The Infection

THE HOSPITAL

The Bradley mounts the steel cantilever Liberty Bridge and begins crossing its five-hundred-foot main span over the Monongahela River at a careful pace. There are few abandoned cars cluttering the four-lane bridge but Sarge does not want to take any chances. He knows that a National Guard artillery unit destroyed several bridges in the area in a misguided effort to contain the spread of Infection, and does not want to drive through a big hole and plummet more than forty feet into the muddy waters below.

The density of vehicles thickens as they approach the other side of the river, blocked by abandoned makeshift barricades. Piles of stiffening corpses draw flies in front of a machine gun mounted behind a heap of sandbags. The Bradley speeds up and drives through the scene, popping skulls under its treads.

The Bradley enters the South Hills neighborhoods. Sarge opens the hatch for a look around in the open air and sees more barricades and piles of corpses. Some of the barricades apparently held; some were overrun. Either way, it did not matter. Even if they held, Infection was everywhere, eventually making barricades meaningless. Plastic bags and bits of garbage dance in the air, carried on the wind. A shredded T-shirt hangs on the branches of a tree, waving bye-bye at him, while another tree burns energetically like a giant torch, scattering heat and sparks and ashes. A pair of military jets fly high overhead, reminding him that the government is still fighting its own people.

The houses here are covered in graffiti. After the Screaming left more than a billion catatonics twitching on the ground all over the world, volunteers in these communities worked with local authorities to search each house for people and get them to a place where they could receive care. Orange posters are still taped to streetlight poles encouraging citizens to call tip lines to report SEELS for pickup. Black Xs are still sprayed on many doors marking houses that have been searched and cleared of victims of SEELS. The tragedy is that by helping the screamers avoid starvation and dehydration, these good people unwittingly aided in their own destruction. Some houses have other graffiti on them; as people fled their homes, they sprayed messages, and other refugees added their own, using the houses for communication. Names and dates. Missing persons. Directions and wayfinding. Going south. Avoid the police station. Bill, I’m going to get grandma. Other messages warn travelers of infestations, give opinions on everything from purifying water to effective killing methods, or offer trade. Some of the graffiti are simple tags. Newly formed militias claiming territory. Boasts of kills and time served. Totemic symbols scrawled by people in a hurry. Arrows. Biohazard signs. Skulls and crossbones.

The Infected stumble and hold their heads, wailing in a constant state of metaphysical pain. They glower and bare their teeth at Sarge as he drives by in the armored vehicle.

The survivors find the tall, muscular man on his front porch wearing a bathrobe and boxer shorts, shouting and waving a pistol in his right hand and a battered, folded-up umbrella in his left. All of the neighboring houses have a large black X painted on their front doors; the Screaming apparently wiped out this community and left this man as its sole survivor.

“This is my neighborhood,” he says, firing off a round with his pistol and killing a running Infected, who falls sprawling on the sidewalk, joining another draped over a fire hydrant and a third crumpled in a fetal position on the hood of an ancient Cadillac. “You ain’t welcome here!”

The Bradley’s gunner, sitting next to Sarge inside the vehicle, sizes up the man through the periscope and says, “I think we found somebody who might be big enough to take you, Sergeant.”

Sarge snorts and says, “I like his spunk. He’s a fighter.”

“Spunk as in crazy,” says the gunner. He has the square jaw of an action movie hero and wears a Dora the Explorer Band-Aid on the left cheek of his stubbled face. “Crazy as in a threat to all of us.”

“If crazy disqualified membership, there’d be no club in this rig. Ha.”

“I thought the plan was we want ‘survivors, not fighters.’ That’s what you said.”

“Fighters are useful, too,” Sarge says cryptically. “We can’t do job interviews, Steve. Let’s invite him on. If he blends, he blends.”

“You’re the boss, Sergeant,” the gunner says, shrugging.

The man roars: “Kids used to play on this street!”

crack crack

Sarge says, “Something about him reminds me of Randy Devereaux. Remember Devereaux?”

“Not really, Sergeant. I hardly knew him.”

“Right,” Sarge says. “You’re right. That’s my bad.” Steve and Ducky, the driver, are new to the Bradley, replacements for the previous crew, who fell down during the Screaming nearly two weeks ago. Two weeks and an eternity. The replacements barely had any contact with the Bradley’s infantry squad, the boys who survived the Taliban and the Screaming and then flew all the way back from Afghanistan to die in a Wal-Mart parking lot in Pittsburgh.

