The Killing Floor

The next morning, Ray pisses hard into the hay, smokes a stale cigarette, and cuts open a can of cold SpaghettiO’s pasta, which he eats with a plastic spoon. The air is warm and humid; his body is already slick with sweat. His legs are sore and a part of him wants to sleep the day away again. He stares into space scratching at his bug bites until boredom drives him back down the ladder and into the farmer’s yard. Beyond, winter wheat stands hunched and wet under a dim, heavy mist that shrouds the distant fields and woodlands.

He decides he likes the mist. The mist could be his friend. As long as it lasts, he can hide in it. The house still stands quiet, but Ray is certain he is being watched. He feels a sudden urge to wave, or better yet flip them the bird, but doesn’t have the energy for it.

Shouldering his pack and gripping his walking staff, he disappears into the treeline.

♦

Minutes later, the mist surrounds him like a living thing. It feels cool and wet in his lungs. He cannot see more than a few feet in front of him but has the skin-crawling sensation he is still being watched. He is in danger here. Coming into the mist was a mistake, but it is too late to go back. He already no longer has a sense of where he started.

He closes his eyes and pictures sitting at a big desk in the station’s holding pen, where Unit 12, his old police unit at Camp Defiance, made its home. He and Tyler and his kid Jonesy and all the other guys in the unit, Cook and Salazar and the rest, laugh at some joke as they pass around a can of warm beer they scrounged up.

Ray just wants to go home. He does not have the stamina to live under constant threat like Anne and Todd. He needs people. He wants to be in a nice, safe place among friends.

Over time, his inability to see amplifies his hearing. Things tramp through the forest all around him. His own footfalls sound loud to his ears, as if he is walking on garbage bags filled with crumpled paper. But standing still is worse than making noise. Standing still is worst of all.

He remembers a dream he had while fighting his infection. A dream of something that happened to him when he was a kid. The dream so real, the actual memory so long ago, he wonders if it actually happened, or if he just dreamed it. In the dream, he shoved Shawn McCrea’s face into a tree while playing a trust game. That’s how he feels now, being led through the forest blinded by mist. At any moment, he is going to get sucker punched.

His father’s voice: Hey Ray, come here a minute.

Ray breaks into a run, hands splayed to ward off low-hanging branches. In his mind’s eye, his father is about to hit him. The fog is so blank it is easy to write one’s memories and worst fears onto it. He wants to outrun the old man, but, as in a dream, he cannot move. In his memory, he loves his father too much to leave, so he obeys; he walks meekly to his dad. And gets slapped. It feels good to get it over with. The worst part is the waiting. The cat and mouse game.

Leona, stay out of this or you’re next. Kid’s got to learn. He’s got to toughen up.

The sad thing is, Ray believed him. He believed his father was trying to help him when he got drunk and slapped him around for not being strong enough.

A black shape forms in the mist, coalescing into a gaunt, looming monster. Ray gasps and falls to his knees, his heart galloping in his chest.

This is it. I’m going to die.

It almost feels good to get it over with. As always, the worst part is the waiting.

It registers in his panicked brain that the monster is a tree. Ray curls up at its base, shaking with terror. It is like being back in the storage locker, trapped with his own memories and thoughts. It was his past that drove him back out into the light of day.

Ghostly voices call in the mist. The sound rakes across his already tattered nerves. A motor engine revs before cutting out. Then silence.

He feels light on his face and blinks into the fleeting glare of sunlight winking through the forest canopy above. The fog is dissipating, retreating into shreds and wisps.

The voices shout again, clearer this time.

Ray peers out from behind the tree. A Winnebago sits parked on the shoulder of the highway, a battered state police cruiser next to it. A man with a hunting bow stands guard near two men hunched over the RV’s engine, while a woman sits behind the wheel of the police car. They look as terrified as he feels.

“Hurry up, the fog’s lifting,” the man with the bow says. He wears a tank top and fluorescent blue jogging shorts, exposing hairy, thickly muscled arms and legs.

Shaking, Ray stands, hugging the tree, and considers how to approach them. Should he call out? The alternative is to walk out there nice and calm, hands in the air. Either way, he might get one of those arrows in his ribs. They might think he’s infected. They might not be friendly to strangers.

No choice, then. He will have to call out and see if they’ll welcome him. He is starving for human company, driven by a need to be in the middle of the herd. He made it this far, but he knows any luck he’s had is running out.

Something thrashes in the foliage. Ray drops his pack and draws the steak knife. A pair of Infected, a man and a teenage girl, burst from the bushes snorting, leaves and twigs falling from their hair. Ray crouches, willing himself not to be seen, his body electrified by a shock of adrenaline. The Infected run past his tree, heads wagging, their faces and arms a ghastly patchwork of livid red scratches. The girl snarls, revealing braces black with decaying meat.

An arrow thuds into the man, who falls thrashing in the tall grass just outside the treeline, shrieking like an animal. The bowman notches another arrow and shoots the girl through the hip. She falls, gets up, then falls again, writhing and bleeding on the grass.

More Infected emerge from the woods, drawn to the sound of the cough of the Winnebago’s engine as it tries to start. The woman in the police cruiser screams when she sees them, covering her ears. The man with the bow crosses himself and gets back to work.

Another arrow whistles though the air, flying through a young woman’s throat before piercing a man behind her in the face. The man howls and runs in circles, batting at the arrow flopping around his head; the woman continues to run, coughing blood with each stride, until pitching forward into the grass.

“Right on,” Ray hisses. He feels a strange kinship with the archer wearing the ridiculous shorts. He wants to get into the fight and help. He pictures leaping from behind the tree, joining the pack of Infected running past and cutting their throats one by one with his carving knife.

Welcome, stranger, they’ll say. He and the archer will clasp hands warmly, recognizing in the other a warrior of the apocalypse. Because he helped them, they will trust him. Then they’ll get the Winnebago running and drive it to Cashtown in comfort. It’s a good plan.

The fantasy over, he does not move. He clings to the tree, feeling rooted to the spot, watching the Infected close in on the group. It’s not my fight, he decides. Not my problem. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I’m too tired. All I have is a knife some family used for carving rib roasts.

But the truth, again, is there is no fight left in him.

More Infected run across the field behind the survivors. The man with the bow sees them and fires another arrow, which misses. He shakes his head and says something to the men working on the Winnebago, who ignore him. The archer roars at them to move. The man hunched over the engine raises his head, blinking at the Infected rushing at him, and bolts for the police cruiser with the other man at his heels. The group slams the doors just as a man punches the windshield, cobwebbing it. A woman climbs onto the rear of the car, scratching at the back window with her nails as the vehicle growls its way to life.

Go, Ray wants to scream. You’re surrounded. Get out of there.

The car lurches and bangs into the man, knocking him down with a sickening crunch. The woman tumbles off the back and the car roars down the road, trailing a massive cloud of exhaust and a score of screaming Infected.

Ray waits several minutes, picks up his pack and approaches the Winnebago. He spots the problem with the engine, but lacks the tools to fix it. Inside, he finds food and water, a bucket for a sponge bath, shaving kit, and personal knickknacks. The vehicle smells like people, a comforting smell.

He decides to stay the night here. Eat, sleep, shit and maybe try to get cleaned up a little so the Camp Defiance guards don’t shoot him on sight thinking he’s one of the crazies. Ray tries the stove, and permits a brief smile. He is going to eat hot food tonight, and bathe and shave with hot water. By tomorrow, with hope, he will feel human again.

He spots a photo album and opens it. Weddings. Family vacations. Births. He smiles at these highlights of a normal life, but after a while the images become difficult to look at. A proud fisherman with a prize catch. Children building a sandcastle at some beach. An attractive woman smiling flirtatiously at the camera. The photos portray memories too painful to remember, even for a stranger. And yet whoever owned these pictures is going to regret leaving them behind.

The past haunts everyone, even the good stuff. Especially the good stuff.

♦

Ray gets an early start the next morning, setting a brisk pace with his walking stick. He stays on the highway, hoping to find other survivors, but the road is deserted.

He passes an abandoned van resting on flat tires, and peers in through a gaping hole in the windshield. Animals rustle and hiss in a pile of torn luggage and seat stuffing in the back, probably a family of racoons. The interior smells like dung. It doesn’t take long for things to fall apart, Ray realizes. By the time we’re all dead, most of what we’ve built will crumble into dust.

He returns to the road, scanning the trees on both sides for ambush, but he’s not used to living so close to fight or flight, and zones out, thinking about everything and nothing. For some reason, his thoughts turn to Lola Rivera. He dreamed about her while he fought Infection, he remembers. He dreamed his entire life, it seems. It would be nice to believe some kindly force made this happen to teach him something about his life so he would make the most of this second chance, but the memories had a forced quality about them, as if they were being taken from him. Ray woke up feeling exhausted, docile, violated. All of the fight was sucked out of him. I don’t want anything, he understands, and experiences the shock of this, being a man of constant need and habit, a creature of deep drives and dark urges.

Now all he wants to do is continue living. Nothing else but live. Breathe in, breathe out.

Whatever the source of the dreams, without his rage, he can only look back on his life with remorse. He regrets what he did to Lola, how he treated her. After he sucker punched Bob at the bar and made bail, he went to the hospital and told Lola he did it because he still loved her. Every day, he went, and said he’d do it all over again, just to have her back. Eventually, something in her snapped and she gave herself to him. That night, while lying beneath him on his bed, she opened her eyes and, seeing only spite written on his face, realized he did not love her. She wept until he threw her out in a fit of anger. Rage came so easily to him, the urge to lash out instead of do the right thing. It was his automatic defense against both love and shame.

You do have a second chance here, bro. Maybe when you get back to camp, you can try to make things right with a few people, if they’re still alive.

He finds the idea surprisingly appealing.

As the sun dips low in the sky, he finds the exit for Cashtown and walks off the highway, pausing to flinch at the bang of a high-powered rifle. Ray grimaces with relief. He is not far from Camp Defiance now. The rifle shot was one of the snipers in the watchtowers doing his monotonous, grisly duty.

As he gets closer to the camp, the air fills with white noise, the sound of thousands of people and vehicles punctuated by the distant pop of gunfire. The breeze delivers the faint but familiar odors of wood smoke and human waste. He breathes deep, enjoying a sudden rush of memories. Tyler in his ridiculous red suspenders, chuckling over a book, his reading glasses perched on the end of his nose. Doug Foley loading shells into his shotgun between nips of Jägermeister, getting ready for patrol. Jonesy licking his hands and slicking back his hair in front of the mirror, announcing he has a hot date. Boy, are they going to be surprised to see me, Ray thinks, feeling good for the first time since he woke up.

Topping the next hill, the camp spills across the horizon, a mass of densely packed buildings and tents and vehicles all shrouded in a haze from thousands of cook fires. Mountainous walls of heaped sandbags, tractor trailers and barbed wire, buttressed by watchtowers, surround the bulging mess like an old belt, keeping it from vomiting onto the neighboring smoking fields, keeping Infection out one day at a time. Ray gazes at it for several minutes, wiping away a tear. Never did this sprawling dung heap look so good to him, not even when he crawled out of the storage locker, fleeing his fears lived over days in darkness.

He spots a series of windmills churning over the southern side, near the big circus tent, the start of a power grid. When he left to blow up the Veterans Memorial Bridge at Steubenville, the windmills were just a plan championed by the do-gooders. The people must be starting to accept they’re going to be here for a while. Ray wonders again how long he has been gone, decides he doesn’t care. The camp is still here; that’s all that matters.

He gasps, unable to breathe, wondering how fast he can run back into the trees. A man stands rock still fifty yards down the road, dressed in a ridiculous Santa costume, one arm frozen in a wave. It takes him several moments to realize it’s a store mannequin, one of many dotting the no man’s land surrounding the camp as bait for the snipers. The Infected make a beeline for the color red. Ho, ho, ho, welcome to FEMAville. BANG. Splat.

In the distance, he sees a figure running toward the wall. A woman doing the hundred yard dash, hoping to get in and spread her disease. The effort strikes him as both heroic and suicidal. The echoing roar of a single rifle shot rolls across the fields. The figure spins and falls. Ray watches as the woman continues to drag her broken body along the ground, still fighting for her cause even while she bleeds into the mud. Behind the wall, life in the camp goes on as if nothing happened.

The cracked road plunges down the hill and leads straight to the gates. All he has to do is walk down there and he’s home. But he is unsure how to get there without getting shot. It’s too dangerous to move now.

Best to wait until dark, he decides. The hour just before dawn.

♦

Ray wakes during the night to the sound of machine gun fire. It stops abruptly, leaving him wondering if he dreamed it. He wipes drool from his mouth and sits up, slapping a mosquito on his cheek. A flare traces a burning arc over the distant fields, washing the ground in a bright, eerie glow. Shadows gradually infect the light, lengthening as the flare continues its long descent. Ray sees figures moving in a mad rush. The machine gun starts up again, sounding tinny and ghostly across the fields, like someone clapping chalkboard erasers together. Tracers burst in the dark. The figures now lie on the ground, melting into the darkness as the flare falls to the earth.

For several minutes, Ray sits in the dark waiting, but nothing happens. It strikes him his plan to wait until the hour before sunrise would work better if he actually knew what time it was. He gazes at the night sky but there is no Moon, no stars. Massive clouds still blanket the atmosphere, the tail end of the storm passing over this part of the world on its way to the Atlantic. The lights of the camp are his only beacon.

Something tramps through the woods behind him. Whatever it is, it’s tall enough to rustle through the branches of the trees, snapping twigs that rain onto the forest floor. Ray hears a deep, nauseating gurgling, like what he would imagine a motorcycle idling underwater to sound like. The gurgling ends in a throaty chuckle. Ray knows the sound; it is one of the tottering monsters that ate the Reverend on the bridge. The rustling becomes violent thrashing. The thing smacks its wet lips. Leaves flutter to the ground around Ray, tickling his face.

Time to move. Now.

Ray lopes from the woods at a brisk pace, trying to stay as low to the ground as he can, grunting under the weight of the backpack. He pauses to shrug it onto the ground behind him and keeps moving, breathing hard.

The machine gun fires again. He throws his body into the mud face first, but the tracers flicker into the woods to his right. He grunts, gets back onto his feet and keeps going, running blindly now, the camp lights swimming in his gaze. He hears feet splashing to his left and hurls himself down again as a flare bursts high overhead, turning night into day. Face pressed into the mud, he hears the crash of rifle fire and bodies falling. A body thrashes nearby in the muddy water. The machine gun joins in, sending bullets plopping into the earth around him.

