The Infection

THE TRUCK STOP

Wendy staggers out of the Bradley’s oven heat onto a wide open parking lot under a glaring, overcast sky. The scorched air dries the sweat on her face instantly, cooling her skin while giving her the strange sensation of being baked. She breathes deep but coughs on air heavy with a tangy burning chemical smell.

A large building sprawls in front of her under a massive sign announcing GAS AND ALL YOU CAN EAT BKFST AND CAR WASH. Two canopied fuel islands flank the building, one promising gas for vehicles and the other diesel for big trucks. Without power, the building appears dark and desolate. The place has been abandoned for some time. The parking lots are all empty, dotted with random litter and fluttering on the sudden hot breezes.

For a moment, she imagines truckers filling up their rigs during their long hauls in and out of the Keystone State, heading into the greasy spoon for coffee and a piss. Then the moment passes. These days, she knows, people can see ghosts. They are all around if you know how to look. All you have to do is remember the past. Conjure up some memory of the dead world.

She gasps on the smoky air. The very atmosphere has been burned. It smells like lung cancer. Impossibly, little gray snowflakes tumble gently across the barren landscape. It takes her exhausted brain several moments to understand that these flakes are hot ash. That they are, in fact, the cremated remains of Pittsburgh, drawn into the atmosphere on massive convection currents, and scattered on the winds. One twirling piece of ash lands on her shoulder and she absentmindedly tries to brush it off, leaving a smudge of gray dust.

Pittsburgh is still burning. Wendy turns and stares at the vast wall of smoke rising up from the smoldering ruins of the city in the east, surrounded by heavy particulates.

“Everything I knew was in that town,” she says hoarsely, her throat raw and dry and scratchy from the heat and the screaming. “Everything and everybody I ever knew in the world.”

The place where she was born and the place where she was raised. The house where she smoked weed for the first time and the house where she lost her virginity. The school where they educated her about the basics and the school where they taught her to be a cop. The station house where she worked and all of the neighborhoods she patrolled and the mall where she shopped for clothes and the supermarket where she picked up her groceries and bars where she drank a few beers on the weekends. The theater near her house where she watched dozens of movies with various friends and dates, the hospice where her parents died, the hospital where her niece was born, the restaurant where she fell in love with Dave Carver, the squad car that was like a second home to her.

These places, and all the people who filled them with their lives and played a part in hers both large and small, all burned into ash. All lost in the fire. And all of her past lost with it. It is too much to comprehend, too horrifying to even imagine.

“I can’t believe it’s gone,” she says, swallowing hard.

She turns to see if anybody is listening to her, but nobody is there. Each of the other survivors has wandered alone and dazed across the empty lot and stopped as if straining against an invisible leash tying them to the vehicle. They have gone as far as they can from each other without being completely alone. She wants to go even further.

Patting the Glock on her hip to feel its reassuring weight, Wendy begins marching towards the highway.

Ethan wakes up on warm asphalt with a splitting headache. He feels like a piece of chicken left in the oven too long. He opens one eye blearily and clenches it shut as the glaring silver sky painfully blinds him. Blinking tears, he tries again. Slowly, his eyes adapt to the light and he can make out figures on a wide parking area in front of a simple shoebox-shaped building. Truck stop, he thinks. Woods and hills beyond. They have not only left the hospital, they have abandoned Pittsburgh entirely. Just what the hell happened last night?

The last thing he remembers is the sharp prick of the needle sliding into his arm.

He tries to bring the dark figures into focus. His glasses are missing and he has trouble seeing distances. The blurry figures slowly coalesce into the other survivors, scattered around the asphalt. Anne is at the Bradley, ransacking it. The soldiers are dragging the struggling driver into the shelter of one of the fuel islands. Ethan notices their body language and wonders if they are Infected. His immediate instinct is to play possum. He closes his eyes and tries to ignore his aching bladder.

“Where are we going to go?” somebody asks. “Is anywhere safe?”

Ethan knows the voice; it was Paul speaking. He suffers a sudden sense of déjà vu, a flashback to one of the endless nightmares he dreamed last night. Again, that strange sense of disorientation, of not knowing who he is or why he is here. At least he knows now that the others are not Infected; the Infected do not talk. He opens his eyes and tries to sit up. The air is hot and tinged with smoke, stinging his eyes. His shirt is covered with a dried red crust. Not blood; vomit. The acid smell triggers the dry heaves. He groans on his hands and knees, his vision blurred with tears, spitting repeatedly into the dust. He wipes his eyes and notices the other survivors watching him.

“Water,” he croaks. His voice sounds alien to his ears. His tongue feels like a piece of leather.

Anne comes out of the Bradley and drops a box onto the ground, where it bursts open, spilling cans across the asphalt. She unholsters one of her handguns and begins marching towards him. The other survivors drift closer.

“Can I have some water?” he says.

Anne kicks him in the ribs, pushing him back down onto the warm hard ground.

“Motherfucker,” she says.

The sudden stress makes his stomach lurch again. His body writhes in the soot, struggling to breathe, retching.

Anne kneels next to him, grabs his curly hair in one first, and shoves the barrel of her pistol into the soft flesh under his chin. The sky darkens as the winds shift.

“We were attacked,” she hisses close to his ear. “We were attacked and you weren’t with us. We had to carry you out of there. We had to carry you. You let us down, Ethan.”

“Don’t you do it, Anne,” Paul says, his deep voice angry and commanding.

Ethan regains control of his stomach and breathing and glares up at Anne.

“Yes, do it,” he says.

Anne recoils in surprise.

“Are you trying to die? Is that it?”

“I don’t care anymore.”

“You want me to do it because you can’t do it yourself. You’re a coward. I could do worse. I could leave you here for them.”

He hesitates before answering, struck by the realization that she is right. He has no hope of finding his family and without his family he has no hope at all. But he does not know how to die.