“This is a nice place to live!”

Sarge calls out to him, but the man ignores him. If he does not trust the military, maybe one of the civilians can coax him. Anne volunteers to get out and do the inviting. While the Bradley stands idling, she approaches with her hands up, palms out.

“What’s your name?” she asks.

The man glares at her sideways, frowning, then waves her off. “Aw, you don’t live here neither.”

“My name is Anne. There are five of us plus the crew—”

The pistol cracks in the man’s hand twice, dropping two distant running figures.

“I am making my stand!” he announces to the sky.

“Come on, get in,” Anne says. “You can come with us.”

“I said, step off, bitch!”

Sarge laughs, shaking his head, while the gunner grins.

“But we want you to come with us,” Anne says.

“Too dangerous out there,” the man tells her, waving his umbrella. “It’s raining zombies!”

crack crack

He fires again several times at distant figures running down the street. At long range, barely looking, and does not miss. One of the kills, Sarge saw it clear, was a headshot. The Infected’s head snapped back and he was dead in the blink of an eye.

Steve says, “Is he actually hitting anything with that pea shooter?”

“Yeah, he is. In fact, every shot hit a separate moving target and brought it down at between twenty-five and thirty meters.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m not a kidder, Steve.”

“With a handgun, though? Wow, this guy is amazing.”

“No, you’re right,” Sarge says. “He’s crazy. Radioactive.”

He calls out to Anne, who jogs back to the vehicle.

“This is my home! My land!”

crack crack crack

Sarge lowers the telescopic seat and closes the single-piece hatch.

“How long do you give him, Sergeant?”

“I don’t know, Steve. Longer than most. Not long enough.”

Paul runs his hand over his salt-and-pepper stubble and takes in the massive hospital looming against the graying sky. The air is cooling and he can feel the tickle of tiny drizzling raindrops on his face. Dull thunder grinds in the distant ether, as if God is moving his furniture across the floor. Now this is good weather for an apocalypse, he tells himself. A gray sky against which black birds swarm. He found the past two weeks of May sunshine jarringly discordant with the end of the world. The diseased walking blindly past flowers in bloom. (Earth abides.) The dead rotting away on lush green grass and overgrown gardens, slowly eaten by bacteria and insects and birds and animals. By the very soil. (Yes, the earth abides.) Paul wonders if God, who also abides, is as impervious as the weather to all of mankind’s horrible sufferings or if, like the grass and the animals and the insects, his creator is getting something out of it.

The wind picks up and the drizzle turns into a spring shower. The survivors set out buckets to catch the water and decide to wait out the downpour inside the hospital instead of the Bradley. They navigate a cluster of abandoned ambulances and dead bodies and enter what is supposed to be the emergency room but what instead looks like a burned-out slaughterhouse. Signs of extreme violence are everywhere on this place. The floor is littered with charred bodies under a thick layer of ash and dust. The walls are painted with dried blood.

“When the first Infected woke up and spread out into the city, the first responders brought the victims of the violence here, to the hospital,” says Ethan. “Gift-wrapped for the rest.”

“It looks like some concerned citizens then showed up and firebombed the place,” Wendy says, kicking at the ash and raising a small cloud of black dust.

The place gives them the creeps. The hospital seems eerily deserted except for the charred dead. It is not hard to imagine doctors and nurses hurrying across this noisy room to greet hardworking first responders bringing in broken and dying people for life-saving treatment. But this is where Infection started. After the Screaming, the people who fell down were brought here and to the ad hoc clinics. Three days later, they woke up and slaughtered and infected the people who had been working around the clock to keep them alive. They slaughtered and infected their own families coming to visit. Then they went out into the city in the early morning hours, driven by the virus’ simple programming: Attack, overpower, infect.

Now it is a killing floor. A dead place. Sarge regards a wheelchair crumpled in a corner, the walls above it riddled with bullet holes. Wall-mounted electronic medical devices hang uselessly. Disturbed by movement, black ash swarms in drifts in the air, acrid to the nose and bitter on the tongue.

Ethan studies the faces of the other survivors, searching for encouragement and finding none. The others look as damaged as he feels. The place has an almost supernatural aura about it. As familiar as the hospital is in some ways, in many ways it feels like the unknown.