Hail Mary, full of grace, hail Mary, full of grace, hail Mary, Jesus and God—

The firing stops. The gates are just fifty or so yards ahead.

Screw this.

“Don’t shoot! I ain’t Infected! Don’t shoot me!”

No answer. That’s not good.

On the other hand, nobody’s shooting at me either.

Ray gets onto his feet, shaking violently, and raises his hands. Standing in the flare’s light, he feels like he is on stage, in full view of an audience he cannot see.

“I’m coming in now,” he announces, marching forward. “Open the gates for me.”

“We can’t,” someone shouts from the wall, using a megaphone.

Ray staggers to a halt. “What do you mean?”

“The gates stay closed until sunup. That’s the law. It won’t be long. Just hang tight.”

“Come on! I’m Ray Young! I’m a cop. I almost died to save this goddamn place.” He is babbling like a madman, but cannot help himself. “I blew up that goddam bridge in Steubenville—”

Muzzle flashes pop along the wall like paparazzi. Ray flinches, but realizes they are not shooting at him.

“Hurry up,” the voice shouts through the megaphone. “Come on.”

He turns and sees a small group of Infected racing into the dying light of the flare, their eyes black and their yellow faces twisted in hate. Two of them disintegrate into smoking body parts, flopping to the ground.

Another flare bursts high overhead, revealing a hundred more running behind them.

“What the f—”

His words turn into an incoherent screaming flood of obscenities as he throws his exhausted body into a full sprint toward the wall, reaching it in less than a minute and falling to the ground gasping for air. One of the gates grinds opens inch by inch as gunfire crashes overhead.

The horde pauses twenty yards from him in a wide semicircle, ignoring the guns cutting them down.

“Move it!” a man says, standing next to him.

Ray rolls aside as several fighters rush through the partially opened gate in single file, holding what appear to be fire hoses attached to tanks on their backs.

The Infected reach out to him with an odd pleading gesture as blinding jets of fire pour across their ranks, turning them into a massive bonfire of dancing, shrieking figures. The heat blasts Ray’s face, making him wince.

One of the men kneels next to him and takes his hand.

“It’s a goddamn miracle,” the soldier says. “Are you injured?”

“No,” Ray croaks, unable to look away from the Infected flailing in the wall of fire like a vision of hell. “I don’t think so.”

“Were you bitten?” The man has to shout to compete with the screaming.

“No,” Ray says. “I ain’t bit.”

The man grins and squeezes Ray’s hand. “Welcome home, Ray.”

“Let’s go,” another voice roars.

“I hope he’s worth it,” another voice says. “The Captain is going to have our heads for this.”

“Don’t matter,” the first man answers. “Look, it’s already sunup.”

“He never would have authorized us going out there with that many Infected outside.”

“Thank you,” Ray tells them. “Oh Jesus, thank you.”

“You’re home now, Ray. You’re safe—”

Several men lift him roughly and carry him through the gap and into the safety of Camp Defiance.

♦

They set him down on a plastic tarp as the gate grinds shut. Ray gapes at the bearded faces and thanks them repeatedly, babbling. The men crowd around, pressing in for a look, most of them soldiers, some disposal workers in yellow hazmat suits, some salvage operators from outside the camp. They tell him he’s going to be okay and ask him questions about where he’s been, how he survived. They don’t know whether they are looking at a living legend or a ghost. A plastic bottle is shoved into his hand and he gulps the warm water. Someone yells to break it up, let the guy have some air, and the crowd loosens, giving Ray a view of the sky, already paling with the sunrise and dotted with a flock of birds in flight.

The man who yelled—a stocky, clean-shaven soldier with friendly blue eyes set far apart on his large head—kneels next to him and introduces himself as Sergeant John Riley, U.S. Army. Ray stares at him, finding it hard to understand what is being said to him.

“I’m Ray Young,” he says.

“You’re a lucky bastard, is what you are,” Sergeant Riley grins. “So what do you need, Ray? We don’t have much here in the compound, but we got hot coffee, water, food, a medic—”

“Unit 12 station.”

“Settle down,” the sergeant yells at the crowd, quieting them. “What’s that, Ray?”

“I want to go to Unit 12 station,” Ray repeats. “That’s my police unit.”

The man nods, considering the request. Behind him, the other men frown with disappointment. They obviously hoped they could do more for him.

“And a smoke,” Ray adds.

One of the men leans in to offer a cigarette jutting from an open pack. Ray takes it with two shaking hands and accepts a light.

“I’ll drive you wherever you want to go,” Sergeant Riley tells him.

“He’d better report to Captain Mattis,” another soldier says.

“He can do that later,” Riley growls. “Let Mattis sleep. This man’s just been to hell and back. He wants to be with his people. They’ll take care of him.”

The sergeant extends his gloved hand and pulls Ray onto his feet.

When Sergeant Wilson told him and the others about the lunatic plan to blow the Veterans Memorial Bridge at Steubenville, he thought they would drive out there and probably die and nobody here would care. Life would go on as if they were just another band of Infected dying outside the wall. Road kill of the apocalypse.

He had never been so wrong. Sergeant Riley and his men had risked everything to save him. If Ray was anyone else, they would have left him out there to die.

His luck is still holding, just as it was the moment the horde was upon him, when they hesitated instead of tearing him to shreds.

Why didn’t they attack? Maybe they were just trying to scare me to death. He snorts. They came damn close to succeeding.

Minutes later, Ray is bouncing along through the camp in Sergeant Riley’s Humvee. Sagging in his seat, he looks out the window at the bustle of the early risers starting their day. They pass what used to be Meade Park, now a dense sprawl of motor homes and campers looking like a traffic jam that went on for so long the drivers decided to live there. A man anchors a tarp into the ground, observed by his young son, while a woman hangs faded laundry from a clothesline strung between two RVs. Another man brews coffee using a contraption consisting of two soup cans, while a woman connects a car battery to a power drill. A pair of tired-looking, scantily clad blondes walk arm in arm—prostitutes going home after a long night’s shift by the porta-johns. A work crew pulls planks of lumber from the back of a pickup truck, laying them in the mud end to end to form pedestrian pathways. The world may be ending, but people still need to brush their teeth and cut their toenails and patch holes in the knees of their jeans. Life abides.

Ray looks at these people living hand to mouth at the edge of survival and thinks, I nearly died for this?

“It’s going to be another beautiful day,” Sergeant Riley says, whistling.

It’s the first time the soldier has spoken to him during the ride. Ray nods and Riley says nothing more. Ray is grateful not to have to talk. He glances at the man’s earnest profile and feels a little ashamed. The soldier just led a squad of flamethrowers outside the wall to torch dozens of Infected bearing down on him, with the fate of the entire camp in his hands, and has survived fights that were most likely far worse in the past few weeks. What Ray went through is probably nothing in comparison. The old Ray would have converted his shame into anger—gotten mouthy and ruined the man’s generosity—but again, it isn’t in him anymore.

He’s one of the centurions, Ray tells himself instead. Our one chance at ending the epidemic. If these guys can’t do it, God help us.

“This is you,” the sergeant tells him, turning the wheel and bringing the Humvee to a halt at the curb.

Ray sees the worn police station building and feels a strange sensation in his stomach. Butterflies. He never thought he’d miss this shithole as much as he had. It’s like a homecoming. He watches two burly cops exit the front doors, grim-faced and toting shotguns, dogs yelping around their legs. People on the sidewalk jump aside to let them pass.

“Thanks for the lift,” he says. “Thanks for, uh, everything.”

“Don’t mention it,” the man says. “Listen, I got a bottle of old scotch under my bunk I’ve been saving. If you ever want to share a drink and some stories, look me up. I’ll bet you’ve got one hell of a story to tell.”

“I’ll do that, Sergeant,” Ray tells him, and steps out of the vehicle.

As the Humvee pulls away honking, Ray stands on the sidewalk. The few people out at this hour stare at him as they pass. He guesses he looks pretty screwed up even by camp standards. A speaker mounted at the top of a telephone pole, surrounded by a dangling spaghetti of wires, whines with feedback just before a tinny voice wishes Camp Defiance a good morning and launches into a public service announcement.

Taking a deep breath, Ray enters the police station, ignoring the confused stares of the cops behind the big desk, and slips into the hallway leading to the holding pens.

Tyler Jones sits behind the desk in the empty Unit 12 barracks, an open space with jail cells once used to hold prisoners but now used as bunks. Just as he remembered him, reading glasses perched at the end of his nose and ridiculous red suspenders and all. Instead of reading a cheap paperback as his usual habit, Tyler is poring over some paperwork on his desk, his lips moving while he reads, cursing someone named Benny under his breath. A large poster mounted on the wall to his left shows a photo of a smiling little girl under the words: WHY WE FIGHT.

Ray grins. “Tyler Jones, you old shit.”

“Get out of my ass, Ray,” Tyler says, then blinks, his mouth hanging open. His eyes flicker and take in Ray leaning against the doorframe. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph.”

Ray shrugs, enjoying the sight of Tyler staring at him with his paling face. “I’m back.”

“I can’t believe it.”

Tyler half stands, still bug eyed, and Ray waves him back into his chair. “I’ll come to you.”

“Well, sit down then! You want some coffee?”

Ray takes a seat opposite Tyler with a painful grunt. Every muscle in his body aches, the result of burning massive amounts of adrenaline over the past few days. He feels like he could sleep for a year. “And a smoke, if you got one.”

Tyler shuffles to the pot, pours a metal cup full of hot, black coffee, and returns, slamming it on the desk in front of Ray. He snaps his fingers, as if forgetting something, then pulls two cigars from the breast pocket of his gray work shirt.

“Wow, look at you,” Tyler says as he lights Ray’s cigar.

They say together, “You look like shit.”

Tyler laughs. “This is the best day of my life, Ray. I mean it.”

“I can’t believe I’m here.”

“What the hell happened to you?”

“Never mind that right now, Tyler.” He reaches for the coffee and sips it, humming with pleasure. “How long was I gone? I kind of lost track of time out there.”

“You left two weeks and three days ago, champ.”

Ray shakes his head. He was asleep for roughly two weeks. I’m a regular Rip Van Winkle. “What’s been going on around here?”

“Progress, Ray,” the old man tells him, puffing on his cigar. “The government is digging wells and building windmills. We even got a radio station now, telling happy stories about loved ones reunited and teaching everyone how to make a vegetable garden. People here started getting a little more hopeful when the Army invaded Washington, DC. They’ve got a big piece of it cleared out already. A whole company of them showed up here, too.”

Ray thinks of Sergeant Riley, how he was regular Army. “The Army’s here? When did that happen?”

“As a matter of fact, they showed up the day you left.”

Just a couple of hours, and Ray would not have had to go to the bridge. The Army would have taken care of it. The Reverend Paul Melvin would still be alive, and so would Ethan Bell, the teacher, and thirty-three National Guardsmen. And Ray would not have been stung and infected.

He sobs, unable to tough it out. He sniffs and wipes tears from his eyes.

Tyler shakes his head. “Jesus, Ray, look at you. Your nerves are shot. Let me get something stronger.” He holds up a small key and uses it to access a file drawer in his desk, from which he produces a bottle of Wild Turkey and two glasses. “I know it’s a little early, but let’s have a snort.”

“Why not?” Ray forces a smile. “I just can’t believe I’m actually here.”

“Shit, boy, I can’t believe you’re here either!” Tyler laughs. “We had a funeral for you and everything. We even said nice things about you. Anyway, drink up while you still can. The good stuff won’t last forever. We’ll all be swilling dandelion wine and mead pretty soon.”

Ray grins at Tyler and remembers his dream. His friend holding two green monstrosities that strained against their leashes, trying to get near him. Whoa, we got a live one here.

He feels a sudden hot flash followed by the urge to vomit.

The thing shivers, releasing a cloud of musk. This is how it eats.

Tyler is staring at him with obvious concern. Ray reaches for his glass and slams his drink back, gasping with pleasure.

“So how’s your dumb kid?” he says.

Just before he left for the bridge, Jonesy and Wendy had been attacked by camp riffraff while on patrol.

“Jonesy is great, thanks for asking. He got over that knock on his head in about two days. All the guys should be done with their shift in about a half hour. You can say hello. They’re going to shit themselves when they see you.” Tyler taps the end of his cigar against the edge of the ashtray. “Listen, Ray, they made me sergeant. But you’re still in charge here as far as I’m concerned. I’m happier doing dispatch. You rest up and take command whenever you’re ready.”

Ray frowns. He had not thought about it, but right now does not welcome the idea of being a cop again. Does he have any responsibility to other people anymore? He remembers standing next to Todd Paulsen on the bridge, emptying his pistols into the greasy pale hide of the tentacled giant, screaming his head off as it bore down on them. Last time he stuck his neck out to save the world, he got infected. He beat the bug, but far from feeling invincible, he dreads everything now. Let the Sergeant Rileys fix this mess and leave me out of it, he decides. I deserve a break. I’ve got a second chance, and I have to figure out what to do with it so I don’t waste it. And for that, I need a little time. No worries except breathing in, breathing out.

“Any word from Saslove?” he asks.

Tyler nods. “I heard our dear Wendy’s shacked up with that big Black fella, Toby Wilson, and they’re traveling around with an outfit called the New Liberty Army.”

“Good. Sarge will take good care of that girl.”

“She was the real thing.” Tyler snaps his fingers. “Hey, I almost forgot. Get a load of this.” He goes into one of the holding cells, rummages around in a box, and returns with a mint-condition black STEELERS cap. “Try this on for size.”

“I can’t believe it,” Ray says, blinking another round of tears.

Tyler laughs. “Boy, that old hat of yours has seen better days.”

Ray takes off his old STEELERS cap and puts on the new one.

“How does it look on me?”

“Like lipstick on a pig.” Tyler laughs so hard he starts coughing. “Lipstick,” he repeats, his face turning red. “On a pig.”

Ray watches with mounting alarm as the veins in Tyler’s throat stand out hard and dark like wires. The man is choking. He grimaces and wheezes: “Pig.”

Then he slams both hands on the desktop, stands and sprays a geyser of vomit from his open mouth. Ray lurches back in his chair as the old man’s breakfast splashes across the desk and onto the floor.

“Tyler!” he roars, standing.

The man collapses to the floor, convulsing.

Ray kneels next to him, pressing down on his shoulders, trying to hold him still. “Aw, shit,” he says. He has no idea what to do. “Help! Help me!”

Run, Tyler hisses just before his eyes roll back into his head.

Ray jumps to his feet and races down the hallway to find most of the cops on the floor. The men still on their feet stare at them helplessly, their eyes wild, shouting at each other to do something.

