The Killing Floor

THE KILLING FLOOR

Craig DiLouie

Published by Permuted Press at Smashwords.

Copyright 2012 Craig DiLouie

www.PermutedPress.com

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Renée Bennett, Jessica Brown and Elizabeth Stang for their editing support. I owe an additional thanks to former Chief Petty Officer James R. Jackson, who reviewed most military-themed content for accuracy.

Note

A significant amount of research went into this novel to make the setting and action as realistic as possible. That being said, all of its characters are completely fictional, and any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidence. Further, many places and organizations are either fictional or fictionalized. For example, liberties were taken in the geography, towns and roadways between southeastern Ohio and Washington, DC to enhance the story. Military units are also fictionalized, with the Fifth Stryker Cavalry Regiment being an invented unit borrowing elements of several existing units in the United States Army.

For my beautiful family, my neverending worries for whom fuel these apocalyptic dreams.

Outbreak

On the second floor of the West Wing of the White House, the meeting adjourned for lunch early because the machine gun was too loud.

Dr. Travis Price, assistant director with the Office of Science and Technology Policy, stared out the window into the smoky haze that had settled onto the city.

Outside, the Marines were still shooting the Infected off the fence.

The conference room doors opened and servers entered in crisp blue suits, pushing carts across the carpet. They flinched at the machine gun’s coughing bark.

“Oh my God,” said Sanders, standing at another window.

“What?” someone said, his voice edged with panic.

“It’s one of the gardeners.”

Travis looked down at the green lawn, but saw nothing except for an infected woman climbing the fence. She flopped to the ground. The machine gun stopped firing.

“What happened to him?”

“Nothing. He’s down there pruning the rosebushes.”

A few people laughed.

“Now that’s loyalty,” someone said.

“Hope he’s getting time and a half.”

Amazing world we now live in, Travis thought, where the mundane shocks us.

The Continuity of Government Task Force had been thrown together on the epidemic’s first day. The President wanted more authority to deal with the spread of the Wildfire Agent, the official name for the Infection. Congress had to approve everything. The room was packed with bureaucrats, policy wonks and congressional staffers; Travis had been attached to the task force as science adviser. They argued posse comitatus, the Insurrection Act of 1807, the lessons of Operation Noble Eagle. Mostly, they fought over the boundaries of executive authority and ways to legitimize mass slaughter. Busts of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, placed in niches on the far wall, observed the proceedings with mild disdain.

Travis wondered if all this debate over legal interpretations was some kind of institutional denial, the equivalent of Nero fiddling while Rome burned.

His stomach growled. He had eaten little over the past few days, and his body needed food.

He approached the lunch table, picked up a sandwich, and stared at it. Tuna fish, he observed, with the crusts expertly cut off. He marveled at the amount of care in its preparation. He took a bite, chewed, forced himself to swallow. Packs of Infected ran through the nation’s cities on a series of TV screens recessed into the wall just above his head. Two of the stations, taken over by the Emergency Alert System, scrolled evacuation instructions.

So far, he had been asked to contribute little to the meeting—which was good, since he had no insights to offer. Everyone knew what he knew: Seven days ago, one in five people around the world fell down screaming. Four days ago, they awoke from a catatonic state and began attacking others and infecting them with some type of disease, plunging the world into hell. It was all right there on the TV screens.

The big question was why, and nobody had an answer to that.

CNN showed a mob tearing apart a squad of riot police in Chicago. Someone gasped. The violence was agonizing to watch. The Infected were like animals. The cops fought desperately, pushing them back and flailing with their batons.

“No, no, no,” someone sobbed.

“Hey,” Travis hissed to two men standing near him. Fielding and Roberts, clean-cut men with hard faces and astronaut builds. They worked for the office of the National Security Advisor. “Should we be allowing this on the air?” He felt sure the government should be trying to control the flow of information in a crisis like this. Censorship was wrong, of course, but could also be practical to prevent panic.

Fielding and Roberts exchanged a glance.

“Why try to cover up or deny something that’s happening everywhere?” said Roberts.

“Stick with science, Doc,” Fielding said.

Travis turned away, his face burning with embarrassment. He wondered why he’d bothered. Outside the realm of science in which he excelled, he was awkward around other people, always saying the wrong thing.

On the TV screen, three of the five fallen cops were getting back onto their feet. While it took three days for the screamers to awaken and attack their caregivers, once bitten, conversion took mere minutes. Heads jerking, the cops ran to join a pack of Infected.

“The biggest question is why they run so fast.”

“What’s that, Dr. Price?” Roberts asked him.

Travis blinked, unaware he had voiced the thought aloud. “Uh, the biggest question on the tip lines,” he said. “Why the Infected can run.”

The men stared at him blankly. Travis moved aside to allow other people closer to the sandwiches. The crowded room buzzed with gossip and debate.

He went on, “A lot of people think the Infected are zombies. Like zombies in old movies. Dead people who have come back to life. Zombies are slow, right? People don’t understand.”

“Probably a good thing too, Doc,” Fielding said. “If people think their loved ones are already dead, fewer of them might hesitate. They’ll kill them on sight, if they have a weapon.”

“But we’re not telling people to kill the Infected,” said Travis.

“Of course we’re not telling them that,” said Fielding.

“I guess if they were zombies, they’d be dead and have no rights and then it would be okay to tell people to kill them,” Travis said. “Too bad about that.”

“Interesting,” Fielding said flatly, his hard eyes betraying his contempt.

“Dr. Price, do you mind if I talk to you alone for a moment?” Roberts asked him.

“Certainly,” Travis said with relief he hoped did not come across as too obvious.

The man gestured to the window and they moved away from the others. Travis winced at the man’s breath, sour from endless tension.

“My wife fell down,” he said.

“SEELS?” Travis asked. Sudden Encephalitic Lethargica Syndrome, or SEELS, was the formal, if somewhat broad, term scientists were using to describe the mystery disease that made more than a billion people collapse screaming, bringing the world to a crashing halt.

“Yeah,” said the man, running his hand over his buzz cut. “I got her into a hospital. Now she’s one of those maniacs out there.”

“I’m sorry,” Travis said mechanically.

“Listen, she’s pregnant. Eight months.”

“Oh.”

“My kid—is he one of them or one of us?”

Travis opened his mouth and shook his head. Theories flooded his brain, fighting to be spoken, but he held them back. Roberts wanted some type of assurance, but Travis did not know the right words. He was as bad at platitudes as he was at small talk.

“The President,” Fielding called to Roberts, pointing at the TV screens.

President Walker had spent most of the crisis underground in the Situation Room. Since the epidemic started, they had seen him only on television. Someone boosted the volume, filling the room with the President’s address to the nation from his desk in the Oval Office.

“—functions of our government continue without interruption.”

Roberts turned away to watch. Travis sighed with relief.

“Federal agencies in Washington are evacuating and will reopen at secure locations within the next few days. To ensure the safety of personnel critical to the continued functioning of our government, I am also ordering the immediate evacuation of the White House.”

The room erupted with gasps and murmuring and people shushing each other.

“Quiet!” someone shouted.

“Excuse me,” Travis said, stepping through the crowd. “I’m feeling sick.”

They moved aside readily, staring at the screens. He did not even need the ruse. They were like sheep.

“—evil acts of terror perpetrated by people who were once our family, friends, neighbors.”

He closed the door behind him.

A human train hustled past, shoving him aside. He caught a glimpse of the Attorney General flanked by stoic Secret Service agents and trailed by pale staffers clutching briefcases and stacks of files against their chests.

Travis fell in with them, glancing over his shoulder at the conference room doors. Fielding and Roberts and the others were still listening to the President’s speech. He did not need to hear it. He had already gotten the message loud and clear: Get out. We’re leaving now. Six thousand people worked for the White House. He had no idea how many were in the building right now, but it was a lot. He would take no chance at being left behind.

A large man wearing a business suit and ear piece appeared at the end of the corridor, waving them forward. “The stairs are clear,” he barked. “Let’s move it.”

The group quickened its pace, suddenly interrupted by people pouring into the corridor from multiple doors. Everyone was getting the same message: Evacuate.

“Go,” one of the agents said, pushing through the mob. “Make way for the Attorney General, people.”

Travis tried to follow in their wake, but was blocked. He was now at the rear of a large crowd filling the corridor and trickling down the stairwell. Behind him, the thirty people from his working group caught up. A large portrait of Andrew Jackson frowned down at them from the wall.

The line ground to a halt. The staffers cracked open laptops and made calls on their cell phones. People sat on the steps and shared what they knew. Rumors rippled down the line.

Helicopters are taking us out. Marine One is in the air.

The President was already gone.

The line moved, and then stopped again. Travis chafed, feeling trapped. He had a bad feeling about the evacuation. He looked at the worried faces around him and wondered if they felt it too. He loosened his tie and tried to control his growing panic.

They finally reached the bottom and exited the building. Exhausted from working day and night to help steer the White House’s lumbering decision-making process, officials and bureaucrats and secretaries blinked at the gray sky, looking for the sun. Ahead, more people streamed through the trees under the sentinel gaze of Marine guards with automatic weapons. A sniper on the roof fired his rifle with a sudden bang, making the crowd flinch in unison like startled deer. Travis hurried after them, coughing on hot, smoky air that smelled like burning chemicals. For days, he had watched the apocalypse on TV, and now here he was hurrying right into it. It was strange, but he thought he’d been in the safest building on the planet.

Emerging from the trees, Travis was greeted by the cathartic view of a massive Chinook helicopter standing on the broad South Lawn, the metallic chop of its rotors competing with the crackle of gunfire. The door was folding closed. Travis scanned the black haze drifting across the sky. Past the familiar sight of the Washington Monument, he saw the black dots of one helicopter receding, another approaching.

The helicopter on the ground lunged into the humid air, blasting the mob below with a strong hot wind that carried an oily smell. A briefcase spilled open and shed hundreds of sheets of paper that fluttered into the air. This is not an evacuation, Travis thought, feeling a rush of panic. This is a meltdown.

The Secret Service waved the crowd back, their mouths working, as the next helicopter landed hard and fast. Travis pressed ahead, ducking at the booming shots of the sniper rifles. He was so close now. If not this ride, he would make the next. Instead of assuring him, this idea inspired more panic. The people around him continued to shout into the roar of the blades, scream at the crack of Uzis, point at the Infected being shot down as they climbed the makeshift fence surrounding the landing zone.

“Come on!” he shouted into the noise.

People were moving again, climbing aboard the helicopter. Then the Secret Service closed ranks, blocking the way. The helicopter was full, the agents shouted. Wait for the next one.

So close, Travis thought. He looked at the sky past the Washington Monument and saw one helicopter disappearing, but none coming.

Someone screwed up. There’s not enough transportation to get everyone out.

They’re going to leave us behind to die.

Driven by his terror, he pushed forward until he stood face to face with one of the Secret Service agents. The crowd heaved and Travis found himself looking into the barrel of a large handgun, one short squeeze from oblivion. He dug his heels and pushed back at the bodies pressing against him, staring wild-eyed at the big gun in the agent’s hand.

“Please don’t shoot me,” Travis said.

“Back,” the agent told him.

“Listen to me,” he said. “You have to get me on this helicopter.”

The large man’s expression remained inscrutable behind mirrored sunglasses.

“I’m a science adviser,” Travis added. “The President needs me, do you understand? If you want this thing to end, the President is going to need me at his side. I’m a scientist.”

The agent said nothing.

“You really think bullets are going to stop this?” Travis said in disgust, giving up.

The agent frowned and Travis winced, thinking he was going to be shot. Instead, the man turned and boarded the helicopter, grabbed the arm of a young woman sitting near the door, and pulled her from her seat. She burst into tears, obeying meekly until she stood in the opening looking dazedly at the crowd, mascara running down her face, her hair frayed around braids coiled into a bun. The roiling mob glared back at her in a state of fierce panic. The agent said something; she screamed and clawed at his face until he shoved her off. People surged around, trying to help. She continued to wail. The sound of it made Travis want to throw up.

Then he realized what was happening.

“Hey, wait,” he said.

The agent slid his hand under Travis’s armpit and squeezed, propelling him toward the open door of the helicopter.

“You can’t do this,” Travis pleaded. “You have to let that woman on too!”

The agent said close to his ear, “Don’t try my patience.”

If you want to live, live, he seemed to say. If you want to die, die. Don’t play games with me. I have to stay here. I’m a dead man doing his duty.

His face burning with rage and shame, Travis climbed into the helicopter and took the woman’s seat, avoiding the eyes of his fellow passengers. He sensed someone staring at him. He glanced up and locked eyes with John Fielding.

The helicopter lurched into the air.

He looked away, feeling Fielding’s cold gray eyes boring into him as he fought back another urge to vomit. The machine banked in its long ascent, giving him a window view of the crowd surrounded by swirling debris. A sob ripped through him.

I just want to live.

The helicopter was still turning. Below, Travis saw a shiny black Lincoln Town Car, little flags fluttering on its hood, approach the South Lawn at high speed, pursued by a horde of running people. Some high-ranking official or diplomat seeking sanctuary. The vehicle accelerated as it neared the fence, then veered sharply as Secret Service agents opened fire on it. Moments later, the car crashed through and coasted to a smoking halt among the trees.

The Infected were streaming across the lawn into the guns of the Secret Service when the helicopter straightened out, cutting off his view.

Three Weeks Later

Part I. Typhoid Jody

Ray

The battle is over. The dying writhe in piles, softly hissing.

The man sits on the jagged edge of the broken six-lane bridge connecting West Virginia and Ohio, his feet swinging in empty space. His old work boots feel heavy and hot on his sore feet. A warm breeze moans across the gap, clearing the smoke from the air and drying the gore covering his body to a crust. Seventy feet below, the river is still clotted with corpses. Nobody will ever cross this bridge again. Less than an hour ago, he and his team blew a massive hole in it with several tons of TNT to stop the hordes, still pouring from the burning ruins of Pittsburgh, from continuing west toward the FEMA 41 refugee camp, otherwise known as Camp Defiance.

Just like the three hundred Spartans, he reflects with a harsh laugh, cupping his hands to light a cigarette with his steel lighter. Camp Defiance is saved. They’ll write legends about us. An incredible thing, but in the big scheme of things I’d rather not be dying.

Ray inhales and coughs, his ears still ringing from the blast. Forty feet away, the Infected crowd the far side of the broken bridge, snarling and clawing at the air, still trying to get at him. They are people, once like him, now turned into monsters compelled by their viral programming to seek, attack, overpower, infect. An overweight man in a business suit loses his footing and falls shrieking into the river. Ray glances down and thinks, There goes another CEO. His gaze lingers on the sunlight sparkling on the brown currents and feels the urge to jump. Back on the bridge, a howling, hulking brute in bloodstained overalls takes the businessman’s place.

Something blocks the sun; despite the heat of July, he feels a slight chill on his back. He takes a final drag on his cigarette and tosses it into the wind before turning to squint at the woman standing over him, the sun glaring around her head like a halo. Pain lances across his ribs, radiating from his wound.

“You must be Anne,” he says, wincing. “You’re Anne, aren’t you?”

The woman nods. She is five-five and dressed in a black T-shirt tucked into dark blue jeans. Two large handguns are holstered snugly against her ribs. A black baseball cap rides low over eyes glinting like cold steel. Her face is disfigured with fresh scars running down her cheeks like scabbed tears. A cloth pad is sewn over the right shoulder of her T-shirt, put there to absorb the recoil of her sniper rifle. She carries herself like a soldier but he knows the truth, which is that less than three weeks ago, Anne Leary was a suburban housewife with three small children. She and her people showed up at the end of the fight, buying them enough time to finish the demolition.

If the PTA were a bandit army, Ray thinks, she’d fit right in. As its general. “Todd told me about you. How is the little pecker, anyway?”

“Todd will be all right,” Anne says.

“Where is he?”

“On the bus. Sleeping. He doesn’t know.”

Ray nods, running his hand over his handlebar mustache and stubble. It’s better Todd doesn’t. “He’s a—” He almost said Todd is a better man than him. He probably should have. The kid fought like a maniac during the battle. “He’s just a dumb kid. Take good care of him.”

Ann unholsters one of her guns and taps her thigh with the barrel. Ray frowns.

“So that’s how it is,” he says.

“It’s just an offer.”

“Of what, exactly?”

“Mercy.”

He snorts with laughter; Anne does not strike him as the merciful type. The woman stares down at him as if he is a block of wood. She knows he is infected. To her, he is not a real person anymore. All she sees is the organism in his blood. For his part, all he sees is a cold-hearted bitch all too happy to put a bullet in his head.

On the other hand, it would be a mercy. He has a few hours at most to live and they promise to be insanely painful, culminating in the final horror of being eaten alive by the thing growing inside him.

Bone cancer would be a pleasant death compared to what I got ahead of me. But a few hours of pain is still life. And living is still better than dying.

“So that’s what I get for what I done here today?”

It’s not fair.

Anne shrugs. All of that does not matter. The only cure for the bug is death. The one choice you have, if you get one at all, is how you want to go.

“I don’t want to die,” he tells her.

“You’re already dead.”

Anger burns in his chest. She reminds him of the busybody neighbour who always gave his mom a hard time about her dog barking. The upright citizen type who called the cops on him when they found him sleeping one off on the bus stop bench. A lifetime of judging and now this, the final insult.

“Yeah? What about Ethan? Was he already dead too, when you shot him?”

The woman winces.