Paul wishes the dead had come back to life to eat the living. That there was truly no room in hell anymore and the end of days had come. Because then there would be evidence of a supernatural cause instead of just a bug created in a lab by men to kill other men. There would be evidence of a hell and true evil and Satan. And if there is a Satan, there is a God, and if there is a God, then death is not the end, but the beginning. Man’s suffering over a lifetime is nothing compared to an eternity of bliss in God’s direct presence. To see the dead rise is to see the end of days and with it, the end of faith—the beginning of certainty. With such certainty, Paul would willingly walk into the embrace of the dead and let them tear him apart and eat him. Did Christ not suffer more on the cross? What use is this old fleshly cage when paradise awaits the spirit?

His wife had always laughed at him when he would watch quasi-religious films about Satan visiting the earth and trying to trigger the end of the world, only to be stopped by an action hero with a shotgun. He would cheer for Satan to get on with it. He would yell at the action hero: Why are you fighting God’s plan? Let Satan win already so we can all go to heaven!

“We can’t stay in this room,” Sarge says, finally breaking the spell. He crosses his arms and nods to Anne. “What’s our next move?”

Anne shakes her head, looking back at him with raised eyebrows.

“We treat this like climbing a mountain,” Wendy says. “It’s too big. So we conquer it in stages. But first we need a base camp.”

“Sarge has military experience, Wendy,” Anne says quietly. “I think we should ask him what he thinks we should do.”

Sarge nods at the transfer of authority, which he expected. “There are some simple tactics for taking down a building. Wendy, that analogy of yours was actually very good.”

“Go ahead, Sarge,” the cop says. “It’s your show.”

“All right,” he says. “Here’s how I see it. There are three things we need to do. One: secure a piece of this building for ourselves. Two: strip it down of anything that we can use that will keep us alive. And three: avoid obvious signs that the building has new ownership. We all agreed on that?”

The survivors nod.

“The crew and I will get the rig under cover. Out of sight, but not too far. Anne and Paul, find a janitor’s closet and get as much bleach as you can. Then find a broom.”

“You want us to clean this room?” Paul says, incredulous. “Just the two of us?”

“No. Later on, we’re going to make it exactly as it was before we showed up. We’ll need to get rid of our footprints and we’ll need the broom for that. Okay?”

They nod.

“And while you’re doing it, take a look and see what kind of supplies might be around that we can come back for later,” Sarge adds.

“Got it,” Anne says.

“Wendy, Ethan and the Kid will go up to the third floor, seal themselves in, and then start clearing it of anything living.” Sarge grins. “Then we all get to do some cleaning. We will need to scrub that level from top to bottom with bleach and air it out before we can move in. But only the rooms on the side of the hall away from the windows. Don’t clean the rooms with the windows, since again we don’t want to advertise to anybody that the building has new ownership. Just seal those rooms and leave them. Okay? Once we get all that done, we can do some exploring.”

The survivors agree. It is a good plan.

When Paul’s wife fell down during the Screaming, he arranged for her care in their home. The next day he visited the hospital, where exhausted first responders and volunteers were still delivering scores of twitching bodies, and tried to provide counseling and strength to the families of the victims. He expected the Spirit to tell him what to say but nothing came. Feeling hollow, he rolled up his sleeves and helped empty bedpans for hours. That night, he held a special service. The church was filled to standing room only, the few regulars and the many fair-weather Christians he was accustomed to seeing only at holiday services, many of them holding candles. There was no music or singing because the organist had fallen down and Paul had not arranged for a new one. There would be no collection plate because the ushers had fallen down and Paul had not replaced them either. Paul simply wanted to speak for a few minutes, and offer comfort to his flock through the power of prayer. He had no sermon planned. The Spirit would move him, would speak through him. Looking at all the anguished and weeping faces on the benches, he began by asking rhetorically why this happened.

For long, agonizing minutes, the Spirit said nothing. He was on his own.

He cleared his throat and said, “John, chapter thirteen, verse seven: ‘Jesus replied, “You don’t understand now what I am doing, but someday you will.’”

Several in the congregation nodded, encouraging him to continue, but he fell silent. It was not enough for him to say the Lord works in mysterious ways. Not nearly enough.