Outside the building, he stops in awe. Everywhere, bodies are flopping in the mud like fish while the survivors stand over them, crying for help. A man hobbles away on crutches, raising the alarm.

“Infection! Infection!”

A cop wrenches a pistol from his shoulder harness and fires into the face of a woman lying on the ground. People shrink away in revulsion from the roar of the gun. Even from two feet away, he misses two shots before the woman’s head explodes across the sidewalk.

“They’ve got the bug!” a woman says, drawing her own gun and emptying half a magazine into another convulsing victim.

Another woman screams at her: “We don’t know they’ve got it!”

“Are you blind?”

A man roars: “That’s my mother! Put that gun down!”

The shooters raise their guns. Ray flinches at another round of gunshots. The cop and a bystander collapse to the ground. People are running, trying to get away.

“Stop it!” a woman shrieks, hugging a wailing toddler against her chest. “Stop it!”

The people on the ground stop twitching. They sit up, looking around in a daze. Slowly, they get back onto their feet.

Ray’s vision shrinks to the size of a small circle.

“Aw, shit,” he says.

Screams rise up from all over the east side of the camp, an exciting wall of sound, like being in a football stadium during a dramatic play. The dogs go berserk, yelping and howling. The first gunshots follow within seconds, a random pattern that rolls into an avalanche.

This is everywhere.

The Infected stand with their arms at their sides, hands clenching and unclenching rhythmically, heads darting to follow the progress of the fleeing survivors. The voice droning over the speaker on the telephone pole stops and a deafening air raid siren begins to wail.

The Infected are running.

Two women drag a man down, one pulling his hair out in fistfuls while the other scrabbles at his clothes with her nails, looking for a place to bite. A fleeing woman runs into a plate glass window and bounces off it, stunned; a teenager in a hoodie lands on her back, gnawing at her scalp. A man’s pistol clicks empty just before a pack surges over him. A tow truck roars down the street, Infected swarming over it, running down anything in its path. A dozen people wrestle in a pile at the curb. A dog with bloody jaws hovers at the edge of the melee, snarling and barking, lunging in to bite and tear the flesh of the Infected.

Ray pulls out his carving knife and turns in place, waving it vaguely at these threats.

A man staggers past, blood trickling down his forehead, wearing the dazed, panicked expression of someone who has just been bitten. The man stops, turns and frowns at Ray, his face twitching. He begins to chew his lips.

Move, bro, a voice screams in Ray’s head.

He runs back to the police station but pauses at the steps leading up to the main doors. Dark shapes struggle inside. A shotgun blasts twice, and then goes silent. The shape of a man fills the doorway, hunched and snarling, blood splashed down the front of his shirt.

“No,” Ray says, horrified. “God damn it, no!”

Tyler Jones jogs down the steps and stops in front of Ray, his face bright with fever. Ray glances at the knife in his hand, but cannot make himself cut the old man.

“Look at me,” he pleads. “I’m Ray Young. I’m your friend.”

Something like recognition flashes in Tyler’s eyes.

“That’s right,” he goes on. “It’s me.”

Tyler’s head jerks as if trying to see something more interesting behind Ray, and lunges snarling after a screaming woman. Ray watches him go in amazement and realizes the street is filling with Infected.

A military helicopter hovers low over the rooftops, its thundering rotors sending bits of garbage swirling through the air. Ray holds up his hand to shield his face against the wash, watching the Blackhawk turn in place until the machine gunner, crouched behind his M60, comes into view. Another soldier, crouched next to him, makes a chopping motion with his hand.

A burst of smoke appears in front of the roaring gun. The air buzzes with flying metal. People collapse where they stand, large parts of them missing.

A storefront explodes with a burst of light, raining the street with glass, as Ray throws himself onto the ground and covers his head with his hands.

The Blackhawk stops firing and moves on, searching for fresh targets.

Ray refuses to move. Lying on the road with his face pressed against the warm asphalt, he is going to stay right there and hide in plain sight for as long as it takes.

Feet stomp the ground as people run past him with howls of rage.

This is the last moment of your life, he keeps repeating in his mind, while praying it isn’t.

Anne

From a nearby hilltop, Anne studies the death throes of Camp Defiance through binoculars. A drifting pall of smoke hangs over it. Helicopters circle low, pulling the smoke into fantastic swirls, dropping missiles that burst on the ground in sudden flashes. Gunfire crackles along its length. Two Chinook transports rise above the airfield in a hard ascent, one of them wobbling unsteadily in the air, people cartwheeling out of the back in a swift return to the earth. The muffled screams never stop, rubbing her nerves so raw she has to fight the urge to join in.

This has been going on for hours. FEMA 41, Camp Defiance, is devouring itself.

Her Rangers stand in a line behind her, hands over their mouths, gasping as an explosion rips apart a patch of ground on the north side, hurling bodies and debris into the air. Jean, whom they picked up in Hopedale two days ago, cries hysterically in Gary’s arms, dressed in her wrinkled Chanel suit. Ramona and Evan lean against each other until standing cheek to cheek, watching. Marcus, the toughest of them all, wipes tears from his eyes. Anne spares a glance at Todd, standing ramrod straight and pale with his hands over his ears, watching the open gates with rigid hope as vehicles emerge singly and in groups, going south. One of the vehicles veers off the road, crawling over the muddy field, tiny figures struggling in the cab.

The Chinooks pound overhead, heading east. The hum of their powerful rotors drowns out the screaming for a few minutes. Anne gasps with relief.

Hundreds of camps have been set up across the country, she knows, possibly thousands. She tries to tell herself the human race can survive the loss of even this massive battle. That they can still win the war. But this corner of southeastern Ohio has just gone dark. It belongs to Infection now. And Anne and her team are in no man’s land, at ground zero. She knows they should already be back in their bus and moving. She returns the binoculars to her eyes and stays.

“What are we going to do?” Marcus says.

“It isn’t over,” she says.

“Can’t we do anything to help them?” Todd asks her.

Anne shakes her head, watching a squad of soldiers emerge at the top of the wall and begin climbing down the other side to safety. Even the Army is bugging out.

“Erin,” he says, and sobs, covering his face, giving in to the feelings he has been holding at bay all day. “What’s happening to her?”

“It isn’t over,” she repeats, but it is.

She tries not to think of the children. Everyone knows the Infected do not convert them. They eat them. Thousands of children are in the camp. Her hand flickers to her scars, where she scratched her face in grief when she discovered the dead bodies of her own children six weeks ago.

As the endless day grinds on, the others drift away to process what has happened and mourn lost friends. When the sky dims toward twilight, only Todd remains with Anne, watching, hoping for his miracle.

Camp Defiance is dead. A convoy of military vehicles shot their way out an hour ago, and then the entire camp fell silent.

Anne rubs her stiff and tired arms. A lone figure emerges from the camp gates and moves south. She raises the binoculars to her eyes and swears under her breath.

In her magnified view, the man runs splashing through the mud, looking over his shoulder with blank terror. She would recognize that mean face anywhere, even without the ballcap.

“Do you know him?” Todd says. “Who is it?”

“It’s Ray Young.”

“But you said he got stung. The hoppers got him. Nobody can survive that.”

“It’s flat out impossible, Todd, but there he goes.”

She chews her bottom lip, wondering how he survived both the hopper sting and the sudden fall of the camp.

“Look,” Todd says. “More people are coming out.”

She turns slightly, giving her a view of what he is pointing at. Infected are pouring from the mouth of the camp. Scores of them, walking hesitantly, hands pressed against their chests, heads cocked to study Ray’s retreat.

One by one, they trickle after him.

“Are they survivors, Anne?”

She understands. It is a miracle, true, but not all miracles are good. Some miracles are evil. Some miracles, like Infection itself, can end the world.

“Do you see Erin?”

She lowers the binoculars and spits.

“Anne?”

“I should have killed that motherfucker when I had the chance.”

Part II. Endgame

Ray

They are gaining on him.

Ray stumbles through the cornfield crying and laughing and screaming. He flails blindly against the cornstalks with sticky, stinging hands, driven by memories: The Infected raced into gunfire time and time again, some of them taking a dozen bullets to put down, overrunning scores of last stands. Military helicopters screamed low to the ground in high-speed strafing runs, heavy fire striking down both the normal and the diseased. People clawed screaming at the base of walls that once protected them. Officials evacuated the burning school that housed the government, trying to push their way out as the Infected forced their way in, the air filled with burning posters reading, ASK ME ABOUT RESETTLEMENT.

Choking on smoke, Ray fled across the camp, searching for sanctuary until the last strongpoint fell. Realizing the camp was finished, he ran headlong through the slaughter, ignoring screams for help and mercy alike, until he reached the eastern wall. Hours after he entered the camp, he ran back through the gates and disappeared into the woods from which he came.

A massive human pile writhed like worms in the bloody mud. A woman engulfed in flames walked past without a sound until collapsing in a burning heap.

Now he runs through this endless cornfield, his exhausted body driven solely by blind terror, as insects shriek in his ears and the thrash of pursuit grows steadily closer. The sun dips toward evening, bathing the corn the color of blood as the dark closes in.

A running mother, bleeding from multiple bite wounds, suddenly turned against her child, eating him while he cried and struggled in her arms.

Ray bursts gasping from the field and staggers into a large yard. He pauses to catch his breath, his heart thumping at an alarming speed against his ribs, and scans the area for weapons, a place to hide, anything that can help him. They are close behind.

A farmhouse stands with its back door open and inviting. An aboveground pool stinks like rotting plants near a clothesline. An old swing set rusts among the dandelions between a vegetable garden and a barn. A solitary wooden baseball bat leans against an apple tree. Ray lopes to the tree, scoops up the bat and turns to face his pursuers.

The backyard is empty. Insects rip the air like distant chainsaws.

Still gasping, he slaps corn dust and tiny bugs from his T-shirt, wondering what happened.

People were chasing me. Where did they go?

A flock of birds flutters into the air, swirling around the sky before falling into formation and heading east. In the twilight, the wall of corn is dark and impenetrable. As his eyes adjust to the light, he realizes the stalks are trembling.

People are moving across the cornfield.

Ray stands his ground, sure he is being watched. Slowly, his muscles uncoil. He lowers the bat. If they were Infected, they would have attacked by now.

“Hey,” he says. “Who’s there? Come on out of there. It’s all right.”

The movement stops. The ring of cicadas crescendos and ebbs. Please, he thinks, pleading. Don’t go. He needs people right now. He doesn’t want to be alone again.

“I ain’t dangerous or anything. It’ll be safer if we stick together.”

A man appears, bugs and bits of cornstalk clinging to his hair and clothes, followed by two women.

“It’s all right,” Ray tells them. “My name’s Ray. I was at the camp too.”

The people pant, watching him. Dozens more appear. Then a hundred. Behind them, hundreds more stream into the yard. The cornfield ripples with the movement of a horde.

Ray laughs with relief. He can’t believe how many. He takes several steps forward and then stops, his lungs constricting.

Can’t be.

He turns toward the house. The open door now seems impossibly far away.

Can’t be.

The people continue to gather, staring at Ray. Some of them reach out to him, moaning.

Can’t be, can’t be, can’t be.

They’re Infected. All of them.

Todd

The bus rumbles along the road toward Trimble Airport, a tiny commuter airfield outside of what used to be a small town called Appleton. Anne’s Rangers converted one of the hangars there into a safe house. Harsh red light flickers through the metal-slatted firing ports, fitted where the windows used to be, as the sun bleeds into the horizon. Todd is too preoccupied to worry about being caught in the open at night. They’ll reach the safe house soon enough. He does not care what happens in the meantime.

The Rangers sit scattered around the bus, each taking a seat as far as they can from everyone else to be alone with their thoughts. Hugging his assault rifle, Todd tries to process the horror of what he saw today. Jean cries in the back while Gary tries to console her. The Rangers rescued the pair from an art gallery in Hopedale two days ago. She is taking it the worst. Her wailing scatters Todd’s thoughts until he begins to hate her.

We have all suffered, lady. We’ve all lost people.

Todd knows he will never see Erin again. The best he can hope for is somehow she survived and is on her way to a safe place. He shuts his eyes and pleads with God to let her live.

Spare her and I’ll do anything. Just name the price.

He wonders if this is how the Reverend felt when he prayed. Bargaining with a God who does not answer. Who may not even be listening. And yet it feels good to bargain.

I should have tried to save her. I did nothing. I just watched.

If you tried to save her, you’d be dead by now. Dead or infected.

I could have tried.

Around and around his mind goes.

The Rangers lived on the road, searching for survivors and bringing them to the camp. Defiance was their port—a place to rest, retool and resupply. Without it, they are adrift, anchorless, in a sea filled with monsters.

Erin was Todd’s port.

Everything he’d enjoyed doing as a troubled, geeky teenager before the epidemic was gradually forgotten along with the millions of other things people liked doing, such as going to the movies, ordering takeout from a Chinese menu, buying flowers for a date, catching up on reruns of a favorite series. Even the things Todd found exciting about the epidemic—the boyish thrill of living without school or parents, shooting guns, living life dangerously, the freedom of the apocalypse—had all turned sour with repeated use. Todd was growing up in a world filled with risk and death. A world he looked at with the resentment of a boy cheated of his inheritance. Erin was the only thing in that world offering him any real happiness, and now Infection has taken her from him, just as it took his parents, Sheena X, Paul, Ethan and so many others.

The vehicle shudders as it drives over rubble and shards of timber. Unknown to the people of Camp Defiance, the storm that lashed the camp several days ago was the northern front of a small tornado ripping through southern Ohio. Most of the buildings here took damage; some of the weaker structures were crushed flat. The road is blanketed with leaves and branches, wires, furniture, soggy books, broken plates, shattered electronics, the bloated bodies of people and cattle.

The bus drives over it all with a crunch.

♦

The Rangers would visit Camp Defiance for a day or two and then return to the road for as long as a week. The more Todd stayed away, the more Erin wanted him. Each time he left, she cried and screamed and called it quits. After sex, he studied her body, feeling helpless. His happiness with her felt as fleeting as life itself, and just as doomed. He believed someday she would leave him not because of his separate life on the road, but because he was not who she thought he was. Todd believed she was too good for him, and would one day realize it.

His life among the monsters appeared to be a constant source of attraction to her. Erin called him the coolest guy she knew. She said how all the other guys she’d ever liked had the trappings of being a bad-ass. Todd had none of the trappings, and yet he was the biggest bad-ass she knew.

He would just laugh. If only you really knew, he would say. If only you saw what was out there. You wouldn’t think I was bad-ass. You’d think I was certifiably bonkers.

