The Infection Page 6

  “Reverend, did you have to kill somebody you love?”

  Paul remembers Sara getting older and how on some level he saw her as a mirror reminding him that he was getting older. He did not like it. Death? Beats getting old, Sara used to say. She had a great attitude about it. He frequently wondered about the strength of his faith if he was afraid of getting old and dying. But even then his mortality was still just a frightening abstraction, not like the past nine days, during which he has been continually, painfully aware of the thin ice separating life and death. You walk along and suddenly you fall through and then either there is a heaven or there is only oblivion. Sara used to joke, if you want to be remembered for a really long time after you’re gone, die young.

  He remembers lighting a cigarette in the alley behind his house several nights after the Screaming. So late at night it was practically morning. He had tossed and turned and barely slept. The neighborhood twenty-four hour convenience store was open and he bought a pack of cigarettes to satisfy an incredible, sustained craving he felt immediately upon waking up. Now here he was smoking for the first time in years. Beating an addiction takes belief in a higher power, and while his faith in God helped, the strength of his marriage got him to finally kick the habit. Now Sara was lying on a bed inside his house, connected to an intravenous bag, and here he was standing in the alley lighting up and blinking at the immediate head rush. He coughed but by the third drag he was hooked again. Like riding a bike. He enjoyed the quiet. A dog barked and then stopped. For the first time in the past few raw days, he felt something like an inner peace. At least one itch had finally been scratched.

  A figure appeared under the streetlight at the end of the alley, a small silhouette. Paul squinted at it for a few moments, unsure it was even a person until he realized it was growing larger. Moving towards him. It passed a light fixture mounted on a neighbor’s garage and Paul caught a glimpse of its terrible face. It was breathing hard and running at Paul as fast as the average human being can run. It was doing the hundred yard dash and Paul was the finish line. For several critical moments, Paul was outside his body, watching himself do nothing. He was not sure he could move; his legs had turned to water.

  He started to feebly ask, can I help you, barely finishing the sentence before turning and sprinting back into his backyard and locking the gate behind him, his heart hammering in his chest. He sensed the man pacing outside the gate, hissing like an animal.

  He walked carefully back to his house on wobbly legs, still filled with dread.

  Inside, Sara was sitting on the edge of her bed. Waiting for him.

  “No,” Paul says. “I haven’t killed somebody I love. Have you?”

  “Yes,” Anne says.

  ♦

  The doors at the end of the corridor burst open and a snarling man races through. The Kid fires a burst that obliterates his face and then falls back, continuously firing and dropping bodies as a swarm of Infected pours into the corridor, filling it with their horrible, sour stench.

  Wendy keeps pace at his side, the beam of her flashlight glittering across red eyes, covering him with her pistol. The Kid’s gun jams and he stares at his weapon in numb surprise. The cop empties the Glock into the snarling faces, drops the mag, loads another. The Kid wrestles with the bolt until a howling woman claws at his eyes. Holding the carbine sideways in front of his body for protection, he slams it into her gray face on impulse, breaking her nose. She falls back howling and a giant of a man in a paper hospital gown stomps towards him with clenched fists like sledgehammers, roaring. The top of his head erupts in a geyser of blood and he disappears. Wendy is still shooting, burning quickly through the next magazine. The first woman comes back and wrestles with the Kid for the carbine, her jaws chomping in a blind rage. He hears a scuffle and the crack of the cop’s police baton striking bone. The Kid shoves the woman against the wall and smashes the carbine into her face repeatedly until she slides down the wall leaving a smear of blood. Panting, he turns and sees Wendy fighting two men twice her size and kicking the shit out of both of them with her side-handle baton. He clears the jam out of his carbine and signals to her, murder in his eyes. She backs away just in time for him to gun them down with several bursts from the hip.

  They stand quietly for several moments, unable to speak or move, utterly drained. Just breathing. A pall of gun smoke hangs in the air. The cordite bites their nostrils, competing with the bitter smell of blood and the rank stink of the dead Infected.

  “You kick ass,” he says finally.

  “It’s the training.”

  “That was way too close.”

  “We’re going to be okay.”

  “You’ll have to teach me your judo skills sometime.”

  “Wait,” the cop says. “Do you hear that?”

  The Kid shakes his head, trying to get rid of the ringing in his ears.

  “I can’t hear anything,” he says.

  Ethan, Anne and Paul rush into the corridor, breathing hard.

  “We heard the shooting and came as fast as we could,” Anne says.

  “Sounded like a war up here,” Paul says. “You okay, boy?”

  “We’re okay,” the Kid tells him.

  “Quiet,” the cop says. “Something is coming.”

  ♦

  The survivors train their light and weapons on the doors at the far end of the corridor. A strange sound comes to them that slowly reveals itself as something familiar. Chewing. The sound of an animal chewing a piece of meat, oddly amplified.

  “What the hell is that?” the Kid says, wincing.

  A fresh wave of sour milk stench assaults their nostrils with an almost physical force.

  “God, that smell makes me want to puke,” the cop says.

  “Don’t even say that word or I’ll actually do it,” Ethan says, pale.

