The Infection ti-1 Read online

  Ethan found his wife and daughter upstairs on the rocking chair in Mary’s room. Carol was reading her a story from a hardcover compendium of Curious George stories.

  “Are you happy, Daddy?” Mary said.

  “I’m very happy,” Ethan said, close to tears.

  They gave her a glass of water and tucked her in with her dollies, then turned out the light and left her to sleep.

  Carol went downstairs for coffee and Ethan trudged after her.

  “I’m sorry I yelled,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, too,” she said.

  The next thing he knew he was bawling with his head bowed and his shoulders shaking and Carol was holding him, telling him everything was going to be okay.

  “I didn’t like the look on Mary’s face,” he said.

  That heartbreaking look of confusion, fear, guilt that her parents were fighting.

  He had surprised himself by crying. He had not cried in at least ten years, when his mother died. But that look haunted him. That look of broken trust and loss.

  “Kids blame themselves for everything,” he added. “I don’t want to fight in front of her. I don’t want to ever fight in front of her again. We’re supposed to be protecting her.”

  Carol understood. They promised each other it would never happen again. They made up and went to bed feeling better about their marriage. As Ethan lay in the dark that night, trying to sleep, he vowed to preserve Mary’s pure innocence and joy as long as he could. She would slowly learn over time that the world was a hard and terrible place. But he would fight that world as long and as hard as he could to protect his little girl from its dark truths.

  ♦

  In the third-floor lounge, the other survivors sit around a small table and share a breakfast of peanut butter on crackers and wash it down with instant coffee sweetened with honey and lightened with powdered milk. An espresso machine gathers dust in the corner next to a small refrigerator nobody is interested in opening. Corporate art decorates the walls. The stale air smells like dust. The LED lantern casts long shadows behind a fake potted plant.

  “I think we can all agree we need to continue searching the building,” Anne says. “I’d like to lead a team to look for supplies. Food, water, drugs and anything else we can use.”

  “If it’s all right with you, I need to sit that one out,” Sarge says.

  “Got to work on the Brad?”

  “No, I’d like to take my boys and find the emergency generator. We might get some lights going again. Charge our electronics. Maybe even get some news of the outside world.”

  “Wow,” Wendy says, smiling. “That would be nice.”

  “Hooah,” says Sarge.

  “Don’t tell me you have to go into the basement,” Anne says.

  Sarge shakes his head. “There ain’t no generator in the basement. If a water main broke or there was some type of disaster where fire hoses or sprinklers would have to be used, it could get flooded out too easy. Hurricane Katrina taught everybody that. No, this hospital has a mechanical penthouse. High and dry on the top floor. That is where it will be. Me and the boys will take care of it.”

  The survivors eat quietly. Sarge pours himself more coffee, smiles and adds, “So don’t you worry about me. The only people going into the darkest, most dangerous parts of the hospital today will be you.”

  “Don’t leave without me,” Todd says, shuffling into the room. “But first give me some of that coffee and my pants back.”

  “How’s the arm?” Wendy says.

  “Sore as hell, but I’ll live.”

  Anne pats the empty chair between her and Wendy. “Have a seat, Kid.”

  Todd sits, grinning in his blanket and glasses and battered SWAT cap, and extends his hand to Anne for a shake. “Todd Paulsen. Nice to meet you.”

  ♦

  Paul aims his shotgun into the darkness, illuminated by the sharp beam cast by a flashlight wrapped around the barrel with electrical tape. The Remington 870 tactical pump shotgun features a short pistol-grip stock and a recoil pad. It packs seven twelve-gauge rounds. He likes the gun because it is dependable and it will stop anything.

  They pass the radiology department. Down the corridor, on the right, they find the chapel. Paul blinks at it in surprise. He had completely forgotten that the hospital would have a chapel. The survivors look at him, questioning, and he nods, yes, he would like to see it.