He feels a brief moment of triumph. That’s right: When it’s your friend, it’s not so easy to call them dead, Miss High and Mighty. The moment passes, and he finds he no longer cares. He turns and regards the vast blue sky and remembers something Paul, the chain-smoking preacher, said to him: The earth abides. The thought makes him feel warmly detached.

“Do it, if that’s what you want,” he says. “I can’t stop you. In fact, I’m honestly too tired to give a shit.”

Do it now, he prays. Do it before I change my goddamn mind.

Ray tenses and waits for the gunshot to split his head open. The sky has never looked so blue. The muddy river flows deep under his feet. Birds chirp in distant trees. The earth abides: He tries to hold that thought and make it his last but his scalp starts to itch. He can almost taste the metal of the bullet coming out the front of his face, taking his teeth with it. The more he thinks about it, the more it fills him with mindless, screaming terror. In a moment, he will enter oblivion.

The dead don’t even dream. They don’t even know they’re dead. They are a person and then they are nothing. Just meat.

“No,” he moans, sobbing.

Behind him, boots splash among the dead. Anne is leaving without a word.

Ray exhales. He realizes he was not breathing. Mercy, indeed. He wonders why she did not go through with it, but it does not matter why. All that matters is he has a little more time. Time for what? He pulls another cigarette from his crushed pack and lights it with a cough. Time enough for one more smoke. Funny how he used to worry about lung cancer.

Gunshots echo across the bridge, sending his heart lunging into his throat. The others who’d gotten infected are taking Anne up on her offer of mercy. He hears the rest of the survivors piling their gear and casualties into the truck beds. They will not let the monsters take their dead. The bodies will be buried in a special place where nothing will be able to dig them up and eat them.

Soon, Ray will be alone with the hundreds of Infected still crowding the edge of the shattered bridge, growling and reaching for him with outstretched hands. Behind them, smoke blackens the horizon, where heat waves ripple into the sky as Pittsburgh continues to give up its ghost.

Everything is busy becoming something else.

For him, the change will happen soon.

♦

The convoy of heavy vehicles drives away. Ray wanted them to leave, but now feels tired and lonely. Around him, the dying have stopped moving, congealing into a single rigid mass. It is hard to distinguish individuals among the piles of torn and mangled bodies. He sees a hairy wrist with an expensive watch, and suppresses the urge to lift it. It has no value to him now other than to remind him he is running out of time.

The sun hangs low in the sky. Tonight, the real monsters will arrive, sniffing the air, and eat the dead. He wants to be somewhere else when they come. His instincts tell him to seek out a private place to curl up and die.

He works his way onto his hands and knees, gasping at the pain in his side. The puncture site has swollen to the size of a grapefruit, waiting patiently to be born. Behind him, the Infected on the other side of the torn bridge stop clawing and hissing and begin to moan. He reaches his feet through sheer willpower, hugging his throbbing ribs, and sees the Infected reach out to him as if pleading.

“What the hell?” he says. He finds this raw display as unnerving than their constant rage.

A distant monster bellows like a foghorn, reminding him that not all of the children of Infection wear human faces.

Get out of here, his instincts warn. Even now, he obeys the will to survive. If the juggernauts find him, they will grind him into paste and suck the blood from the remains.

Ray staggers among the bodies, trying to keep his footing. He finds a rifle lying on the ground, picks it up and peers through the scope, aiming at a woman wearing the shreds of a nightgown. He wonders if it still works.

One way to find out—

The rifle fires with a metallic crack. The back of the woman’s head explodes, splashing the Infected behind her with smoking pieces of bone and brain. The shell casing rings on the asphalt. The woman crumples to the ground, rolls in a tangle of limbs, and tumbles into the river.

“That was for Ethan,” he says, certain now he is holding what was the teacher’s rifle. Ray hardly knew the man, but they fought together on the bridge, and Ethan became infected covering him and the others as they fell back to fire the charges and destroy the bridge.

He detaches the magazine and counts three bullets. He hopes it will be enough to get him to Steubenville and into a nice soft, clean bed to lie on and die. He sneezes on the puff of gun smoke and swears at the shock of pain arcing through his chest.

“Kill all you bastards,” he mutters.

His mother’s voice: You do what you think is best, Ray.

“Damn straight.”

The Infected reach out to him, moaning and wailing, their eyes glimmering in the growing twilight. Come back, they seem to say. Don’t go just yet. Ray coughs and spits a gob of black phlegm. It is easy to forget sometimes they were once average people. That they were loved.

The foghorn call booms across the dead landscape, closer now, sending a jolt of adrenaline through his system. Time to go. Now.

He starts walking. It is difficult to move; the right side of his ribcage feels like a giant fishhook is stuck in it and someone is trying to reel it in. The cancerous grapefruit throbs hotly, continuing its relentless growth.

He carries a special strain of the bug. He was not bitten; he was stung.

Some of the Infected do not look like people. The only way to describe them is to call them monsters. One particularly horrible species of these things, called a hopper by most people because of their oddly articulated legs allowing them to leap high into the air—but also going by the names jumper, imp, goblin and humper—stung him during the fight on the bridge. He imagines trying to explain it to Tyler Jones back at the Camp Defiance police station, where he worked as sergeant of Unit 12.

Well, Tyler, think of a whining hairless monkey the size of a German shepherd tearing you a new asshole and then fucking it with a syringe full of acid.

And that was just the beginning. The injected material immediately got busy converting his cells to start another hopper growing right out of his rib, like Adam making Eve.

Congratulations, Ray. You’re going to be a daddy. And when it’s born, it will eat what’s left of you. At that point, you’ll be so drained, all you will be strong enough to do is watch.

Is this really worth surviving for?

Breathing hard, he staggers off the bridge and stares blankly at the outskirts of Steubenville: several white buildings, houses, gas stations, distant smokestacks and church steeples under a dimming sky. From here, the town has no visible scars from the epidemic. No charred homes half burned to the ground, no abandoned wrecks of vehicles, no piles of corpses drawing flies in the heat. The only oddity is the eerie quiet, the lack of any living human. Nonetheless, he feels watched. The waning summer sun casts long shadows across the features of this ghost town. He hobbles along the street, passing under dead traffic lights, tears streaming down his face, driven by a need to survive he no longer understands.

Goodbye, sun.

The blue house calls to him. It reminds him of his mother’s house back in Cashtown. This house, he decides, will be a good place to die.

♦

Ray tries the front door. Locked. The garage stands open, but its door is also locked. He limps to the side of the house, stumbling over a garden hose sitting in the tall grass like a patient snake, and finds an open window over an overgrown flowerbed. All he has to do is tear out the mesh and pull himself up and over—something he’s done at least a few times during his long career as an asshole—but he wonders if he has the strength to do it now. As if sensing his ambition, the monster growing from his side pulls against his ribcage, warning him to stay put.

Don’t rock the boat, mister, he can picture it saying, or I’ll suck one of your lungs through your ribs.

“Shut the fuck up,” he tells it.

Ray returns to the garage and drags out a short ladder, which he props against the window. Even with its aid, his progress is slow and agonizing. By the time he steps gingerly onto the floor of the house’s kitchen, he is drenched in sweat and has given the growth in his side a full-fledged malevolent personality, something other than God to bargain with.

He needs water. The tap in the sink produces nothing but a single constipated groan. He eyes the refrigerator warily and decides not to open it. Its door is plastered with kids’ drawings, a shopping list and a calendar filled with scribbled appointments and X’s leading up to the day of the epidemic. The day all calendars stopped.

“Damn it,” he says, rubbing his eyes. He left his rifle outside, propped against the wall, like the idiot in a horror movie that everyone yells at. There goes his suicide option. His face feels hot against his hand. Fever. His body trembles as his energy drains out of him and the simple act of standing becomes tiring.

“Ray?” a voice calls from behind the wall. “Is that you home?”

“Who’s there?” he whispers.

“Ray?”

“Whoever you are, please don’t mess with me.”

The ghostly shape floats out of the gloom of the dining room, a giant woman in a white nightgown, her short hair mussed from sleep.

Ray blinks. “Mom? What are you doing here?”

“I’m so glad you’re home, sweetie.”

“Are you a ghost?”

His mother laughs. “Of course I ain’t a ghost.”

“Mom, you’ll never guess what I did.”

His mother checks out the kitchen, wearing a sad frown. “Does it smell musty in here? This place needs a good cleaning. So much dust.”

“I’m a cop now. A real cop.”

“So much work to do—did you say you’re a police officer now?”

“That’s right, Mom. At the refugee camp.”

“Oh,” she says with a worried expression. “Well, you do what you think is best.”

His smile falters. “No, Ma, listen. We just blew up the Veterans Bridge. The Infected were coming out of Pittsburgh because of the fire, and we had to blow the bridge to stop them from crossing over and coming after the camp. I volunteered. I was one of the few who survived.”

“Oh,” his mother says again, touching her face. “Whatever you think is best, Ray.”

“Stop saying that!” he roars. The creature inside him awakens and turns over, pulling at his internal organs. The shock strikes his body like lightning. He wakes up on the floor curled into a ball, still screaming. “Don’t say that to me anymore!”

Several monstrous foghorns blast in unison outside, one of them close. The house trembles from the vibrations. The windows shiver in their frames. Glasses and plates rattle in the cupboards. A distant car alarm honks.

His shouting expended the last of his energy, but broke the sudden delirium. Mom’s not here. They put her in one of those mass graves outside of town. Mrs. Leona Young died during the Screaming, drowning in the bathtub as Ray slept one off downstairs in his basement apartment. So many people died during the Screaming that nobody could give his mother a proper burial. The public health department came to pick up her body for disposal in one of the mass graves the county dug outside of town. The health workers were unable to lift her three hundred pounds, and settled on dragging her from the house on a mattress. We’re going to need a bigger hole for this one, ha ha. Even in death, Leona could not find dignity.

“Don’t give up on me, Momma,” he says, crawling out of the kitchen.

Whatever he thought was best was never any good, but she loved him anyway. All that mother’s love, unconditional, abundant, wasted.

The couch in the living room looks deep and inviting. Gritting his teeth, Ray starts his journey across the dusty-smelling carpet, pausing often to rest. He tries to spit, but his mouth is dry. Maybe I should just give it up. What does it matter where I die? But he makes it. He may have lived like a dog, but he does not intend to die like one. He pulls his body up onto the couch and sits gasping, his face burning with fever as his immune system wars against the invader in his blood. Outside, the light is failing fast. Night is falling for the last time on Ray’s world. Time enough for one last smoke, and then good night and good luck. He puts a wilted cigarette between his lips and lights it, staring out the big picture windows at the empty street outside.

Ray looks around, surprised to see no TV. He notices an unopened can of beer on the end table, hiding in plain sight, and blinks away a tear.

“Merry fucking Christmas,” he says.

He opens the beer and smells it. Sips it. Pours some on the bulge in his shirt.

“You like that, you little bastard?”

The growth throbs in response.

The brew is warm and a little flat and not his brand but it is the best beer he ever drank in his life. Finding an unopened beer is almost enough to make him believe in a kind and merciful God. After savoring a few sips, he chugs half of it and belches.

The can falls from his hand to spill foaming onto the carpet.

“Get out of here,” he whimpers, waving his good arm. “Go. Git.”

The picture windows are filled with Infected. They stand motionless, peering in with dark eyes, their breath steaming the glass.

Why don’t they attack?

“Leave me alone,” he cries. “Just let me die in peace.”

Are they real, or am I seeing things again?

Ray curls into a ball on the couch and closes his eyes, pressing a pillow against his face.

Lord, have mercy, he prays. Don’t let them eat me.

As he loses consciousness, he begins to change.

Outside, the Infected scream in the dark, slapping their hands against the glass.

Todd

The convoy grinds west along U.S. Route 22 with the headlights off, navigating by moonlight. Near the front of the battered yellow school bus leading the convoy, the boy huddles against Anne’s shoulder, her leather jacket draped over his body, lulled into a gentle doze by the droning engine. Three weeks ago, he was acing tests and dodging bullies in high school; now he is a veteran fighter in a war that is just getting started but has already changed him. Some of the other survivors weep in the dark. Outside, the Infected suffer their own pain. He can hear them wailing in the trees, mourning the lost world, until falling silent one by one as sleep overtakes them.

Pressed against the warmth of Anne’s body, Todd feels safe.

“Where have you been?” he whispers.

She does not answer; he wonders if he spoke the words or only thought them.

“Going back and forth on the earth, and walking up and down it,” Anne finally says.

“That sounds like a quote. Who said that?”

“Satan,” Anne tells him. The angel of light who was cast out of heaven for hubris.

Todd used to coolly remark the apocalypse beat high school, but now realizes how stupid it was to say such a thing to people who lost everything. For most of his life, he had intelligence but little experience; he envied the natural gravitas of adults, whose sense of themselves ran deep with time. Now he understands. He senses the pain behind Anne’s answer. She is no longer just a mother figure for him. She is a woman battling her own demons.

“Why did you leave us?”

Anne fought hard to get Todd and the others to the refugee camp, riding out of Pittsburgh in the back of a Bradley fighting vehicle, only to disappear just as they found it.

“My family died,” she says. “They died because of me. I don’t get to come back.”

“But you did. You found us at the bridge.”

“Blind luck,” she tells him. “I was just passing through with some other survivors. I’m their guardian angel now. In any case, that’s not what I meant.”

“I know what you meant,” he whispers.

Something large collides with the bus, with a metallic boom followed by a flurry of screams. Todd clutches at Anne, wide eyed and gasping, his arteries turned into wires carrying electric current instead of blood. The monster snorts like a giant pig, grotesquely loud, its hooves clashing on the asphalt. The driver roars, stomping on the gas. Todd feels the sudden pull of gravity as the bus lurches hard to the left. The hooves strike the side of the bus, making the entire vehicle shiver. The boy buries his face against Anne’s shoulder, biting her jacket. Then the thing falls behind, its hooves clattering, shrieking in the dark.

“What about me?” he cries. “Do I get to come back?”

Anne shushes him and strokes his hair until he regains control of his breathing and his heart stops hammering in his chest. It’s all right, the voices shout in the dark. We’re all right now. What about the others? They’re still behind us, thank God. Someone else says, What was that thing? What was it? Nobody answers. Nobody talks about the monsters. To talk about them is to give them your power. You start a conversation ready to fight to survive and end it ready to give up. Todd smells tobacco burning as survivors light cigarettes in the dark. As the others settle into an uneasy silence, Anne tells him, in a warm whisper close to his ear, a story about a woman who was a simple housewife—a loving mother, a devoted wife, a respected neighbor—who had everything until suddenly she didn’t. When Infection arrived, she refused to accept what was happening. She sent her husband out into the storm of violence on a fool’s errand. She left her kids with a neighbor to go search for her husband and realized, too late, she had left them to die. The woman wanted to die herself but could not overcome her instinctive need to survive. And so she made her survival a mission—a mission of vengeance.

Todd listened closely, his body slowly uncoiling as he relaxed, but now says nothing. He does not ask her if that is how she got the scars on her face. Her story makes sense to him. He spent two weeks with her in the back of the Bradley. She has the fury of Captain Ahab—if Moby Dick were a virus. Most people are just trying to get by these days, just trying to survive. Anne is at war. Her enemy is one of the tiniest forms of life on the planet.

“Is that why you hate them so much?” he says.

“Who?”

“The Infected, obviously.”

“I don’t hate them, Todd.”

“Never mind,” he says, frowning.

“Todd, those poor people deserve nothing but our sympathy.”

“Then why do you like killing them so much?”

“Is that really what you think?”

“Well,” he says.

“I enjoy nothing about it. But they’re already dead. The second the bug takes them, they stop being people. Everything that makes them who they are dies. As far as I’m concerned, they’re the walking dead. It’s not the people I kill. It’s the virus controlling them. That’s my enemy.”

He does not understand. The Infected are evil, yes, he reasons, but they wear the faces of our loved ones. Perhaps there is something of those people left inside. Even if they only remember themselves when they dream, does this not still make them human?

When he shot Sheena X in the face on the first night of the outbreak, he was not killing a virus, he was killing his friend. When Anne executed Ethan on the bridge at the end of the battle, how could she not see the man, but just the virus controlling him?

“Thank God,” the driver shouts back at the survivors, switching on the headlights. “It’s the camp! We made it!”

Todd tightens his hold on Anne. “Are you coming this time?”

“For a while,” she tells him.

“Can I stay with you?”

“Todd, I’m going to get back on the road as soon as I can scrounge up a few things. You know what it’s like out there. There is no life. It’s no place for you.”

I want to be safe, he wants to tell her, but does not know how to explain how he feels. He knows he will be safer in the camp. But he feels safer on the road, close to his fears.

Even after everything, he already feels its call to stay out here among the monsters.

Get on the road and keep moving, and they will never get you.

He remembers Sarge, the battle-hardened commander of the Bradley, falling apart during the orientation session at the camp. He stopped moving, and it nearly broke him.

Even the strongest sometimes are not strong enough to fight themselves.

Anne shakes her head. “All right, Todd. If you don’t feel right tomorrow, come and find me and we’ll talk.”

Todd nods and sits up, sniffing and wiping his eyes with the palm of his hand.

“Camp Defiance,” the driver says, pointing.

The sprawling camp looms ahead, the ragged outline of its makeshift walls and watchtowers silhouetted by the warm glow of searchlights and thousands of cooking fires. The warm breeze carries the sound of cheering crowds. Random snatches of machine gun fire. The smell of wood smoke. Overhead, helicopters roar through the night.

Home, Todd thinks. I want to go home. Where is home?

