospital, dropped by first thing in the morning to set up bedpans and intravenous tubes. After she left, Marcus could not cope with the empty, funereal silence and went to the liquor store, where he stood for hours in a line that went out the door and around the corner. Returning home, he found his boys lying in the exact same position he’d left them. He changed their bedpans and IV bags, exercised their limbs a little, gave them a quick sponge bath. When he moved Michael’s arm, he noticed his younger son had waxy flexibility, which he’d heard was another occasional symptom of the syndrome. Wherever he put the boy’s limbs, they stayed frozen in whatever position they were last left.

  This done, fighting tears, Marcus went back downstairs, poured a few fingers of Wild Turkey bourbon, topped it up with Coke and ice, and turned the TV on. A blowhard on the cable news was saying things like brain drain and national inventory and precipice.

  None of it made any sense to him. The world began to blur.

  Two days later, he heard shouting on the TV. The screamers were waking up, and they were attacking people. Nobody knew why. Apparently, if a screamer bit you, you caught the disease. Marcus watched Cleveland fall apart for an hour before realizing his kids had woken up as well. He could hear them stomping around upstairs.

  Still reeling with hangover, Marcus staggered to the foot of the stairs. He considered calling Kirsten, or maybe the cops, and felt ashamed. Why was he afraid? What was there to be afraid of? The boys were his own flesh and blood.

  He climbed the stairs slowly, one step at a time.

  “Jack,” he said when he reached the bedroom door. He felt out of breath; he could hardly speak. “Michael?”

  He heard snarling on the other side, fingernails scratching at the wood.

  “Are you guys okay?” Marcus whispered, suddenly scared of his own voice.

  Something large thudded against the wall on his left, making a picture jump off its hook and clatter to the floor. Moments later, something crashed against the door, making it shiver on its hinges, followed by more growling and pacing.

  Shit, Marcus thought, afraid to say anything. Terrified to even move. Even breathe. His body would not stop shaking. After a minute, he held up his trembling hand and stared at it as if it belonged to someone else.

  I’m afraid of my own sons, he realized. My sons. My own flesh and blood.

  It was like being afraid of yourself. They were a part of him.

  Even worse, he was afraid he would open the door and they would have hate in their eyes. That they would look at him as if they didn’t know him.

  In the end, he had no choice. He opened the door.

  “Boys? It’s your dad. I’m coming in now. Take it easy, okay?”

  Jack came at him first, hands splayed into claws. Marcus pushed him onto the nearest bed as Michael lunged at his legs. He kneed his younger son in the face, hard enough to make him yelp, and would have apologized if Jack weren’t flying at him again. He shoved Jack to the floor, trying to buy time some to figure out what he was going to do. He was stronger than them, but he knew how much energy they had; they could keep this up for hours, while he was already breathing hard and sweating.

  Retreating into the hallway, he slammed the door as the boys launched themselves against it, and moved a massive dresser from his own bedroom to block it. He listened to them howl and scrabble at the wood with their nails.

  “You can bang on that door all you want,” he said. “I’m not letting you out.” The father in him felt the urge to add, “until,” but until what?

  Until never.

  His body tingled with shock. His own children were trying to kill him. They had turned into the monsters he saw eating the dead on the cable news. He stumbled downstairs feeling fuzzy, as if he were floating. A part of him had been amputated, leaving nothing behind. The TV was still on, showing another talking head saying things like we’ve lost contact with John and apocalypse. Marcus poured another tall bourbon and Coke and wondered how long the door and dresser would hold his kids before they broke out and came for him.

  The world blurred again. A tank rolled past the house on shrieking treads. People swarmed on top of it, clawing at the armor, trying to get in. Inside, dishes rattled in the cupboards. Pictures fell off the walls and crashed to the floor.

  So this is the way the world ends, he thought.