She told him she loved him. Isn’t that enough? she said. What more proof do you want? Stop trying to think and feel and choose for me. I know how to think and feel and choose. And I choose you. I am giving myself to you completely. Just accept it.

Like a fool, he did not allow himself to believe her. He survived the end of the world, but still suffered from the low self-esteem that had plagued him in high school. Now Erin was dead or infected in the camp with its massive walls and watchtowers, and he was alive out on the road, the most dangerous place in the world.

He remembers scavenging around Pittsburgh with Anne and several other people in a Bradley fighting vehicle during the first weeks of the epidemic. After settling into a building they hoped to make their home, Todd asked the Reverend what he missed most from the time before Infection. Todd started listing off a lot of things—Buffalo wings, wargaming, computers, ice cream.

What about you, Reverend? he asked. What do you miss the most?

Paul grimaced, excused himself, and left the room. At the time, Todd put his brooding down to the dark, odd behavior of people whose age placed them closer to their death than their birth. His own dad had him when he was forty; for most of Todd’s childhood, his dad seemed paranoid the world was going to end, that his family would be attacked or robbed, that the government was going to take everything away from him and give it to lazy poor people.

Then, one day, his dad stopped caring about these things. His dad realized his own parents were dead, some of his friends were dying, his brother was fighting cancer. His attitude went from, Fight for what’s yours to: We’re next. He no longer seemed paranoid. He seemed resigned. That’s what Paul was like when Todd asked him what he missed. Resigned to his fate.

It wasn’t until later Todd realized the one thing Paul truly missed was his wife, Sara, who had become infected.

Now, above all things, above even his parents, Todd misses Erin.

Now he finally understands loss.

♦

Marcus parks the bus in front of the hangar and lets it sit idling. The survivors stir, gathering weapons and equipment, but nobody gets off. He kills the engine and they sit and listen to the pulse of insects for a while. After several minutes, Anne says, “All right, let’s move.”

Todd exits the bus and jogs to his designated position, sweeping the area with his carbine. Regardless of his despair, he has a job to do, and people’s lives depend on him staying alert. He scans his sector looking for threats. The airport is a disaster, covered in a jumble of leaves and branches and scattered equipment. The orange windsock and antennae jutting from the dark control tower have been swept away. He notices a small metal sign, bent double but still standing: LEARN TO FLY HERE!

He sees no Infected. Maybe I won’t have to shoot anyone today.

Marcus opens the hangar doors with a grind of metal. Todd lowers his weapon and jogs back to help unload their gear. The survivors fall into the routines of survival, filling buckets with water from the rain barrels they installed under the building’s rainspouts, collecting and cutting firewood, servicing the bus’s engine. The safe house is just as they’d left it. Nobody says a word unless it is necessary. Night is falling, and they have to get inside.

One by one, however, they stop moving. The Rangers gather on the tarmac, gazing at the eastern horizon. The cloud cover glows like burning coals, reflecting the light of vast fires on the ground. The story of the battle of Washington, written on the sky.

“Let’s get a move on,” Anne tells them.

Todd shoulders his rifle and helps Evan bring a cooler into the building. Inside, their footsteps echo across the massive, empty space.

The Rangers settle in for the night, eating a hasty supper around their small fire, listening to monotone voices on the radio mourn the fallen and encourage all Americans to continue to fight Infection. Nobody says a word. Any conversation taking place is the internal kind. The silence suits Todd just fine. The fall of the camp calls for a night of silence just to process it.

Then he realizes Anne is staring at him. He looks away, feeling like he failed some sort of test. Like the others, he is a little afraid of her.

And yet he understands her a little better now.

He is learning how to hate.

Wendy

The juggernaut gallops on its four thick legs through the half-empty parking lot of the Lebanon Costco, scattering garbage and vehicles and making the ground tremble. It stops, its lungs swelling against its ribcage. Dozens of tentacles sag from the body, swaying tentatively, as if groping. They straighten and shiver, flailing, blasting like foghorns.

The sound fades, replaced by the growl of advancing machinery. A Technical—a pickup truck with a heavy machine gun bolted onto its bed—races through the empty adjacent dirt lot, sending a rooster tail of mud flying behind it. The driver wrestles with the wheel while the gunner holds on for dear life. On the other side of the parking lot, another Technical, a Toyota with bumper bars welded onto its face, slams through a snarl of shopping carts under a dead light pole, sending them flying with a crash of metal.

The gunners open up at the same time, sending rounds arcing across the parking lot to fall into the flank of the monster, punching holes through hide and muscle.

The drivers whoop at the sight of the elephant-sized thing limping away on legs thick as tree trunks. They step on the gas and lean on their horns while men in the passenger seats shout reports into radios. They are pushing the thing into the rest of their combat team, which even now is circling the other side of the Costco.

The monster lows in pain, so white now it is almost translucent, leaving a trail of blood that fills the air with a copper scent. One of the trucks splashes through it moments later.

The man in the passenger seat sees a gray blur and screams a warning.

Five tons of flesh and bone slam into the vehicle and shove it into a crashing roll that sends the gunner flying and leaves the truck lying on its back, parts of it scattered all over the parking lot. The second juggernaut embraces and lifts the wreck with its swarming tentacles. Two of the tentacles punch through the cobwebbed windshield, latch onto the dying driver, and start sucking, throbbing scarlet as they drain the man’s blood.

The other truck veers away, its gunner hanging on, as the Bradley fighting vehicle crashes through a chain link fence and hurtles onto the parking lot on screaming treads. A wreath of wildflowers trembles on its metal chest like a necklace. A faded American flag waves from one of its antennae. The crew of the Technical raise their fists and whoop as the armored vehicle rushes past, its turret rotating to align the cannon for its first shot at the monster.

The men glimpse the words BOOM STICK stenciled on the side of the turret, partly erased by deep grooves in the armor, as the cannon fills the air with manmade thunder.

♦

Gum cracking, Wendy sits at the gunner’s station in the Bradley and feels the surging power of five hundred horsepower flow through the rig’s twenty-five tons. She applies gentle pressure to the joystick with her gloved hand, keeping the giant monster centered in her integrated sight unit as the cannon continues to boom.

“Target,” she says, announcing they are making solid hits. “Target.”

The tracers surge into the monster, which sags, collapses. The tracers begin to flow over it. Instead of correcting, Wendy ceases fire.

She finishes: “Target destroyed.”

“Rapid scan,” Toby says.

“Hotel Bravo identified,” Wendy answers, referring to the monster type known among their militia as horn blowers, then adds, “One.” One hundred meters.

Another of the monsters has entered the parking lot, bellowing in rage. Wendy confirms range on the RANGE-SELECT knob and that the AP LO annunciator light is illuminated on the weapons box. They’re going to fire armor-piercing rounds from the cannon at a rate of about a hundred per minute.

“Line it up,” Toby tells her, watching the thing on his optical relay.

“Wilco,” Wendy says. She pushes the joystick a little, making the turret rotate until the reticle falls center mass on the new monster on her screen.

She was once a cop and now she’s a tanker, a monster slayer. It used to be exciting. Now it’s just slaughter. Every day, she thinks, some of us get killed, some of them. It never ends.

Toby puts his ear against the instrument panel, listening to the Bradley’s beating heart. Wendy breaks from her mental routine and watches him. Armored vehicles are impervious to most children of Infection, but not malfunction.

He shakes his head. “It ain’t nothing.”

She catches the reticle drifting and feathers the joystick to stabilize it. Then she realizes the thing is moving. Galloping straight at them. She blinks sweat from her eyes, ignoring the sweltering heat inside the tank.

“One thing at a time,” Toby tells her. “Fire.”

“On the way,” Wendy responds.

She presses the trigger switch, feeling the stresses of the cannon’s recoil spread through the rig’s frame. Like Toby, she knows every inch of the rig by feel as well as sight and touch. She can tell if one of the guns is malfunctioning before the annunciator lights confirm it.

She knows when to use the coax MG and when to use the twenty-five-millimeter cannon. She knows which creatures require a high rate of fire to bring them down. She knows when to use the heavy explosive ordnance and when to use the armor piercing.

“Target,” she says with cold familiarity to the task. She remembers when firing the tank’s cannon filled her with a primitive joy, enough to make her whoop as it sent its devastating ordnance flying down range. Now Wendy and the gun are an old married couple. “Target. Target destroyed.”

“What’s wrong?” Toby asks her, sensing her mood.

“I don’t know,” she says, shrugging. “Everything?”

The radio crackles.

Sarge, this is Joe. Sherman Tully and his boys didn’t make it.

Toby glances at Wendy, who winces, but says nothing. The New Liberty Army is made up of people who do not expect to live long. Death is so commonplace, when one of them dies in the fighting, it is expected, not mourned. And yet every death weighs on her.

“Roger that,” Toby says into the comm. “What about the equipment?”

The truck’s a total write off. The gun too from what I can tell. We’re salvaging the ammo and some gas and whatever else we can.

“We’ll provide overwatch from here until you’re done,” Toby tells him.

Much appreciated.

“Then we’ll camp inside that Costco tonight.”

This is Russell, Sarge. My boys missed out on all the fun. We’ll get to work clearing the Costco.

“Fine with me,” says Toby. “Any word from Ackley? Moses Ackley, how copy?”

Moses, here.

“What’s your sitrep?”

We found a litter of their young, Tobias. You should see the yard where they built their nest. It’s covered in bones and hair. Small animals—I’m guessing dogs, mostly. Some human kids in there too from the looks of it. We killed the adults. We’re gonna torch the little brats next.

Wendy winces again. She hates the idea of killing children, even the children of monsters. But it has to be done.

“Roger that,” Toby says, and takes a deep breath. “Lebanon has been liberated.”

The men cheer over the radio. A few pop off rounds into the sky. Tonight, they will break out the whiskey and drink until oblivion.

Toby turns to study her. “Tell me what’s wrong, Wendy.”

“How’s she doing?” Wendy says, extending her arm to touch the instrument panel. She feels its pulse flow through her hand and into her arm.

“We’re going to need some real maintenance soon,” Toby says, frowning at her evasion.

“Sergeant,” Lieutenant Chase says from the back. His young face appears past Wendy’s shoulder, frowning at them. “Why are we stopping here for the night?”

“We’re stopping here because we’re done,” Toby tells him.

“You said we’d sweep through and continue on to Washington. That’s our mission.”

“Don’t worry, LT,” Toby tells him, pronouncing the word as el tee, an abbreviation for lieutenant. “The war will still be there by the time we show up.”

“From now on, I expect us to do what we agree to do,” the young officer says.

Toby’s voice becomes low and menacing. “Lieutenant, you should know by now that the NLA ain’t the regular Army, and that it follows its own impulses.”

Wendy stifles laughter. To claim the New Liberty Army follows its own impulses is an understatement, to say the least. The outfit was created by men who cannot live in the refugee camps, who have the stomach for constant slaughter, and who do not fear death. They’ve been mopping up towns all over eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania for the past three weeks. They are good at what they do. They are damaged people; they can never go back to the way things used to be. After the war, they will have to be put down like wild dogs.

Wendy does not worry about that too much. She doesn’t think the war will ever end. And if it does, she doubts any of them will live long enough to see it.

“It may not be the regular—”

“Besides,” Toby adds, “we are providing overwatch for the salvage operation. We are still in combat. Now’s not the time.”

“I just wanted to point—”

Wendy wrenches her eyes from her display and says, “Sit the fuck down, sir.”

Lieutenant Chase blinks and glares at Toby, who shrugs. “You heard the lady, sir.”

As the young officer returns to the passenger compartment to retake his seat with the squad, Toby sighs and says, “So are you going to tell me what’s eating you today?”

“Nope,” Wendy tells him.

♦

The fighters shoot out the skylights in the Costco to create smoke vents, chop up some of the empty shelves, and settle into lawn chairs around their cook fires. The beards, sunglasses, bandanas and leather make them look more like a biker convention than a military force. The women look even fiercer than the men, some of them wearing bits of armor and body paint and necklaces of ivory monster teeth. At any one time, roughly six hundred men and women to serve in the New Liberty Army. Outside, the sentries stand guard on the beds of the trucks arranged in a line in front of the store. Inside, a boom box blares an old Jimi Hendrix song, rebellious and nostalgic. The fighters swap war stories and pass around chewing tobacco and mason jars filled with grain alcohol. Franks and beans and Ramen noodles bubble in pots set over the fires, filling the store with the rich smell of camp food. The fighters play cards for hundreds of dollars looted from the cash registers. They trade toilet paper for cigarettes, chocolate bars for antacids, silver dollars for porno mags and Percocet. A man tries to sell a handful of gold wedding bands, but gets no takers. Everyone knows carrying such things around is bad luck.

Each night they are alive is cause for as big a party as they can put together with whatever they have on hand. Tonight, the fighters are happy to be camping inside, away from the rain and the mud and the mosquitoes. The New Liberty Army is a nomad army, always on the move, living off the land and leaving a vast swathe of death and destruction in its wake. They are an unforgiving army; wounded fighters are left behind with a gun and a little grub to die or get well. Their sole mission is to purge Infection from the region, scavenge what they can, and then move on. They are hard men and women, civilians who fight like professionals. An army of psychopaths, a legion of the insane, a homegrown militia of monster slayers. These people are here because they can do nothing else. They are damned. They don’t mind killing; some of them enjoy it. Some hotwire mannequins with dynamite, and laugh when the flash and boom turn the Infected into jelly and pieces of bone. Some mutilate the dead. What some of them do to infected women, Wendy doesn’t want to know. Most have lost everything and hold a grudge.

Anne would fit right in here, Wendy muses.

And yet it is a tranquil army, one where many of the old divisions do not exist, or at least have been put aside. She remembers Paul telling her about the demonstrations at Camp Defiance and the old hates pulled into the new world they lived in, some of them even amplified. Some believe God hates the Infected, while others believe the Infected are specially chosen instruments of divine wrath. Some argue abortion can no longer be justified during a time when more people are dying than being born, while others argue the option of abortion makes even more sense in this harsh, dying world. On and on. None of that stuff matters in the New Liberty Army. Nobody cares Toby and Wendy are a mixed-race couple, for example, or that Billy Weaver’s crew is openly gay, or that the Ackleys are Jehovah’s Witnesses. They are united in their single purpose to stamp out the plague, without mercy, with fire and shot.

She walks away from the others, picking through the shelves looking for something useful. With hope, she’ll find some gum. Looters have already been through the store, however, and taken almost everything. The candy aisle has been stripped clean. It’s not over, however; you just have to know where to look. Getting down onto all fours, she feels under the bottom shelf, her hand sweeping through the dust, until settling on something. Bingo.

