The Killing Floor Page 8

  He ran back outside, the cooler perched on his shoulder, and nearly dropped it as someone fired a gun in the house next door. Old Wexler lived in that house with his poodles. The guy was pushing eighty. Ray wondered if he should go help him out.

  In the distance, a woman screamed as if being tortured. The sound froze the blood in his veins. Wexler fired his gun again, BANG BANG. Ray saw the flashes of light in the living room window.

  “Oh, God,” he sobbed, heaving the cooler onto the back of the truck and jumping into the driver’s seat. “Holy shit.”

  The radio was still playing commercials. He worked the dial until he found the local AM news station, which blasted the angry klaxon honk of the Emergency Alert System. He turned the radio off. He didn’t need it. He had plenty of information. Everything he needed to know was happening right outside his windshield.

  Squinting against the orange glare of the morning sun, he threw the rig into drive and turned onto Oakland, swerving to dodge cars and crazies. He drove blind through a billowing hot cloud of pitch black smoke, screaming hail Mary, and emerged in time to narrowly miss ramming a wailing ambulance in the process of swerving off the road. Another car, its windows streaked red, crashed through a phone booth and into a wall. Galveston looked clear and he floored it, pushing aside the worry a cop was going to pull him over. Figures ran in the distance. Bodies lay on the sidewalk. As he passed, they sat up and stared at him.

  Minutes later, his truck idled in front of the self-storage facility’s chain link fence while Ray panted as if he’d run, not driven, the entire trip. Sweat stung his eyes and he wiped it away with the back of the sleeve of his uniform. He had to talk himself into leaving the truck. Opening the door, he walked to the gate on trembling legs and unlocked it. He drove into the compound and parked in front of one of the storage cubicles.

  As he jumped down from the vehicle, a deep thud reverberated through the ground, making him stumble. Car alarms shrieked across town. A massive fireball rose over distant houses. He paused, feeling curious. What’s over that way? Gas station?

  The gate rattled. Someone was trying to get in.

  Breathing hard, Ray cut the lock on one of the storage cubicles with a pair of bolt cutters. He opened the door and squinted into the darkness, wondering. A strong musty smell poured out of the room. It was half filled with dusty boxes, some old furniture, a few floor lamps, an area rug rolled up and bound with masking tape. Good enough. He tossed in the cooler and a few blankets and clothes he’d scooped up back at the house and pulled the door shut. The darkness enveloped him. He felt safe in it.

  Footsteps pounded outside, receding.

  ♦

  For five days, he lived like a rat in a hole. At least, he thought it was five days; after a while, he lost track of time. At first, it was like a party. If this was the end of the world, he might as well drink up. His mother was dead, everyone had gone crazy outside, and he wanted to forget it all. Two days later, he woke up in the darkness to the smell of his own vomit, barely able to remember where he was and how he had gotten here.

  Boredom set in. He spent hours rummaging through the boxes with his flashlight and found nothing useful. Just the detritus of some other loser’s life: photo albums, knickknacks, children’s toys, women’s magazines, portable heater, computer mouse, mystery novels, videotapes, dishes and cutlery, blankets, dead cell phone, bras and clothes and a broken wristwatch. Nothing he could eat or drink or fight with. He used one of the boxes of clothes as his toilet. Filled with self pity, he had his first crying jag.

  The batteries in his flashlight failed on what he thought was the third day. He started to panic. He pressed his ear against the big metal door but heard nothing outside, wondering what that meant. Maybe the entire town was on the other side of the door, waiting for him to come out so they could yell, Surprise! and laugh at him. Then he imagined Stewie and Brian standing on the other side of the door listening for him, drool leaking from grinning, chomping, red-stained mouths. The lockup had filled with stale cigarette smoke and the nauseating odors of his own vomit, shit and piss, but he didn’t dare open the door even a crack to let in some fresh air. This made him wonder if the lockup had any ventilation at all. He imagined suffocating in his sleep, and spent the next hour taking deep breaths until his mind moved on to something else.

  Between the fear and the isolation, he was starting to go crazy.