Why would God allow this to happen? He could not fathom it. The standard arguments raced through his mind justifying God’s existence in a world in which God allows evil to happen to good people. God’s creation has free will and that includes the free will to do evil. But what evil did his Sara do? God allows evil to thrive in a world corrupted by original sin. But were not the sins of Adam and Eve and everybody since, including Sara, washed away by the blood given by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ? Evil is complementary to good. But how could Paul see anything good in a world without his beloved wife?

God is testing us. God is trying to teach us something.

No, he decided. God is not just teaching.

God is punishing.

Paul told the congregation, “The good book also says: ‘And if you fail to learn the lesson and continue your hostility toward me, then I myself will be hostile toward you. I will personally strike you with calamity seven times over for your sins. I will send armies against you to carry out the curse of the covenant you have broken. When you run to your towns for safety, I will send a plague to destroy you there, and you will be handed over to your enemies.’ Leviticus chapter twenty-six, verses twenty-three to twenty-five. I intend to learn why these verses were written. I intend to learn the lesson God is trying to teach us through such harsh discipline.”

His congregation did not like his message. They did not want to be forsaken. They wanted answers. They wanted comfort and mercy. They stared back at him with terror.

The Old Testament God of justice was back, and Paul, who had worshipped and studied and preached the good news of the New Testament God of mercy and love all his life, did not know what God wanted from him. For two days, he prayed. Sometimes he prayed for understanding. But mostly he prayed that God would show mercy and bring his Sara back to him.

Two nights later, his wife got out of bed in her nightgown, her face gray and her eyes black and cold as a serpent’s, and lunged shrieking for his throat.

The survivors climb the stairs to the third floor. Wendy and the Kid volunteer to clear it while Ethan guards the stairs so that nobody can get in or out. They left him huddled in a corner, terrified at being alone.

The Kid walks ahead of Wendy, scoped carbine shouldered and ready to fire, jerking the barrel back and forth as he scans for targets, although he is not paying much attention to what he is doing, instead imagining what he looks like to the beautiful blond cop. He wonders if Wendy is impressed with his warrior skills. He wishes his carbine had a laser sight. She walks behind him, treading slowly, holding her Glock in her right hand and a flashlight in her left. Their footsteps disturb a thick layer of dust carpeting the ground.

The Kid suddenly bends over with an explosive sneeze, followed by another.

“Shit,” he says, his face burning. “Sorry about that. That wasn’t very ninja.”

The cop smiles grimly. “We’re not trying to be ninja. We’re here to clean up, not sneak around.”

“Oh, right.”

“You know, I’m never going to get used to calling you Kid.”

His mind is reeling. “You don’t like it?”

“I’d rather call you by your real name.”

“It’s Todd,” he says quickly. “But don’t tell anybody else.”

“I promise,” she says with a smile. “It’s our secret.”

He says nothing, flustered and afraid he might blurt out something stupid and irrecoverable.

Wendy motions for him to stop. “You ready to shoot that gun, Todd?”

He nods.

“Then let’s clear this hallway.” The cop calls out, “Hey! Hello? Anybody home?”

A woman bursts out of one of the recovery rooms, dressed in hospital scrubs stained with dried blood down the front, and begins jogging towards them with a bark. The survivors flinch, their hearts racing. Immediately, the ammonia smell of piss assaults their nostrils, making their eyes water.

“Who?” says the Kid.

“You,” says the cop.

The Kid wishes he could have set his rifle to full auto and let it rip like in the movies, but Sarge said not to do that. Sarge said you do not need suppression. You just need to stop somebody, running right at you, with as few rounds and as little energy as possible.

The Kid does not aim at the woman’s head, which offers only a small, lurching target. Instead, he aims at her center torso and squeezes the trigger, firing a single burst of three bullets.

The center of the woman’s chest explodes and she stumbles, wincing and smoking, before bouncing off a wall and toppling to the floor.

The man turns the corner and lunges at them from behind. Wendy wheels and fires her Glock. The bullet enters his left eye socket, scrambles his brain and shoots the mess out the back of his head. He collapses instantly without a sound, dead before he hits the floor.

“Nicely done,” the Kid says weakly, feeling drained.

“I swallowed my gum,” Wendy says.

The corridor suddenly echoes with howls and the tramp of sneakers, dress shoes, high heels, bare feet. Wendy and the Kid freeze, breathing hard, standing back to back with guns ready.