“I’m sorry I let you down,” he says. “If you want to scapegoat me, that’s fine, too. It doesn’t matter anymore. So do it, if that’s what you want.”

“He knows what he did, Anne,” Paul says. “What’s done is done.”

“Who trusts him?” Anne says, glaring at the other survivors. “Who here trusts him now? This is not about justice, Paul. It is about survival.”

“We all know what’s at stake here. You think we don’t know?”

“Leave him alone,” Todd says shrilly, his voice cracking.

“It could have been any of us,” Paul adds.

He stands over Ethan, holding his shotgun. Ethan realizes these people are not his friends and that he does not really know them.

“Do you want to live or not, boy?” Paul asks him.

“I want to live,” Ethan says through gritted teeth. “But I’m sick of surviving.”

“That’s not an answer,” Paul tells him. “We’ve got to know we can count on you or Anne’s right, we’ve got to part ways right now. It’s a simple question. Can we count on you?”

“Yes,” Ethan says.

“He’s mine,” a commanding voice booms.

Sarge pushes his way into the ring of survivors, his helmet off and holding his automatic rifle in his right hand. The soldier glares down at him.

“You come with me,” he says.

Anne returns her large handgun to its leather shoulder holster and heads back to the Bradley. The supplies she left on the ground are already gray with a light coating of soot, a depressing sight. She feels an overwhelming urge to hit the road. Paul suddenly blocks her path, cradling the shotgun, glaring down at her from his large, grizzled head. The gesture would be enough to intimidate anybody except her. She sidesteps him and continues to the vehicle.

“We need to talk, Anne,” he says. “I have something I need to say to you.”

She ignores him, rummaging through the boxes until she finds a battered PHILLIES cap, red paisley bandana and bottle of water. After fitting the cap on her head, she unscrews the cap of the bottle and soaks the bandana before tying it over her face to cover her mouth.

“We all look up to you,” Paul says. “If things get really bad, we all look to you to tell us what to do. And even if we think you’re wrong, we still do it. Because we believe.”

Anne clasps her metal canteen onto her webbed gun belt.

Todd watches her closely. “Where are you going, Anne?”

Paul says, “But there are some things you don’t get to decide. Like who stays and who goes. You don’t get to make that decision. It’s not up to you.”

Todd adds, “Why can’t we get out of this ash and make some plans? We need a plan.”

Anne squints up at Paul’s face, sizing him up.

“I’m going to take a walk,” she says, picking up her scoped rifle. “You’re in charge.”

She begins walking towards the distant trees.

“I wouldn’t do that by yourself,” Paul says.

“You’re not me,” she says.

“When are you coming back?” Todd asks nervously.

Anne ignores them, marching with a purposeful gait that takes her onto the highway. In the distance, coming and going, she sees tiny figures moving along the road. The only vehicles are abandoned wrecks, their doors hanging open. Her ears still ring painfully from the screaming monster that attacked them.

She needs to be alone for a while. She relishes the sudden sense of space.

They are all going insane one day at a time and each of them—at different times, depending on the individual—will crack under the stress, she knows. This can take many forms. And if one of them cracks, that person could put them all at risk. Like Ethan. He suffered some sort of breakdown and endangered all of them. The man already has a bad habit of firing his rifle with his eyes closed. He is simply not as cool as the others in a fight. Anne was willing to overlook these things, as Ethan has good instincts that warn them about obtuse threats such as the tank firing on them and the worm monster having a second head. He also came up with the idea of the Molotov cocktails. He makes a real contribution. But if he is cracking up, he will be a liability to them. He will take up space in the Bradley, consume scarce resources; worse, he will not cover their backs.

Then they will have to make a tough choice as a group. Anne would rather not wait until people get killed before that decision is made. If it were up to her, the man would have been left behind at the hospital last night. Which would have been sad. But necessary.

About a mile down the road, oily black smoke billows from a burning vehicle in the middle of the highway’s westbound lanes. She peers into her scope and sees a pair of olive green vehicles, one a Humvee with its headlights on and behind it, a military flatbed truck, its cab on fire and pumping smoke. Anne squints, trying to see more, but everything is blanketed in ash. Visibility is steadily diminishing. Across the landscape, tons of ash continue to flutter to the earth in drifting clouds of black snowflakes, rapidly turning into a hellish blizzard swirling through the trees and darkening the sky.

Anne slings the rifle onto her shoulder, digs her hands into her pockets, and begins walking west.

Sarge and Paul and the other survivors are getting sentimental, she knows. They are getting to know each other. Becoming friends, even. They are forgetting that being sentimental is a luxury at a time like this. They are forgetting that the only reason they have this luxury is because they have been tough as nails. Because they all pull their weight.

She has a sense that the others are leaving her behind. But they are not moving forward. They are regressing. They are becoming what they were before the world ended.

Anne cannot go back.

As she approaches the Humvee, she shrugs the rifle into her hands and approaches more cautiously, the weapon held in the firing position.

She almost trips over the first body. There are four dead soldiers sprawling on the ground amid broken weapons and scattered empty shell casings, coated with soot. Their heads are eerily missing. Something decapitated them and left the rest for the birds.

Inside the Humvee, a tangle of voices compete for expression across the ether, gradually resolving into a single urgent female voice, Patriot 3-2, Patriot 3-2, this is Patriot, how copy, over? The radio blasts white noise for ten seconds. Then the message repeats.

Something rustles in the trees, sighing.

Wendy tramps numbly through the ash along the road, surveying the hellish gray landscape warped by shimmering heat waves. The giant wall of smoke continues to rise over the smoldering ruins of Pittsburgh like a distant storm. Heavy particulates flow steadily up into the sky, riding pulses of heat. The highway races east in a long straight line that dissolves into the smoky haze. Figures toil in the distance—refugees, probably, fleeing the inferno. Tiny headlights glimmer in the ash fall. She wonders what it would be like to lie down in the warm soot in the gulley below the guard rail and surrender herself to the earth. Philip did that, she remembers. He was tough as nails but one day he saw a Wall Street Journal with the wrong date and sat in the ashes and that was that. He had become numb, too. He could not handle seeing his world die. When you find yourself envying the dead, you are not long for it.