  The small room looks like a miniature church, complete with red carpeting, dark wood pews and a stained glass wall that was probably backlit when the power worked. Hymn books are scattered on the floor. Dead flowers are crumbling in their vases and most of the candles are melted. Ethan takes the candles that are still usable and puts them in his bag. The others stand by the doorway, watching Paul, who picks up the hymn books and stacks them carefully on the lectern.

  He looks at the arched ceiling overhead and closes his eyes, remembering the last time he spoke as a clergyman. After the Infected rose, he kept Sara tied to a bed for three days, feeding her, bathing her, changing her bedpan, while the world ended outside his window. He even tried an exorcism, commanding demons to abandon her body while she shrieked and panted, straining at her bonds. Time blurred until he realized that people were probably flocking to his church for comfort and there was nobody there to give it. He had a responsibility to his congregation that was just as great. Exhausted from lack of sleep, he put on his clerical uniform and staggered out into the night. People sobbed and screamed in distant houses as he walked to the church in a daze. The Infected were running howling down streets and alleys, breaking into homes and attacking their occupants. Paul arrived at his church only to find it had been attacked. The dead lay in heaps surrounded by clouds of flies. The streetlights shined through the stained glass windows in a ghostly shimmer. The carpet squished wetly under his feet. The Infected had eaten the children on the altar. And he thought, Isn’t this what you wanted, Paul? The End of Days?

  The signs of violence were everywhere in this place. There were as many Infected lying on the ground as those who were not. His congregation had put up a fight—for their children and their sanctuary. The massive wood cross mounted behind the altar, the symbol of his faith in a divine sacrifice that had made life everlasting possible, loomed without potency over the carnage. Rage boiled up inside him. Infection had invaded and defiled this holy place. Infection had raped his wife’s blood. And he, personally, had not been touched.

  Dawn brought the singing mob marching down the street out of a haze of smoke, sweeping him along. Middle-class suburbanites carrying shotguns and baseball bats and crowbars and kitchen knives and garden tools. They shouted and sang and waved banners proclaiming: we are the majority and defend our homeland and we shall not be moved. One carried a Bible and a large wooden cross. There were hundreds of them. The vanguard roared and dragged along eight Infected, who snapped and struggled against handcuffs and ropes tied around their necks. The men stopped in the middle of an intersection, threw the ropes over the traffic signal, and promptly began hauling the Infected kicking and gasping into the air. Paul pushed his way through the clapping mob for a better look until he was satisfied that Sara was not one of the victims. The air smelled like smoke. The Infected hung by their necks, jerking and twitching until they died. The mob cheered, some shooting at the corpses with their guns, others singing “The Star Spangled Banner” until everybody joined in, tears running down their cheeks. Paul was finding it hard to breathe. Several people noticed his clerical collar, shook his hand and began shoving him to the head of the column, chanting, “Bless us! Bless us!” A man with a mullet and a hunting bow, standing on the hood of a car, pulled him up with one hand and clapped him on the back. Paul looked down upon the cheering crowd in anger and did not trust the Spirit. What could he say that they wanted to hear? Should he tell them that God was on their side and approved of them murdering their brothers and sisters in broad daylight? Should he rouse them to torture and murder more of them with a hymn,
maybe “Onward, Christian Soldiers”? Then he realized how scared they all were. The faces looked up at him hungrily; if ever they needed the strength and hope of Christ’s love, it was now. They were quiet now except for the cries of their babies. A pair of military jets roared overhead in the gray, smoky sky, followed by the boom of distant explosions. His heart opened. He raised his hands and blessed the mob.

  “Your war is just,” he told them.

  For a war to be truly just, its soldiers must kill with love, not hate, he thought. This was perhaps the first war in history where the combatants killed those they loved most.

  People at the edge of the crowd began to scream. Infected were rushing out of nearby lawns and gardens into their midst, punching and biting. Shotguns and handguns roared in a motley cluster of shots, followed by triumphant shouting. Several people began trading punches over a bitten and newly Infected teenage girl lying twitching on the ground.