  On the last day, still wearing his rumpled brown security guard uniform, he pulled open the cubicle door and emerged blinking into the light. The darkness had driven him out. His terrors lived in that darkness. His memories. More than food or water, Ray craved light.

  In his fevered delirium, he recalls what happened next. Instead of a wasteland overrun by crazy people, which is what he half expected, he saw the watchtowers of a thriving refugee camp. He saw people unloading the storage lockers and staring back at him just as curiously. He figures on some level a bad guy like him was supposed to join a roving post-apocalyptic biker gang raping and pillaging and making things worse, just like in the movies. If he’d left the storage lockup and found such a gang, he supposes he would have signed up if he thought they could keep him alive. But he didn’t find that. Instead, he found a struggling community making a stand, people working together to maintain something like normal. This was fine with him. He wanted nothing more than to help fight for that normalcy, even to the point of becoming a cop. The truth is the apocalypse scared the hell out of him. Sure, he was bad to the bone, as the song went, but he would rather be a bad guy among good, honest folk than a bad guy among homicidal maniacs. The apocalypse changed him—made him want to do better before it all fell apart. That’s why when he met Wendy, the rookie cop from Pittsburgh, he pledged to watch over her. Even after every other cop was dead or run off and her city burned to the ground, this poor, innocent girl still fought the good fight, and it broke his heart. She deserved a guardian angel. He followed her to the bridge at Steubenville—perhaps the one selfless thing he ever did—and entered the nightmare of Infection.

  In his delirium, however, he opens the door and does not see watchtowers or people looting the storage lockers. He does not hear dogs barking or men hammering boards or five-ton trucks churning up clouds of dust. This twilight world is barren, as quiet as the Moon. Infection is not showing him what has happened, but what might have been, or what might yet be.

  He tries to start his truck, which clicks in response. The battery is dead. Outside the storage facility, he walks past an abandoned Laundromat, car dealership, appliance store, fast food restaurant, daycare. The pawn shop has been burned out. His boots crunch on broken glass. His footsteps are loud in his ears. The town looks like it has been bombed. The street is torn up and strewn with rubble. Trash rustles across the ground. Someone spray painted giant letters across the front of the police station: WE HAD IT COMING.

  For hours, he explores his old town as little bits of ash flutter to the earth. His own house has been burned to the ground. None of the cars will start. The houses have no power. He sees no bodies, no animals. He finds a battery-powered radio but it hisses across the entire band.

  It is a dead world.

  Then he sees the distant walking figure.

  Ray calls to him. The man turns and grins and waves as Ray grunts with recognition.

  Tyler Jones, still wearing his CASHTOWN FIRE DEPARTMENT cap and dark gray work shirt with a pack of Marlboros in the breast pocket, waits for Ray to catch up. Tyler is half friend, half mentor and, in semiretirement, something of a professional bum. Like so many people who lived in Cashtown, he did a little of this, a little of that, to make his beer money. Unlike other people, he wore his lack well. He always seemed completely comfortable with what he had, right down to his skin.

  Tyler squints at him, chewing on a toothpick. “Where you been, boy?”

  “What happened here, Tyler?” Ray yells breathlessly as he jogs close. “What happened to the camp?”

  This question appears to irr
itate the man. “Hell, there ain’t no camp, Ray.”

  “The camp, Tyler. The camp! Camp Defiance.”

  “Check this out, bud. Look what I found. It’s going to blow your mind.”

  Ray gasps in revulsion as Tyler steps aside, revealing two creatures bound to him with leather leashes. They’re four legged, the size of deer, and covered in hairless green skin. The barrel-chested one on the left totters on tapering stalactite legs, its skull covered in long, straight horns. The other has bloated legs with wrinkled knees and a head covered in a briar patch of fleshy antlers throbbing like veins.

  Ray glances down at the ground and sees a chunk of concrete on the rubble-strewn road. He picks it up, feeling its weight.

  “What the hell are they?”

  Tyler laughs wetly, wiping yellowish mucus from his mouth onto the back of his hand. “This,” he announces proudly, “is Life.”