♦

The convoy grinds to a halt in front of the gates, churning dust that swirls like angry ghosts in the headlight beams. A machine gun rattles on the wall, tracer rounds spitting toward the distant trees. The sound of cheering grows in volume, responding to a voice squawking through a megaphone. The bass line of a pop song vibrates through the vehicle. Despite the notes of celebration, at night the camp has the atmosphere of a siege slowly being lost. Blinding white light floods the bus and then fades out. The gates open with a bang of gears.

“Show time,” Anne says to Todd, nudging him with a wink.

Todd smiles at the inside joke. Sarge always said that before a scavenging mission.

“Welcome to FEMAville, Anne,” he says.

This is the place he fought the horde to save. The place for which Paul and Ethan died.

The vehicle rolls into the compound and comes to a stop, the rest of the convoy stacking up behind it. The driver turns off the engine and opens the door, allowing the omnipresent camp smells of cooking food and open sewage to waft in. Bulbs on wires strung between wooden poles light the area, surrounded by moths. Music blares from a speaker mounted on one of the poles in a tangle of thick wires: Queen’s “We Will Rock You.” Todd peers out the window and blinks in surprise at the cheering faces. Holy crap. They’re cheering for us.

A military officer climbs aboard the bus and speaks to the driver, who shakes his head, turns in his seat, and points at Anne. The officer approaches, introduces himself as Captain Mattis, and fires questions, his voice barely audible over the roar: Lieutenant Patterson? Sergeant Hackett? Sergeant Wilson?

Dead, dead and trapped on the other side of the river, Anne tells him.

“Too bad about Wilson.”

“He’ll make out all right,” Anne says. She knows Mattis is noting the loss of the Bradley more than its commander.

“So who are you, then?”

“Just passing through with some other people. We heard the shooting and helped out.” She tilts her head toward Todd. “He made it. Some engineers, some National Guard. That’s it.”

“The mission was a success, though,” Mattis says.

Anne nods. “The Infected won’t be crossing that bridge.”

“Outstanding.”

“Is that what all this is about?”

The Captain sighs. “Not exactly. The good citizens are celebrating because the military has arrived. Army units are dropping at refugee camps around the East Coast. A single company showed up and now everyone thinks it’s going to be over in a few days and they can go home.”

“It’s about time the Army pulled its weight, in any case,” Anne says.

Mattis smiles and shrugs. As a military man, he can say no more.

“People at the camp know what you did, though,” he tells her. “Word’s been going around all night about it. It’s a day of wonders.”

“It’s the worst day of my life,” Todd says.

“You saved all of us,” Mattis goes on, holding out a box. “You’re giving these people hope, son. That’s an important thing. Make sure you get your ribbon.”

Anne holds one up and laughs, startling Todd, who never heard her laugh even once in all their time together.

“It’s a dog show ribbon,” she says.

“Best of breed, to be exact,” Mattis admits with a smile.

Todd stares at the purple and gold ribbon clutched in his hand. He can hardly speak; it’s ludicrous. “What the heck is this?” he demands.

“We can’t pay you. We don’t have anything to pay you with. All we can do is try to honor you. Everyone at the camp knows about what you did and that you are wearing these ribbons. You’re going to have a hundred and thirty thousand people treating you like a hero for the next few weeks. Extra food, extra showers, you name it.”

Anne takes the ribbon from his hand and pins it to his T-shirt. Mattis stands back and salutes.

“Welcome home, son.”

One by one, the survivors stagger off the bus and are welcomed by the cheering crowd. They huddle together, blinking tears. The more the people applaud, the more the survivors cry. Someone whistles and Todd flinches. He keeps seeing gray faces lunge out of the crowd. Faces of the Infected howling for his throat, spraying spittle rich with virus.

No, no, no. You’re way too young to be this screwed up, Todd old man, he tells himself. Yet it takes every bit of mental energy he has not to yank out his pistol and start shooting.

“If you don’t feel right in the head tomorrow, come and find me,” Anne says. “I’ll be here.”

“Wait,” Todd says, scanning the crowd. “Where’s Ray Young?”

He turns back, but Anne is gone. And Ray is nowhere to be found among the sea of empty, grinning faces. Someone presses a warm can of beer into his hand and tells him to drink up.

“Ray!” he cries.

A girl walks out of the crowd. He catches a glimpse of her blue eyes and wild red hair before she cups his face in her hands and kisses him. The crowd applauds heartily and whistles, the sound blending with the roar of blood rushing through his ears.

“Erin,” he gasps. “It’s you.”

“Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

She takes his hand and leads him through the clamoring mob. Hands clap him on the back and seek out his to shake. He gives someone the can of beer. As they reach the rear of the crowd, they disappear into the darkness, navigating by the dim light of cooking fires. Erin appears to know the maze by feel alone.

Todd can smell her on the breeze. His hand sweats against hers. She leans against him as they walk through the warm, humid night, and he becomes aware of her chest pressed against his arm. He remembers she does not wear a bra.

“Where are we going?”

“I’m taking you home, baby.”

He wonders if he is hallucinating. He feels like he could sleep for days. Just a few hours ago, he was standing on the bridge in the sunlight, screaming for his friends, as it exploded in a blinding white flash. The monster charged, a giant thing covered in flailing trunks, each bellowing its deafening foghorn call. He and Ray stood their ground among the piles of dead, emptying their guns at the thing until it fell through the bottom of the world.

“What’s wrong, baby?”

Then he is back at Camp Defiance, walking among the shanties with this beautiful creature he thought he’d never see again.

She asks him again if there is something wrong.

“I don’t know,” he says.

“You’re not hurt, are you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I had to ask. You may not know this, but you’re, like, covered in blood.”

“Oh,” he says, touching his chest. His shirt feels stiff as cardboard. His entire body hurts, but he does not believe anything is broken. “I didn’t know.”

“You also smell like smoke and sour milk,” she laughs. “Come on.”

Erin leads him into the small shack and lights two candles, revealing a bucket of water and a stack of towels on a blanket.

“Take off your clothes,” she says.

“I don’t have anything,” he tells her. “You took it all already.”

“Do as I say, mister.”

He obeys, peeling off his grimy shirt and tossing it into the corner. Then his boots and socks and pants. None of it is salvageable. He is going to have to burn all of it, and find more. Last, he tosses his gun belt and pistol on top of the pile.

“Now lie down.”

He stretches out his long, gangly body on the blanket. Erin dips a sponge into the foamy bucket, wrings it out, and gently rubs him down. Pure bliss.

“Why did you come back?” he asks her. “You really hurt me.”

Todd arrived at the camp with a bag full of DC-powered electronic gear, hoping to use it as capital to set up a trading business. Erin marked him, seduced him and robbed him. Reeling from the blow, he sought out Sarge and Wendy and signed up for the mission to destroy the bridge.

“I’m sorry for what I did to you,” she says, blinking tears. “I didn’t know. What you did, going to that bridge. . . You’re an amazing boy. I really hoped you would make it back.”

“My friends are dead,” he says.

“Tell me about it.” She pulls her shirt up and over her head. “Tell me everything.”

♦

The Infected shriek down at him, kicking and clawing with faces twisted by rage. The shotgun roars and their bodies explode in a shower of blood and smoking entrails.

The deep voice booms: “Don’t you touch that boy!”

He opens his eyes. Paul, the old reverend, stands over him, chambering another round and firing again. The Infected squeal and crumple in a wave in front of the blast.

“Don’t you touch that boy, I said!”

BOOM. Reload. BOOM. Bodies splash in piles onto the bloody roadway.

The boy looks up at the Reverend through a blur of hot tears. The man’s grizzled face looms large, frowning. He grips the boy’s hand in his own, his eyes burning with worry and love.

“You’re all right now, son. I’ll get you out of here.”

A rumbling sound fills the air, the monster purring deep in its throat. The boy can feel it deep in his chest. The Reverend gasps, his eyes wide with sudden knowledge.

“You all right, Rev?”

The Reverend smiles sadly.

“God bless you, Kid—”

Paul lurches thirty feet into the air and into the chomping mouth.

Todd screams.

“I’ve got you, baby,” the girl says, hugging him from behind.

Todd sits naked on the floor of his shack, arms wrapped around his knees, screaming.

“It was just a dream,” Erin tells him. “Just a dream. You’re okay. See? Everything is fine.”

He stops, panting for breath. Tears and snot stream down his face. His skin is slick with sweat and Erin’s body feels like fire against his back. Sunlight streams through cracks in the walls, illuminating the dust. The small shack feels like an oven.

“What was your dream about?” she asks him.

“I was being saved,” he says hoarsely, barely recognizing his voice as his own. He wipes his face with the back of his hand.

“That sounds like a good dream.”

His face twitches. He notes the symptom.

“Not for the guy who saved me.”

Todd tries to stand and sits back down with a grimace. Every muscle in his body is stiff and sore. His lungs seize from the smoke he inhaled during the fighting on the bridge, and he coughs loud and hard into his fist, just trying to breathe. His throat feels like it has been burned raw from smoke and screaming.

“I’m glad I’m not alone,” he rasps, pulling on his glasses. The left lens is cracked.

“Oh baby, I’m right here,” Erin tells him, squeezing hard.

He did not mean her, but says nothing.

“I have to go see Anne.”

“Who’s that?”

“One of my friends who made it.”

Erin kisses the back of his neck. “Let’s stay in bed all day.”

“No, I have to go.”

“Come on, baby.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Then I’ll come with you.”

“Erin, please.”

She pushes away from him and pulls on her jeans. “Fuck it. I thought you liked me.”

“I do like you,” he says, watching her nudity disappear with longing.

If he had more energy, he would try to please her in some way, but he has none to spare. He stands, pulls on a clean pair of boxers, and buckles the gun belt around his waist.

“You’re going out like that?”

He drapes the blanket over his shoulders. “My clothes are contaminated with Infected blood. They shouldn’t even be in the camp. Put the ribbon on for me, okay?”

“I’ll wait for you,” she says, pinning it over his chest. “I’ll get us some lunch, okay?”

Todd smiles. God, she’s beautiful. “That sounds perfect, Erin.”

He steps outside and enters the mundane chaos of FEMAville. The air is so humid it is difficult to breathe. The smell of wood smoke sets off another coughing jag. Water glistens on the ground, evaporating in the sunlight. Hard rain came last night; he fell asleep to the sound of it drumming on the roof. His bare feet sink into soft, warm mud.

First stop, latrine, then the showers.

Paul flew through the air into the gaping mouth of the monster.

Todd gasps, his heart racing. The dream, so vivid.

He cannot figure one thing out. Why was Paul smiling?

“Coffee?” says a voice.

Todd is aware of everything. Dogs bark and military vehicles groan on the other side of the camp. A few boys play horseshoes, wagering cigarettes on the outcome, while a woman shouts at her children to be careful running. Someone chops firewood while someone else practices the harmonica. Two grinning men carry a large painting that Todd recognizes from the Andy Warhol Museum.

“You want some coffee, buddy?”

Todd focuses on the bearded man sitting on a plastic cooler, brewing a pot of coffee on a Coleman stove. His wife kneels on a tarp, filling plastic bottles from a rain collector.

“Sure, thanks.”

The man glances at his wife, who nods. “Want some sugar in it?”

“That’d be great.”

Todd accepts the mug of coffee and blows on it, savoring its aroma.

“You look like you’re going somewhere,” the man tells him. “You can bring the mug back later, all right?”

“Thank you,” he says again. The sweetened coffee is an incredible gift and this act of basic human kindness brings him close to tears.

The bearded man nods to Todd’s ribbon. “No need to thank me.”

“God bless you, boy,” the man’s wife says.

God bless you, Kid—

Todd takes a deep breath, gritting his teeth. His heart gallops in his chest. Is this what PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder—is like? The older survivors of the epidemic always talked about its symptoms, but he was never able to relate.

Lying in the jaws of the beast, Paul stared into Todd’s eyes and smiled sadly.

Even in death, he smiled. Why?

Clouds drift in front of the sun, turning the world gray.

♦

At the market, the traders give him new clothes and boots, rainproof poncho, handful of bullets, toothbrush, two packs of sugarless gum, three condoms and a plastic baggie filled with coffee.

So this is what it’s like to be popular. Clean and clothed and eating cold spaghetti and meatballs from a can with a plastic fork, he starts to feel whole again. He always wanted to be popular. It’s a strange feeling.

I wonder how fast it wears off.

He remembers something Erin told him last night: We can make a life here. The hero fights the monster and gets the girl and the treasure. Perfect story, right? He wonders if Prince Charming also screams in the dark during the happily ever after, dreaming about his fight with the Dragon.

His eyes wide with sudden knowledge—

Paul knew he was going to die. The monster’s long, revolting tongue, studded with slimy suckers, had already gripped the Reverend’s ankle.

And yet he smiled. In the air too. In the mouth of the beast.

Paul: the man who loved God but feared death. Who loved his enemies as he killed them. Who tried to reconcile the forgiving, loving God of the New Testament with the apparent return of the judgmental, violent God of the Old. Who could not live without his wife even though Sara would have wanted more than anything for him to go on living.

A fellow traveler of the thin line of survival, that limbo between living and dying. Torn between forces larger than himself, he gave himself to others, ultimately giving his life, and in doing so, welcomed death. With his wife now at last, either in heaven or oblivion; it did not matter which to him. Was this the peace the Reverend found? Could this be why he smiled? He had given up worrying whether he would ever see her again. All that mattered was they were together one way or the other. In the end, Paul welcomed his death.

Todd wonders if he will ever love anyone as strongly as that. He wonders if he could ever love Erin so much. Before the bridge, he would have said he already did. After the bridge, he does not know. He doesn’t know much of anything. All he can think about is the road.

He limps past dozens of shacks, each leaning on the next for support in the endless shantytown. People sit on lawn chairs watching over their children, cook, tend gardens, stack wood, stoke fires, hang laundry, gossip, trade. They fall silent as he passes. Chickens cluck in a series of pens, filling the air with the acrid smell of shit. Several men swear over a tractor coupled to a water tanker, both of which are stuck in the mud. A teenager pushes a wheelbarrow filled with plastic jugs, surrounded by smaller children splashing through puddles acting out the fight at the bridge, holding back the Infected onslaught while the engineers lay their charges.

“On me!” one of the kids cries. “Come on, we’ll make our stand here!”

Todd smiles at them, idly swatting a mosquito on his neck.

“Are you one of those people from the bridge?”

He turns and sees the teenager pushing the wheelbarrow, staring at him with something like awe. The kid is only younger than Todd by two years at most, filthy and dressed in rags. One of the many orphans of Infection.

“No,” Todd says. “You are.”

He unpins the ribbon, gives it to the surprised boy while the smaller children howl in disbelief, and walks into the compound adjacent to the gate, a hive of constant activity: salvage coming in, waste going out. A five-ton driven by men in bright yellow hazmat suits rolls through the gate, carrying corpses stacked in shiny black body bags. A squad of tired National Guard in olive green rainproof ponchos watches the truck leave, smoking and yawning and rubbing their eyes. Workers unload salvaged goods from a white pickup scarred with hundreds of tiny scratches made by fingernails and jewelry. Men fill out paperwork and hand over receipts. A large American flag hangs wetly from an overhead wire. This land is still the USA.

He finds the bus parked between a Brinks armored car and a pickup truck with a cobwebbed windshield. Dressed in greasy gray coveralls, Anne bends over the engine, talking to a mechanic. Another man paints camouflage colors over the bright yellow skin. A woman scrubs the V-shaped snowplow mounted on the grill, a retrofit enabling the bus to slam into human beings and toss them broken into the nearest ditch. Todd notes the metal plates welded over the windows, creating slits useful as firing ports.

Looks pretty ninja, he decides.

Anne senses his approach and turns to watch him limp stiffly, like a zombie, across the mud. The mechanic, a giant of a man with long blond hair, tightens the grip on his wrench, scowling at him. He takes a step forward but is halted by Anne clicking her tongue.

“Hello, Todd,” Anne says, wiping her hands on a rag.

“Who are these guys?” he asks her, glancing nervously at the mechanic.

“I guess you could call them my crew. Marcus here I brought with me. Evan and Ramona heard about me and came here. They don’t want to stay. They want to go back out.”

“They call us Anne’s Rangers,” the mechanic tells him.

Todd likes the sound of that. “I thought you said there’s nothing out there.”

“I made a deal with Mattis,” Anne explains. “The Camp will supply us with diesel, weapons, some other things. We’ll find more survivors and bring them here. Run supplies and mail to the other camps. That sort of thing.”

Todd nods. “That’s a good job for you.”

“What about you? You staying, then?”

“I want to go home.”

Anne gives him a grim smile. “All right.”

“Is that okay with you?”

“Marcus will get you some gear. Then rest. Tomorrow, we go back out. We can use you.”

“Thank you, Anne.”

The blond giant nods and extends his hand in welcome.

Todd smiles as he shakes it and thinks, I always wanted to belong somewhere.

Marcus

He was a good mechanic and this got him steady work at auto repair shops. Mufflers, brakes and shock absorbers, mostly, plus body repair and painting. After his wife died, leaving him with two growing boys, he quit Sears Auto Center and got a job closer to home as a service technician at a Toyota dealership. He was welding when the Screaming swept through town.

After hours of starting and stopping, swearing and leaning on his horn, Marcus pulled into the high school parking lot and lunged sweating from his truck. Inside, he pushed through the roar of red-faced parents and teachers and into the gym, where the survivors had laid the bodies of the fallen, students and teachers alike, in rows on the floor. Both Jack and Michael lay on their backs, their bodies still jerking in tiny spasms. He swept them up, one boy over each shoulder, and carried them to his truck. A teacher approached to challenge him but dodged aside after seeing the terrible expression on his face and his hands clenched into fists.