  “Brothers and sisters,” Paul sang to them. “The Lord is with you. Do not be afraid.”

  More Infected ran into the crowd, sending tremors of panic rippling through it. Some people ran away while others huddled closer together for protection. They stumbled over the newly Infected that lay twitching under their feet. A swarm arrived howling, and the mob began to break and tear with screams and gunshots and running feet. The fighting went on and on, the mob slowly dissolving like a wounded whale surrounded by sharks, flailing and dying one bite at a time. Soon, Paul found himself alone, watching the last clumps of people throw away their banners and flee, abandoning dozens of bodies on the ground. A small knot of fighters made a stand in a smoky haze, shouting at each other and firing their shotguns, until the Infected overran them.

  Paul opens his eyes and is back in the hospital chapel, his face upturned towards the ceiling.

  He offers a silent prayer for the dead and then sings aloud in a rich baritone voice, “Amen, amen, ah-ah-men.”

  The other survivors stare at him wearing stricken expressions. Wendy wipes her eyes with the palm of her hand. Paul wonders if he said something while reliving that horrible day so vividly. He realizes his own face is wet and that he has been crying. He realizes that he was not singing at all. He was moaning. He did not remember what happened so much as relived it. But he cannot remember what happened afterwards. The fighters made their stand and they died in the smoke. Then nothing more.

  ♦

  They all know about flashbacks. The experiences are so real, so visceral, that they can swear they have discovered a legitimate form of time travel. But unlike the type of time travel one might find in, say, the movies, with this type of time travel, they cannot change the outcome. They are doomed to relive the past repeatedly without being able to change it. And no matter how many times they visit the past, they will never truly comprehend it.

  ♦

  The survivors enter the gift shop guns first, clearing it the way Sarge taught them—fanning out along the walls and circling back to the door.

  “Clear,” they sound off, then start looting.

  Ethan is again struck by the sensation that the world has become a giant museum dedicated to the day the world ended. The magazines and newspapers sitting in their racks still trumpet dramatic headlines about the Screaming. He runs his fingers over the greeting cards, pauses in front of a selection of stuffed animals and shiny balloons that proclaim it’s a boy! and feel better soon! and happy mother’s day!

  Behind him, Wendy opens a dead refrigerator and begins emptying its bottled water and juices into cloth shopping bags packed onto a wheelchair, which they are using as a cart. Paul lights a cigarette with a tired sigh and sits on a stack of magazines. Todd scoops up candy and gum and shoves it into another bag. Anne prowls the other shelves with her flashlight, snatching up aspirin and nail clippers and deodorant.

  Todd holds up his bag of candy, shakes it, and says, “Trick or treat.”

  Ethan says, “Do you think they remember who they are?”

  “You mean the Infected?” Todd says.

  “Yes. Do you think their consciousness has been replaced, or that they are still trapped inside their bodies, forced to do things they don’t want to do by the virus?”

  “I would hate to think they were still in there watching themselves attack people and being helpless to stop it,” Wendy says. “Either way, killing them is a mercy.”

  “Maybe when the Infected dream, they remember who they are,” Todd says. “It would be nice to think that.” He quickly adds, “Or completely horrible.”

  Ethan picks up a stuffed animal, squeezes it, and drops it to the floor. “I’m wondering if they still love us. If they recognize us and love us while they attack us even as we recognize them and love them while we kill them.”

  Paul’s head jerks up and he stares at Ethan.

  Anne says, “Nobody likes these questions.”

  Paul says, “They’re the only questions worth asking.”

  ♦

  The door to the mechanical penthouse is locked. Sarge and the crew go out to the Bradley to recover the demolition kit, which contains a few blocks of C4 plastic explosive and detonators. They are going to cut and mold a wad of C4 onto the doorknob, stick a detonator into it, let the wires run out until they get to a safe place, trigger the detonator, and BOOM. The soldiers have a casual but deep appreciation for the stuff. You can throw it and kick it and it will not blow up on you. Light it on fire and it burns nice and slow and you can heat an MRE on it if the area is properly ventilated, as Sarge did many times in Afghanistan. Mold it wherever you want it to go in whatever shape you want it, pop in the detonators, and you can take down buildings.