  The blowhard on the TV was saying, God help us all, when the power failed and plunged the world into darkness. Marcus sat on the couch sipping his bourbon in long stretches of silence periodically shattered by distant screams. The air smelled like smoke.

  No son of mine is going to be a monster, he decided. His boys needed mercy only a loving father could give.

  He drank until he had the courage to do what needed doing.

  As dawn paled the sky, he lurched to his feet and searched until he found Michael’s baseball bat. He hefted it, feeling the weight in his large hand.

  Then he went upstairs to say goodbye to his sons.

  Cool Rod

  Back in Kandahar, the Fifth Dragoons played death metal battle anthems like “Bodies” and “Die Motherfucker Die” as they rode into battle in their Stryker vehicles, pumping up their courage and scaring the shit out of the Afghans. Now, roaring along the service road adjacent to Ronald Reagan National Airport near Washington, DC, the boys of Comanche Company are listening to the plaintive sound of “Paranoid Android” and still searching for the right note.

  Sergeant Hector Rodriguez—Nimrod in elementary school, Hot Rod in high school, Cool Rod in the Army, and just plain Rod to his friends—doesn’t mind. To him, this is a Radiohead war. Surreal music to go with the surreal scenery: a desolate, post-apocalyptic America. He feels like a sailor on a submarine, returning home after fighting a nuclear war, only to find his country destroyed.

  In any case, at least it’s not Enya. Some smartass cranked up “Only Time” as they stormed the airport a week ago, and nobody challenged it. It actually fit their mood.

  The small VDT screen mounted next to the driver shows a digital map of the southeastern quadrant of Arlington, Virginia. Blue icons reveal friendly forces, so massively concentrated at the airport, now a forward operations base, that it is hard to pick out their column of LAV IIIs tu
rning north onto Crystal Drive. There are no red icons. It is assumed the enemy is everywhere, dispersed in small formations.

  In neat white letters on the back of his green helmet, the driver has stenciled, how’s my driving? call M2-BOOM. The Stryker commander stands on a platform with the upper half of his body outside the vehicle so he can operate the fifty-caliber machine gun.

  Rod scans the anxious faces of the eight beefy kids sitting with him in the hot interior of the vehicle. They look formidable enough. His squad of shooters is armed to the teeth, highly trained, part of a military that once projected American power almost everywhere on the planet. Modern legionnaires, lean and fit and hungry. He wonders if they will have what it takes to shoot and kill American civilians. Not just some, but hundreds, even thousands.

  More specifically, they will be battling monsters. How do you train for that? Rod had been forced to sit through endless PowerPoint presentations discussing the type of monsters encountered and known capabilities and weaknesses. Few traditional tactics apply. The enemy knows no fear. Flanking accomplishes nothing. Ground cover is not important anymore, just concealment. Flamethrowers, which fell out of military use in 1978, are starting to be manufactured again in fortified factories. Shotguns and pistols are in high demand. The bayonet is making a comeback. Some soldiers are being trained as mules—lightly armed troops solely responsible for carrying spare ammunition.

  Everything is changing. They must unlearn everything they know, then relearn it fast or die.

  As the soldiers notice Rod’s attention, they look away. The whine of the rig’s Caterpillar diesel engine fills the dim passenger compartment.

  It’s going to take time to earn their trust. They can hate him for what they think he did. That is fine. But they must believe he is competent, and follow his orders, or he cannot lead.

  Most of the boys in Fifth Stryker Cavalry Regiment’s Company C are orphans from other outfits. Rod and Lieutenant Pierce, assigned to Comanche’s Second Platoon, the Hellraisers, are the sole survivors of Battle Company’s Third Platoon. Rod is new to the Hellraisers and some of these soldiers are new to each other, the result of higher command consolidating understrength units on the fly after the catastrophic losses the regiment took in Germany during the first days of the epidemic. The regiment had flown to Ramstein Air Base as a pit stop on their way home after a violent year in Afghanistan. Then the Screaming struck down one out of every five of them.