On the way home, he listened to the radio. They were calling it a syndrome because nobody knew what the hell it was. There was a lot of talk about exploding head syndrome, frontal lobe epilepsy, nanotech terrorism. None of it made any sense. A doctor said some of the victims exhibited echolalia, the automatic repetition of sounds. His ears perked up at that. After arriving home and getting his boys into their beds, he told them he loved them, hoping to hear it said back to him.

His cousin Kirsten, who worked as a nurse at the hospital, dropped by first thing in the morning to set up bedpans and intravenous tubes. After she left, Marcus could not cope with the empty, funereal silence and went to the liquor store, where he stood for hours in a line that went out the door and around the corner. Returning home, he found his boys lying in the exact same position he’d left them. He changed their bedpans and IV bags, exercised their limbs a little, gave them a quick sponge bath. When he moved Michael’s arm, he noticed his younger son had waxy flexibility, which he’d heard was another occasional symptom of the syndrome. Wherever he put the boy’s limbs, they stayed frozen in whatever position they were last left.

This done, fighting tears, Marcus went back downstairs, poured a few fingers of Wild Turkey bourbon, topped it up with Coke and ice, and turned the TV on. A blowhard on the cable news was saying things like brain drain and national inventory and precipice.

None of it made any sense to him. The world began to blur.

Two days later, he heard shouting on the TV. The screamers were waking up, and they were attacking people. Nobody knew why. Apparently, if a screamer bit you, you caught the disease. Marcus watched Cleveland fall apart for an hour before realizing his kids had woken up as well. He could hear them stomping around upstairs.

Still reeling with hangover, Marcus staggered to the foot of the stairs. He considered calling Kirsten, or maybe the cops, and felt ashamed. Why was he afraid? What was there to be afraid of? The boys were his own flesh and blood.

He climbed the stairs slowly, one step at a time.

“Jack,” he said when he reached the bedroom door. He felt out of breath; he could hardly speak. “Michael?”

He heard snarling on the other side, fingernails scratching at the wood.

“Are you guys okay?” Marcus whispered, suddenly scared of his own voice.

Something large thudded against the wall on his left, making a picture jump off its hook and clatter to the floor. Moments later, something crashed against the door, making it shiver on its hinges, followed by more growling and pacing.

Shit, Marcus thought, afraid to say anything. Terrified to even move. Even breathe. His body would not stop shaking. After a minute, he held up his trembling hand and stared at it as if it belonged to someone else.

I’m afraid of my own sons, he realized. My sons. My own flesh and blood.

It was like being afraid of yourself. They were a part of him.

Even worse, he was afraid he would open the door and they would have hate in their eyes. That they would look at him as if they didn’t know him.

In the end, he had no choice. He opened the door.

“Boys? It’s your dad. I’m coming in now. Take it easy, okay?”

Jack came at him first, hands splayed into claws. Marcus pushed him onto the nearest bed as Michael lunged at his legs. He kneed his younger son in the face, hard enough to make him yelp, and would have apologized if Jack weren’t flying at him again. He shoved Jack to the floor, trying to buy time some to figure out what he was going to do. He was stronger than them, but he knew how much energy they had; they could keep this up for hours, while he was already breathing hard and sweating.

Retreating into the hallway, he slammed the door as the boys launched themselves against it, and moved a massive dresser from his own bedroom to block it. He listened to them howl and scrabble at the wood with their nails.

“You can bang on that door all you want,” he said. “I’m not letting you out.” The father in him felt the urge to add, “until,” but until what?

Until never.

His body tingled with shock. His own children were trying to kill him. They had turned into the monsters he saw eating the dead on the cable news. He stumbled downstairs feeling fuzzy, as if he were floating. A part of him had been amputated, leaving nothing behind. The TV was still on, showing another talking head saying things like we’ve lost contact with John and apocalypse. Marcus poured another tall bourbon and Coke and wondered how long the door and dresser would hold his kids before they broke out and came for him.

The world blurred again. A tank rolled past the house on shrieking treads. People swarmed on top of it, clawing at the armor, trying to get in. Inside, dishes rattled in the cupboards. Pictures fell off the walls and crashed to the floor.

So this is the way the world ends, he thought.

The blowhard on the TV was saying, God help us all, when the power failed and plunged the world into darkness. Marcus sat on the couch sipping his bourbon in long stretches of silence periodically shattered by distant screams. The air smelled like smoke.

No son of mine is going to be a monster, he decided. His boys needed mercy only a loving father could give.

He drank until he had the courage to do what needed doing.

As dawn paled the sky, he lurched to his feet and searched until he found Michael’s baseball bat. He hefted it, feeling the weight in his large hand.

Then he went upstairs to say goodbye to his sons.

Cool Rod

Back in Kandahar, the Fifth Dragoons played death metal battle anthems like “Bodies” and “Die Motherfucker Die” as they rode into battle in their Stryker vehicles, pumping up their courage and scaring the shit out of the Afghans. Now, roaring along the service road adjacent to Ronald Reagan National Airport near Washington, DC, the boys of Comanche Company are listening to the plaintive sound of “Paranoid Android” and still searching for the right note.

Sergeant Hector Rodriguez—Nimrod in elementary school, Hot Rod in high school, Cool Rod in the Army, and just plain Rod to his friends—doesn’t mind. To him, this is a Radiohead war. Surreal music to go with the surreal scenery: a desolate, post-apocalyptic America. He feels like a sailor on a submarine, returning home after fighting a nuclear war, only to find his country destroyed.

In any case, at least it’s not Enya. Some smartass cranked up “Only Time” as they stormed the airport a week ago, and nobody challenged it. It actually fit their mood.

The small VDT screen mounted next to the driver shows a digital map of the southeastern quadrant of Arlington, Virginia. Blue icons reveal friendly forces, so massively concentrated at the airport, now a forward operations base, that it is hard to pick out their column of LAV IIIs turning north onto Crystal Drive. There are no red icons. It is assumed the enemy is everywhere, dispersed in small formations.

In neat white letters on the back of his green helmet, the driver has stenciled, how’s my driving? call M2-BOOM. The Stryker commander stands on a platform with the upper half of his body outside the vehicle so he can operate the fifty-caliber machine gun.

Rod scans the anxious faces of the eight beefy kids sitting with him in the hot interior of the vehicle. They look formidable enough. His squad of shooters is armed to the teeth, highly trained, part of a military that once projected American power almost everywhere on the planet. Modern legionnaires, lean and fit and hungry. He wonders if they will have what it takes to shoot and kill American civilians. Not just some, but hundreds, even thousands.

More specifically, they will be battling monsters. How do you train for that? Rod had been forced to sit through endless PowerPoint presentations discussing the type of monsters encountered and known capabilities and weaknesses. Few traditional tactics apply. The enemy knows no fear. Flanking accomplishes nothing. Ground cover is not important anymore, just concealment. Flamethrowers, which fell out of military use in 1978, are starting to be manufactured again in fortified factories. Shotguns and pistols are in high demand. The bayonet is making a comeback. Some soldiers are being trained as mules—lightly armed troops solely responsible for carrying spare ammunition.

Everything is changing. They must unlearn everything they know, then relearn it fast or die.

As the soldiers notice Rod’s attention, they look away. The whine of the rig’s Caterpillar diesel engine fills the dim passenger compartment.

It’s going to take time to earn their trust. They can hate him for what they think he did. That is fine. But they must believe he is competent, and follow his orders, or he cannot lead.

Most of the boys in Fifth Stryker Cavalry Regiment’s Company C are orphans from other outfits. Rod and Lieutenant Pierce, assigned to Comanche’s Second Platoon, the Hellraisers, are the sole survivors of Battle Company’s Third Platoon. Rod is new to the Hellraisers and some of these soldiers are new to each other, the result of higher command consolidating understrength units on the fly after the catastrophic losses the regiment took in Germany during the first days of the epidemic. The regiment had flown to Ramstein Air Base as a pit stop on their way home after a violent year in Afghanistan. Then the Screaming struck down one out of every five of them.

Three days later, the screamers rose from their beds.

Many soldiers could not fire on their comrades. They tried everything to subdue them without using lethal force. They wrestled and clubbed them and shot at their legs and gradually became infected themselves. Rod knows soldiers ultimately fight and die for the guy next to them. Why else would they do it? Death is final, and it is eternal. Looking death in the eye, country and apple pie and bringing democracy to the Middle East don’t seem as important as they did at the enlistment office. So they do it for the other guys in their foxhole. It is a brotherhood bred not from the rigors of war, but from facing death together—a will to survive demanding mutual support and sacrifice.

The Infected left their beds and attacked their comrades.

Many of the soldiers could not shoot.

Rod’s old squad had revered him back in Kandahar, calling him Cool Rod for his icy calm in a fight. But when his boys came running at him, he had not been able to shoot them. The entire platoon had been infected, along with a number of support personnel, and they ran at him and the Lieutenant in a wave. The young officer shot them down, killing thirty-one uniformed men and women, a heroic act in a battle where heroes eventually became despised. The Infected could not be subdued. They had to be killed. It was a horrible necessity, and anyone who pulled the trigger had blood on their hands. These boys see him as a monster.

Rod claimed the kills and Pierce did not contradict him. Pierce thought Rod was protecting him, but he was really protecting himself. If he admitted he froze, he could no longer lead men into battle. He would rather his new squad see him as a devil than a coward.

The boys glance at Rod with distrust, wondering if he would sacrifice them, if they got infected, as readily as he did his entire platoon.

Devil or coward. Soon he will be confirmed as one or the other. Because the Hellraisers are going to shoot American civilians today, and he will be asked to pull the trigger.

♦

Rod opens the hatch over his head and takes a look outside. The Stryker column snakes along the road at a reserved thirty miles an hour. They are in no hurry. Ten feet both high and wide and nearly twenty-five feet long, the squat metal titans look like ungainly boats on eight giant rubber wheels. Most are still clad in cages of slat armor to protect them against rocket-propelled grenades and piled with gear, making them look like something from The Road Warrior. The commander of the next vehicle in line grins at Rod under his Ray-Bans and spreads his arms as if to say, Look at all this. Can you believe this shit?

The combat engineers spent two days clearing a twelve-foot-wide path through what was a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam of abandoned cars and trucks choking Crystal Drive all the way to their objective. Judging from the scattered luggage, these folks were probably trying to get to the airport, which had already been shut down. The vehicles, stripped of gas and useful parts, are now piled along the sides of the road awaiting towing. It is like driving through a junkyard. Rod scans the wreckage for improvised explosives out of habit. Bodies are entombed in some of the cars. Loose trash floats and rustles on the breeze.

The plaintive notes of a religious song fall on his ears from one of the lead vehicles. It’s “Ave Maria,” Rod realizes with a frown. Christ, what a downer. And yet it fits.

Ave Maria, gratia plena.

Hail Mary, full of grace. Roger that.

The Strykers ahead disappear into a wall of black smoke billowing from a distant hill of burning corpses, and Rod follows, emerging coughing on the other side. The entire city is shrouded in haze, ashes of torched people floating on currents of hot air. An automatic cannon booms in the distance, drowning out the crackle of small arms fire that is so omnipresent it is only noticeable when it stops. Fighter jets roar through the distant murk, barely visible in this false twilight at nine hundred hours. One of the fighters breaks formation, veering toward the earth like a bird of prey to fire a missile at a target on the ground. Light flashes on the horizon. BOOM.

The battle for the capital is in full swing.

On his right, C130 cargo planes drop from the sky in a steady stream of screaming metal and disappear behind Terminal B of the airport, where they will land and disgorge even more troops and equipment. Rod’s regiment has been bivouacked in Terminal A for the past few days, one of the first units to arrive, and it is already getting crowded. The troops swarmed Washington’s key facilities and most defendable and sparsely populated patches of ground—Reagan Airport, East Potomac Park, Theodore Roosevelt Island. The engineers began the herculean task of clearing the major arteries. This beachhead secure, the invasion force now needs to expand to make room for more troops as well as civilian refugees starting to trickle in.

Something about the whole operation still smacks of a massive Army foul-up. Oops, we invaded ourselves by accident. Nice going, General Stupidity, you’re relieved. General Chaos will take it from here.

He can’t get used to it.

A foghorn booms in the west, answered by another in the south. Rod knows they are not real foghorns. They are giant monsters browsing their way through the city. He can’t get used to that either. An MH60 Blackhawk gunship catches up to the column and paces it, the thumping of its rotors drowning out even the foghorns. It will provide top cover for the rest of the trip.

It’s good to be back in the USA one way or the other. They all feel this way. They are back on sacred ground, that much closer to the people who matter most to them. They are home. When they captured the airport, a grizzled veteran dropped to his knees and kissed the tarmac. Mecca’s the other way, Sergeant, one of the boys said, slurring the word as Sarrunt as so many of them did, but nobody laughed. Rod nearly kissed the ground as well. Leading his squad across the tarmac, he half expected to see the Washington Monument wrapped in monstrous tentacles or the Lincoln Memorial covered in vines or half buried in apocalyptic sands. Instead, he saw a typical airport with stately jumbo jets at rest among fuel trucks, water trucks, ramps, hoses and other white utility vehicles. Some scattered luggage offered the only clue something was wrong. That, and the total absence of people. Everything was abandoned. The city appeared to have been converted into a massive, derelict parking lot.

The column winds through an artificial canyon formed by rows of boxy office buildings, street-level retail stores and the ever-present piles of cars pushed to the side of the road. One of the buildings boasts in large letter signage that it is the corporate home of general dynamics. Rod grins. They’re the company that makes the Stryker. The vehicles pass their maker. Minutes later, the column grinds to a halt in front of another large building and sits idling.

This is their objective. Seven floors. Three hundred and forty rooms.

The Crystal Palace Hotel.

♦

The plan is to unfuck America, starting with Washington, DC, their new area of operations. That is how Captain Mack, call sign Outlaw, put it during the mission briefing back in Germany. The Brass dubbed the invasion Operation Yellow Ribbon, but the grunts call it simply the Home Front. It is the largest and most complex military operation in America’s history, involving units staging from around the world, and thrown together in less than a month.

Rod considers liberating Washington to be a symbolic gesture. There is nothing special about the city itself. No weapons manufacturing, food production, vital scientific facilities. The scuttlebutt is the Brass did not want to do it. The generals wanted to fight a campaign somewhere else with less risk to gain a secure foothold on the mainland and gain experience fighting this new enemy. The President, however, wanted something big and decisive to raise morale.

“We’re going to take it back,” Captain Mack told them.

Washington. Rod can feel the raw power in the air, even with the city fallen to the Wildfire Agent. Talk about symbols and myths. Washington was where taxes came from. Where the establishment ran the country. Where politicians clowned and fought in neverending political theater. It was a bag of dicks, in Army parlance, even before Wildfire. Some guys Rod served with over the years considered Washington a foreign power. For his part, he cannot help but feel massive anger and pride actually being here. Anger at seeing his capital in the hands of the enemy. Pride at being part of a massive invasion force that will take it back.

This is the first army in the history of the world, Rod muses, called to war to fight a virus. A war fought not over religion or resources or territory, but pure survival.

Mack said the Regiment would be fighting within miles of Arlington Cemetery, where thousands lie buried having died fighting for freedom. Let’s do America proud, he told them. Let’s do the Army proud. Our families are back there. Our homeland is under siege. It’s time to take it back.

Standing at attention on the tarmac, the boys roared the regimental war cry.

AIEEYAH!

An hour later, they filed onto Russian-made AN-124 cargo planes for the long flight to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. After refueling, they hopped to Ronald Reagan National Airport ready to fight, crossing a Potomac swarming with Coast Guard cutters and supply ships, only to find the facility already secured by a unit of Marines and combat engineers, now banging away at Infected on the roads and clearing the traffic jams.

The Dragoons found themselves with nothing to do. Hurry up and wait, as usual. Welcome back to the Suck.

The EUCOM, CENTCOM, AFRICOM, PACOM and SOUTHCOM strategic commands were all heading home to be folded into NORTHCOM headquartered at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado. From all over South America, Europe, Africa and the Middle East, troops poured into Andrews and were then flown to Reagan, while troops flying home from Pacific Command established a bridgehead on the other side of the country in Santa Barbara, California. Chinook helicopters filled the sky over Washington day and night, ferrying troops to bivouacs established on Theodore Roosevelt Island and East Potomac Park. The grand strategy was to expand these pockets to link up with Bolling Air Force Base, Fort Myer and the Pentagon, creating a secure zone supported by other installations in the region such as Quantico, Fort Belvoir, Andrews, Dahlgren and Indian Head. From this expanded beachhead, the invasion force would cross the Potomac and drive east through the Mall to secure the White House and the Capitol.

Apache and Battle Companies were called away on missions. Then Comanche Company got its turn, a solid operation that would take it outside the wire: secure the Crystal Palace hotel. The invasion force was beginning its expansion phase and, besides that, needed the extra housing for troops and refugees.

This is what war looks like to grunts. The grand strategy is sweeping and covers the entire region, but is ultimately comprised of small units capturing small objectives. Being a veteran, Rod understands that these small steps win campaigns. For Company C, the next day of the war will be spent seizing a hotel, searching and destroying.

Rod’s mission is much more personal than recovering Washington, DC, however. He needs to get home to his wife and children.