  They move quickly, rifles shouldered and aimed, communicating by hand signals only. Papers and loose trash flutter across the parking lot. The parking garage where they hid the rig under a tarp does not appear to be occupied, but swarms have a way of appearing as suddenly as a flash flood. They are used to playing it safe. Caution is now second nature to them.

  Once they are back in the hospital, the soldiers begin to relax a little.

  “Are we safe here, Sergeant?” Duck says. “In this building?”

  “Safe enough at this moment.” This is Sarge’s stock answer to that question. He credits staying alive and sane this long with taking this hellish journey one day at a time. One moment at a time. Speculating about what you do not know is a waste of time and energy that you need to stay alive.

  “I mean, are we going to stay a while?”

  They begin climbing the stairs. Sarge shrugs and says, “I think we should. It’s a good place.”

  “I thought the idea was we would train a civilian combat team and use them as security until we found some friendlies.”

  “That’s still the plan, Ducky.”

  “The civs seems to think we’re going to live here.”

  “Yes, we are still trying to find the Army,” Sarge says. “No, we do not need to advertise this fact to the civilians. Do you even know where the nearest friendlies are? Because I sure as hell do not. Our battalion technically does not exist anymore. We’ve heard nothing on the net in days.”

  The soldiers reach the top floor and pause to catch their breath. The gunner drops to one knee and starts rigging the C4 charge.

  “There’s always the camps,” Steve says as he works. “The FEMA camps. The closest one is in Ohio, right?”

  “Which we do not even know still exist, Steve. If they ever did. We’ve heard of lots of refugee camps and Army elements that either moved by the time we showed up or were never there in the first place. I am not interested in risking our safety for any rumors, especially if it means driving all over Ohio on a quarter tank of gas.”

  “Hey, I’m with you. I’d like to stay. I wouldn’t mind if we bunkered down here until the whole thing blows over. Let the gung ho mo-fo’s take care of it.”

  “I don’t want to stay here forever. The Army is out there still fighting somewhere and we’ve got to find them and help. But the
se people need a rest. We need a rest.”

  “Roger that,” Steve says.

  “I look at it this way,” Ducky says as they retreat down the stairwell. “Every hour we sit here, more people die that we could be helping. So how long are we staying if we are staying?”

  “At least a few days,” Sarge says. “A lot can change in a few days. We are still taking this one day at a time.” He remembers what the Boy Scouts taught him about having the right frame of mind for survival: Stop, think, observe and plan, or STOP.

  “What if we decide to move on but the civs want to stay?”

  “I do not know, Ducky. I honestly do not. They’re not in the Army.”

  “Fire in the hole!” Steve announces. The soldiers crouch and plug their ears.

  The C4 explodes with a clap of metallic thunder that rolls down the stairwell, followed by a wave of smoke and dust and a strong chemical smell. The warped metal door hangs on one of its hinges, then snaps off and flops to the side.

  The soldiers stand and dust themselves off.

  “The truth is we really need them,” Sarge says. “They’ve gotten good.” He smiles grimly. “In fact, I would hate to piss them off.”

  ♦

  God is good, and death is evil, so why does God allow people to die? That was a question Paul had never been able to answer during his ministry. When he was ten years old, a plane crashed, scattering burning metal and body parts across miles of scorched and bruised earth, killing more than two hundred people, including his mother. He experienced the full gamut of grief, from denial to anger to bargaining to guilt. The guilt was the worst. He had been asleep when she left for the trip and it haunted him that she could be taken away so suddenly, without even a final goodbye. By the time he reached the acceptance phase, he had aged beyond his years. He had aged beyond his years because he had become aware of death and the fragility of life.

  A minister came to the house frequently in the weeks following the crash, offering consolation to Paul and his father.