She pulls it out and holds it up in the dim light. It’s a Tootsie Pop. Not gum, but it will do.

“Wendy Saslove?” says a man’s voice.

Wendy stands, feeling a little silly and also foolish for having made herself so vulnerable. The last time she dropped her guard, she was on patrol with Jonesy back at Camp Defiance, working as a police officer for Sergeant Ray Young in Unit 12. She was violently attacked by three scumbags, two of whom she beat senseless, the third she fought off after he attempted to rape her. She hadn’t felt safe since that night unless in Toby’s arms or in the gunner’s station of the Bradley.

She faces the large, bearded man, feeling the reassuring weight of her Glock on her hip, her hand near her pepper spray and side-handle police baton. She is a beautiful woman; she has been told this enough times to be sure. Most of the men are afraid of Toby, who is something of a living legend in the outfit, but a few made a move on her anyway when his back was turned. They didn’t know Wendy was a cop before she became a volunteer gunner. Too bad for them: She stomped them so hard, many of the boys grew even more afraid of her than Toby.

“I’m Dennis. Dennis Warren.”

“Nice to meet you, Dennis,” she says.

“I joined the outfit about a week ago.”

“I’ve seen you around,” she says. “How’s everything?”

“I don’t mean to bother you or anything, but I heard you were a cop. Over in Pittsburgh.”

Wendy relaxes a little. “That’s right.”

“I just wanted to say thank you.”

She knows what he wants to do, so she asks the question. “For what?”

He wants to tell her his story. That’s always what they want when they mention they find out she was a police officer.

There were four of them trapped in a supply closet in an office building, two women and two men, one of them a cop suffering a severe concussion, floating in and out of consciousness. Outside, an Infected man scratched at the door like an animal, grunting, while the survivors gaped at the noise, sweating and paralyzed and feeling nauseous. One of the two women worked in Finance; Dennis didn’t know her name, even now, but he had seen her around the building for years and always thought she was pretty. She was trying to help the cop. She said there were dozens of Infected out there, maybe even a hundred. She insisted on this until Dennis believed her. He was out of his mind with fear. The Infected heard their voices and pounded at the door, screaming loud enough to send fresh waves of adrenaline through Dennis’s body. His brain went numb with fear. One little bite, he knew, and I’m as good as dead. The Infected outside wanted to bite him. The door trembled on its hinges. The center splintered. The woman took the cop’s gun from its holster and aimed it at the door, her arm shaking, taking deep breaths. Leave us alone, she screamed. Stop it! The Infected outside howled in a blind rage and crashed against the door. She said it was no use. She said the Infected would get in and tear them into pieces. Best to end it now. Janet, I’m so sorry. The gunshot blasted in Dennis’s ears, making him flinch. When he opened his eyes, Janet sat on the floor gaping at nothing, her brains splashed up the shelving behind her and coating the neatly stacked Post-Its and legal pads and pencil sharpeners. I’m sorry, the woman with the gun said, turning back toward Dennis with eyes glazed with shock. I never got your name. Dennis lunged and wrestled her to the floor. Don’t hurt her, he told himself. He felt like he knew her after sharing elevators with her for two years. He’d always had something of a crush on her. She fought like an animal, pulling on his tie until pain lanced through his neck, trying to free her wrist so she could shoot him or herself in the head. Kill me, she begged. Quick, before they get in. I don’t want to turn into one of them. Dennis slapped her hard. He just wanted to make her be quiet, but she kept screaming and clawing at him. Everyone just settle down now so I can think, he said, hitting her again. His hoarse whisper sounded like someone else speaking. He wrapped his hand around her throat and squeezed for a while to stop her screaming. Just be cool for a minute. He couldn’t think straight. She stopped struggling. Oh shit. Oh shit, I didn’t want that. Crying now, he untangled her fingers from the grip of the cop’s gun and pointed it at his own head as the door splintered further and the Infected face appeared snarling in the hole. Dennis blinked in surprise; it was Paul Dorgan, VP of Product Development. Wait, a voice said. Dennis turned and saw the cop pushing himself up trembling onto one elbow. Give the gun to me. I’ll do it. The cop accepted the Glock, raised it calmly and fired through the hole. The body fell heavily to the floor.

“If the cop hadn’t been there,” Dennis says, “I would have died in that closet. Simple as that. The fear made us crazy. I was out of my mind. I owe that man my life.”

“What happened to him?”

“He didn’t make it. He died that night in his sleep. His name was Matt Prince. He was a Pittsburgh cop. Did you know him?”

“Sorry, no,” Wendy tells him. “I didn’t know any Matt Prince working Northside.”

“Well,” Dennis says. “I was just wondering.”

“What did you do, Dennis? Before?”

“I worked in the IT department.”

Wendy smiles. His appearance fooled her; she thought he was just another lost redneck like many of the others. “You’re a long way from that world.”

“I wish I were,” Dennis says. “That would mean it was still there.”

She hears boots stomping down the aisle behind her, and knows it’s Toby. She turns and sees him approaching.

“God bless you, Wendy,” Dennis adds, and turns away to return to the camp.

Toby folds his arms around her shoulders and chest. It is like being hugged by a bear. The familiar odors of his body push away the irritating smells of wood smoke and dust. Wrapped in his large arms, Wendy feels like she is back in the Bradley, completely safe.

“He heard you’re a cop,” Toby guesses, kissing the back of her head.

“The police did amazing things,” she says, as if she were describing heroes of ancient legend. “The ones who stuck it out and didn’t run. They really helped people.”

He hugs her tighter. “Some of them still do.”

“No. The police are all dead now. There are no police. Not real police, anyway.”

He kisses her again. “You’re a real cop.”

“I’m not police anymore, Toby. I’m an exterminator. A gas chamber operator.”

Toby sighs and releases her. “It’s almost suppertime. You coming?”

“Where else would I go?”

He frowns. “I keep pissing you off. Tell me what’s wrong, Wendy.”

“It’s not you,” she tells him, placing her hand against his muscular chest, over his heart.

“Maybe this will make you feel a little happier.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a handful of moist toilettes in their wrappers. “I got these off one of Ackley’s boys. I know how you like to stay as clean as you can.”

Wendy’s eyes flood with tears. “I don’t want this.”

Toby stands with his hands at his sides. “You don’t?”

His tone of rejection only makes her cry even harder. “This, Toby. This. I don’t want this.”

“It’s all there is,” Toby says as gently as possible.

He tries to pull her back into his arms, but she shoves him away and dashes into the dark aisles. That can’t be true. There must be something else. There has to be.

It’s been less than two months since the screamers woke up and the epidemic began. How can I do this for another two months? A year? A lifetime?

♦

They turn off the music so Tom Ackley can play his violin. Nothing white trash; pure Stravinsky. The stark notes fill the empty spaces and make the fighters feel melancholy. It gets so quiet they can hear a distant radio droning advice to stay indoors and wear dark clothing and isolate and abandon loved ones who have been bitten. The fighters chew slowly; the music makes them remember. A woman pauses while cutting her toenails and trembles, sobbing, as she relives some past event. Tom breaks into the warm rhythm of a waltz, making them glance at each other and smile. Laughing, the boy switches to bluegrass, sawing the strings like a fiddle and tapping his feet. The fighters clap as the music makes them forget.

“Here you go, Wendy,” Will Barnes says, handing her a paper plate loaded with franks and beans, Ramen noodles tossed with grilled vegetables, and canned pears.

“Thanks,” she says, taking a seat far from the others, her eyes on Toby, who sits at another fire with Steve, the driver, telling the story about being attacked by the Demon. The militia never gets tired of hearing that one. The Demon is a legend. They heard one screaming in the hills once and ran across its tracks, but never saw one themselves.

Which is why you’re still alive, Wendy muses. If you saw one, it would have eaten you and shit you out already. The one thing that saved me and Toby and Steve was the Bradley’s armor. Even then, it was a close thing.

The men’s eyes gleam in the firelight, hanging on every word. Wendy notices Toby’s hair is going gray. He is going to look like the Reverend Paul Melvin in no time. Thinking this, her heart goes out to him. He is my man.

“Mind if I sit with you?”

Wendy glances up, her mouth full of beans, and motions for Lieutenant Chase to join her.

“Thanks,” he says, sitting with his own steaming plate of food. He takes a sip at the clear liquid in his mason jar and gasps, then laughs. “Wow, that’s strong stuff. Like drinking a bayonet.”

“Sorry I yelled at you earlier today in the Bradley, Lieutenant.”

“That’s all—”

“But lives were depending on me paying attention to the ISU display. I couldn’t have you yelling in my ear about military strategy.”

The officer nods. “Fair enough.”

Lieutenant Peter Chase showed up several days ago and latched onto Toby as the only non-com in the outfit who is regular Army. What he doesn’t understand is Toby isn’t in his Army anymore. And the New Liberty Army doesn’t have a general. Each of the Technicals has its own commander, and all of them decide as a group where to go next. They all want the same thing, and none of them mind doing their part. Often, they debate little over what to do, and a formal vote is not required. At least, that is, until the young lieutenant—yanked from West Point, put through a special counter-Infection training program, and thrown into the field—showed up. The Army is invading Washington, he told them. We need you in the fight, each man to his duty.

Wendy likes the young officer, who isn’t even old enough to legally drink in most states, and has a penchant for the melodramatic. Who will follow me to Washington? he actually said once. Another time, Wendy could have sworn he said, We will drive east, toward the sound of the guns.

The New Liberty Army is not a field army, however; it is a militia made up of people from the region who see no reason to fight outside of it. Moses Ackley said America is dead and they need to take care of business here. He pointed out that if they go, they may leave the entire region vulnerable to Infection. This ground here is not America; it is their home. They know the area intimately, making them successful in battle, and they are highly motivated to defend it. To men like Moses, America has become an abstraction, without meaning. Without the NLA, the refugee camps like Camp Defiance might be threatened. Most of the commanders are not ready to write off the United States, however. They still believe in America, if only in the ideal.

Lieutenant Chase offered them a deal. He said, If you follow me to Washington, we will supply you. Fuel, parts, weapons, ammunition, medicine, food and water, and payment in gold. Moses Ackley called it a trick, and besides, he said, the NLA is not for hire. Other commanders wondered what choice they had. The NLA is mechanized and without resupply, they will end up on foot. They’re always running out of things and what they have is steadily deteriorating.

“I was wondering,” says Chase, “if you would put in a word with Sergeant Wilson for me.”

“He’s right over there,” Wendy tells him. “Go tell him what you want. He’s reasonable.”

“Wendy, the mission is in Washington. We need to be moving at a faster pace.”

“And you think Toby can make that happen?”

Chase blinks, considering how it could be any other way. “Of course.”

She laughs. “Lieutenant, everyone here looks up to Toby. But nobody reports to him. Even I don’t report to him. Not even Steve, who used to report to him. This outfit is not military, LT. It’s a gang. I’m amazed it’s lasted as long as it has. One little thing could tear it apart.”

“And you think I’m that one little thing?”

“Yup,” Wendy says, scooping noodles and corn into her mouth.

Chase stares at the fire. “About two hundred miles from here, the Army is fighting for its life. Everything is riding on this one big battle. Higher Command wants me to get this militia into it as fast as possible. If I don’t make progress, they won’t deliver the supplies I promised.”

Wendy nods. “You’re in a bad spot. If you don’t deliver any supplies soon, you’re going to lose these people. It’s on you, LT. Not Toby. You’re going to have to find a way.”

“Shit,” he says, and then blushes. “Excuse my language.”

“No, you’re right,” she says. “It’s shit.”

“Shit, shit, shit.”

As if on cue, she watches Moses Ackley stand, dust off his pants and approach Toby, no doubt to make his case to strike west instead of east, and screw the Feds. His Biblical beard spills down his chest, giving him a stern, fearsome appearance. Behind him, some of the boys finish a shopping cart race that ends with a metallic crash and laughter.

Wendy remembers driving to Camp Immunity near Harrisburg. It’s the biggest camp in Pennsylvania, even bigger than Defiance, and better organized. They hid the Bradley outside, walked in and found Ethan’s family. Wendy recognized them from the photo Ethan carried around; she felt like she already knew them after living with Ethan for weeks. Carol Bell sat in terrified silence, hugging her little Mary tightly on her lap, while they told her everything. The weeks scavenging in Pittsburgh. Following a theory into one of the hospitals. The flight from the fire that consumed the city. The refugee camp, the bridge. Ethan’s infection and death.

Ethan was brave, they told her. At the end, he died fighting. He saved our lives time after time with his intelligence and intuition. He never stopped searching for you. You were his sole purpose for going on. He never gave up hope. At the end, he believed he had found you. He died knowing you are alive. His last thought was of you.

Carol could not stop crying. She wanted them to tell Ethan she was sorry she left the city during the evacuation. Surely, he would understand she was only looking out for Mary. She refused to acknowledge he was dead. When hope is all you have, it’s hard to give it up.

Hours later, they left her and had a look around the camp. This is a good place, Wendy said. They have their shit together.

We can’t stay, Toby told her. You know we can’t stay. None of these places are good for us.

Toby had barely been able to stand Camp Defiance. None of his group of survivors had been able to really stomach it. They fought so hard to survive long enough to reach sanctuary, just to find out they would rather live on the road.

Now she thinks about that camp and wants to disappear into the crowd. Forget the NLA and the epidemic and the neverending slaughter. Just her and Toby. They could build something like a home there. Wendy is tired of the war. She could handle the fighting if she could believe there might one day be an end to it. She would even lay down her life if it meant victory. But the slaughter never ends. It just goes on and on.

She remembers asking Toby if they have any responsibility to other people. She’s a cop in a lawless land. He’s a soldier without an army. Do they owe people anything? Even if she does, she signed up to be police and help people, not butcher them. Steve sometimes calls the Infected “crunchies,” after the sound they make when the Bradley runs over them. Wendy doesn’t like it; the Infected never quite feel like the enemy to her.

She longs for home.

We’ve done our part. God knows we have. It’s someone else’s turn to fight the war. It’s our turn to live in peace.

But she knows it could never be. The refugee camps are noisy and crowded, filled with people who cannot be trusted, and neither she nor Toby believe they could truly live in one of them again. She just wishes there was a way.

Lieutenant Chase nudges her. “I think something’s happening.”

Tom Ackley has stopped playing. Toby and Moses jog toward a group of fighters gathering around the radio. People are shouting, their voices edged with panic.

“Oh God,” Chase groans.

“What is it?” Wendy asks him, fighting the urge to run to the Bradley.

Instead of answering, he throws his plate into the fire, swears loudly, and buries his face in his hands.