His marriage with Gabriela started off stormy. They tied the knot while the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were in full swing, and he spent most of those years in the Sandbox. When he came home he was angry, restless, difficult to live with. They foolishly decided having kids would fix things. Oddly, it did. Children changed him. His kids became his center; their chaos gave him a sense of stillness he needed. He wanted a hundred and settled for three: Kristina, age four, Lilia, age three, and Victor, the youngest, still a baby.

Rod cannot imagine what happened to them. He has had no contact with his family for twenty-three days. They lived on base at Fort Benning, Georgia. The base was evacuated, and Rod still has not been able to find out where they went.

If he finds his children okay at the other end of this thing, he will hand in his rifle and become a priest. If not, he will curse God. He does not know what he would do if he lost them. He heard the Infected kill and eat children instead of convert them. He cannot even imagine someone eating his Victor. Just trying would destroy his sanity.

Captain Mack is right. They are going to have to take America back one house, one building, one city at a time. Rod will be there, fighting every step of the way, until he gets home.

♦

The column coils in front of the hotel, the vehicles grunting like giant metal bulls as they nudge into their final positions. Rod closes the hatch and touches his front cargo pocket, where he keeps his mission notes. The boys glance at him with wondering expressions, sweating in their armor and fatigues. It’s still hot as hell today, especially inside this metal box on wheels.

Outside, a voice blaring through a megaphone addresses any locals in the area, competing with the final strains of “Ave Maria.”

Attention! Attention! Military personnel are present in this area.

“All right, listen up,” Rod says. “The hour is at hand. If anyone’s got any last questions, now’s the time.”

The boys stare at him. Half of them are clean shaven. The other half are working on wispy combat mustaches.

Troops are preparing to advance. To avoid injury, please remain in a secure location and wait for further instructions.

Finally, PFC Tanner, a gangly kid from Wisconsin, raises his hand. “Do you think you could see the Washington Monument from the roof? Maybe even the White House?”

The other boys crack grins. They are afraid of Rod. They’re not even sure of his humanity. But they cannot help themselves. Following an unspoken Army tradition, they have to test their sergeant.

Tanner explains, “This is my first time in DC.”

“You’re not a tourist, fuckchop,” Rod says, fixing him with a hard stare. “You’re a soldier. I want you watching your sector, Private, not seeing the sights.”

“Is it true there ain’t gonna be any light inside?” Lynch wants to know. “We’ll be doing this by flashlight with the night vision goggles?”

“You afraid of the dark, Corporal?”

“No, Sergeant. Just what’s in it. Those little jumpers are fast.”

The boys wince. They hate the ugly, whining little hoppers more than anything. They see the stinging as sexual—violent rape by another species.

“We don’t know what we’re going to find in there,” Rod says, acknowledging their feelings. The truth is the hoppers terrify him as well. “But this is what we do. You did this a million times over the past year in Afghanistan. You’re good at this. The stakes may be higher here, but the job is the same.”

The boys glance at each other and nod. The ramp drops, flooding the passenger compartment with gray light.

Do not run at military personnel. Repeat. Do not run at military personnel.

“All right, let’s roll,” Rod tells them.

The squad files out of the vehicle and fans into a circle around it, establishing security. The other squads are also dismounting. The soldiers from the new flamethrower units pull their tanks onto their backs and help each other fasten the belts; these units, along with the Stryker gunners eyeing the street, will provide outside security for the operation. The street is sprinkled with shell casings. It stinks of blood and death here. The Marines and combat engineers have been through this street clearing obstacles, and left them a present: A bulldozer stands next to a large pile of corpses surrounded by a cloud of flies at the bottom of the steps leading up to the hotel doors. Dozens of gray faces and arms and legs clad in the clothes of home: the soldiers crane their necks for a quick look. A few sneak pictures with their cell phones.

Lieutenant Pierce, trailed by Tom Ford, the platoon sergeant, walk away from their huddle with Captain Mack and the other platoon leaders.

Rod jogs forward to join his fellow sergeants gathering around the Lieutenant.

“The OpOrder is the same,” Pierce says. “First Platoon is the designated entry team and will secure the lobby, first floor and maintenance facilities. Third and Fourth will take the second through the fifth. We Hellraisers are going all the way to the top. We’ll be clearing the sixth and seventh floors as well as the roof. Got it?”

“Aieeyah, sir,” says Sergeant Jake Morrow, grinning. Like the other non-commissioned officers, he is sick of the endless PowerPoint presentations, and is feeling gung ho being back outside the wire doing the Lord’s work. Rod and the other men nod.

Pierce unfolds a map, actually a photocopy of an architectural blueprint. The non-coms huddle closer, whistling. It’s a large building. Behind him and Ford, First Platoon rushes up the steps into the hotel, equipment rattling. Rod listens for gunfire but hears nothing.

“Tom and I will take Headquarters and Weapons Squad and establish our base in the elevator lobby here,” the Lieutenant says, pointing to a section of the map. “Jake, you’re going all the way across the floor. I want you to take this hallway and all connecting rooms, and establish security at the opposite stairwell. Rod, you’ll push out from the elevator lobby and take the nearest stretch of hallway and adjoining rooms.” He glances at Navarro. “Joe, you’ll cover this area between them. We’ll be in radio contact at all times. Watch the corners and don’t get bunched up in any fatal funnels. I want good trigger discipline inside. I don’t want any blue on blue. . .”

A wave of horror crosses the young lieutenant’s face, transforming him into a man old and tired long before his time—a man with more ghosts than a haunted house. Only Rod knows the source of the man’s pain. The Lieutenant glances at Rod, who turns away, his face burning. The two men share the same shame, but for different reasons. One fired his weapon, the other didn’t. In doing so, each failed his ideals.

“Remember the rules of engagement,” Ford grates in his gravelly voice. “Yes, we’re in someone’s house here. Specifically, our house. There may be Americans in there. But the ROE is clear: Shoot on sight any individual who’s got the bug. Shoot to kill. If somebody runs at you, assume he’s got the bug. You take no chances. Worry about staying alive now and your conscience later.”

“Roger that,” the men respond.

Ford is good people, Rod knows. As the platoon sergeant, he will take good care of Pierce. The Lieutenant is in good hands. He’ll be all right.

“Then get your men ready,” Pierce tells them. “We step off in five.”

♦

The sergeants tell the Hellraisers to form up in ranger file. The squads stack behind them, waiting for the order to advance. Captain Mack growls at First Sergeant Vinson to put the church music out of its misery, and Mozart’s ethereal “Ave Verum Corpus” abruptly dies. In the ensuring vacuum, the distant gunfire presses in a little closer. The music lingers in Rod’s mind, comforting and pure, and he finds himself humming it. One of the flamethrower units sprays a jet of fire onto the pile of burning corpses, setting them ablaze and filling the air with a nauseatingly sweet, rotten, beefy stench Rod can almost taste.

“Flashlights on, weapons hot,” he tells his squad, giving them a quick once over to make sure they’re ready to go. The boys stare back at him with wild eyes.

Pierce gives the order to step off and leads the platoon into the hotel. The anxious looks transform into professional frowns as the training takes over. Leading his squad, Rod raises his AA12 automatic shotgun with its attached SureFire flashlight and blinks in the gloom. The lobby is massive. After weeks of neglect, it smells like an old couch. Beams of white light play in the corners; that’s First Platoon doing their jobs. Someone shouts that he found a body. The boys sneeze on dust in the air. They sweep their sectors with their weapons without breaking stride, boots stomping on clothes and hairdryers and books that spill like entrails from discarded luggage. Rod aims his flashlight over his head and watches the beam sparkle along a dead chandelier.

A rifle discharges in the manager’s office with a loud bang.

“Lord, please don’t let it be jumpers,” Corporal Lynch hisses.

First Platoon’s got this, Hellraisers, Pierce’s voice buzzes in his headset. Keep moving, out.

The stairwell door opens ahead of them. Boots thunder on the metal steps. That would be Jake Morrow’s squad, Rod knows. After them, Joe Navarro, then him, then Headquarters and Weapons.

Rod leads his shooters onto the stairs with weapons cocked and locked and night vision goggles on. The stairwell has no windows and is pitch black. Their flashlights flicker across cinderblocks and handrails coated in generations of paint now rendered in their grainy, monocular vision as shades of green. The boys cut off their muttered prayers and bitching as they enter the danger zone, breathing through their noses.

Above, a door bangs open. Rod’s radio fills with chatter as Sergeant Morrow narrates what he sees and his progress toward achieving his objective.

Nobody here. Smells like sour milk, though. Stay frosty. Out, here.

Third Squad enters the elevator lobby and pauses in the hallway beyond. They made it to their objective without incident. Now all they have to do is sweep twenty-five rooms and a vending area, without getting mauled and bitten, to earn their pay for the day. Behind them, Headquarters and Weapons enter the elevator lobby and set up the machine guns.

“It’s time to earn our money, vatos,” Rod says. He orders Corporal Davis to take Fireteam A and clear the rooms on the other side of the hall, and then gathers Fireteam B in front of a nondescript hotel door reading 6101.

“U.S. Army!” he calls out. “If you are inside this room, get down on the floor now.”

Silence.

“You’re up, Sosa,” he says.

The giant soldier grins and steps forward with the handheld battering ram. He takes pride in being the big kid, the bully. The fireteam makes way for him.

“Wilco, Sarge,” he says.

He rears back and swings the ram into the door, which bangs open. The fireteam rushes past, weapons leveled and sweeping the room. Tanner breaks left and Arnold breaks right, circling back to Rod, who provides overwatch at the door. Lynch checks the bathroom.

“Clear,” the boys sound off.

“Clear,” says Lynch.

Rod scans the room again. An open suitcase lies on the unmade bed, half packed with wrinkled clothes. He joins Lynch, who shines his flashlight at the bathroom mirror. Someone wrote a message in red lipstick.

Sorry Sean I had to leave to find Liz

The sink is filled with bloody bandages.

The corporal shakes his head. “Like one big haunted house, Sergeant. I wonder what their story was.”

Rod barely hears him. The lipstick reminds him of Gabriela.

The hopelessness of their mission feels like a sudden weight on his chest. The country is huge. How many miles, how many rooms, how many bullets until he reaches his family?

“Holy shit,” one of the boys says back in the room.

Rod and Lynch rejoin the fireteam grouped around the window, and raise their night vision goggles. Someone pulled back the curtain, filling the room with bright gray light. From this high up looking northwest, Arlington sprawls before them behind a veil of smoke. Gunships buzz over the distant buildings, covering the combat engineers. Several circle a distant point, dropping Hellfire missiles before veering away. The boom reaches their ears and shakes the window for a fraction of a second just before a fireball blooms over the spot, dissipating in a mushroom cloud.

“It almost feels like we’re winning,” Arnold says over the grinding thunder.

“Winning?” Sosa snorts. “Shit, man, this is easy. The Infected don’t shoot back, right?”

Jake Morrow reports to the Lieutenant that he has reached his objective. The constant chatter on the radio reminds Rod they have a job to do.

“All right. Enough sightseeing. Let’s get back to work.”

They have twenty-three more rooms to go.

Davis calls out from the hallway: “Contact!”

“Coming out!” Rod calls back, and rushes outside in time to see a man approaching them from the other end of the corridor. The flashlight beams converge on his face and chest.

“Sergeant, we got a civilian,” Davis tells him.

“Stop where you are, sir,” Lynch orders.

The man obeys, sniffing the air, his fists clenched against his chest.

“Some of these doors must be open,” the corporal says. “He was in one of the rooms.”

“Does he have the bug, Sergeant?” says Tanner.

Rod shrugs. He believes the man has the bug, but such speculation is pointless. The rules of engagement are clear. “If he makes a run at us, he does.”

As if hearing an invitation, the man sprints at them, growling on the exhales, closing the distance. A wave of nauseating sour stench precedes him.

“Stop where you are, sir!” Davis shouts as the soldiers aim their weapons, waiting for the order to fire.

“Sergeant?”

The man rushes at them, his pale face shining in the glare of the flashlights, teeth gleaming, feet pounding the floor.

Rod doesn’t want to shoot.

He also cannot order his boys to do something he wouldn’t.

“What do we do, Sergeant?”

Rod raises his shotgun and growls back at the Infected.

“Fuck you, Jody,” he says, and squeezes the trigger.

♦

The man’s chest explodes with a burst of smoke as the high-velocity buckshot rips through his body, filling the air with a bloody mist. His legs give out, sending him careening into the wall, where he leaves a long smear of blood and bits of flesh.

Pierce’s voice buzzes in his ear, urgent.

Hellraisers 3, this is Hellraisers 6. Sitrep, over?

Rod realizes he was not breathing. He takes a long, shuddering breath.

Repeat, Hellraisers 3. What’s your sitrep? How copy?

Rod looks at the grinning corpse smoking on the carpeted floor at the end of a long trail of blood and guts and feels nothing but horror at himself.

The boys are laughing like crazy people.

“What the hell?” he says with disgust. “This man is dead.”

“Sorry, Sergeant,” says Tanner, coughing into his fist.

“Get your shit together,” Rod snarls. He keys the push-to-talk button on his headset and reports in. “Hellraisers 6, Hellraisers 3. We engaged and eliminated one hostile, over.”

“Not just any hostile,” Sosa says, setting the boys off again.

Hellraisers 3, that’s a solid copy. Stay in touch, out.

“Roger, sir,” Rod says, glaring at his squad. “Out.”

“Sergeant,” Lynch explains, “you called him Jody just before you fired.”

Rod grunts in surprise. “I did?”

In Army folklore, Jody is the sweet, sensitive civilian man who screws your girlfriend or wife while you’re away fighting for your country. You spend months getting shot at in some bombed-out shithole where even the sand hates you, and then one day a Dear John letter comes from your old lady telling you how Jody was there for her while you were away. How his poetry speaks to her. How things sort of just happened. How she wants the uncomplicated life Jody offers.

Everyone in the Army, from the lowliest private to the Chief of Staff, hates Jody’s guts. If Rod wanted to demonize the enemy and help his boys find humor in the horror, he couldn’t do any better.

“Well, then I guess he had it coming,” he says, sending the squad into hysterics.

Everyone is looking at the corpse. None see their sergeant wincing, blinking tears.

This isn’t war. It’s murder. Genocide. And Rod is no longer a soldier. He’s an exterminator.

I’m sorry for what happened to you. I’m sorry I had to end your life, whoever you are. Please consider it a mercy and recommend me to God as a friend.

God, karma, whoever is out there, he prays, at the end of this I will answer for anything I’ve done. Do not punish my family for my actions, for they are innocent.

Amen.

“Ice cold, Sergeant,” says Sosa, glancing at Rod with new respect.

Hellraisers 3, this is Hellraisers 6.

“Hellraisers 3. Go ahead, Hellraisers 6.”

We got people in the elevator, over.

While the Lieutenant talks, Rod hears a metallic boom in the background. Someone is pounding his fists against the elevator doors, trying to get their attention, wanting out.

“Copy that, Hellraisers 6,” Rod says. “Are they infected, over?”

No way to know until we get them out of the elevator, over.

“Hellraisers 6, do you need assistance, over?”

We could use you pulling security in the hallway, Hellraisers 3. Stay close, over.

“Roger, Hellraisers 6. Hellraisers 3, out.”

More hurry up and wait. They’ll have to finish clearing the rooms later.

Rod leads Third Squad back toward the elevator lobby. Turning the corner, he sees Weapons Squad prying open the elevator doors while the Headquarters guys cover them with their rifles. He wonders how long those people have been trapped inside the elevator. Infected or not, they will be too weak to stand up.

Refugees are going to defeat the invasion, Rod believes. Thousands of people are still alive in Arlington alone, he is sure of it, barricaded in basements and other safe places. Hundreds have already reached the airport. They need food, water, shelter, medical care. Many of them are so psychologically damaged they present a danger to themselves and others.

The worst part is the military took their guns. Never did this country need a draft more than it does now, but the government has not yet done this. Many of the refugees are willing to fight alongside the Army, but they are not allowed, not even as mules, not even behind the lines. So they sit around and drain resources the military needs to win this war. It’s a giant waste, and just thinking about it makes the old rage boil inside him.

A strange smell—a dry, antiseptic scent, like rubbing alcohol—strikes his nose, making him cough. He keys his headset in alarm. “Hellraisers 6, this is Hellraisers 3, how copy, over?”

Hellraisers 3, Hellraisers 6. We almost got it open. Wait, out—

The elevator lobby fills with the crash of gunfire and strobing muzzle flashes.

♦

The firing stops, replaced by screams.

“Move, move!” Rod roars, surging forward with his automatic shotgun up and leveled.

The lobby fills with chittering black creatures swarming over the bodies of the soldiers. They look like giant flies, their backs covered in greasy mesh wings, their limbs sharp edged and hairy, their eyes massive and pure white, their bodies ranging size from as small as a dog to as big as a cow. They smell like rubbing alcohol. One of them hunches over Sergeant Ford, its multiple limbs folding the man into a box shape, ripping flesh and bone like cardboard.

Ford screams in agony.

“Jesus Christ,” Arnold says.

“Don’t shoot!” Rod says. “That’s our people in there.”

“What do we do, Sergeant?”

“Follow me!”

They’re going to have to kill these things at close quarters.

A voice calls from the elevator lobby: “Fire!”

“We’re coming to get you, sir!” Rod says as he rushes forward.

“That’s an order!” Pierce shrieks. “We’re done!”

The squad hesitates in the corridor with gasps of revulsion and dread. Rod realizes he is alone.

Pierce is still screaming: “Fire! Fire! Fire!”