Stopping at the hospital was a mistake, she knows. They invested their hopes in its promises, believing they found a place where they could at last feel safe. But that is not the world they live in. All of those hopes—of living instead of barely surviving, of having some sort of future after the end of Infection, of being able to dream again—were blindly and cruelly crushed. In this world, giant faceless things haunt abandoned buildings and duel with armored fighting vehicles in the dark. In this world, entire cities burn to the ground and everything you ever knew and loved is converted into tons of ash floating on the upper atmosphere. In this world, the children are dead. It is best not to hope in this world. It is best to keep moving and never stop.

The only thing giving her strength is that brief moment of contact she experienced with Sarge last night. The memory of that contact is still burning in her chest. She had gone into his room on impulse intent on dropping a hint, maybe flirting a little: I see you, she wanted to let him know. You see me and I see you, too. She found herself kissing him and falling into blissful nothingness. She told herself that the world was ending and love was in very short supply and so you had to grab it where and when you could find it. Wendy and Sarge were made of the same stuff, she thought; that is what attracted her to him. He is a soldier without an army, a centurion still fighting even though his legion is dead; she is a cop in a lawless land. Then she slept in his arms for a short time and had never felt safer. It amazes her how just a simple man could make her feel that safe in a world this dangerous.

Wendy begins to pass a motley group of refugees, mostly young men and women, some of them wrapped in blankets, others carrying backpacks and umbrellas, some decked out in goggles and respirators. All of them are armed with knives and crowbars and baseball bats and even makeshift spears. The soot is beginning to form a paste in her mouth, a grit between her teeth. She spits and wishes she had thought to bring along a canteen.

“Hello,” she says, eyeing them curiously. “You all right?”

The people ignore her, walking by in a daze, their hair and shoulders covered in gray-white ash.

“You’re going the wrong way,” a man says, flashing gray teeth.

One of the women notices her badge and belt and asks her if she is a cop.

“Where are we supposed to go?” the woman says.

Wendy pauses to spit out her gum, which has become gristly with dust. The woman watches it fall into the cinders with longing.

“My advice would be to keep going west,” Wendy tells her. “Get as far away from Pittsburgh as you can.”

“You mean there’s no rescue station on this road?”

A man with a bleeding ear shouts, “ARE YOU FROM THE FEMA CAMP?”

“I don’t know of any FEMA camp, sir.”

“WHAT?”

“If it’s not on this road, where is it?” the woman says, her voice edged in panic.

A small crowd is gathering. The people stare at her with a mixture of hope and resentment and shock, shivering in the heat. The man who shouted stumbles, briefly disoriented, and then shouts again, “THERE’S NO HELP AHEAD? WE’RE ON OUR OWN?”

“I don’t know of any rescue station or FEMA camp anywhere. I’m not here in any official capacity. I’m with another group of people leaving the city after the fire.”

“We lost everything,” the woman pleads. “We have no food. Some guys with guns back there on the road took the last drop of water I had. Where am I supposed to go?”

“Where were you cops when those monsters were ripping my family apart?” a woman says, her eyes glazed with fever. Most of her hair and eyebrows have been burned off and the right side of her face is covered by a filthy, bulky bandage. “That’s what I want to know. I called 911 and nobody came. Nobody came and now Edward is dead. Edward and Billy and Zoe and little Paul. Now you show up and try to tell us what to do? Where the hell were you, lady?”

The crowd presses in, angry, its slim hopes dashed and its resentments stoked.

“I’m sorry,” Wendy says. She wants to explain her situation—that her precinct was overrun, that she is on her own, that she cannot help them—but these people do not care. She is a symbol to them. They look at her with hungry, feral eyes gleaming from the folds of bundles of rags tied around their heads. They cough into their fists loudly, struggling for enough air to scream.

“Give me something,” a woman hisses, reaching out for Wendy’s face.

Wendy takes a step backward and places her hand over her pepper spray dispenser. She senses a dangerous line forming—knows it is there because it is about to be crossed. The crowd closes in, muttering.

A man wearing a cowboy hat and carrying a walking stick marches past and yells, “Hey, now! What are you bugging that girl for? There ain’t no rescue coming and there ain’t no police. She ain’t no cop. Get over it.”

Wendy bristles, but before she can say anything, she hears the echoes of gunshots back in the smoky haze. All of them turn toward the noise, flinching. A moment ago they were menacing her but the fact is they are terrified and running on fumes.

“There you go, officer,” the man says, still walking. “There are a couple of guys back there with a truck robbing people and shooting anybody who fights back. You want to be a cop? Do something about it.”

Ethan follows Sarge past the Bradley and pauses with his mouth hanging open in awe. The rig looks like it lost a brick fight. The welded aluminum armor is pockmarked with dents and scratches. Several plates on its side are missing.

Sarge turns and sees him lagging behind.

“You sure you’re okay?”

“I could use a drink of water.”

“I’ll get you water after we do this thing, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Anne can be a little rough.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Ethan says, meaning it. The truth is he feels completely numb. He does not feel pain. He does not feel anything. “What happened to your tank?”

“Those plates are explosive reactive armor,” Sarge tells him. “It protects the vehicle by exploding outward when something comes at it trying to explode inward, canceling it out.”

What could have hit the Bradley with that much force?

“What happened last night?” Ethan says.

“There was a fire,” Sarge tells him. “See all the ash starting to rain down on us? That’s what’s left of Pittsburgh—west of the Monongahela and the Ohio, anyhow.”

“What happened to the vehicle?”

“The gates of hell opened. If we hadn’t dropped smoke, I don’t think we would have made it. That thing was kicking the shit out of my rig. Come on.”