A lot of people are coming.

Sunlight cannot reach this part of the building where it is now perpetual night. The corridor connects the emergency room with the guts of the hospital. Paul and Anne explore its length, searching for supplies, anxiously aware of the sound of their breathing and footsteps. Paul lights the way with a highway flare, revealing bloody handprints on the wall in glaring detail. Beyond several feet, the light is quickly swallowed in the gloom. Bodies lie on the floor surrounded by small clouds of flies. The air reeks of bleach and rot. Water drips loudly somewhere close. A door slams, far away. Paul’s shoes crunch on the scattered remains of a smashed jar of tongue depressors. Rats scamper along the walls before disappearing into the dark.

“I made a mistake, Reverend,” Anne says, shattering the silence.

“What kind of mistake?”

“The kind you regret.”

Paul grunts. He does not know what to say. This is survival. He does not think it is possible for somebody to be alive today without having regrets. He is trying hard to keep his moral compass aimed in the right direction but the harsh truth is morality is a luxury at a time like this. There is plenty of guilt to go around. He wishes there were just a little forgiveness. But even guilt is a luxury reserved for those still alive and feeling safe enough to experience it.

He pauses in front of a door and holds up his flare.

“‘Custodial,’” Paul reads. “I think this is it. It’s unlocked.”

Too late, he realizes that Anne was not talking to him as a fellow survivor. She was speaking to him as a man of the cloth. Sorry, lady, he wants to say, that well has run dry at the moment. He realizes that he knows so little about the people on whom his life depends on a daily basis. He glances at this petite woman holding her powerful scoped rifle and the satchel filled with ammo and thinks, take the gun away and she could be a housewife. A dentist. An actress doing local theater. President of the PTA. The only part of her he has really cared about, however, is her natural talent with the rifle that has helped keep him alive for so long while other men, better men, have died.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” Anne says.

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

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

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

“You kick ass,” he says finally.

“It’s the training.”

“That was way too close.”

“We’re going to be okay.”

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

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

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

“I can’t hear anything,” he says.

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

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

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

“We’re okay,” the Kid tells him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Wait,” Anne tells them. “Quiet.”

A baby is crying.

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

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

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

“That’s not a child,” Anne says.

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

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

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

“Can it see us?” Wendy says.

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

“Oh, God!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What about its other end?

Something whirs in his brain and clicks.

He roars at the survivors, “GET BACK!”

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

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

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

“Out of the way!” Anne screams.

“Everybody get down!”

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

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

The survivors are screaming.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How long is incubation?”

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

“Who has a watch?”

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

“Counting down,” he says.

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

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

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

“We know. The Kid knows it, too.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Zero,” Ethan says, visibly deflating.

“But I’m still me,” the Kid says.

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

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

“I want my mom,” he says.

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

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

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

Todd shakes his head numbly. He is already alone.

Anne says, “Here, let me help you.”

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

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

“We need to talk, Anne.”

Anne glances at Todd and shakes her head slightly.

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

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

Todd does not answer.

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

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

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

After he leaves, Anne nudges him and whistles.

Todd smiles.

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

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

Christ, she was about to shoot Todd in the head and she was on Infection’s doorstep herself.

Would she have done it?

If she had to do it, then yes, she would have. Murder one or help to murder all.

Would she have then shot herself if she felt herself turning?

Yes, she told herself. More readily than shooting one of the others, in fact. The realization surprises her.

Most of the other cops never accepted her and yet she was still a cop. Many cops at the station had an us-against-them mentality about the communities they policed. Wendy was trained in that culture and adopted it as her own. She was still one of “us.” Nobody had as much authority as she had when she patrolled the neighborhoods. Up until she held her gun against that teenage boy’s head, she saw the other survivors as civilians, people who were not her equals but instead her ungrateful charges. She no longer feels that divide. We are becoming a tribe, she thinks.

Somebody knocks and she tells them to wait a moment while she pulls on a black T-shirt, making a mental note to put antiseptic on the cut given to her by the monster, which carried God knew what germs in its rancid mouth besides Infection.

Sarge enters the room, glancing up and down and nodding appreciatively. It is so subtle that he does not realize he is doing it, but Wendy can read the language of attraction without trying. She pointedly looks away, pinning her badge to her belt. The soldier clears his throat and gets down to business immediately.