  “Wait,” Anne tells them. “Quiet.”

  A baby is crying.

  Ethan takes two steps forward before Anne reaches out and grips his arm, holding him back.

  “It’s a baby,” he says, his eyes wild. “A little baby. Oh, God.”

  Paul grunts in surprise, holding his dying flare. A baby in the hospital, alone in the dark. A miracle baby. How did it survive? What has it been eating? Is it Infected?

  “That’s not a child,” Anne says.

  The creature pushes the doors open and slithers through. The survivors flinch and take a step back with exclamations of horror and revulsion. It is a giant worm, half as thick as a car and twice as long, with an enormous blank face made up of wrinkled folds of skin. The creature appears to be blind, propelling itself towards them using tiny appendages, something like a cross between giant warts and tentacles, that cover its body. It looks sick, its body pale and grayish and covered in purple bruises, trembling as it slithers, starving.

  Ethan sobs in horror, unable to comprehend the existence of such a repulsive thing. His concept of reality is disintegrating. It is as if the map of the world were now blemished with big blank spaces marked with the thickly scrawled warning: here be monsters.

  The worm plows into the dead, pushing the corpses against the sides of the corridor.

  “Can it see us?” Wendy says.

  The monster shivers at the sound of her voice, pausing in front of one of the bodies and nuzzling its hair. The massive blank face cracks open, revealing a gaping black maw ringed with sharklike teeth. It promptly begins to absorb the corpse headfirst with a slurping sound.

  “Oh, God!”

  The creature shudders, then resumes its feast, cracking bones. Chewing.

  “I’d like to leave now,” Ethan says, shaking.

  “What do we do?” says the Kid. “Anne? What are we going to do?’

  The creature shivers again, mewing like a baby wanting milk.

  Anne shoulders her rifle and says, “Kill this fucking abomination.”

  ♦

  Gunfire instantly fills the corridor as the survivors vent their fear and revulsion, screaming bloody
murder and draining their magazines. The worm abandons its grisly meal and lurches forward, its movements jerky in the strobing light of the muzzle flashes. The bullets sink into the mottled flesh of its face with no apparent effect.

  Ethan lowers his smoking carbine, feeling helpless. How can it be killed? Does it even have a heart or a brain? Even if it were just a giant worm without a brain or heart, the amount of ordinance they are throwing at it should be tearing it to shreds, and yet here it comes. The creature appears to have some type of bony plate on its face that is thick enough to absorb their firepower. He sees it differently now, not as an aberration but as a form of life perfectly designed for tunnels. That would mean it is vulnerable on its sides but not its front.

  What about its other end?

  Something whirs in his brain and clicks.

  He roars at the survivors, “GET BACK!”

  The creature’s rear end leaps into the air, revealing itself as a second head with another hissing mouth ringed by giant sharp teeth, and lunges forward with surprising speed and force, leapfrogging its front and landing among the screaming survivors, scattering them. Wendy pauses at the top of the stairs, squeezing off a few more shots with her Glock before following the other survivors down.

  “Keep going,” she calls. “It’s right behind us!”

  They exit the stairs and enter the emergency room. Anne points to the Bradley parked outside in front of the large floor-to-ceiling windows, the barrel of its 25-mm automatic turret-mounted gun aimed directly at them. Slanted rain pelts the armor. Sarge sits in the open hatch, waving at them frantically.

  “Out of the way!” Anne screams.

  “Everybody get down!”

  The cannon fires, shrouding the vehicle in smoke. The windows burst and the inside of the emergency room dissolves in a series of flashing explosions and enormous clouds of smoke and dust. The survivors are on the ground, their faces buried in their arms and eating ash. The vehicle trembles as the gun fires again: BUMP BUMP BUMP BUMP BUMP BUMP, vomiting empty shell casings down its metal chest onto the ground. And again. And again.

  The firing finally stops. The dust and ash swirl in black clouds.

  The survivors are screaming.

  ♦

  Sarge climbs out of the Bradley gripping his AK47 rifle, leaps down onto the ground, and races into the hospital, shouting names. The impossible creature he saw is now a quivering, smoking ruin smeared across the floor. He hopes he has not killed the other survivors in the bargain. The Bradley’s cannon is a sledgehammer, not a scalpel, and it is best to be nowhere near where its rounds are falling and exploding if you want to live. He had no choice; he heard all the shooting upstairs and revved up the Bradley and brought it back in case the others needed to make a quick exit. He calls the others’ names again and is relieved to hear voices shouting behind reception. He finds the others, covered in black ash, ringed around the Kid, who sits on his knees, holding a bleeding wound on his arm. The cop is screaming and pushing her Glock against his head while he pleads for his life and the others shout at her and each other, waving their weapons.

  “It’s dead,” he says, wiping rain from his face. “The thing is dead.”

  “We’ve got a bigger problem right now, Sarge,” Anne says.

  “My point is we’re okay now. So let’s just be cool and lower all these guns.”

  “He got cut by the thing’s teeth,” Anne says. “Wendy is right. He could turn.”

  “I’m not doing anything unless that happens,” the cop says.