Ethan shakes his head in amazement. That thing, Sarge said. This was not the average Infected and probably not a worm either. The commander obviously had no idea what he had been fighting in the dark. As Ethan suspected, there are other children of Infection, probably an entire family of monstrosities. If there is something out there that can take on an American armored fighting vehicle, Ethan believes, the human race might have to give up its claim on the planet.

He has often speculated about what could have caused the pandemic. As an educated man, he refuses to believe the cause is supernatural. Infection is spread by a virus, but a virus does not explain these bizarre mutations. In the days following the Screaming, scientists were speculating about a nanotech weapon that escaped the lab. Could nanotechnology create such monsters?

Ethan once again finds himself entertaining an alien colonization theory. Consider an alien race on a distant world that wants to propagate itself across the galaxy. Instead of spaceships, it sends seedlings out across the cosmos, which eventually rain down on Earth to colonize the resident species’ DNA, mutating the natives into adaptations of the alien species and its ecology. The creatures are at first sickly because they are still adapting to Earth’s environment. They eat the dead but are starving because their alien digestive systems cannot extract nutrition from it. While they turn the dominant species against itself through Infection, they burrow into the darkest spaces in abandoned buildings and adapt and multiply. Over time, they grow stronger until they eliminate the dominant species and complete the conquest of their adopted world. It makes sense, he reasons. Why else would they target our children for immediate extermination?

Or perhaps the aliens are indeed coming in spaceships, but they are terraforming the planet before the ships arrive, eliminating the resident species in the process. Which means humanity is not fighting aliens, but the wildlife of the aliens’ home world. These things are repulsive but they are not evil in the sense that they want to hurt humans purely out of malice. They are hunting people for food. In one sense, they might as well be millions of hungry lions roaming the streets, hunting and eating people simply to survive.

The worst part is the human race will probably never truly understand what killed it.

His family needs him more than ever. He will keep looking for them. He wonders if this is why he is so calm, that he has surrendered what is left of his sanity to the delusion they are alive.

I’ll keep searching for you, Mary. I’ll never stop looking.

They approach a figure sitting on the ground propped against a gas pump. The man is pale, underweight, his cheeks sunken, his eyes dark and bruised. His arms rest withered and useless at his sides. Ethan suddenly recognizes him as the driver—what is left of him, anyway. The gunner kneels next to him, trying to give him water.

Sarge is saying, “You’re smart, Ethan. I’m betting you can figure out a way to fix him.”

Ducky Jones lost thirty pounds since Ethan saw him the night before. The man is almost visibly wilting in front of him, coughing feebly, his breath rapid and shallow. His dark, intelligent eyes flicker at Ethan with a mixture of fear and hope. There is still a man in there.

Ethan holds his gaze respectfully for several seconds, then looks down at the revolting thing that protrudes from his hip like something out of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not.

Todd enters the truck stop cautiously, violating Anne’s standing rule of never going anywhere alone. Something could attack him and he would be vulnerable. Anne’s rules suddenly mean a whole lot less to him today, however. The monster changed the game last night. How can they hope to survive with horrors like that out there hunting them? Like most victims of bullies, Todd is highly sensitive to what other people are feeling, and the best word he can think of to describe the mood right now in the group as a whole is deranged. Deranged and black, raw, angry. In other words, morale is shit. They are becoming people who do not care, people who are losing hope and otherwise have nothing left to lose. Damaged goods.

They are close to giving up.

Inside the lobby, he has a choice of restaurant, convenience store or public restrooms. As much as he would like to take a private dump on a real toilet, there is no way he is going into a public restroom by himself. The store looks interesting. The shelves have been rifled but whoever did it left most of the stuff behind. He might find some good loot in here. He remembers that Wendy wants a pair of toenail clippers.

His nerves are crawling with the oppressive feeling that the group is falling apart. Anne and Wendy wandered off to who knows where, Paul is emptying the Bradley’s guts into the ash under the pretense of organizing their supplies, and the driver is dying at the fuel island. Anne was ready to blow Ethan’s head all over the pavement. What about Todd? Nobody wants to listen to him. They obviously think of him as just a kid. But he will not abandon the group. He feels a very strong loyalty to it. Groucho Marx once quipped that he would never want to be a member of a club that would have him as a member. Todd wants to be a member of the club almost entirely because they offered him membership. America feels like a distant dream. This tiny tribe is his nation now. These people are not mere tools used to help collect food and stand guard while he sleeps. They are much more than that. They are something like family to him.

It is true that as individuals, while he trusts the other survivors and feels comfortable with them, he does not know them well, even after days of fighting together against terrible odds. All anybody talks about is how they plan to survive the next ten minutes. It is not like people are going to open up during the apocalypse about their hobbies or where they went for vacation last summer or their favorite flavor of ice cream. They have intense flashbacks, but never talk about their separate pasts from the Time Before. The past right now seems less real than the demon that attacked them last night. The past is also too painful to recall willingly, bringing to mind too many lost things. Todd likes the other survivors, but his interactions with them, while intimate, have been largely superficial. He feels his deepest connection with the group itself—feels safest, in fact, interacting with the others through the medium of the group.

But if there is no group anymore, to what or whom is there to be loyal?

A bell tinkles as he enters the store, sending his heart galloping in his chest. The place smells musty. The air feels flat, dead. He accidentally kicks a two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew spinning across the floor. He flinches at the noise, raising his rifle and sweeping the store for targets as he backs against the nearest wall.

Maybe coming in here by myself was not such a good idea, he thinks, gasping for breath. Another scare like that and I’ll drop dead from a stroke.

Having a closer look at the shelves brings further disappointment. Most of the merchandise is still sitting on the shelves or hanging on hooks, but there is no food, water, medicine. Instead, almost all of the stuff left in the store are products specifically marketed to truckers who have to live on the road for as long as a month at a time. Movies and audio books, CB radio equipment, hazmat placards, truck stop exit guides, road atlases, electric frying pans, toasters, DC adapters, coffee makers and TV/VCR systems.