The words turn into a long keening wail. In front of Rod, the thing that folded Sergeant Ford into a neat box is now spinning him while shooting a stream of viscous webbing around the body. Another of the things picks up the shrieking radio operator, expertly lops the AN/PRC-119 radio off of his back, and then hacks off his limbs, chirping musically while it works. Its glistening wings tremble, making an oily, leathery flapping sound that gives Rod the skin-crawling sensation of cockroaches on his body.

He fires the AA12, which discharges with a deafening boom. The thing cocooning Ford explodes in a spectacular splash of carapace and white slime. He fires again, blasting another of the things into wet pieces.

Navarro’s voice buzzes in his ear: Hellraisers 6, this is Hellraisers 3.

“Lieutenant!” he cries, ejecting the smoking twelve-gauge casing and chambering another round. The men in the elevator lobby have stopped screaming. The buglike things continue their grisly work on the bodies, ignoring Rod, their bulbous white eyes inscrutable and seemingly blind.

Rod turns and sees his squad flinching away from the sight.

“Fire your goddamn weapons!”

Hellraisers 6, how copy?

More of the things pour from the blackness of the elevator shaft and swarm across the ceiling and walls and floor in a single chittering mass, their wings trembling.

chk-chk-chk-chk-chk

“We’ve got to get out of here!” one of the soldiers shouts.

Rod flicks the selector switch on his thunder gun to auto and rains buckshot into the things, splattering them. He backpedals quickly, reloading, as the squad opens up, screaming their heads off. The monsters fly apart under the storm of shot.

For every creature they kill, another takes its place.

Any Hellraisers unit, this is Hellraisers 1. Identify source of gunfire, over?

Rod shouts into his headset, “All Hellraisers, all Hellraisers, this is Three. Six is down. We are engaged at the elevator lobby. Request assistance, over.”

The voices of the other sergeants crash in his ear, talking over each other.

Copy that. On the way, Hellraisers 3, out.

Hang on, Rod. Wait one, out.

The wall next to them begins to crumble. Through the hole they hear the buzzing of wings.

“Fall back, fall back!”

The squad turns and sprints down the hallway, their boots slamming the carpet, surrounded by an omnipresent scratching sound.

The walls are dissolving.

Rod pauses to fire his shotgun. The gunstock hums against his shoulder. Shell casings fly into the air. The bloated black bodies explode under the fusillade.

The gun clicks empty.

chk-chk-chk-chk-chk

“Go, Sergeant!” Sosa roars, shouldering his SAW and opening fire. The tracers arc down the hall into the thickly massed creatures, splattering dozens of them.

Bits of dust and paint sparkle in the air around him, almost beautiful as seen through his night vision goggles.

Rod grabs the man’s collar and pulls hard as the ceiling collapses under the weight of a pile of the things, landing on the floor with a thud. The bodies explode on impact, spilling guts and organs across the carpet.

Davis and Lynch wave the men through, shoot into the swarm and then run after the squad.

Rod sees lights flickering ahead and calls out, “Third Squad here!”

The squads almost collide at the corner. It’s Navarro and his shooters, wide eyed and gasping.

“Where’s Jake?”

“Don’t know,” Navarro tells him. “What the hell did you guys do? I’m being chased by giant flies, for Chrissakes.”

“No time,” Rod says. “They’re right behind us too.”

“If they are, we’re trapped.”

“Then we make our stand here. See to your men. We got your back.”

Navarro nods, paling. “Good luck, Rod.”

Rod hears muffled gunfire erupt on another floor of the hotel. Whatever Lieutenant Pierce unleashed is spreading through the building. With just seconds to act, he points and calls out names, positioning his two grenadiers against the walls and the SAW gunners next to them, where their overlapping cones of fire will cover the hallway with minimal shifting fire. Two riflemen kneel in the middle with Rod and his shotgun, while the other two stand behind them.

The swarm is nearly upon them when Rod gives the order to fire.

He shoulders his shotgun and squeezes the trigger, the gun booming in his hands. The grenadiers shoot their thumpers, sending multiple projectile rounds deep into the elevator lobby. The SAW gunners, lying on the floor, fire hundreds of rounds, tracers zipping downrange in blurred streams. The riflemen fire in an endless series of metallic bursts.

The corridor’s volume fills with hot, flying pieces of metal. The creatures disintegrate under the withering fire. The grenades burst, sending a thick, rolling cloud of smoke and dust surging toward the soldiers. They cough on it, blinded, and continue to shoot.

“Loading!”

Light flashes in the smoke as another grenade bursts. The building trembles. The concussion blows a fresh wave of particulates into their faces. Dark shapes swarm toward them through the dust, like ghosts.

“Loading!”

Rod empties his shotgun and reloads until he has no more full drums in his pouch. Hundreds of warm shell casings flicker in his peripheral vision and roll across the carpet to gather in piles.

One by one, the rifles click empty.

“Last mag!”

“I’m out!”

Rod orders the boys to fix bayonets as the SAW gunners empty their belts.

The last gun sputters, falls silent, leaving a deafening ringing sound in their ears.

Rod draws his knife and offers a brief prayer for his family. Around him, the firing line, emptied of ammunition and bristling with bayonets, waits for the end.

The smoke and dust dissipate, revealing a jumbled carpet of black pieces of carapace and limbs crushed into a thick layer of white slime.

“Joe, what you got?” Rod calls out.

“I can’t see shit,” Navarro answers. “But I don’t see any bugs either.”

Several creatures squirm wetly through the sticky remains, their legs broken, making clicking sounds. At the end of the hallway, near the elevator lobby, the ceiling is on fire, the flames obscured by a growing haze of smoke. Another threat. They are going to have to move within the next few minutes.

“They ain’t coming,” Arnold says in disbelief, blinking. “We got them all.”

“Kicked their ass,” Sosa says, but without force.

“Aieeyah,” Lynch answers mechanically, spitting into the dust.

Tanner slumps against the wall hugging his ribs, his body shaking. Davis lights a short length of foul-smelling cigar and sighs. Some of the other boys pass around a can of wintergreen dip.

“Hellraisers 1, this is Hellraisers 3,” Rod says into his headset. “How copy, over?”

The platoon’s private channel hisses with static.

“Do you copy, Hellraisers 1?” He glances at Navarro, who looks back at him with a grim expression. “Check the Comanche net, Joe. Outlaw needs our sitrep. Tell him the Lieutenant is down, the building is on fire and we’re coming out.” Then he tries to raise Jake Morrow again, fearing the worst.

“Rod,” says Navarro, his eyes glassy as he listens to the chatter on the company net. “It’s a shit storm. Captain Mack is wounded. We’d better get moving.”

Ray

The children walked among the trees, feeling the energy of the crisp autumn air, their sneakers crunching dead leaves. Ray knows this place; it’s Cashtown Elementary. And he is seven years old again, guiding a blindfolded and laughing Shawn McCrea.

His father, Ray Senior, got drunk and beat his wife and sucker punched his son until one day he died of a heart attack. Ray Junior adapted to a world where you were either a taker or a giver. Whatever goodness his mother had to offer was not enough. Ray had nature and nurture going against him.

People are not born greedy or violent or cruel; the world teaches them.

The children drifted among the trees, the sighted leading the blind under the watchful eyes of the teacher. The point of the game was trust. You trusted the person guiding you. It was an exciting game.

When Ray pushed Shawn face first into the oak tree, he thought he was winning.

♦

Infection rages in his blood. In his fevered dreams, the memories blur one into the next, settling on him sitting hunched over the counter at Pete’s Tavern, slowly converting his last paycheck into shots of Wild Turkey and mugs of draft. Just three years out of high school, he had already been hired and fired from Walmart, the local Exxon station and the facilities department at a local hospital. As for next week, he had no idea what he’d be doing. A friend at a moving company had said he could use him, so maybe he’d do that for a while and see how it went. Anything but the Army. Ray liked to do what he wanted, when he wanted to do it.

He glowered at his image in the mirror behind the bar.

If I see that bitch Lola again, I’m going to slap her good.

(Whatever you think is best, Ray.)

And if I ever see her little jerk college boyfriend, I’ll break his goddamn face.

(If you think that’s best, Ray.)

Damn straight.

Lola Rivera was the one good thing that happened to Ray in high school. School had been like prison to him, a place to kill time smoking in the boys’ room and terrorizing the weaker kids and thinking deep thoughts during detention. She was a good girl attracted to his unintentional bad boy charm, which smacked of honesty to her. For his part, her beauty and intelligence awed him, made him want to be a better man to give her what she deserved instead of what she was really getting.

Then Lola went to college, while Ray got a job wearing a blue vest. She called him a few times and they had awkward conversations about her exciting new life. Gradually, the calls stopped as they drifted apart, or rather, recognized how little they actually had in common. He hadn’t thought of her in years until hearing she’d brought a guy home with her on Christmas break, some pansy ass named Bob. The happy couple had been spotted holding hands at the mall. Ray counted the years and realized she would be graduating soon. She would start a career, get married, buy a house and have kids, while he’d be stuck in Cashtown for the rest of his life, one of the losers he’d always ridiculed and sworn he’d never become.

Stewie and Brian entered the tavern, laughing and slapping snow from each other’s shoulders, and joined Ray at the bar. Ray scowled at them.

“You’ll never guess who’s right behind us,” Stewie said.

“Merry Christmas, Ray,” Brian snickered.

The door opened with a jingle and a young couple stepped blinking into the warm neon gloom. Ray squinted and recognized Lola. His heart fluttered unexpectedly in his chest; she had flowered into a beautiful woman over the past several years. Bob struck him as your typical mild-mannered jock with his clean white oxford shirt and powder blue sweater, his blond hair neatly combed to the side. More Clark Kent than Superman, though; Ray believed he could push this college boy around pretty easily if he wanted. Lola called out to Pete to bring a pitcher. Bob pointed to a booth, and they took their seats and shucked their coats. Lola laughed and socked Bob playfully in the shoulder while he grinned, apparently teasing her.

She used to do that to me, Ray thought, feeling sorry for himself. He realized he’d let something great slip through his fingers due to sheer laziness.

Stewie and Brian snickered while Ray glared at the couple. Eventually, Bob noticed and bristled. Lola saw Ray and whispered into Bob’s ear.

Listen to your girl, Bobby, Ray thought, giving him an evil smile. You’d better stay put or you’re going to get hurt tonight.

Bob gently shrugged off her hands and stood. Ray downed his shot and made a show of cracking his knuckles as Bob approached.

“You’re Ray Young,” Bob said uncertainly, glancing at Stewie and Brian and sizing them up before leveling his gaze at Ray.

“You found me,” Ray said.

“All right,” Bob said. “Well, here it is.” He took a deep breath. “I heard you’ve been talking shit about me and Lola. Saying how you’re going to kill us or something.”

Before Ray could answer, Bob stepped forward and stared into his eyes from inches away. “Is that true, Ray?”

Ray’s height and size and scowl intimidated most people, but not this kid. His fantasy of how this was supposed to roll dissolved in an instant. His alcoholic bravery abandoned him, leaving him feeling naked. He smiled, fighting to keep his cool.

“I don’t know who told you that,” he said.

He realized the bar was growing quiet. Everyone was watching.

“People told me,” Bob said. “Worse, they told Lola.”

“Well, they’re liars. I never said anything like that. No, sir.”

It might have worked if Jeff Vogler, standing at the other end of the bar, didn’t laugh.

Bob’s eyes narrowed. Ray couldn’t believe this guy’s self control. He felt what little courage he had left drain away.

“Let me put it this way,” Bob breathed into his face. “Do we have a problem?”

Ray smiled again. “You’ve got a lot of heart coming in here, Bob. I’m willing to let it go.” He raised his half-finished mug. “In fact, let me buy you a beer. You and Lola, for old times’ sake. Peace offering.”

The room relaxed a little. Ray had chosen an honorable withdrawal. Now it was up to the college kid to do the right thing, which everyone knew he would. Back at Bob’s booth, Lola’s eyes were wide and glassy. Pete started to fill a pitcher, which he would offer on the house.

Bob shrugged. “All right—”

Ray swung the mug into his face, spraying beer and blood and sending a chipped tooth skidding across the countertop. Then Ray was on top of him, straddling his chest, punching him with both fists.

When they pulled him off, he couldn’t stop laughing because he had never felt such joy.

♦

Twelve years later, the Screaming changed everything. This is where his fever takes him next. That day, Ray woke up moaning in his basement apartment, his head pounding like a drum. He snoozed for another hour and decided it was time to get up. Rubbing his belly, he plodded into the bathroom and noisily emptied his bladder while he inspected his bleary eyes, bristling stubble and wild handlebar mustache in the mirror. What a night. By now, Ray accepted he was a loser, but took an odd pride in the fact he was somehow good at it.

He paused while brushing his teeth as he realized he had not heard his mother’s characteristic plodding around upstairs. The floor was always creaking.

Pulling on a clean T-shirt, frayed jeans and his trademark STEELERS ballcap, Ray lit a cigarette, coughed up a ball of phlegm, and thought about hitting the old lady up for some breakfast.

He stepped outside and climbed the stairs to the main house. The air was filled with distant sirens. A haze of smoke hung in the sky. That figured. He’d joined the volunteer fire department to try to experience a little excitement that didn’t come from a bottle or between a woman’s legs. There was finally a big fire, and he’d missed it.

Ray opened the side door and walked into the house on bare feet. Too late, he remembered his mother’s injunction against smoking and rushed to drop it into the kitchen sink.

“Mom?”

No answer.

“Ma, it’s me, Ray.”

He checked the couch and her bedroom, wondering if she was taking a nap, but there was no sign of her. He speculated that she’d gone out for a walk. Miracles do happen, he thought. For years, his mother had been a shut-in for the most part. He made a strong cup of coffee and sipped it, feeling a little better. Any minute now, she would squeeze herself through the front door and make him some bacon and eggs, all the while muttering some vague assurance that he was a good man, destined to do something special.

Ray noticed the bathroom door was closed. It was never closed unless his mother was actually using the toilet.

“Mom? You in there?” He knocked. “Can I come in, Mom?”

He opened the door and gasped. His mother lay sprawled in the bathtub, her massive belly rising above the gray water like the back of a whale, giant breasts swaying in the murk.

“Ma!” he roared, falling to his knees and trying to pull her slippery bulk out of the tub. He settled on raising her head. Water spilled from her mouth, open and stretched wide in a horrific, soundless scream.

Soaked with soapy water, he reached under her back and pulled the plug, letting the water drain out. He kissed her cold face, sobbing.

“No, no, no,” he told her. “Don’t die.”

As a volunteer firefighter, he was trained in CPR. First, he had to get help on the way. Running to the kitchen, he grabbed the cordless phone and dialed 911 on the way back to the bathroom. The phone beeped in his ear, telling him all circuits were busy. Roaring a string of obscenities, he clasped his hands and pushed his mother’s sternum, cracking it. The bathroom filled with the smell of shit. He breathed into her mouth, counting. Her body was freezing.

“Don’t give up, Ma,” he whispered.

The tears flowed. He could not stop crying. She was a giver and he was a taker but he had never looked down at her for that. Ray loved his mother more than himself. He loved her because she had given him whatever shred of goodness he had.

He finally got through to 911 after two hours, continuing to give CPR with his aching arms while shouting his address into the phone.

The ambulance never came.

Ever since that day, he had the nagging feeling her death was somehow all his fault.

♦

Three mornings later, Ray climbed into his battered pickup after a twelve-hour stint at his rent-a-cop job guarding a self-storage facility, and started his drive home. He was exhausted from the long night shift, his grief and battling with the mortuary people to take his mother’s body and put her into the ground with some dignity. It was a fight he’d lost; several guys in bright yellow hazmat suits had loaded her corpse onto a truck the day before, and had handed him a receipt. Leona Young would be buried in a collective grave outside of town. Later on, when resources freed up, he could arrange to have her dug up and buried right. Meanwhile, the government had plenty of other problems to worry about. One in five people had fallen down. It had just been Leona’s bad luck she’d caught SEEL Syndrome while taking a bath, which had led to her drowning. Most of the screamers were still alive, and needed around-the-clock care.

He was so preoccupied by these things he nearly missed the pajama-wearing lunatics running down the paper boy and ripping his body apart by the handful.

Ray slowed his truck, gaping, as they crammed his flesh into their mouths while the kid was still screaming.

“Hey,” he hollered. “Hey!”

They reared their heads, still chewing, their chins stained black.

“Mike, what the hell are you doing to that kid?”

A woman stood, snarling, and sprinted toward his truck.

“Oh shit,” Ray hissed, throwing the vehicle into drive and stomping on the gas pedal, pulling away on squealing tires.

He drove from the scene feeling shaken and unsure of what had happened. Did a group of people—one of them Mike Parsons, who got up early every morning to walk his dog—really run down the stupid redheaded kid who delivered the papers?

They were eating him, bro.

Naw, impossible.

All he knew was whatever they were doing to the kid, he didn’t want anyone doing to him. He never claimed to be hero material. He would drive into town and call the cops; they could handle it.

Ray turned the wheel, feeling the truck bang over something. People ran across the street in front of him, chasing a screaming woman wearing a jogging outfit. She ran toward the truck, waving her arms.

He stepped on the gas and sped past, knocking down a mailbox. His truck glanced against one of her pursuers and sent him spinning through the air onto a parked car. The others tackled the woman, bearing her down onto the road.

“Shit, I’m sorry,” Ray sobbed, and then flinched as a man stormed onto a porch in a bathrobe, firing his shotgun.

Sirens wailed in the distance. A dog bolted across the road, its head down. A car fishtailed and crumpled around a light pole. The driver looked at Ray in a daze as he passed.

“Sorry,” Ray whispered, keeping his eyes on the road.