Wendy stands, her hand on the grip of her police baton, and approaches the huddle. “What’s going on?” She shoves one of the men. “Hey! What’s happening?”

The man turns, his eyes wet and feverish. It’s Rick Combs, one of Russell’s guys.

“We just heard it on the radio,” he tells her.

“Heard what?” she grates, her patience exhausted.

“Camp Defiance has fallen. It was overrun. It’s fucking gone.”

♦

Many of the fighters had friends and family living in Camp Defiance. They sit alone or in huddles around the dying fires, wailing into their hands. Aside from the crying, everyone talks and moves as quietly as possible in the funereal atmosphere. Wendy’s brain tingles with shock. She thinks about Todd, Anne and Unit 12, the police unit at the camp where she served with Ray Young, and wonders if any of them made it out. So many people died in Steubenville to save that place: Paul Melvin, Ethan Bell, Ray Young and the rest. All for nothing. To hear the entire camp has collapsed is too much to take in at once, forcing her into a state of denial. An entire camp. More than a hundred thousand people. Wiped out. Just like that. All of them infected or dead.

The commanders of the Technicals crowd around Toby, arguing in hushed whispers, the hissing turning into shouting that startles even those doing it. Chase stands next to Toby, visibly wilting. Some of the commanders blame him for distracting the New Liberty Army. Their shame fuels their fury. If they blame the Army, they don’t have to blame themselves. Wendy pushes through the mob until she reaches Toby and Steve and the Lieutenant, her hand on her baton. She stares back at the angry and terrified faces, angling her body into a fighting stance and planning where she is going to hit them. Her despair craves its own outlet. A part of her is hoping they will give her an excuse to stomp some ass.

“This is why we need to stay in our territory,” Moses says in his deep baritone. “Washington is an empty gesture. The fight is here. If we leave, there will be nothing to stop the bug.”

“We are in our territory,” Russell tells him, scratching at his beard. “And we didn’t do nothing to stop shit. The camp was wiped out on our watch.”

“There’s still the smaller camp at Mason,” Joe Hanley chimes in. “Camp Nightingale. They need protection, too.”

“Cashtown couldn’t hold out,” Martha Grimes says in her raspy voice. “How can Mason hold out, shit for brains?”

“They’re next,” Russell mutters. “You can bet your ass they’re next.”

“We don’t know that. There are forty thousand there. They need us.”

“Your country needs you,” Chase says, but it falls flat. Some of the men openly laugh at him.

“My country is Ohio, boy,” Moses growls. “And we need to take it back before it’s too late. As for America, it can take care of itself. I don’t see it looking out for me and mine.”

“America expects each man to do his duty,” the young officer grates. “I would expect all of you, being military men, to understand that.”

“Dumb shit thinks this is the real Army,” someone snickers.

“Who said that?” Toby roars, shutting them up. “We are, in fact, nominally an Army operation, which means we will give the LT real respect as an Army officer. Whoever disrespects him again will get my boot so far up his ass, he’ll be flossing with my shoelaces.”

The men grumble, sizing him up. Wendy tenses, putting on her game face. There are dozens of commanders here, and just four soldiers. But nobody challenges them.

“So what do you think, Sarge?” someone calls from the back.

“This is not a local problem,” Toby answers. “If we don’t take all of America back, we’ll never be truly safe anywhere. We got to start someplace, and that place might as well be Washington. That’s where the Army is, and we should help if we can. Plus the LT says he’s going to get us supplies that we need. It’s a good deal. We should honor our end of it.”

“Sarge, with all respect, I am sick of this man’s empty promises,” Russell says. “The Federal government promised help on the first day of epidemic, and it never came. They promised to protect us in the shelters, and those shelters didn’t last a goddamn week.”

The fighters growl, remembering. The shelters became deathtraps.

“They promised us a vaccine, and there was no vaccine, and no cure,” he continues. “They promised to send troops, and then sent them all to Washington.”

The fighters glare at the officer with open resentment.

“I’ll tell you what, sir,” Russell tells the Lieutenant. “If those supplies don’t show up by tomorrow morning, I’m taking my crew and going west.” He glances at Moses. “All right, Ackley?”

“That’s fine,” Moses tells him.

“What about Camp Defiance?” says Joe. “There could be survivors.”

“We could split the NLA in two,” Fred White chimes in. “Half head west to Defiance, and half east to Washington to join the fight.”

“And be too weak to do either one right,” Martha says.

“Put it to a vote,” Fred says.

“Vote for suicide?”

“We’ll go,” Wendy says. “Me and Toby and Steve, with our shooters and the Bradley. We’ll backtrack to Morgantown and then go north to check out the camp. We’ll catch up with you in Washington.”

The men glance at Toby, who shrugs. “You heard the lady,” he says. “All right, Fred?”

“That’ll work, I guess,” Fred says. The other commanders nod at this, but reluctantly; they’d all rather have the Bradley riding along with them.

“It’s on you, then,” Russell tells Chase. “All this talk is pointless if our resupply don’t show up here tomorrow. If it don’t, then, well, we’re all going west.”

The mob breaks up. Toby and Moses exchange a nod of understanding. Wendy blows air out her cheeks and tries to relax; she feels like she could run a mile.

“Wow, I thought they were going to crucify the LT,” Steve says, grinning.

“By the way, Sergeant Wilson, thank you for supporting me,” Chase says.

Toby shakes his head. “Next time you see a fire, LT, try throwing water on it instead of gas.”

“So if you go west and the rest of the NLA goes east, who am I going to ride with?”

Wendy says, “Try to find the crew that hates you the least, sir. In the meantime, I’d lie low if I were you. A lot of people here still blame the Army for what happened to Defiance.”

“But why?” Chase asks in a childlike voice.

How to explain human nature? She shrugs. “Got to blame someone.”

“So it’s going to happen?” Toby says. “You’re going to be able to deliver?”

“I don’t know. Look, can I be honest with you guys?”

“Please,” Steve tells him.

“The policy is only the militias that make it to Washington get the supplies. Otherwise, there’s too much risk they’ll take the resources and do nothing, or get killed on the way to Washington and waste them. It’s supposed to be an incentive.”

“Well, LT,” Toby says, “I’d say you have a pretty strong incentive to get on the horn with your people and convince them to cough up the gear, or they’ll get no help from the NLA and you’ll be hitchhiking to Washington.”

“Assuming I can even convince them, will your people honor your side of the deal?”

The tank commander shrugs and says, “Probably.”

Wendy takes Toby’s hand.

“Enough of this,” she says. “Come on.”

Once they are out of earshot of the Lieutenant, Toby asks, “Why do you want us to go west?”

“You know why. These idiots wanted to split the army.”

Toby shakes his head; he doesn’t believe her, but it doesn’t matter. “Are you going to tell me why you’re pissed at me?”

“I’m not pissed at you.”

“Are you going to tell me why you’re pissed at the world?”

They stop in front of their tent.

“No,” she says, ducking inside.

“Tell me,” he says in the dark.

She whisks her T-shirt up and over her head, steps forward and kisses him. Minutes later, they make love on top of their bedroll. She clings to him fiercely, squeezing him so hard it makes him gasp. Come on, she says. Harder. She wants to forget everything. She wants to fall inside of him. That’s it. They grind against each other in a growing frenzy. Oh, fuck, yes.

He climaxes just after she does and they fall asleep sweaty and panting.

The next morning, she straddles him.

“Sergeant Wilson, it’s reveille. I want you at attention, bud.”

Toby awakes and grins, studying her face, the spill of her blond hair covering her left shoulder and breast. “Christ, you’re beautiful.”

Wendy places her hands against his chest, covering his tattoo of a bear claw, the symbol of his dead regiment.

“Shut up,” she says, maneuvering her hips, and then gasps as he enters her.

She wants him to know that despite whatever she may feel about her life, he is her man. That every time he touches her, she feels safe.

Outside the tent, the fighters cheer as a dull metallic roar fills the store.

Toby and Wendy throw on their clothes and emerge from the tent to see the fighters streaming out of the camp, leaving their frying pans and coffee pots untended, and toward the parking lot, where a massive Chinook aircraft lands in the light of the morning sun.

Anne

As the sun pales the eastern sky, Anne steps outside the hangar doors and inhales the stench of wet decay. Trimble Airport features a forty-five-hundred-foot runway, now blanketed with fallen leaves and branches, as well as landing facilities and fueling, maintenance and other services for a variety of aircraft. Private operators here once ran aerial tours, commuter flights to the big cities in the region like Cleveland and Pittsburgh, and weekend jaunts to private cabins around Tappan and Piedmont Lakes. Now the planes and helicopters are gone, the fueling station drained and idle, the facilities falling into rust and ruin, the ground covered in garbage and debris swept here by the storm. The world is starting to look more apocalyptic every day, she muses. Everything is falling apart. She finds it sad nobody will clean up the mess. Anne has always been a bit of a neat freak.

The others huddle around the fire, staring at the flames in a daze. Todd tosses in one branch at a time and watches the sparks flutter into the air. Marcus gets the coffee boiling and calls to Anne, telling her it’s time to talk about what they are going to do next.

She accepts the coffee and sips it, savoring its rich taste and trying to commit it to memory. She knows it is the last of their supply and that it will be hard to get more. Soon, she believes, people will eat only what they can grow locally, behind walls topped with barbed wire. She has gotten used to living out of an old backpack and does not really care what she eats, as long as it gives her the calories and energy she needs to survive another day. But she will miss coffee.

Its loss reminds her of the loss of so many people at Camp Defiance, which reminds her of the loss of her husband and children. My good Peter. My big, grownup boy, so brave, just like his daddy. She closes her eyes and sees a bloody baby tooth resting on the mantle of a fireplace in a dark suburban living room while a bright TV blasts the Emergency Alert System signal. Her hand flickers around the scars on her cheek, feeling the damaged skin.

Anne suppresses her feelings until they boil back up as rage. Rage, she can use.

♦

She sets out a cloth, makes sure her pistols are unloaded, and field strips them for cleaning: frame, rod and spring assembly, barrel, slide. Her Springfield nine-millimeters don’t have the stopping power of her sniper rifle, an old military-issue M21 with telescopic sight. They are light and have little recoil, however, and with nineteen bullets in the magazine and one in the firing chamber, she can punch holes in any Infected that get too close with a fair degree of accuracy.

“We need to figure things out,” Marcus says, gazing at the fire as he feeds it another branch. “Unless someone has a better idea, I think we have two choices. We can either go to Camp Nightingale, or stay here until things cool down, and then backtrack to Defiance.”

“Why Defiance?” says Gary, his arm around Jean. “They’re all dead or Infected.”

“There’s a huge amount of food and equipment just sitting there now.”

“Sounds dangerous,” Evan says. He is a small, wiry man who has survived for so long because, like Ethan Bell, he is able to think several moves ahead; that is why Anne chose him for the team. In the time before, he was an electrical engineer.

“The Infected will migrate,” Marcus points out. “They’ll leave a giant stockpile of gear we can use. We could pick up enough supplies to keep us going for months. If we grab another decent vehicle, even longer.”

“That’s right,” Evan counters. “There are possibly a hundred thousand Infected, and they’ll be migrating everywhere. And all those dead bodies are going to attract monsters looking for an easy meal.”

Marcus glances at Anne to gauge her reaction, but she ignores him, dipping her bore brush into her bottle of solvent and running it through the barrel with the cleaning rod.

Normally, she and Marcus act as a team. After leaving Sarge’s band of survivors, she found Marcus alone, bloodied and wild and liable to be mistaken for Infected himself, wandering the wasteland killing with bat and axe. The willpower involved in killing another human being, face to face and with a blunt weapon—not to mention the strength and stamina required to survive long bouts of hand to hand combat—amazed her.

He recognized in Anne a kindred spirit, and decided to follow her. But while they share a vision of wiping the Infected from the earth, they are doing it for different reasons. Motivated by hate, Anne kills for revenge against the organism that destroyed her life. Marcus kills to release lost souls enslaved by the virus; he kills for compassion. For him, it is about mercy.

While they have never touched, they are something like lovers. More feelings to suppress. Anne knows Marcus would follow her off a cliff if that is what she wanted.

Today is different, however. Today, Marcus must make up his own mind. Anne is planning her own mission, and it is not up for debate.

“Some of us have people back at Defiance,” Todd says. “I want to go.”

“You know what the odds are,” Evan says. “I’m sorry to say it like that, but we’re making decisions that will affect our survival. Even if she survived, by the time we go back, she will probably be long gone.”

“I have to see,” Todd says.

“And you’re willing to put our lives on the line for that.”

“Yes,” the boy says, glaring back at him.

Anne smiles, pushing a cotton swab through the barrel.

“He doesn’t have to justify his vote,” Marcus says.

“We should be logical about this,” Evan tells them. “The smart move is to go to Nightingale. They’re picky about who gets permanent citizenship, but we know people there who will vouch for us. Once we get in, we could organize a scavenging expedition to Defiance.”

“If they let us in, we’d have no say in what we would do,” Ramona says. Slim and athletic like Anne, she sits cross-legged near the fire, eating Spam from a can. Overweight people are rare these days, at least outside the camps; they either dropped the pounds due to exercise and change in diet, or died out. “They run a tight ship at Nightingale. They have people at the top making all the decisions. They might break up our unit and make us scrub toilets. That’s how it is.”

“We formed this unit so we didn’t have to be citizens of anything,” says Marcus. “We’ve always worked on the outside. I think it’s best if we keep it that way. We’re better off on our own.”

“We might have to rethink some things,” Evan answers. “The fall of the camp changes everything. We need to be flexible. I’d rather scrub toilets than throw my life away.”

Anne pauses in her work to squint at Evan. If you value your life so much, what are you doing here at all?

“What about us?” Gary says, staring at Jean, who gapes wide eyed at the fire, shivering. “Don’t we get a vote?”

“Fine,” Marcus sighs. “That all right with everyone?”

The others murmur their assent. Gary and Jean are refugees, not part of Anne’s Rangers, but the situation is unique, with extreme stakes.

“We need to get to the other camp,” Jean says, struggling with the words, her face and voice straining with effort. Anne studies her briefly, noting the symptoms. “Can’t you see that? Are you blind? We’re out in the open here. We’re all going to die if we don’t get somewhere safe.”

At one time Jean was a beautiful woman, Anne believes, and this is the person Gary sees when he looks at her. Now her hair is disheveled, her eyes puffy and glazed, her mouth twisted into a grimace. They locked themselves inside the Wild Arts Gallery in Hopedale during the first days of the epidemic, and survived there for weeks. People will do whatever it takes to survive. The only problem is they have to live with what they’ve done afterwards.