Todd wonders what a trucker would do with a coffee maker and then realizes, looking at the packaging, that all of these devices are DC powered. And the DC adapters allow AC devices to run off of DC. He suddenly has an epiphany. Most appliances do not work anymore because they need AC power, and the only way he knows to make AC power when the grid is down is with an emergency generator that runs on diesel or propane or natural gas. But DC comes from batteries.

They could run all this stuff off of car batteries. Of which there are plenty lying around, courtesy of the fact that their drivers are either Infected or dead.

Looks like being a whiz at science has finally come in handy, Todd tells himself. He slowly realizes that he has hit some sort of jackpot.

Wendy marches resolutely through the smoky haze, her Glock unholstered and held at her side. She is a police officer, still on duty, still protecting life and property. Perhaps the last cop left in Pittsburgh. Perhaps the last government employee still doing anything. Once she left, the crowd debated following her to see what kind of loot might become available, but eventually gave up and resumed their long walk west. Apparently, they did not have much faith that she would be able to stop the bandits and recover their supplies. The truck stop is far behind her now, perhaps a mile, perhaps more. The chemical fog hems in on all sides, reducing visibility to less than fifty yards. Ahead, the headlights of a large vehicle wobble in the rising heat waves.

She hears gunshots, flinching at the sound, and then puts on her game face.

The absurdity of her situation continues to nag at her, however. What is she supposed to do, arrest these people? And then what? There are no more courts, no more judges. No more jails or wardens either. The entire legal system is gone. There is only frontier justice now—the law of the gun, with justice dispensed using bullets. Is that it, then? Is she supposed to kill them? Even sheriffs in the Wild, Wild West had judges and jails and a community they could count on.

She clears her scratchy throat and considers her next move.

Perhaps she should yell freeze, police before shooting them, she thinks with bitter humor. Read them their rights before opening fire and cutting them down in cold blood for maybe doing something that used to be illegal when there used to be laws and a government.

She ain’t no cop, the man said.

Wendy suddenly stops, her mouth hanging open, and returns her Glock to its holster on her belt. Ain’t no cop, he said. And he was right.

The realization of this simple fact feels as pleasant as her heart being torn out of her chest.

I did my best, she thinks, trying to remember the fallen whom she once considered her tribe, but she cannot recall their faces. Even Dave Carver is just a blur. She has a pounding headache and is starting to feel light headed. She should have brought water.

Time to go back, then.

Wendy slowly removes her badge, runs her thumb over its edged details, and puts it into her pocket. This done, she turns and begins walking back to the truck stop.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is not king. He is not king because nobody recognizes him as king. The others do not even know he is there.

Wendy coughs long and hard on the smoke and soot, her lungs on fire. When it is over, a smile flickers across her face. If you are still alive after part of you dies, she thinks philosophically, it is like being reborn. She will survive this.

The gunshots escalate back at the truck and the headlights shake and blink out. Moments later, the first screams echo across the asphalt. The darkness closes in around her.

Wendy breaks into a run, reeling from the sudden understanding that her decision to stop being a cop probably saved her life.

Anne steps carefully between the trees, her body taut and her rifle shouldered and ready to fire. She blinks away the sweat that is slowly pooling under her soaked cap. Her finger twitches near the trigger. Each step is planted carefully, one foot following the other, taking her deeper. She is a hunter now. She does not yet know what she is hunting. Her quarry is present, but not known.

Sighing in the trees. She can hear them now, their guttural clicks. Communication that is like ancient speech, but also as mindless as insect mating. The things scamper playfully through the bushes and leap into the trees, releasing clouds of soot that make the little bastards squeal and sneeze.

They’re like children, she thinks, and then banishes that painful thought. Unlike the other survivors, Anne does not question why she is here. Does not constantly compare herself, the world around her and what she is doing in it to the Time Before. Anne has survived so far because she successfully locked away her past. She does not need to remember it to continue atoning for it. She has learned to truly live in the moment.

The ash blankets the treetops and drifts in the air, obscuring everything green and creating a virtual twilight. Anne closes her eyes for a moment, and when she opens them, she sees the eyes glimmering in the haze. Dozens of staring red eyes burning in the gloom, the dark spaces of the forest. She takes another step forward.

Foliage thrashes as the creatures scamper across the treed ground. The air fills with guttural clicks and squeals. Even the squeals sound like language. They know she is here. She is no longer hunting, but observing. There are too many to fight; it is not worth the risk.

Anne raises her rifle slowly and peers into the scope, conducting a slow sweep until stopping at a small group clustered at the foot of a massive oak. The crosshairs come to a rest on a blank little elven monkey face, blandly chewing, its mouth stained. As if sensing it is being watched, the creature bares bloody teeth and glares with pure malice, without real intelligence. She moves the rifle and begins watching the others shove handfuls of some furred animal into their mouths.

She cries out, her eyes flooding with hot tears, before she can stop herself. She falls to her knees, weeping openly with racking sobs, her shoulders shaking with each burst.

The forest suddenly comes alive with hoots and shrieks.

“It’s just a dog,” she says. “Just somebody’s old dog.”

Anne stifles the next sob, sniffing loudly and wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. Within moments, she regains control of her breathing. She hates them with every ounce of her being. She raises the rifle, aims it at a snarling face, exhales and squeezes the trigger.

The rifle fires with a flash and bang that fills the forest with an echoing, rolling roar. The creatures rush and bound through the undergrowth, hooting and shrieking, gathering for a charge. The acrid smell of cordite fills the air.

She fires again, the rifle lurching hard against her shoulder. She sees the skull explode before the view in the scope jumps in a haze of smoke.

“I’m going to kill you!” she screams at them with incredible volume, her voice ringing through the trees. “Do you hear that, you little freak bastards?”

Her dog had an almost supernatural talent for catching Frisbees.