  Ray stares at them in horror. They are starving, weak, disgusting. They have no mouths, no teeth, no claws. They appear harmless, and yet he has never been so afraid of anything.

  Tyler adds, “Come on over here, Ray, and meet the family. They ain’t gonna bite.”

  He whistles and the creatures stir and totter forward. Ray is too terrified to move. Close up, they appear to be blind, without eyes, and yet he knows they can sense his presence—knows that they’ve been looking for him, that they’re happy to finally have found him. They smell like pus.

  As the creature with the antlers nears, its head shifts as if to nuzzle and its body shudders, releasing a cloud of musk. Ray cringes in disgust, fighting the urge to vomit. Make your pecker fall off, his mind blurts out irrationally. His instincts are howling with fear. He realizes he is not looking at another hideous spawn of Infection. He is looking at Infection itself.

  Specifically, he is looking at his own infection. The sickness that right now is turning him into something else. It is like having cancer and being forced to say hello to your tumor.

  The antlered thing scuttles toward him in a surprising burst of speed, straining at the leash and releasing another cloud of musk. Ray can feel its raging fever heat.

  “Oh, we got a live one,” says Tyler, laughing.

  Ray reels from a massive wave of nausea. He looks at his hand and sobs in horror. It is bright red and swollen and covered in warts and blisters, one ruptured and leaking bloody fluid. His index finger has been bitten off. He is afraid that if he screams he’ll start vomiting and won’t be able to stop.

  The thing shudders again, releasing another cloud of musk. This is how it eats.

  Ray roars and crushes the creature’s head with the chunk of concrete, the antlers stinging his hands as his skin brushes against them. The dark green skin splits easily, spurting pus and wriggling things that splash wetly onto the road. Its head destroyed and sagging like the ruins of a burst balloon, the creature continues to skitter back and forth on its leash, spilling squeaking parasites and fluids rich with alien bacteria and viruses.

  Heaving the concrete over his head, Ray smashes the body into a puddle of green flesh.

  Tyler laughs. “What do you think that’s going to do? Shit, you can’t kill Life, boy.”

  Ray says nothing. He no longer understands language. He no longer has a mouth. The heat is incredible—the heat of his own blood pumping through his body. Tiny monsters swim in the soup, spreading fresh diseases his body receives and catalogs with joy. He peers out from rubbery green skin with millions of microscopic eyes, sensing Tyler’s presence. His hooves, chapped and raw and bleeding, clomp on the road.

  He has become Infection.

  Red mist veils his vision as he dreams the dreams of the Brood, the dreams of home. He floats over an endless plain under a copper sky filled with red dust and countless screaming winged things. As far as the eye can see, the land below swarms with monsters—naked things of all shapes and sizes constantly fighting and eating each other in teeming mountains of flesh. An entire ecology based on meat and waste in a circular food chain where everything eats everything else. Life filling every bit of space, eating and breeding and fighting for scarce nutrients and air and sunlight. This ecology is harsh and brutal but also rich, diverse, changing. Soaring through the humid, oily air, Ray watches as species rapidly evolve in endless competition. He wonders which of them is the Brood.

  Then he understands. They are all the Brood.

  As the myriad species fight and fuck and die, the Brood sighs content, flush with cheerful health. Oh, the joy of life. The wonder of endless creation. The brilliance of evolution. The Brood infected their world, and turned it into a laboratory for distilling perfection.

  A dark shape veers shrieking from the left, and the dream ends.

  Ray awakens and feels the constant hunger. He scuttles toward Tyler on his four legs and shudders, flushing powerful enzymes into the air.

  “That’s right,” Tyler says, his eyes swelling shut, his face red and shiny with fever. “You eat. You grow up big and strong. It is time for you to become, Ray. Become perfection.”

  Dr. Price

  Travis sees the woman head into a side tunnel terminating at a three-story office building buried under the west portal, part of the underground world where he now lives.

  Don’t go, Travis wants to call after her. He mouths the words but cannot say them.