They do not know Anne found the trash can in the back office, next to the gas grill, filled with human bones.

“So that’s three for Defiance, three for Nightingale,” Marcus says quickly, obviously regretting agreeing to give the refugees a vote. He turns to Anne, who rubs a drop of gun oil across the slide of one of her reassembled Springfields. “Anne, it seems you’re the tie breaker.”

Anne loads the pistol and holsters it.

“Anne?”

“I’m going south.”

The survivors glance at each other. Marcus clears his throat and asks why.

“I’m going to kill Ray Young.”

The Rangers watch her in stunned silence.

“This is the guy you think is some kind of Typhoid Mary,” says Evan.

“He murdered a hundred thirty thousand people,” Anne says. Most of them are not dead, are in fact Infected, but it is all the same to her. “He’s a walking neutron bomb. He needs to die.”

“Even if he did what you believe,” Evan ventures, “what’s the point of revenge?”

“If he goes to Washington, he will infect the soldiers fighting there,” she tells them. “The military is our last hope. If they can’t retake the city, it will be over for us. The war will be over.”

“How would we even find him?” Todd wants to know. “He could be anywhere.”

“He’s heading southeast,” she says. “That was his heading when he left the camp. He knows the Army is in Washington, and might go there thinking someone can help him.”

For the next hundred miles, a single east-west road cuts through the Cherokee Valley, linking up with the highway system just east of Morgantown. They will need to move fast, and hunt and catch him on this stretch of road.

The survivors grow quiet, considering this.

“We don’t know that for sure,” Evan says.

Anne stands, wiping the gun oil on her hands onto her camo pants.

“I’m leaving,” she adds. “You can do whatever you want.”

The survivors shift uncomfortably at this news.

“Anne, we need to talk about this,” Marcus growls.

“No, we don’t,” she answers. “If you’re coming with me, we’re leaving on the bus in fifteen minutes. If none of you are, I’ll leave now and track him on foot on my own.”

Marcus appears hurt, but she cannot help that. “We still need to vote on it.”

“There is no vote. You are either with me, or on your own.”

“But how would we find him?” Evan asks.

“I’m going to follow the Infected. They’re following him.”

Jean groans, burying her face into Gary’s shoulder.

Marcus stares at her, raising his eyebrows. Are you sure?

She returns his stare. This has to be done.

“All right, let’s get ready to move,” Marcus announces, standing. Anne stifles a sigh of relief. She was partly bluffing; she is not sure she could stand to part with him.

“You could at least drop us off at Nightingale,” Gary tells her.

“No,” she answers.

“It’s the moral thing to do.”

“No.” Anne barks a short laugh at this. “It isn’t.”

“You’re crazy,” Jean says.

“The sane thing to do is to save as many lives as possible. More lives than just yours and Gary’s. Wouldn’t you agree? That means killing Ray Young.”

“But we were safe in that art gallery. It was hard and we suffered but we were safe. Now you want to drag us along on some quest. We never would have left if we had known.”

Anne shrugs. Things have changed. She can do nothing about it.

“You don’t understand,” Jean says, her tone pleading. “I’ve lost everything. I can’t do this anymore. You have no idea what I’ve been through.”

The Rangers bristle at this. Shaking their heads in disgust, they move away to collect their gear to load back onto the bus.

“That’s a good point,” Anne tells Jean. “I have no idea what you’ve been through. So tell me about it. What did you do to survive back there in Hopedale?”

“Wait,” Gary says, startled.

“Leave her,” Jean hisses in a sudden ugly rage, glaring at Anne with open hatred. “If she wants to die so bad, let her. Let her go to her Infected. They’ll rip her apart and stuff the pieces in her mouth to shut up her lies.”

The Rangers ignore her, focusing on their tasks. Anne pats one of her holstered pistols pointedly, and then hurries to catch up with Todd.

“I’m glad you’re with me,” she says close to his ear.

He blinks, lost in his thoughts, as if surprised to see her there.

“If I lost you and Marcus,” she adds. It is too painful to finish the thought.

“Anne, I’m not with you,” Todd tells her.

“I thought you were coming,” she says, surprised at how hurt she feels.

“I am. If what you’re saying is true and the Infected are following Ray, then going with you is my best chance of finding Erin if she was infected. But don’t make the mistake of thinking I’m with you. I won’t kill Ray Young. I won’t do it. I won’t even help you do it.”

Anne grunts in surprise. “What is he to you? He caused Erin’s death, you know. I’m sorry to be blunt about it, but it’s the truth.”

“Every couple nights, I have a dream,” the boy says. “I see Paul pulled up into the mouth of one of those tall monsters—the ones that look like giant heads on skinny legs. I see Ethan pushed to the ground and infected. Sarge and Wendy drive the Bradley into the smoke to fight the Demon, and don’t come back. In the end of the dream I’m alone and the juggernaut is coming straight at me. Then all of a sudden I’m not alone. Ray is there and we’re screaming our heads off and shooting at the thing together. My last thought before the monster falls through the broken bridge is I’m happy I won’t die alone.”

She hears the unspoken accusation clearly. You abandoned me. Ray didn’t.

“Infection killed her, not him,” Todd adds. “I don’t hold him responsible.”

“Fair enough,” Anne nods, once again suppressing her feelings. “Just stay out of my way when the time comes.”

Jean

She was starving. Someone was going to have to go out for food, but they were too weak to do it. And Prendergast would not shut the hell up.

They’d been stuck in the art gallery for six days. Instead of sanctuary, it had become a tomb. They were dying by inches, surrounded by Prendergast’s massive, horrible paintings.

The artist himself lay spread eagled at the foot of one these paintings, sweating profusely, his wrinkled black shirt riding up to expose his round white belly.

“My work connects the real and the imaginary,” he said.

“Your work idealizes ideology through literary exposure, and yet real ideology is a hidden force, a political prime mover, not something you can frame and point to,” Jean whispered, laboring to speak clearly. “The paintings juxtapose the real and the imaginary in conflict, not connection.”

“The connection is within the conflict of these opposites,” Prendergast insisted. “My work is fascism expressed as a brand. You can buy it, you can use it, you can throw it away.”

Jean closed her eyes. She did not have the energy to say anything else.

At the other end of the gallery, Gary sat huddled against the wall, hugging his knees and rocking, watching them with narrowed eyes that appeared sunken into his skull.

Getting Ricky Prendergast and Jean Byrd together at the gallery had been his idea. He owned the gallery and considered Prendergast the local boy who made good. The artist’s paintings and their declaration of a stark totalitarianism repulsed and attracted at the same time. Their size enveloped the viewer, threatening his or her individuality, and yet were strangely seductive, promising an existence without thought, whispering, you kind of want this.

Jean was an East Coast art critic who wrote for several important art magazines. Her pen had made a few careers, and broken more than she could count. She and Gary had fallen into bed together after Grady Tallman’s opening (which she later skewered) in New York three years ago. Hearing she was going to be in Akron, he’d convinced her to visit his gallery in Hopedale and review Prendergast’s exhibition at Wild Arts. After the Screaming screwed everything up from air travel to basic utilities, he’d doubted she would show, but she did.

“You’ll love it,” Gary had told her when she’d appeared at his door first thing in the morning. “His paintings are like propaganda for a fantasy regime built on absolutes. They make you want to punch a Nazi in the face. Wow, Jean, I’m so happy you’re here!”

He’d kissed her, laughing, and handed her a mimosa in a champagne flute. He told her how good she looked in her black and white Chanel suit. She sipped her drink, smiling back at him. Gary was strictly small town, but he was extremely cute, and she had always had a soft spot for him.

Jean had toured the gallery, aware of Gary’s eyes on her, and concluded Prendergast’s work stank. His paintings were childish in their assumptions, their one saving grace, in her opinion, being their rich colors and sheer size made them audacious—suggested maybe they weren’t childish after all, but profound, perhaps even threatening.

Gary had sensed her vibe, mistook it for ambivalence, and told her she would really come around once she met the local genius himself.

Prendergast, a giant of a man dressed in a black suit—his height and size squandered on fat, however, making him appear as if he were made of spheres—arrived late, complaining of the ungodly hour. His big, bright grin, framed by dimples and surrounded by a beard, forced you to like him, if only for a moment. He extended his large, sweaty hand, and Jean shook it. They agreed to have breakfast at the cafe around the corner, and discuss her impressions of his work.

As they’d left the building, a policeman shot a woman sprinting, dropping her to the asphalt. The gunshot electrified them. The cop screamed, waving them back inside, as more howling figures appeared. Before Jean knew what was happening, she was back inside the gallery and Gary was pulling down the metal gates to cover the windows.

The police officer’s pistol had cracked several more times as Gary darted back inside and locked the door, his eyes bulging and his chest heaving, babbling about crazy people in the street. Whatever he’d seen outside, it had terrified him.

Gary did not have a radio or television in the gallery, but they’d had their cell phones, and both Prendergast and Jean had iPad computers. They spent the day surfing and sharing information. They finished the orange juice and champagne, getting drunk and treating the whole thing as an adventure. In a few days, the government would resolve the crisis, they believed, and then they would have a great story to tell when it was over.

Jean had slept on the floor curled into a ball, using her purse as a pillow, and woke up starving in the middle of the night. She hadn’t eaten all day, and she felt weak and nauseous. After an hour of pressing her fist against her stomach to try to quell the growls and pangs of hunger, she fell back asleep.

The next day, the street belonged to the crazies, cutting them off from the outside world. Things appeared to be getting worse by the hour. They felt lightheaded and jittery. Their blood sugar levels were crashing. The room stank of bad breath. They drank as much water as they could, and spent hours checking the Internet and talking through their options, each of which led back to staying put inside the gallery doing nothing. As the day wore on, Jean became unable to focus on what she was reading. All she could think about was food. Every time they opened the door, screaming maniacs charged them. They were trapped. For hours, they sat in a fearful silence.

“Maybe we could talk about your impressions of my work,” Prendergast had offered.

Jean had actually appreciated the request. Anything to pass the time.

“I don’t like your paintings,” she’d said. In fact, she was terrified she was going to die surrounded by them, and Prendergast’s Iron Eagle, an art deco portrait of an angry stylized war bird surrounded by light beams, would be the last thing she saw. “Sorry, Ricky, but I don’t.”

That was five days ago, before the power went out, before they began to die.

“My work is a complete rejection of post modernism, offering one truth,” Prendergast said.

They had argued for most of that time, but now Jean just moaned. Her body had burned through what little fat remained on her rail thin body, and had begun eating itself to recover proteins it needed to keep her heart and brain and nervous system functioning.

She could not believe how empty she felt. She’d once thought art could change the world. Now thoughts of food occupied every horizon of thought, left room for nothing else. Everything important in her life before the epidemic now struck her as pointless next to food.

“One truth,” Prendergast repeated, “but one that is painful to look at.”

Jean opened her mouth. Her tongue felt like it was covered in moss. Her breath smelled sour.

“Okay,” she whispered. “I like them. I like your paintings. I will write a good review.”

Prendergast lay silent, and then said, “Thank you.”

For what, the capitulation or the argument that took his mind off his contracting stomach, she wasn’t sure. In the ensuring silence, she fell into darkness.

When she awoke, Gary and Prendergast were gone and the gallery smelled like burning meat, overwhelming the open sewer shit smell emanating from the bathroom with its dead plumbing. Her salivary glands squirted, flooding her mouth, and she wondered if this were a mirage—a bitter manifestation of her starvation.

“Gary,” she hissed. If this was a sign of the end, she didn’t want to go alone. She gathered her strength and screamed, “Gary, please!”

He emerged from his office smiling and knelt on the floor next to her. She had a hard time seeing him; her vision had gone blurry.

He unclenched his fist and showed her a sliver of steak cupped in his palm.

“Eat,” he said.

Jean swiped the warm meat from his hand and jammed it into her mouth, swallowing it almost whole. It was amazing. Nothing she’d ever eaten, in fact, had ever tasted so good. It had tasted like God. She licked her fingers and cried.

“I have more food, but you have to go slow,” Gary told her. “I know how hungry you are, but you have to take it slow, okay?”

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you.”

“I chose you,” he said enigmatically. He smelled like smoke.

“How did you get it?”

“After you fell asleep, I went outside to check things out. The crazy people were gone. So Prendergast and I scavenged around the neighborhood and found a butcher shop with some meat in a cooler that was still good for eating. I dug the hibachi grill out of storage; we used to cook shrimp out back for parties. I got it set up in my office. I’m trying to vent the smoke out the window.”

Jean felt alarmed Prendergast was eating it all. “Where is he?”

Gary’s smile turned into a hard line. “Ricky didn’t make it, Jean. We weren’t alone out there. Some of those people were around.”

“I’m sorry,” she told him. “I know he was your friend.” Faced with the prospect of survival, she now regretted compromising her artistic principles by conceding the argument and saying she liked his work.

“Yes, he was. Thanks for that. Listen, the steaks are going to burn. I’ll be back in a bit. You stay here, okay? Don’t move. I’ll bring you more food in just a minute.”

Jean lay on the floor for some time breathing in the odors of roasting meat and moaning with need. Wisps of barbecue smoke drifted in the air like spirits. Burned, medium rare, raw—she didn’t care, as long as she got to eat it. Now she started to panic Gary was going to eat it all, leaving her with nothing. He didn’t understand; she had to eat. She had to eat now.

She raised herself to her knees, gasping for breath and feeling dizzy, and gained her feet. The floor looked very far away. Then she started walking toward the office, her mouth filling with saliva again.

Jean opened the door, squinting to see better, and gasped.

Gary stood at the barbecue shrouded in cooking smoke, his mouth open in surprise. The room was dim and smoky, but she could see, plain as day, a plate of steaming brown steaks lying on a silver serving tray, the one he used to serve champagne to guests for small showings to important buyers. Two champagne flutes stood filled with water.

He had scavenged a feast for her. This food would bring her back to life.

For a moment, she thought she’d seen something else, something evil and impossible, a trick of the gloomy daylight filtering through the smoke. She thought she’d seen a chopped up carcass hanging from hooks used to mount large and heavy artworks. It’d looked like the body of a naked obese man hung upside down with his head, feet and hands cut off, gutted and bled out, the blood and organs dumped into a large plastic garbage can beneath the body.

Then she blinked, and it was gone.

“You weren’t supposed to see this,” Gary shouted, his voice edged with panic.

“It’s beautiful,” she said, leaning against the doorframe. She couldn’t take her eyes off the steaks. “It’s so beautiful.”