The creatures try to gather again. Anne shoots another one and the rest leap back into the trees. They appear to be baffled by the distance over which she is reducing their numbers one by one. The little things caper about, roaring and baring their teeth and puffing out their little barrel chests, pointing at her and throwing handfuls of their shit in her direction. She fires again. And again. A group breaks from the woods, leaping at her with their comical insect legs, and she cuts them down. She fires until her rifle clicks empty. They sense her hesitation. With a massive howl, the children of Infection rush at her all together. She drops the rifle.

“God damn you,” she sobs, tasting salt and soot in her mouth as they rapidly close the distance in great leaping bounds. “God damn you for what you’ve done.”

Anne raises her handguns in both fists and rains death upon them.

Paul pulls a large sack out of the Bradley and curses loudly as it splits open in his hands and spills cans, bags of rice, water bottles, medical tape, hand sanitizer, tampons, mosquito repellant and a box cutter onto the gritty asphalt. Everything is coated in a sprinkling of soot. He can feel the ash settling on his hair and shoulders, finding its way under his shirt, mingling with his sweat and turning into a grimy paste coating his back. This project is converting him to paganism. Getting these supplies sorted is like something out of a Greek myth expressing the usual cruelty of the gods towards those who worship them.

He reenters the hot, dim interior of the Bradley, his back aching at having to walk stooped, and rummages through the three neatly rolled MOPP suits that he found earlier. The soldiers at the government shelter wore suits like this, and they had respirator masks. He finds one with the filter already attached and pulls it over his head. The inside smells like a men’s locker room and it feels mildly suffocating, but it seems functional enough. He no longer feels like he is breathing sandpaper. He raises the mask until it rests on top of his head, sits and lights a cigarette, tossing the match on the floor and coughing.

Where are you, God?

Paul has not prayed in weeks, ever since Sara came at him with her hands stretched into claws. He always found conversing with God directly a path to inner peace and unlocking the solutions to problems.

Why have you forsaken us?

He wonders if this is some type of test for humanity and possibly for him personally. If it is, it is not a fair test. Imagine a school where the students have to guess what the question is on a test before they give their answer.

Dear God, help me to remain your servant. I only want to serve you and glorify you through good works and spreading the good news of your son’s resurrection.

He thinks about that. What has he done to help, other than endless work with the shotgun? He wonders if he is still invited to Heaven. Jesus’ teachings do not appear to apply to this holocaust. Those who followed to the letter God’s prohibition against killing died fast.

He had been so close to giving up entirely. He remembers standing near a wall in the government shelter while the other refugees were being evacuated. The people crowded against the doors while Paul pretended to pray over rows of body bags lined up neatly against the wall. He intended to stay behind after the others left. He wanted to stay behind because he was going to zip himself up inside one of those bags and lie there, pretending to be dead, until God came for him.

Instead, Anne taught his hands to war.

God already ended one wicked age with water, a great heaping flood that covered the earth and drowned it. Then the waters gave and Noah, stepping down from his ark, saw the washed-away ruins of the great cities covered in rags of seaweed, the thousands and tens of thousands of bloated bodies half-buried in the mud.

Noah had been tested. And yet God had talked to Noah.

Speak to us, Lord. Tell us what you want.

He steps on his cigarette and thinks bitterly that perhaps there is a Noah out there, building his fortress for the righteous, and Paul is simply not invited.

He is no Noah. He knows that. He feels he has much in common with Job, however.

God asks Satan what he thinks of Job, a truly pious man. Satan answers that the only reason Job loves God is because God blessed him with riches, health and family. God gives Satan permission to test Job. First, all of his property is destroyed. Then a wind kills all of his children. Job continues to praise God, lamenting that as the Lord gives, so the Lord takes. Satan next afflicts him with boils. Sitting in cinders, Job laments but forgives God.

Finally, unable to endure, he curses the day he was born. He realizes his life has no meaning and believes there is nothing for him to do but die. He does not understand why God created man to suffer.

It is a good story. Paul can relate to all of it.

God comes in a whirlwind and tells Job that it is not for him to question God, as God is king of the universe, not accountable to his creations for anything, including their approval.

Paul had always thought that it was a cop-out, that God gave Job a terrible answer that basically boiled down to: I’m God and you’re not, so do not ask me to justify myself.

But at least it was an answer.

Talk to us, God. If you will not even talk to us in this time of darkness and sorrow, why should we give you any allegiance?

The Jews grappled with the Holocaust for more than sixty years, trying to reconcile their belief in a just and merciful God with the millions gassed and shot and fed to the ovens in the death camps. Paul wonders what humanity will make of God when and if this plague ever ends. If God does not need Man’s approval, he may sacrifice it.

The Old Testament God rewarded such waywardness in his creation with pestilence and slaughter. But as Job basically said, what else can you do to me that has not been done?

Paul dons the respirator mask and steps out into the early twilight created by massive smoke clouds slowly writhing across the sky, as if tormented. He spends several minutes watching as the green landscape continues its slow dissolution into a gray wasteland. He thinks of the other survivors wandering across this wilderness, alone and without hope. This is a place where people face themselves and learn what they really are. In war and adversity, we learn our true nature as humans. On our deathbed, our curse as earthly beings. In a place like this, we gaze into a mirror at our image rendered naked in cruel honesty—at who we really are as people.

His knees popping, he bends and begins brushing soot off of the supplies and organizing them for repacking into the Bradley. Lanterns, Coleman stove, propane tanks, rifle bore cleaner and lube, first aid, duct tape, cord, string, roll of sheet plastic, bags of salt, vitamins, toilet bucket, powdered lime, coffee pot, aluminum foil, soap, Ramen noodles, beans, waterproof matches, bolt cutters, energy bars, bedrolls, flashlights, his tattered copy of the Holy Bible.

Lord, would you have destroyed Sodom if I was there?