Something big was happening, something horrible, even worse than the Screaming. He turned on the radio, set to his favorite station. At this time of morning, Kaptain Kyle and Betty Boo did their morning zoo program. A muffled voice was shouting.

I swear to Jesus I saw this. The school bus was shaking. People were shoving at each other to get inside. Swarming. The bus was packed with people. They could barely move in there, there were so many. There was blood all over the windows. The windows were streaked with it. Those people were doing something awful to those kids—

Kaptain Kyle: And you’re done. Another caller bites the dust. Look guys, it’s a funny joke, but enough’s enough already. I’m not falling for it. From now on, I’m cutting you off immediately. Even think the word “zombie” and you’re gone, okay?

Betty Boo: It sounded real though, didn’t it? Jeez, it gave me the willies. A school bus.

Kaptain Kyle: Some kind of War of the Worlds thing going on today.

Betty Boo: Is today the anniversary?

Kaptain Kyle: You’d think after the Screaming, people would show a little class. Should we take another caller? Dare we risk it?

Betty Boo: What’s she doing?

Kaptain Kyle: Ladies and gentlemen, our producer, Sharon, is waving her arms at us. That is how cutting-edge modern producers tell their on-air talent to go to commercial, instead of using their microphone. They wave their hands in the air like they just don’t care.

Betty Boo: Must be important. She’s kind of freaking out. Is she crying?

Kaptain Kyle: Curioser and curioser. Ladies and gentlemen, we will return after the break.

Ray’s truck rocketed down the street until coming to a skidding halt on the sidewalk in front of his house. He killed the engine, cutting off an ad for a better mattress, and jumped out. The air felt warm here and he smelled smoke. He had a rough plan sketched in his head. He knew a place where he could hole up for a while, but he needed supplies.

Inside the house, food, beer, liquor, cigarettes and dip, jugs of water, flashlight, packets of Kool-Aid, burritos and TV dinners all went into a plastic cooler until it was full. He had no idea how long it would last him, but it was all he had.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The gate rattled. Someone was trying to get in.

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

Footsteps pounded outside, receding.

♦

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is a dead world.

Then he sees the distant walking figure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What the hell are they?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He has become Infection.

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

Then he understands. They are all the Brood.

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

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

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

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

Dr. Price

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The chase leads him to the mass transit station.

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

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

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

Stay focused. Follow the girl.

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

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

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

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

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

In chambers carved into rock deep inside the earth, Travis would never know he has been buried alive. The leadership would never tell him. He and the other refugees would go on doing their jobs, cut off from the surface, until one day the food runs out. Then the competition for resources would begin.

It won’t matter if you’re a Supreme Court Justice or the Secretary of State or the President of the United States. If we get cut off down here, we’ll end up eating each other.

Travis believes it may be inevitable. One day, the Infected will migrate out of the cities. They will discover this complex. The electrified fence will not stop them. Human security systems provide deterrence based on an assumption of interest in self-preservation. The carriers of Wildfire do not understand that concept. Only the Wildfire Agent itself does, and it is all too happy—another homocentrism, as it does not feel anything—to sacrifice any of its hosts, like pawns, to win its never-ending game of dominance and survival.

The question is whether Wildfire has Mind. Is it intelligent, or just blind programming? Another thought that keeps him up at night.

The public address system bleats a muffled message about the cafeteria being open to second shift. The noise startles him, making him forget his fears and focus again on following the woman. A different cheerful automated voice announces the monorail is approaching the station.

The woman walks away from the crowd, stepping onto the track platform and turning so he can see her face. Just as he remembered, she is a stunning creature, tall and frail and beautiful.

Travis pauses, feeling breathless, wondering what he is going to say. How does one apologize for what happened to her? Perhaps that is all he should say: Forgive me.

She stares straight at him, mouthing words he cannot hear but his brain translates as, Save me. Travis watches in horror as the monorail approaches. She spreads her arms as the train’s lights bathe her in white glare, swooning exactly as he remembered her standing in the door of the helicopter, just before the Secret Service agent shoved her into the crowd.

A scream catches in Travis’s throat.

The train passes through the woman, who disappears as if she were a ghost.

♦

The bulletin board is plastered with orange public notices advising the denizens of the Special Facility on everything from dormitory schedules to daycare options to personal hygiene to general propaganda.

Travis scans the notices hungrily, searching for psychiatric help.

He has a choice. The Special Facility offers individual counseling for claustrophobia and depression as well as group grief counseling. He writes down the exchange number for both, hedging his bets. It doesn’t matter whether claustrophobia or loneliness or survivor’s guilt is driving him mad; he is seeing ghosts. He needs as much help as he can get.

This task done, he hurries off to work. He is not afraid of being late, as nobody cares about his hours. The fact is he spends far more time at work than he does in his overcrowded dormitory. Work takes his mind off things, steadies him.

His office building is set up like a Russian nesting doll, with various levels of workers authorized access to certain floors or zones. As an assistant director with the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Travis is Level Seven, enjoying broad access to both his office building and a special Biosafety Level 4 laboratory in another building buried farther west.

That’s where the scientists keep the specimens and experiment on them in ways that would make the Nazis blush. Travis has to remind himself the Infected are not people anymore. In any case, it’s the end of the world. If ever was a time when the ends justified the means, he reasons, this would be it. Recently, the scientists received a shipment of bodies of strange monsters for autopsy, sending rumors buzzing throughout Area B. Travis, of course, knows about these strange creatures that recently started to appear, as he now specializes in studying them. He has seen photos of the bodies, shaky video from the field. He has read countless reports, most of which sounded like folklore. He personally has not yet seen one of the creatures. Perhaps today he will take the time to enter the Lab and view the bodies up close. It is difficult to believe they are real. In the photos, they look like Photoshopped monsters from an Internet hoax. It feels like he is studying the Loch Ness Monster. Looking for a cure to Bigfoot.

In particular, he hopes one day they can catch the big monster commonly called the Screamer, King Monster, Rex, Godzilla, Demon. This rare and powerful beast shows up frequently in reports but has rarely been seen and as far as he knows has never been killed or captured. He believes the Demon has some sort of special role in the monsters’ ecosystem, but he does not know what it is. Many of the monsters appear to be sickly and struggling to survive. They eat constantly but exhibit signs of starvation. Entire species born just days ago seem to be dying out already. The survivors are adapting, however. Growing stronger. The Demon is one of these survivors. Another fact that keeps Travis up at night.

He runs his ID card through another access control, glaring at the door as it pauses for the usual three seconds before opening with a loud beep, as if reminding him that it alone decides whether he is allowed to enter. He remembers when he used to consider this kind of thing exciting. Just a few weeks ago, he craved access. Now each entry feels like walking deeper into a prison.

The ID card reads, THE PERSON DESCRIBED ON THIS CARD HAS ESSENTIAL EMERGENCY DUTIES WITH THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT.

The officials constituting what is left of the Office of Science and Technology Policy work in tiny offices ringing a room where a clerical pool works a reception desk around the clock. This is where Travis Price, PhD, an atomic scientist specializing in nonproliferation, came to study monsters. Scientific and policy journals and texts fill shelving against one of the walls. A soldier, helmetless in bulky black body armor, sits on the edge of the desk, flirting with the secretaries. Travis blinks at this uncommon sight, but has no energy for questions.

The soldier stares at him with cold gray eyes and says, “You don’t remember me, do you, Doc?”

The woman fought the Secret Service agent, only to be tossed like a doll at the desperate crowd screaming into the powerful wash of the rotors. Sitting on the helicopter sobbing into his hands, Travis looked up and met Fielding’s glare with his own.

That’s right, I did it, he thought. And I’d do it again. I’m alive.

Fielding nodded slightly as Travis turned away to regard the city they were abandoning. Without its government, Washington seemed drained of its power, an empty shell.

There is no right or wrong anymore, he thought. There is only living and dead.

The flashback dissipates, leaving Travis feeling exhausted.

“Fielding,” he says. “You’re Fielding. So you’re a soldier now?”

“Something like that.”

“What does that mean?”

“Most of the Secret Service was lost during the evacuation. The President, the Cabinet, the Supreme Court, the Congress; everyone wants a security detail. I’m ex-military. I was recruited.”

“So the government has a paramilitary organization now.”

“We’re more like the Praetorian Guard, Doc.”

The secretaries pointedly ignore the exchange, sensing the tension between the men. Travis hears one of them typing randomly.

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” he wonders aloud. Who will guard us from the guards?

Fielding laughs. “Who indeed?”

Travis is already tired of the sparring. A few weeks ago, he would have been terrified of a man like Fielding, and in fact was at their first meeting. Now Travis has real problems that make Fielding seem like small fish.

“So why are you here?”

“I’m here for you.”

“Let’s go into my office, then. Do you want some coffee?”

Fielding gets off the desk and stands erect, an imposing figure. “No time, Doc,” he says. “Do you still have your suit? The one you wore the day you came here?”

The suit is neatly folded in Travis’s locker. It still smells like fear.

“What’s this about?”

“Doc,” Fielding says, grinning, “you’re going to meet the President of the United States.”

♦

Travis remembers the first time he entered the White House. He tingled as he presented his credentials. A young, attractive aide led him to where he would be working. He glanced into private offices as he followed the woman down the hall and was surprised to see average people hunched over computers in tiny offices, hacking away at keyboards. Phones chirped discordantly, the sound muffled by the carpeted floor. File cabinets bulged with yellowing paper. If he didn’t know where he was, he would have guessed he was in some kind of old, regal, shabby hotel converted into offices for law clerks paid to make deals. And yet that breathless 9/11 feeling permeated the building; the White House was a massive zeitgeist generator. Travis felt connected to mighty levers that turned the world. Even on days the President was traveling and not much was happening, each day felt like the cusp of history.

Travis never met the President, however. Not for two years. The closest he came was when the White House needed some warm bodies for a press photo.

Now, it seems, President Andrew Walker wants to meet him.

He remembers how strange it was. Often one meets a famous actor and later remarks at how much smaller he is in real life than he appears to be in his films. But the President seemed even larger to Travis. He is a giant of a man, making everyone around him appear insubstantial.

Fielding studies him with an expression of subtle amusement. The secretaries stare. One takes off her glasses and squints as if trying to see something in Travis she hadn’t seen before, something she’d missed.

“I don’t understand,” Travis says.

Fielding acknowledges the women with a nod and gestures toward the door.

“Let’s get a move on, Doc.”

Outside in the corridor, Fielding walks a step behind Travis, his eyes never leaving him.

“Am I under arrest or something?”

“No,” Fielding tells him. “You would know if you were.”

“Then why do I feel like I’m under arrest?”

“I’ve seen you in action, Doc. You’re a slippery one. I’m going to keep an eye on you.”

“Slippery,” Travis says, the word bitter on his tongue. It’s not my fault she got left behind, he wants to scream. There wasn’t enough transport for everyone. The agent pushed her off. It wasn’t me. “If you’re the good guy, what are you doing down here? Why aren’t you out there saving the world?”

“That’s what Roberts did—remember him? Stayed behind to look for his wife. Haven’t seen him since. There’s plenty of work around here for a guy like me, Doc.”

“The fact is that the only person who’s going to save the world is someone like me.”

“God help us, then.”

“I’m not joking. You know the military is in Washington. But do you know how many buildings there are in the city? How many people lived there who became infected? We’re throwing what’s left of our military into a meat grinder. There aren’t enough bullets, Fielding. There aren’t enough soldiers. We’re going to lose.”

Fielding says nothing, regarding Travis with narrowed eyes.

“Bullets can’t fix this,” Travis says. “Only science can. We just have to figure it out.”

“All right, Doc,” Fielding says, ending the conversation.

They enter the mass transit station, Travis glancing at the spot where the girl mouthed Save me before dissipating in the path of the train. Fielding sees him shudder but says nothing. They board an outgoing monorail, which drops them off near the dormitories. Travis’s dorm is a large open space packed with cots on which men sleep in the dull glow of a few red light bulbs and exit signs hanging from the ceiling. So few cots are available that people use them in shifts. In four hours, according to the clock set to military time, Travis will be able to use his cot again for sleep, first brushing the other man’s dandruff off the pillow they share.

In the locker room, Travis changes into his suit, shirt and tie, still wrinkled and smelling a bit gamey. It will have to do. One does not visit the President of the United States wearing an orange coverall like a penitentiary inmate.

“Very presentable, Doc,” Fielding says, inspecting his nails.

Travis unravels his tie and tries again, eyeing his reflection in a small mirror. Women often told him he was good looking, even though his social awkwardness and general lack of interest otherwise kept them at bay. Now he appears downright frightening. His stubbled face is pale and his eyes look dead.

“Can you at least tell me what this is about?” he asks.

Fielding shrugs. “Don’t know, actually. Policy is your field. But I would suspect it’s not a social call. Whatever you’re working on regarding Wildfire, the Boss thinks it’s important.”

Travis experiences a sudden flash of panic. Does the President expect me to make a presentation on my research now? Why didn’t the Director tell me about this?

Outside the dormitory, the two men walk east along the crowded sidewalks framing a main road leading into the heart of Area B. People come here to stroll because of the high ceiling and extra lighting. Travis wonders if he should take the President’s interest as a good sign. His theories are controversial and have not been accepted by what passes for the scientific establishment down here. Maybe they’re ready to hear him out and give him some real resources.

Earth is being colonized. Not just colonized, but terraformed. The Earth is, to put it plainly, infected. And humans, other life forms? Fertile soil.

The prevailing theory is humans did this to themselves. People tinkering with nanotechnology. Bioweapons designers creating a beast they could not control. The beast escaped its cage, replicated using resources in the natural environment, and covered the planet within days. Once the nano reached a critical mass, one out of five people fell down screaming within hours of each other. The Wildfire contagion descended from this original nano. End of theory.

The problem is they can’t find it. For that matter, they can’t find evidence of whether Wildfire is a molecular engine or virus or a bacterium. They keep testing and cutting open bodies looking for it, without result. The theory also does not explain the monsters.

Travis has been championing an alien colonization theory. Earth has been seeded with biological software that responds differently to various genetic markers. Spores, in other words. A bit of seemingly harmless organic matter clinging to a falling meteor that thrived and spread and entered the global food chain and, eventually, its resident species. Some people fell down screaming while others did not. Some life forms were transformed into monsters, others not.

This is not to say evil humanoids with big gray heads are flying around in spaceships, manipulating these tragic events. Travis suspects Wildfire is not intelligent in the way most people would define it. He believes it may simply be an adaptive, self-designing but otherwise mindless extraterrestrial life form. Not quite colonization, not an invasion as it would typically be defined, but instead a viral entity, one that infects planets. In people and animals, it disguises itself as a normal virus or bacteria and is only triggered by certain genetic markers.

What this means, of course, is that everyone is infected in one form or another.

It also means the only way to unmask the Wildfire Agent is to examine a huge number of cells. This would take many months even if Travis had the resources he wanted.

What he really needs is a pure sample of Wildfire. If they could get that, they would have a solid chance to win this fight.

An electric jeep whirs up to the curb, driven by a soldier dressed similarly to Fielding, and parks.

“Good afternoon, Captain,” the soldier says, addressing Fielding.

Fielding gestures to the backseat. “Hop in, Doc. Mustn’t keep POTUS waiting.”

♦

Wearing his old suit and riding in a car makes him feel normal again after weeks of living like an inmate in a dystopian prison. The breeze on his face raises his spirits.

The jeep halts in front of a wide, bright passage leading to a gleaming vault door guarded by more soldiers in black body armor. One of them, a tall, athletic woman wearing a black beret and a large handgun on her hip, approaches the vehicle.

“End of the line, Doc,” Fielding says.

“What’s this place?” Travis says, trying to control his sudden panic.

“This,” Fielding says with a grand gesture, “is the Executive Branch.”

“Dr. Price,” the woman says. “I am Lieutenant Lateesha Sanchez.”

She extends her gloved hand and helps him from the jeep.

“Good luck with that saving the world thing,” Fielding tells him.

Looking at Sanchez’s phony smile, Travis is a little sorry to see Fielding go. They may hate each other, but at least everything between them is out in the open.

Before he can say a word, the jeep lurches back onto the street.

“Come with me, please,” Sanchez says, motioning toward the massive door, which the soldiers are pulling open, their machine guns slung over their shoulders.

They enter a long white corridor, dim but regularly cleaned; the floor glistens from a recent waxing. The air is fresher here, with no random pockets of hot or cold air, no sudden blasts from a filthy ventilation duct. Portraits of past presidents, liberated from the White House, adorn the otherwise blank walls, like placeholders for ghosts.

“What’s behind these doors?” he asks, his voice loud in his ears. He pictures large control centers like the bridge of a starship or the set of the old TV show 24, with lots of people hunched over various stations.

“That’s not your concern, sir,” Sanchez says.

Travis glances at a sign reading, EAS STUDIO. The Emergency Alert System. The President can talk to the entire country from here by radio or TV. He can also override or turn off any local broadcasting he does not like.

President Walker’s emergency powers give him the power of a dictator.

“Everything is so clean here,” Travis says. “Even the air. Do you get to live here?”

“I am not authorized to discuss anything with you, sir,” Sanchez tells him.

More corridors, more doors, until Travis becomes convinced they are walking in circles. A door slams and a group of people in suits scuttle from one room to another. Black-armored soldiers scrutinize his ID at checkpoints and wave him through.

She finally stops at a door; the nameplate reads FRANKLIN ROOM.

“This is Lieutenant Sanchez,” she says into her headset. “Package Papa Three is delivered.” With a final smile, she adds, “This is your stop, Dr. Price.”