  “How long is incubation?”

  “Somebody his age and size . . . Three minutes, tops.”

  “Who has a watch?”

  Ethan spits on the face of his watch and rubs it with his thumb.

  “Counting down,” he says.

  “I’m just trying to protect us!” Wendy says, panicking.

  “You’re doing the right thing,” Anne tells her. “You’re doing fine, Wendy.”

  “I don’t want to do this,” she says, tears streaming down her face.

  “We know. The Kid knows it, too.”

  They wait. Ethan marks the time out loud. The survivors hold their breath while the Kid listens to his life ending in ten-second increments. He had pictured a heroic end for himself but this is getting put down, covered in filth, like an animal. After everything he has been through, he will die from a friend’s bullet. He wants to remember something important, hold onto a beautiful memory or thought he can take to the other side with him, but his mind is a raw blank. He wants to pray but all he can remember is the one he used to recite each night as a child.

  “Now I lay me down to sleep,” he rasps quietly. “I give thee Lord my soul to keep.”

  The survivors slowly back away in a widening circle, coughing and fingering their weapons.

  “And if I die before I wake, I pray thee Lord my soul to take.”

  He clenches his eyes shut as Ethan counts down the final ten seconds of his short life.

  “Zero,” Ethan says, visibly deflating.

  “But I’m still me,” the Kid says.

  He laughs until it turns into hysterical crying. Wendy drops to her knees and hugs him. Sarge jogs back to the Bradley to get the med kit.

  “I’m so sorry,” she tells him, her tears joining his. “I’m so, so sorry.”

  “I want my mom,” he says.

  ♦

  Todd Paulsen sits numbly on the floor in the glow of an LED lantern in one of the recovery rooms. Anne unscrews the cap on a plastic gallon jug and pours water into a bucket. Todd wearily pulls off his ruined bullet-proof vest, ripped and slashed by the thing’s teeth. He is skinny and normally does not like taking his shirt off in front of other people, but right now he does not care. He peels off his T-shirt and reaches to scratch a spot between his bony shoulder blades. He feels hollow, empty. Completed drained. If he were not so scared of never waking up he would be asleep already. He did not know death was so terrifying. It had always been an abstraction to him, sometimes even a romantic one. He could afford such foolishness before today because he had been immortal. Now death is in his hair and skin. It lurks in the empty space between the beats of his heart. Non-existence. Nothingness. And all the world with its beauty and horrors will go on without him as if he never existed. What was it the preacher was always saying? The earth abides. The earth, in other words, does not give a shit.

  Todd takes the sponge from Anne and goes through the motions of washing himself. His arms are filthy with ash, the black dust contrasting strangely against his pale torso, gleaming white like a dead fish. He is ashamed of his body and his weakness. He cried in front of them. The adults. He faced death and he cried. He could not think of even one beautiful memory. And worst of all, at the moment he thought he was about to die, he could not remember his mother’s face.

  “Would you rather be alone?” Anne asks him.

  Todd shakes his head numbly. He is already alone.

  Anne says, “Here, let me help you.”

  She takes the sponge, wrings it out, and begins wiping down his face and neck.

  Somebody knocks at the door. Sarge enters carrying his helmet, filling the space with his large frame.

  “We need to talk, Anne.”

  Anne glances at Todd and shakes her head slightly.

  Sarge nods. He squats in front of Todd, who cringes, his expression vacant.

  “How’s the arm?” he says, pointing at the bandage covering the boy’s wound, which Sarge carefully cleaned and stitched up with needle and thread.

  Todd does not answer.

  “Keep it clean, soldier,” the soldier adds. “The bug going around ain’t the only infection we got to worry about.”

  “I’ll take care of him,” Anne says. “You might want to check on Wendy.”

  Sarge appraises Todd with a hard stare and a tight smile. “I just wanted to say you did real good today, Kid. You’re a tough little sumbitch, you know that?”

  After he leaves, Anne nudge
s him and whistles.

  Todd smiles.

  ♦

  Wendy sits on a sheet of plastic on the edge of the bed in another recovery room, her hands shaking. Slowly, she removes her Batman belt—heavy with handcuffs, gloves, gun, TASER, baton, leather notebook, extra magazines and pepper spray—and sets it carefully on the plastic beside her. She takes off her badge and pins and places them next to the belt. She unbuttons her uniform shirt, balls it up and puts in a plastic bag. She unhooks her bra, grimy and soaked through with sweat, and hangs it to dry out. After a quick but thorough wash, she examines herself in the mirror, brushing her wet, tangled hair. She recognizes the face and body but her eyes look like somebody else’s. Her face and perky chest earned her a lot of attention from the other cops but prevented them from fully accepting her. Wendy knows she is physically beautiful; she heard it said enough times to be sure. She knows it made them want her. She knows it made them angry. Then it saved her life when the man who had hurt her most told her to leave and save herself when the Infected came howling through the door.

  She raises her left arm and frowns, inspecting a thin red line across her ribs. The creature’s razor-sharp teeth grazed her flesh. Not deep enough for stitches but enough to draw blood. Enough to plant virus and infection.