Abraham argues with God to spare Sodom and Gomorrah, saying he should not destroy the innocent along with the wicked. He asks God if he would destroy the city if fifty innocent people live there, and God says he would not. He asks God if he would destroy it if forty-five innocent people live there, and God says he would not. And so he bargains with God, forty, thirty, twenty, finally settling on ten. Paul always wondered why Abraham does not ask for mercy if even one innocent man or woman lived there.

Paul decides that he must make himself a righteous man to save the world from God’s wrath, but he does not know how. This is a world where the righteous are easily culled.

He prays for guidance, but again, God does not answer.

“Oh Lord,” Ethan says.

He remembers seeing stories on the news about poor kids from the developing world who were flown to hospitals in the United States to have giant benign tumors removed. The kids were grotesques, carrying twenty to third pounds of flesh on their faces. The tumors were large masses of tissue forming as a result of cancer cells reproducing at an abnormally accelerated rate.

Ducky has something similar growing out of his hip, but it is not a normal tumor. It is a monkeylike creature curled up into a fetal ball, breathing, apparently asleep. Ethan can see where the driver cut the pants of his uniform to release the constantly growing creature. Now he understands why the soldiers were carrying the driver here, away from the other survivors. They do not want the others to see Ducky like this.

Sarge asks the driver how he is feeling. Ducky’s gaze shifts to Sarge but otherwise his expression does not change.

The gunner shakes his head. “He barely has enough energy to breathe right now,” he says.

Sarge looks at Ethan pointedly. “So. You’re the smart one. What do you think?”

Ethan examines the thing growing out of Ducky’s hip, careful not to touch it. It is like cancer, but more than that: a parasite. He cannot believe his eyes; it appears that the man’s entire body has been completely rewired to give everything it has to the growing creature. The thing has apparently reorganized Ducky’s organs and is pressing on his bladder, making him piss himself nearly continuously, a sickly, foul-smelling pink fluid.

Fascinating, almost miraculous, from a purely scientific standpoint. Horrific, and utterly revolting, from a human standpoint.

“We don’t have much time,” the gunner says.

“Time’s up, doc,” Sarge says. “Can you fix him?”

“I don’t understand what it is exactly you expect me to do here.”

Sarge extends his service knife to Ethan.

“Can you fix him?”

Ethan almost laughs, but stops himself. Sarge is not the kind of guy you laugh in front of when one of his people is dying.

Sarge adds, “I sterilized it. It’s clean. And we got plenty of alcohol and gauze.”

“He can’t survive an amputation.”

“Ducky’s a tough sumbitch.” He smiles weakly at the driver. “We’ll booze you up good, Ducky. You won’t feel a thing.”

“Sarge, I’m sorry about your man,” Ethan says carefully. “But there’s nothing anybody can do.”

“Did I make a mistake hauling your ass out of that hospital?”

“Sarge, you’re not really thinking straight. A procedure like this would take a team of real doctors something like half a day in a real hospital. I’m a high school math teacher. I am just smart enough to know that anything I do will kill this man. Look at this small wound here that’s still weeping; he must have tried to cut it off himself in the Bradley, and the pain stopped him. At some point, I assume the parasite will detach, as you can see legs forming here, but right now there is an entire system of veins supplying blood to it. I cut into this mass and even if Ducky’s heart didn’t fail from the shock, the loss of blood would surely—”

“Holy shit,” Steve hisses, pushing himself away from the driver, falling sprawling on his ass.

The parasite’s eye is open, studying them each in turn. The head, fused to the rest of the body-shaped mass of tissue by a thin film of clear mucus, begins to stir. The men gasp with revulsion. Ducky looks down at it, his eyes wide with helpless terror.

The creature is becoming aware. It is literally being born right in front of their eyes.

“It ain’t nothing, Ducky,” Sarge says, his voice fragile. “Don’t even look at it.”

Ethan points to the thing’s face and says, “See how it’s able to move, but Ducky isn’t. The parasite is now stronger than its host, and is—”

He leaps to his feet and bolts across the asphalt screaming.

Sarge chases Ethan under a darkening sky, calling his name, coughing on the smoke and ash that is now falling in a blizzard and almost blinding him. The tiny green figure flickers like a candle fifty yards ahead. The screams ring out across the blank, empty spaces.

Suddenly, Ethan collapses to his knees, gasping. The soldier catches up and drops heavily to one knee next to him, still coughing.

“Let me see it,” he says.

Ethan moans, shaking, cradling his bloody hand.

Paul and Todd come running, looking down at him in surprise.

“Is he in shock?” Paul says.

“No,” Sarge says. “Not physical shock, anyhow.”

“You need help?”

“What the heck happened to him?” Todd asks him, his eyes gaping.

Sarge leans close to Ethan’s ear.

“You’re okay now,” he says calmly and quietly. “Now let me see it.”

He is still doubting what he saw until Ethan slowly unravels his trembling hand and shows the bloody stump where the tip of his index finger used to be. The fucker bit it off. Ate it with a crunch. Its little black eye gleaming with hate.

Ethan is looking at his hand, his face pale and surprised.

“Somebody, get me the med kit,” Sarge says.

“I’ll go,” Paul says, and starts running for the Bradley.

“And plenty of water, Reverend,” Sarge calls after him. He tears a strip from the teacher’s shirt and winds it tightly around the wound. “We’re going to take care of this,” he tells Ethan. “You’re going to be okay. We’ll put some pressure on it for now, all right? Then we’ll clean it real good and I’ll sew it up.”

Todd drops to one knee next to Ethan and says, “You’re alive, man. You’re alive.”

“You’re fine,” says Sarge. “It ain’t nothing.”

Ethan whispers something. Sarge bends closer to hear.

“Kill. Him.”

“The hell you say!”

Ethan winces, his eyes clenching shut against the pain.

“Not murder. Mercy. Quickly, before—”

Back at the fuel island, Steve’s rifle pops once, twice.

“Take care of this man,” Sarge barks.

“Sarge?” Todd says.

Sarge jumps to his feet and runs back across the lot. “No, goddammit, no!”