Travis taps on the door and opens it, peering inside at what appears to be some sort of waiting area filled with men in suits clutching briefcases.

“I was told to come here,” he says.

The men take in his stubbled face and wrinkled suit with contempt. Two large men stand in front of a second set of doors on the other side of the room, giving him a quick once-over. Travis surmises these are Secret Service agents, the last of the old Praetorians.

These doors open and an older, balding man peers at him over the rims of his glasses. Travis recognizes him as Terry Goodall, the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. His boss.

“Ah, Travis,” Goodall says. “Come on in. We’re ready for you.”

Travis walks across the waiting room, trying to ignore the baleful stares of the other men. “What’s all this about, Terry?”

Goodall reaches and grips his arm. “You are about to meet the President of the United States, who at this moment is under a lot of pressure and has more power than Caligula,” he hisses close to Travis’s ear. “We all understand you do not have prepared remarks. Just play off the slides provided and answer the questions as best you can. It’s all in your field of expertise. Okay?”

“I guess it will have to be,” Travis mutters.

Goodall eyes him. “Don’t screw this up, Travis.”

“Of course not, sir.”

“You look like shit. The least you could have done was gotten yourself cleaned up.”

Travis shakes his head. “No time.”

Goodall grunts and ushers him into a bright room. At first all Travis can do is stand at the threshold, half blinded by the sudden change in light, blinking tears.

“Dr. Price, is it?”

Travis blinks again and sees twenty stern-faced people seated around a conference table, observing him with open distaste. Some wear military dress uniforms with chests crusted with medals, what men like Fielding would call a fruit salad.

The man sitting at the center is President Walker. He is older, grayer, more tired than Travis remembers. But still formidable.

“Yes,” Travis says with a weak voice, then clears his throat. “Yes, Mr. President.”

“You realize everything you see and hear in this room is classified.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“Based on your area of expertise, you already enjoy a number of special clearances. Today, you’re going to be privy to information classified as Top Secret. Understood?”

“Absolutely, Mr. President.”

“Good. You’ve kept us waiting long enough. You may begin.”

Travis approaches the screen at the front of the room, his stomach doing flips. This is it, he realizes. He is meeting the President of the United States. The world is ending, and his nation needs him. Nobody listened to his theory, but now he gets this one chance to make his case. The President will be grudgingly persuaded before committing to decisive action.

Dr. Travis Price saves the world.

On the screen, he sees a map of downtown Miami overlaid with a bull’s eye pattern rendered in shades of red.

What does this have to do with the monsters?

“I don’t understand,” Travis says, staring at it.

The President grunts with irritation, folding his large hands.

Goodall places his elbows on the table and says, “Dr. Price, your area of expertise is the weaponization of nuclear fission, is this correct?”

“Nuclear nonproliferation,” Travis mutters.

The Director reads highlights from his resume, focusing on his support of exercises by the Office of Nuclear Counterterrorism and the Nuclear Emergency Support Team, as well as development for the Radiological Assistance and Consequence Management at the Los Alamos Lab.

“You are one of the nation’s leading experts on the effects of nuclear device combustion on populations in urban centers,” Goodall says.

“That is accurate.”

“Good. Then explain the graphic on the screen, if you please.”

The realization makes him gasp. Even with the world coming to a violent end, the terrorists could not give up their grudge against the Great Satan.

They finally did it. They blew up an American city.

“Who did it?” he says, his face reddening. “What kind of madman would do this?”

Even in collapse, America could, and would, retaliate. He heard America still maintains twenty-four-hour flights of strategic bombers able to drop nuclear warheads virtually anywhere in the world.

Goodall smiles. “This is purely a hypothetical, Dr. Price.”

“Hypothetical, sir?”

“Options,” the President grunts. “All options are on the table.”

“I see,” Travis says, feeling sick.

Terrorists did not bomb Miami. The President wants to bomb Miami. Miami, and perhaps other cities as well.

Pure madness. Things must be worse on the surface than he thought. The cities are filled with Infected and have become breeding grounds for the monsters.

Drop the bomb, and they all go away.

But so do the cities themselves, and millions of survivors still living in them.

During the Cold War, a U.S. Minuteman missile crewman once asked the chain of command how he could verify whether a launch order was coming from a sane President. The generals removed him from his post.

If I voice any dissent, I wonder what they’ll do to me?

“This graph shows the effects of detonation of a one hundred fifty kiloton device at ground level in North Miami,” Travis murmurs. “That’s the average size of a single warhead in the U.S. nuclear arsenal.”

“Speak up, Dr. Price,” Goodall says.

“It’s about ten to fifteen times the size of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Everything in the center ring would be exposed to explosive force equaling fifteen pounds of pressure per square inch of overpressure. Everything would be destroyed. People, buildings, everything.”

The bomb explodes in an intensely hot fireball, creating a giant crater hundreds of feet deep and sucking tons of earth into a massive mushroom cloud. Within the blast, buildings and people, normal and Infected alike, vaporize in a flash, becoming part of the cloud. Structures and bodies fly apart in the earthquake and sudden change in pressure. Debris rockets through the air with the force of bullets. Shattered windows turn into flying knives of glass. Miles away, thousands of fires burn, merging into raging firestorms. Flesh melts in the fierce heat; internal organs cook; brains boil. The smog blots out the sun. Dirt and ash rain down as radioactive particulates for miles in every direction, even farther on the winds.

“At a little over a mile from the blast, buildings would suffer heavy damage, and intense heat from the blast would start numerous fires. At a little over two and a half miles, covering El Portal in the south, Pinewood, Golden Glades, most houses—would be—crushed flat—”

His stomach leaps into his throat. He stumbles toward a metal garbage can and vomits. Behind him, he hears a woman mutter, Christ.

“Excuse me, I’m not well,” Travis says, wiping his mouth.

“You may continue when you’re able,” says the President, and turns to ask another man at the table a question about his afternoon schedule.

Travis does not hear the answer. His stomach lurches again, producing a trickle of bile. He spits several times before standing and facing the room with watery eyes, his face burning with embarrassment.

“I apologize, Mr. President. I may have a touch of flu.”

“Tell us about the fallout,” the President says.

“Fallout,” Travis says mechanically, as if he has never heard the word before. “Yes. For a surface burst, outside of ground zero, the area impacted by the blast and the initial nuclear radiation will be less severe than, say, an air burst of similar yield. Local fallout can be dangerous over a large downwind area, however—”

A single gunshot cracks, startling them. The President’s advisers gasp, some already half standing. The President glares at the door.

People are shouting outside in the waiting room.

“John,” the President says to one of his people. “Go take a look.”

“I don’t think we should open the door, Mr. President. You would be exposed.”

“It’s all right, John. I think our people have things under control now.”

The door opens from the outside, giving Travis a clear view. The waiting room is filled with men and women in black body armor. One of the Secret Service agents kneels with his hands on his head, while the other lies grimacing on the floor with a soldier hunched over him, applying a tourniquet to his leg. The other men in suits cower in their chairs.

The President watches them, his face turning from red to purple.

“WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON HERE?”

The soldiers glance at him. The wounded agent cries out in pain. Two men in desert combat uniforms enter the conference room, pistols holstered on their hips.

“Mr. President,” the first man says, taking off his cap.

“General,” the President says. “Glad you’re here. What’s the meaning of all this?”

General Donald McGregor, the chairman of the joint chiefs, is a wiry stringbean of a man compared to the President, but just as intimidating. Travis once met him during nuclear terrorism exercises. He is a ruthless son of a bitch, much like Fielding, and with incredible power at his command.

The General pauses in the doorway, taking in the red rings radiating from downtown Miami on the screen. Travis steps away from it, trying to disappear. McGregor frowns. His eyes flicker to meet the President’s.

“That, sir,” he says, pointing at the screen, “is not going to happen.”

The man behind the General whistles. Soldiers in black body armor file into the room, carrying automatic weapons.

Ray

Unsure of whether he is struggling toward air or plunging deeper into abyss, the man swims against warm tidal currents. Light sparkles in the thick, murky depths. He lets go and drifts weightless toward consciousness.

Ray awakes gasping for air, sucking it greedily into his lungs.

The light, so bright it is blinding.

He does not know anything; it is like being born.

Mysterious dark shapes coalesce into normal things. A television set. A bookshelf packed with books, knickknacks and a bowling trophy. A table lamp. A large picture window covered in smeared handprints, making the world outside appear shrouded in gray fog.

He closes his eyes and tries to return to those warm currents, but his curiosity betrays him, forcing him up into a sitting position. Throbbing pain at the base of his skull makes him groan. He looks at his dirty hands and remembers how he got here.

I’m supposed to be dead. How long have I been on this couch?

The light outside—Christ, it’s the sun.

He survived the night. The Infected are gone. He touches the monster in his side, now just a raw, achy swelling covered in flaky skin. His touch ignites a horrible itch inside the growth, which scratching just makes worse.

Fine. Itch all you want, you little bastard. I beat you. I won. I’m alive.

His body rejected the growth, or perhaps the growth rejected him. Too much smoking or drinking, who knows. He never heard of someone becoming infected by a hopper and surviving it. Then again, after Infection, Ray’s world got a whole lot smaller. Maybe people survive it all the time in Colorado. Maybe California has no epidemic at all. He wouldn’t know.

The floor is covered with empty bottles and jars of food and multiple sets of muddy footprints. People brought him food and water while he slept. His mouth tastes like raw sewage and his teeth feel mossy. His pants are crusted with his own waste. The ammonia smell of his piss makes his eyes water. Something is not right here. How long have I been out?

Feeling frail and shaky, he peels off his clothes, hardened to the consistency of cardboard, and retches at the sight of his waste caked in his pants and clinging to his ass and thighs. It feels good to be naked, however; the house is hot and his body is covered in a slick sheen of sweat.

After gaining his feet, he plods into the kitchen, half expecting to see his ghostly mother doing dishes in the sink, and pulls a squat, ugly looking steak knife from a drawer. Safety first. The window is still open and the outside air smells fresh and clean. He finds a bathroom and spends several minutes examining himself in the mirror with blunt surprise. A gaunt lunatic stares back at him. His acne-scarred cheeks are sunken. His handlebar mustache is now part of a beard. His shaggy hair has grown even longer, greasy and lank, a full-on Jesus mane.

Has he been here for days, weeks? Who was feeding him this whole time?

I’m alive, says the leering lunatic in the mirror.

Dude, you are seriously fucked up.

His caregivers left him two buckets of water. He’s not sure if these are any good for drinking but they look all right for washing. Squatting in the tub, Ray soaks a toilet scrubber with tepid water and liquid soap and scrubs his body until the water turns black and he feels somewhat clean. He scrapes his mossy teeth with his fingernails, gargles and spits the mess into the sink.

Upstairs, he finds a T-shirt and jeans that fit, and puts them on. His STEELERS hat is riddled with charred holes and stinks like old grease, but he puts it on anyway. He checks out the neighborhood through a window. A car is parked at an angle across both lanes of the street below, all of its doors open. The asphalt glistens; it rained recently. The lawns and bushes on the other side of the road look overgrown. Beyond, the bridge invites him back to its scenes of horror. The eastern horizon is no longer blackened by the fires of Pittsburgh, but still shimmers with a polluted brown haze. A flicker of movement down in the street grabs his attention.

A large woman dressed in a filthy halter top and sweatpants limps past the car with her hands clenched into fists against her breasts, one of which sags out of her shirt, scratched and bloodstained. Ray watches her, wondering who she was before the bug turned her into a violent maniac. He feels like he understands Anne a little better now; this woman is no longer human, but a malicious, mindless organism wearing the face of a human, like a mask.

The woman pauses, doing the odd jittery neck roll favored by the Infected. Her head, jerking, turns to the window to look right at him, and tilts to the side, like a dog’s.

He leaps aside, his heart hammering in his chest. He expects to hear feet slapping against the asphalt, the rasping bark, the door crashing open, the pounding on the stairs. His eyes take in details of the bedroom, searching for a hiding spot or a weapon.

Nothing happens. Fighting to control his breathing, Ray glances back at the road. The woman is gone. He snorts.

Maybe I look so bad she thought I was one of them.

He trudges downstairs and puts his boots on, still heavy with dried blood, and walks onto the porch. The abandoned houses stand in silence, bugs buzzing in their overgrown lawns. A deer browses in a garden until bolting across a driveway into someone’s backyard. A light breeze dries the sweat on Ray’s face. He closes his eyes and savors being alive.

There is just this. Nothing else. And that makes this good.

He finds his rifle on the side of the house, wet and spotted with rust, and inspects it. He considers finding some oil and a toothbrush and trying to clean the weapon, but decides to leave it in the grass. Cleaning it would take a long time, and besides, it only has a few bullets. With just a few hours of daylight remaining, Ray feels an overwhelming urge to get moving. He was lucky here, but he has the strong feeling his luck has run out. The open road beckons. His steak knife will have to do until he can find better. The road will provide.

Ray checks out the few cars and trucks abandoned on the streets and writes them off as well. He can fix just about anything with wheels, but none of the vehicles he inspects have keys in their ignitions, and, despite his checkered past, he has no idea how to hotwire a car. The idea exhausts him; the only thing that inspires any energy is getting the hell out of this ghost town as soon as possible.

Guess you’re walking, bro. This is going to take a while. You can hit some houses along the way for some supplies. But it’s time to get moving.

Sticking to backyards, he emerges from town to the north and decides to circle through the woods along Route 22, heading west. Back to Camp Defiance.

He pauses as a foghorn booms close, a vibrating sound he can feel deep in his chest. The sound ignites a flock of birds from a tree, black shapes darting through the air. A distant foghorn answers, then another and another, for miles around it seems.

Ray closes his eyes and listens as if they are communicating something he might understand. For the next few minutes, the air becomes filled with the melodic song of the monsters, a symphony of sounds like tubas and didgeridoos, plaintive and hopeful. Ray smiles, tingling from the vibrations. Their song speaks to him.

We are not alone, it appears to be saying. We are afraid and we may die, but we are not alone.

♦

Shucking his Army surplus backpack heavy with cans and bottles, Ray tramps through a garden eating raw peas and any tomatoes spared by the insects. Unable to eat more, he stuffs his cheek full of Copenhagen dip and lets out a satisfied sigh. He has twenty miles to walk, which will take him two, maybe three days in his condition and carrying the weight of the pack on his shoulders. Climbing over a barbed wire fence, he angles west and starts marching through the trees, knowing Route 22 is about a hundred yards on his left. At the base of an old sawtooth oak, he picks up a good walking stick, a long wizardly staff that helps him find a steady hiking rhythm.

As the sun falls toward the horizon, his eyes roam the landscape, searching for shelter. Wind rustles through the branches and the atmosphere feels moist against his skin. The sun drops behind western rain clouds, dimming air already darkened by the forest canopy, and Ray quickens his pace as a few random drops splat on the rim of his STEELERS hat. He emerges from the trees onto a grassy field covered with a riot of dandelions. At the other end of the field, a farmhouse stands quiet, its windows boarded up, three rotting bodies drawing flies on the porch steps. A tire swing sways from the stoutest branch of a massive oak tree.

He pauses here, listening to the buzz of insects in the tall grass. The world is so lush and beautiful it is sometimes hard to believe it is coming to an end. Then he remembers the world is not ending, just its dominant species.

The sky continues to blacken. Moist wind strikes Ray in the face, carrying a few drops of rain, and he opens his arms to it. The air feels electric. The clouds rumble with distant thunder, a melancholy sound. He takes a deep breath and decides to try the barn to ride out both the night and the rain. The house appears occupied and dangerous. Get too close to that place, he might get a lungful of buckshot, looking the way he does right now. He studies his hands—workman’s hands, hairy and powerful—and realizes his survival and recovery from Infection is not a get-out-of-jail-free card. He might have to fight again, and kill again, if he wants to make it home alive. Ray has a lot for which he wants to live. Nothing ambitious, just a deep, abiding appreciation for breathing in and out. When he thinks about his fever over the past few days—weeks?—it terrifies him because he remembers little of it. He dreamed; many of the dreams were horrible. But mostly, just darkness. Trying to remember those long days of nothing is like trying to remember the time before he was born.

Rain pelts the roof as he enters the barn. Rats flee squealing from his advance, melting into the dark spaces. The building has a rich smell of farm animals and hay and old dung, but the smell is stale, a memory; the animals are long gone, the hay is rotting. Ray sniffs the air again just to be sure, but detects no sour milk stench, the calling card of the Infected. Something crunches and scatters under his boots, and he looks down, only to wish he hadn’t; the floor is strewn with little piles of bones and children’s clothes. Bloodstains have turned the dirt floor the color of rust. The barn was a nest, then; a pack of the Infected killed here, ate here, slept here, but they moved on long ago. Ray waves away a small cloud of buzzing flies and thinks about burying the bones, but he is tired and it is getting late.

“Sorry,” he grumbles, spitting a stream of tobacco juice into the dust. Ray feels like an empty husk. Something in him died when the bug took him. Or maybe he was reborn, and is still finding out who he is. Either way, he has no fight in him anymore.

He climbs a ladder leading to the hayloft, pulls it up after him, and spreads out his old rolled-up blanket on a bed of moldy hay. He pulls off his boots and then his socks and sighs with relief despite the stink, wiggling his toes. Fishing in his pocket, he finds a couple of Band-Aids and applies them over the blisters on his heels. Minutes later, he falls into a deep, blissful sleep to the soothing sound of rain pattering on the roof. Mosquitoes feast on his blood during the night.