“I brought you some more water so you can wash your hair if you want,” he says.

“Just did it. See?”

“Roger that,” he says. “Well, take it anyway, for later. It’s rainwater.”

“Does the building not have any water in its tank?”

“It does. A lot, in fact, but we’re saving it for drinking and cooking. Tonight, we are washing with good old rain.”

“Well, thank you,” she tells him. “So what’s our situation?”

“Steve and Ducky swept the rest of the floor. It’s clear. No Infected and no giant slugs with teeth either. I think we’re secure. Now we’re clearing out the bodies and cleaning up the place.”

“You need a hand?”

“No, no, no. This is just a social call. You rest. You’ve been through hell.”

The cop sits on the bed, sighing. “All right.”

“Hey, uh, Wendy…”

“Yes?”

The soldier takes a deep breath and says, “I wanted to say thanks.”

“For what?”

“For what you said about my boys yesterday. I appreciate what you said. So, thanks.”

Ethan, Paul and the Bradley’s crew drag the bodies downstairs on plastic sheets, change spilling out of the corpses’ pockets. This work done, they mop with a strong bleach solution. The gunner and the driver retreat to one of the recovery rooms to set up the Coleman and try to get supper going. The idea of food makes Ethan want to vomit. Wincing at the sting of the bleach, he and Paul decide to try the roof. The hospital has turned out to be a chamber of horrors, and they are craving some fresh air and a little time and space to wrap their heads around everything they have seen.

He immediately regrets it. The stairwell is pitch black. The air is stale and musty. He cannot remember how high the floors of the hospital go, or what fresh terrors await him up there in the dark. His clumsy footfalls sound like thunder in the stillness. After three flights, his knees and lungs begin to protest.

He cannot stop thinking about the wormlike creature that attacked them. That these things were another of the horrible children of Infection is obvious. But are they a mutation, a freak? Or an entirely new life form? Were they once men? Or has the virus jumped species? He has a terrible feeling that the emergence of this creation may be a sign of a fundamental shift in the ecology of the planet. The Infected violently spread disease and cannibalize the dead; they are a plague and an enemy that has humanity on the run, and that is bad enough. But this is new. The balance of nature is changing. A new world is coming in which humans are no longer at the top of the food chain. The thing appeared to be a bottom feeder, another eater of the dead. There is plenty of food to sustain a large population of these monsters, depending on how much they need to eat. What will happen when they can no longer feed on the dead?

It took a 25-mm cannon to kill it…

They reach the top of the stairs and find the door unlocked. Some of the hospital staff must have fled onto the roof to get away from the Infected rising out of their beds. But the roof is bare of the living or the dead. Ethan walks carefully, feeling exposed under the massive twilight sky.

The rain has mostly stopped but the ground is still wet and the air feels heavy and humid. They walk to the parapet. Over the roofs of the houses and low-rise buildings, they see downtown Pittsburgh in the distance, across the river. The tall buildings stand dark and derelict. The Grant Building is on fire and veiled in white smoke, an incredible sight. Pillars of smoke rise up from a dozen smaller fires scattered across the city. They hear the distant crackle of gunfire at the Allegheny County Jail to the east.

“Reverend, why did those people leave their photos in that garage?”

“I don’t understand you.”

“The parking garage where we stayed last night. People passing through there before us left photos of their families and friends on the wall. Why did they do that?”

“Just saying goodbye, I guess,” Paul answers.

“I don’t think I want to say goodbye,” Ethan says.

Paul shakes his head and says, “I don’t even know how.”

Bonded by their grief, the men watch the sun go down and the Grant Building burn in the twilight. Even after everything they have gone through, it is still sometimes hard to believe what has happened to the world they once lived in. People and buildings and phone calls and TV shows and grocery shopping and the normal pace of life. The gray sky occasionally spits. Over time, the warm rainwater collects in their hair and on their faces, slowly washing away the ash and the filth. They stand there without speaking for over an hour, Paul slowly chain smoking his cigarettes.

This high up, the apocalypse seems almost peaceful.

“The end of the world doesn’t happen overnight,” Paul says, nodding. “It takes time.”

The sky is quickly turning dark. They decide to turn back. Ethan notices that somebody sprayed the words HELP US in bright orange paint across the hospital roof.

“It may never end,” he says, feeling homesick.