He finds Steve standing over Ducky’s corpse, his rifle smoking and his eyes wild.

“What happened?” Sarge demands.

“That thing,” Steve says, shaking with disgust and rage. “That fucking thing.”

Sarge closes his eyes but he can still see Ducky’s body lying on the ground, a drained, sightless, empty husk, and the creature splattered across the asphalt.

He can still see where the parasite had begun eating Ducky’s leg.

Wendy returns in time to see Sarge carrying Ducky, a limp bundle wrapped in a blanket and light as a child, into a nearby gently sloping field crowned by a stand of oak trees. Paul and Todd and the gunner have gathered at the top, covered in soot, next to a hole they dug. They ask her where Anne is; Wendy shakes her head, staring in horror at the empty hole, feeling death’s chill. She tells them the Infected are not far behind. A heavy silence falls on them as they fear the worst has happened to Anne, and turn inward to look at these fears.

Sarge and Steve gently lower the body into the pit.

“He knew he was going to die and yet he kept doing his job to the very end, saving our lives,” Sarge says. “That thing was pounding us and Ducky kept on going. He was in an amazing amount of pain, alone and without hope, and yet he kept on going. For us. And for that, Ducky, you have our thanks. Because of you, we’re still here, and we will remember you.”

He nods to Paul, who intones: “‘Our days on Earth are like grass; like wildflowers, we bloom and die. The wind blows, and we are gone—as though we had never been here. But the love of the Lord remains forever with those who fear him.’ Amen.”

“Amen,” the survivors murmur.

Paul lowers his respirator mask to cover his face while the others lift wet bandanas over their mouths. Steve pours gasoline into the hole with the body and Sarge lights it. They step back from the sudden fury of heat and light. Sarge insisted on burning him. That way, he said, nothing will be able to dig him up and eat him.

There is no time for mourning. Sarge knows that grief is a luxury at a time like this. They will just have to try to find Anne on the road, if they can. After several minutes, the survivors plod back down the slope toward the Bradley, now completely inventoried and repacked, everything in its place. On any other day, they might admire the view from this hill, but not today. Not this wasteland across which distant tiny figures toil. Sarge notices a group of refugees breaking into the truck stop, searching for food, water, weapons, shelter. The Bradley is concealed but they should get back on the road now. The day will only bring more refugees, each more desperate than the last, and behind them, a flood of Infection.

Anne is waiting for them at the Bradley, hands on hips, her head and shoulders wrapped in rags, surrounded by falling ash. Her shirt is sprinkled with fresh blood. She pulls the rags and bandana down to expose her smiling face. They have not seen her smile before and find it jarring and yet also oddly uplifting. A tiny voice in their heads suddenly tells them that this too shall pass. They will get through this. They are alive, and they can go on surviving.

“Don’t give up hope,” Anne says.

The Bradley drives along the westbound lanes of the Penn Lincoln Parkway through open, hilly country, passing abandoned cars and files of tired refugees on foot carrying rifles and backpacks and children. The groups of refugees maintain a cautious distance from each other and nobody waves at or approaches the Bradley. The scarred, ash-filled wasteland that was once Pittsburgh recedes the farther they go west; the view here is a brilliant green, virtually untouched.

The vehicle suddenly veers onto an exit, taking it past another abandoned military checkpoint and onto a sunlight-dappled two-lane back road. They pass telephone poles staked at regular intervals and periodic mailboxes and speed limit 45 and school bus stop ahead signs. Rolling hills overlook the road from the right, crowded with maple and beech and dogwood. Distant dark figures march singly or in small groups across open green fields. The air is humid and clean and crowded with the sounds of birdsong and insects.

After several miles, the Bradley slows, passing a sign announcing BUCHANAN EVERGREEN FARM and another marked christmas trees before turning onto a long crushed-stone driveway, speeding towards the distant farmhouse and raising a massive cloud of dust. In the living room, they find the desiccated corpses of a large family lying on the floor, smiling and blue and hugging each other, surrounded by empty bottles of pills. They remove the bodies and burn them in the backyard, coughing soot out of their lungs and marveling at the greenery and lazy birdsong. Anne wants to put more distance between them and Pittsburgh but Sarge tells her they will stay the night here. Paul contemplates the fresh graves and the family photos on the wall, depicting generations that owned this land until Infection, and believes the world is slowly becoming haunted. Or maybe we’re the ghosts and do not even know we’re dead yet, he wonders; survival, after all, has turned out to be a strange purgatory between living and dying. Anne gives Ethan his glasses back, which she forgot she’d scooped up at the hospital, and a fresh T-shirt. She says nothing else, but Ethan, pleasantly numb on painkillers, knows he is accepted again. While Anne unpacks the Bradley, he searches for but does not find his backpack with his family photos, realizing there is now virtually nothing to even note that they once existed. Like the others, he has no home, not even evidence of a past life outside his own unreliable mind. Todd watches the others move about in safety with a smile on his face, biting back witty quips, biding his time. Wendy cleans her Glock and exchanges a long glance with Sarge before going upstairs to take her turn washing in the antique bathtub. The soldiers fortify the house and sit on easy chairs in the living room with a sigh while the others set up the stove and make coffee and drink it slowly in silence, feeling safe for the first time since they left the hospital.

The clock in the living room chimes the hour.

Anne tells them about the refugee camp.

The soldiers she saw on the highway had been attached to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. They had come from a camp. She talked to an officer at the camp on the Humvee radio. It is only a few hours’ drive away, in Ohio, in a place called Cashtown.

Sanctuary. A place where they can finally rest. The real deal: A place where they can be finally, truly safe.

The survivors blink at her, unsure how to respond to this news. After everything that has happened, they are happy simply to be alive and clean and fed in this house. The idea that they might finally end this journey is a lot to absorb.

After several moments of stunned silence, Paul says, “Well, Amen.”

The other survivors laugh and echo the sentiment.

The night passes without nightmares.

The next morning, Anne is gone.