  Every morning, she appears somewhere on the way to his job, but he has never had the courage to approach her. The truth is he is afraid of her, just like he is afraid of everything down here. His job may sound heroic—searching for a cure to the plague—but mostly he spends his time competing for scarce resources against the rest of the bureaucracy and staring at the ceiling in a state of mild, blank terror. Wondering if all those thousands of tons of earth, just over his head, will one day come crashing down.

  Pale faces flash in the gloom of the crowded tunnel, people heading to their jobs or wandering around with nothing better to do. There are thousands more people than there are jobs. The stale air smells like minerals and concrete and sweat.

  If the ceiling collapses he will be crushed like a bug, with as much awareness of his fate. The world will tremble violently; then darkness.

  A man shoulders him, muttering an irritated apology. Travis catches a glimpse of blond hair in the crowd ahead and changes course, following her into another tunnel.

  His stomach trembles with an odd falling sensation, reminding him of descriptions of love he has read. He wonders why he is doing this. He has no idea what he is going to say when he catches up to her.

  Where are you going? he wants to ask her. I don’t even know your name. How did you survive?

  Nearly three weeks ago, Travis gazed down at Washington from a thundering Army transport. Riding high in the sky, the city looked normal, as long as you ignored the columns of smoke and the omnipresent distant boom of gunfire.

  Heading west, the helicopter left the city and flew over green fields that gradually turned into the treed slopes of a mountain. At its base sprawled a complex of bland, utilitarian buildings and roads girdled by miles of fencing. Beyond, the Shenandoah Valley looked lush, green, untouched by the violence. The helicopter circled the facility and landed on a broad concrete pad occupied by several aircraft, their rotors still turning. Crowds of refugees were being herded by Marines toward the yawning mouth of a large building built from corrugated steel against the base of the mountain.

  My God, Travis thought, pausing to look at the buildings. This is the Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center. The Alamo of the U.S. government.

  A man in a business suit holding an M16 grabbed his arm and pushed him toward the tunnel. Follow the others, he said. Obey all instructions.

  Travis glanced up at the sky and that was the last time he saw the sun.

  Inside, the refugees streamed into what appeared to be a massive bank vault carved into the rock and waited their turn to plunge deep into the earth, emerging into the sunless world they were told was Area B.

  The cha
se leads him to the mass transit station.

  He hurries after, pushing through the crowd, trying not to lose sight of the young woman. She wears coveralls, common among the rank and file refugees who fled Washington with just the clothes on their backs. He grits his teeth and works to control his breathing, fighting his constant claustrophobia.

  We’re just rats in a cage, Travis thinks. The Mount Weather facility was designed to support two thousand people. He guesses at least three times that live here now. The top officials and the Congress and their rich friends have lots of space, he heard. They have their own private apartments and tennis courts and movie theaters. Everyone else lives and works in overcrowded dormitories, locker rooms, office buildings and cafeterias that are spartan, gray and washed out by fluorescent light that never seems bright enough.

  He tries not to think about the overworked ventilation systems struggling to supply fresh air for this many people. Every time he has a headache, he believes it is carbon dioxide poisoning.

  Stay focused. Follow the girl.

  The walls here are painted with a red stripe, indicating he has reached a mass transit zone. Giant letters and numbers spell out his location in code. The air feels humid here and stinks like raw sewage. A crowd of people waits for the train, reading or working on electronic tablets. Behind them, a wall sweats, beads of water glistening on its surface. Travis guesses a wastewater pipe broke behind the wall. He hopes someone is repairing it.

  What if the repairmen died on the surface and never made it down? What if the mains burst and the underground chambers fill with water and human waste?

  We’ll drown like rats in a toilet, that’s what.

  The terror of his claustrophobia takes so many forms, and it is neverending.

  Every night, as he tries to sleep to the sound of a hundred other men snoring, he remembers the Infected charging across the White House lawn and envisions the same scene playing out three hundred feet over his head. In his mind, the Infected break down the fence and overrun the guards and pound their fists against the door to the complex, built thick enough to withstand a nuclear blast. Thousands of them mill around the buildings put there to communicate with the Situation Room, now empty and gathering dust back at the White House.