That night, Gary crawled to where she lay, hiked up her Chanel skirt and entered her. Jean put her arms around him, smacking her lips and thinking about her next meal. He had little energy; it was over fast. Afterwards, while they slept huddled on the floor, the carcass invaded her dreams. The pale carcass of a man, chopped and gutted, mounted on the wall like slaughtered cattle. Like an obscene piece of art, provocative and visceral.

Prendergast would have loved it.

Dr. Price

Travis paces his small cell and pushes at the walls in claustrophobic despair, convinced they are closing in a fraction of a millimeter at a time. He wonders if the cell is properly ventilated until he finds himself on all fours, sucking on air and dust trickling in from under the door. Picturing the room imploding and entombing him in solid rock is actually the least upsetting thing on his mind right now. He believes any minute, someone is going to come and make him disappear down the garbage shaft. In his mind’s eye it is Fielding who comes, grinning and wielding a big shiny knife. Sorry, Doc, orders are orders.

Travis has a bucket for his waste and a mattress mounted on the wall, but otherwise the room is blank. He has no idea how long he has been stuck here; assuming they are feeding him three meals per day, then he has been in this cell for four days. It is something of a miracle he survived this long.

Not long ago, he witnessed an actual coup d’état. Soldiers handcuffed the President of the United States and dragged him shouting from the room. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs calmly eyed the Cabinet and asked if anyone knew where the Vice President was. It was the VP’s lucky day; he was going to be President. Then someone noticed Travis cowering in the corner.

The funny thing is Travis happens to agree with General McGregor. Detonating nuclear weapons in American cities is a desperate measure that would accomplish little. In fact, it’d be like stabbing yourself in the brain with a knitting needle to get rid of a bad headache. In Travis’s opinion, Donald McGregor is even a hero of sorts; he stopped a madman. But whether Travis agrees or not with the men who staged the coup does not matter. What happened did not happen, and that means anyone who knows the truth is a bizarre anomaly that must be corrected, most likely with a bullet in the head.

Sadly, Travis even agrees with the rationale behind his own murder. Outside Special Facility, Wildfire is rapidly paring the Federal government down to the military. Only the military has the command structure and resources to continue functioning on a large scale. The American people do not want the military to run the country, however. They will only follow the President, based on illusions of tradition, leadership, unity. Even most of the military would not obey McGregor’s junta if it openly declared itself in charge. So the President has a “heart attack” and is lionized as a martyr, the Vice President is sworn in, the bombing plan is axed, and everyone tells the same story for the good of the nation.

Through simple bad timing, Travis was given a peek behind the curtain and saw the man working the controls. What he knows could shatter the illusion of civilian control of the military, and with it, unity and loyalty to the government. And for that, he must be eliminated.

The irony of his situation almost makes him laugh. Despite his claustrophobic terrors, deep down he believed he was in the safest place in the country. Then again, he also thought the White House was safe, until it wasn’t.

Boots clomp in the corridor, growing in volume. Instead of a tray of food being thrust through the slot, the lock rattles. Someone is coming in.

Travis realizes how little he will be missed after he is gone. He has no wife or children, no other family, no real friends, not even a hobby. A quiet academic at the University of Chicago, he wrote a paper about Iran’s potential nuclear ambitions that found favor with hawks in the Walker Administration. After Walker won his second term, his people tapped Travis to join the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Travis had always hoped his study of nonproliferation would earn him some type of notoriety, but he never expected it would lead to a chain of events culminating in his execution by a junta now controlling what’s left of the government.

All the knowledge he gained, leading to nothing. What has he done? Faced with the prospect of his death, he feels like he never lived. Is his life worth so much more than the woman the Secret Serviceman threw out of the helicopter?

His one regret, watching her be left behind to die, will go to the grave with him. It was the one time in his life he ever felt real empathy for another human being.

The door groans open, letting in a draft of air. Travis blinks at the figure dressed in black.

“Time to pay the bill, Doc.”

Just as he feared, it is Fielding.

♦

Travis submits to handcuffs, his face burning with shame. Fielding grins; the son of a bitch is enjoying this. Travis braces for a lecture about karma, but it never comes. Instead, Fielding orders him to walk down the corridor. As he walks, Travis fantasizes about turning and knocking his captor unconscious, and then escaping to the surface, or making a brilliant case for keeping him alive, after which Fielding puts his own life on the line to help him escape the General’s justice.

Any resistance would be a futile gesture with a man like Fielding, however, who would likely respond by beating him senseless and frogmarching him to his execution. Head bowed, Travis keeps moving, fuming at his lack of options.

“Stop here, Doc.”

Fielding slides his gloved hand under Travis’s armpit and pulls him toward a metal door, which he opens with a mocking gesture of welcome.

Under the glare of fluorescent lights, three broad-shouldered military officers in camouflage fatigues sit behind a desk, their backs ramrod straight. Their gray-flecked crew cuts, stern white faces and astronaut builds make them all look the same.

Fielding lifts Travis’s shoulder again, forcing him to walk on his toes to a simple steel chair facing the desk. Travis notices the black stains on the concrete floor under the chair and stifles a yelp of panic. Fielding shoves him into it and remains standing somewhere behind him.

The officer in the center places his elbows on the desktop and rubs his leathery hands together before clapping once to call the meeting to order.

“Dr. Price, I am Colonel Slater. This is Major McMahon, and this is Major Buckner. We have asked you to come here today because the General thinks you’re a person of interest. So they tell me you’re a scientist. I’m curious. Tell me, Dr. Price: What do you think of our current situation?”

Travis blinks. “You mean—?”

“I mean in the country.”

Travis studies the man’s face briefly, searching for clues about what he wants to hear for an answer, but gives up. The soldier’s rigid expression tells him nothing.

“I think we have less than a year before the winter finishes us or them.”

Slater regards each of the men next to him in turn before returning his hard gaze to Travis. “See? I told you he was smart. Please elaborate, Dr. Price.”

“We’re putting everything into winning Washington, but it’s a morale boost at best, not something we need to fight a war,” Travis mutters, trying to muster the energy to speak. “We should retrench in regions that produce things we need, such as the grain belt. We should draft people to fight instead of herding them into refugee camps. We should put those who cannot fight to work rebuilding industries we shipped overseas years ago. We need to be able to make everything ourselves now, weapons and ammunition in particular, and we need to do it fast. All fiat currency is worth nothing. Goods are becoming scarce. The government is going to have to start paying in room and board and some type of new money based on a gold standard, and it might have to employ almost everyone in the country for a few years. But even if we did all of this, and did it now, we cannot sustain even what little we have saved. When the winter comes, we will suffer another mass die off. Our one hope is it will be harsher for the Infected so we have a fighting chance in the spring. We’re so occupied with getting things normal again we fail to realize that no matter what happens, Infection has already permanently changed the world.”

He stops talking, hoping at least something he said was pleasing to this man who holds his life in his fist. The officers chew on his speech.

“So you think our current strategy pretty much sucks,” Slater says.

“I did not use that word,” Travis says. “And I may not have all of the facts.”

The officer laughs. “It’s even worse than you know. There were actually people in the government who did not want the military to be recalled. They were worried about our bases overseas. It’s easier to leave, they said, than to ever return.”

Travis realizes he is expected to say something. “I don’t think the military strategy ultimately matters.”

Slater’s leans forward. “Why do you say that?”

“Ultimately, bullets cannot win this fight, only science can.”

“Ah, right. The elusive cure, the Holy Grail.”

“Or a vaccine, or perhaps even a weapon.”

Slater smiles grimly at that. “Dr. Price, I’d like to show you something.”

The door opens; a soldier pushes a projector into the room on a wheeled cart. Crouching, the man taps a few keys on a laptop, which produces a grainy video image on the wall showing a compound filled with soldiers and workers in hazmat suits. Men load body bags onto a truck while others unload salvaged panes of glass from another truck. Another figure in a hazmat suit feeds clothes from a garbage bag into a fire burning in a metal drum. Travis does not know who these people are or where they are other than they are somewhere on the surface.

The video has no sound. The room is quiet except for one of the officers clearing his throat. Travis can hear Fielding, still standing behind him, breathe through his nose.

Sensing this is some type of test, Travis studies the image intently. He blinks in surprise; a man has collapsed and other figures race across the compound to see what’s wrong. Half of them never make it, falling as they run. All around the compound, people topple to the ground and lie twitching. Travis recoils, making his chair squeak loudly; it is like the Screaming. The survivors gesture at each other. One of the soldiers is shooting the victims in the head. Others gather around, waving at him to stop, unaware the rest of the fallen are returning to their feet.

“This is FEMA 41,” Slater says, startling him. “A refugee camp in southern Ohio, yesterday morning, at about oh-six-twenty.”

The video switches to a view of people scrambling around a lot filled with campers and trailers. People have been living here for some time; the space in front of each camper is cluttered with tarps and coolers and other junk laid out like a never-ending yard sale. Two of the figures tackle a third and fall into a fire pit.

“They never had a chance,” Slater adds.

“So it would appear,” Travis mutters. The violence is shocking; he swallows hard to keep from throwing up.

The video changes again, showing a mob of Infected surging over a retreating knot of police firing at them with shotguns. The bottom of a helicopter comes into view. Dozens of figures fly apart, filling the air with body parts. The image shakes. Smoke obscures the camera’s eye just before the picture cracks and turns to electronic snow.

This is not satellite imagery, Travis realizes. They had cameras at the camp.

“I think Dr. Price gets the idea. Corporal, skip to the next part.”

“Sir,” the soldier says, tapping keys.

The video changes to a view of an empty field cut by an old road. A vehicle lies on its side in the distance. A man enters the image, staggering across the mud while glancing over his shoulder repeatedly. Seconds later, he exits the image on the right.

“This is right outside the eastern gate,” Slater tells him. “Now wait for it.”

Travis watches a trickle of people wander onto the scene in the same direction as the running man. The trickle becomes a flood. From their jerky movements and the way they stumble into each other, Travis can tell they are infected. The image fills with a massive crowd following the running man. Hundreds, then thousands.

“In every major camp in the country where we sent troops, we set up a sophisticated video surveillance system feeding data to local commanders and analysis teams here at Special Facility,” Slater explains. “Our commanders use this data for rapid detection and response to outbreaks and riots. The cameras on the wall teach us how to improve camp defenses. In this case, it gave us a blueprint for how we lost more than a hundred thousand people to Wildfire.”

“That man in the compound, the first who fell,” Travis says. “Was he the index case?”

“You mean was he the first person in the camp who showed symptoms of Wildfire?”

“Yes,” Travis says. “The primary case. Victim zero.”

“He’s the first one who showed symptoms, that’s right,” Slater tells him. “But not the first who caught the bug.”

“Are you suggesting an Infected entered the camp who was asymptomatic?”

“Like a Typhoid Mary, you mean?”

“Yes. A carrier.”

“The analysis team narrowed it down to a single uniform mike—an unidentified male. This man entered the camp a short time before Wildfire appeared. And he was the last to leave. That was him we just saw.”

Travis stands, unable to contain his excitement. “But how? How did he spread it to so many people so fast?” Other questions race through his mind: Why didn’t the Infected attack him? Why are they following him?

He feels Fielding’s hand on his shoulder, pushing him back into his chair.

Slater shrugs. “We don’t know. The important thing right now is to evaluate him for response. We know he is a threat. What we want to gauge is his potential value as an asset.”

“If that man is a carrier,” Travis says, “he may carry a pure strain of the Wildfire Agent, which offers amazing research opportunities.”

“You see, Dr. Price, that’s just the thing we’re curious about,” Slater tells him. “From where we sit, we can’t tell if he represents a cure, or whether he’s a superweapon created by the virus.”

The corporal brings up another image. Glowing blotches of red sprawl across a black landscape, like diseased cells under a microscope. Travis realizes he is looking at a thermal image of a large area of ground, taken from the air. The blotches are large crowds.

“As you can see,” the Colonel continues, “the uniform mike has built an army for himself. They were all moving southeast as of an hour ago, when they stopped and surrounded the farmhouse you see at the center.”

“Does he know what he is?” Travis asks.

“We don’t know anything about his range of free will. He might be a mindless agent of Wildfire, some poor guy who can’t understand why everyone he meets falls down and turns into a monster, or something in between.”

“We need to study him. This man’s blood. . .”

Slater points at the thermal image and whistles, imitating a falling artillery round.“Boom,” he says.

“. . . can end Wildfire,” Travis finishes awkwardly, confused.

“The Chiefs want to drop some bombs and put an immediate end to the threat. That’s the smart move, don’t you think?”

“You—you can’t be serious!”

“I’m dead serious. He’s a little over two hundred miles from Washington, Dr. Price. If we do nothing and he shows up with a hundred thousand Infected tagging along, we’ll lose everything. Even if he shows up without them, he could infect our troops.”

“You don’t know where he’s going to go.”

“Doesn’t matter. The region is filled with refugee camps. The man’s a threat to us wherever he goes.”

“I know it’s easy to see this man as a threat—”

“A threat?” Slater laughs. “He’s a walking, talking biological superweapon, Dr. Price. Less than a day’s drive from our front lines.”

“Colonel. Sir. You have to listen to me. As far as we know, this man is a unique mutation of Wildfire. He’s the chance we’ve been waiting for.”

“What kind of chance are we talking about?”

“To beat Wildfire, we need to characterize it,” Travis explains. “To characterize it, we need to identify it. We haven’t been able to do that yet. This man’s blood might be the key to a vaccine or even a cure.”

“What about a weapon? A virus to kill the virus and anyone or anything that’s got it?”

Travis considers this, and nods. “Yes. That’s possible as well. A weapon, or maybe a repellent.”

“You’re sure, then, he’s got such a thing in his blood? You’re one hundred percent positive he could produce material we need to win?”

“Of course not,” Travis says.

“Well, see, that means all you’ve got is a theory.”

“A hypothesis, yes. If he does carry a pure sample, though, it could end all this.”

“We’re not even sure we can get him,” Slater tells him. “Since we don’t know how he spreads Wildfire, will a standard MOPP suit be enough to keep someone from catching the bug from him? Not to mention how we would separate him from a hundred thousand crazies.”

“It’s worth the risk,” Travis says.

“For who?”

“You could send a—what do you call it, a search and destroy. . .”

“Snatch and grab?”

“Right,” Travis nods. “A snatch and grab team. Special Forces. Navy SEALS.”

Slater says, “Dr. Price, I hope you’re listening to me carefully. There’s no way I would risk our best men on your shit theory.”

“Well,” Travis says, stunned.

“Do you play poker, Dr. Price?”

“No, I don’t.” He enjoys cards, but not the social aspect of most card games.

“The General plays. Damn good, too. He’s a man who likes to hedge his bets. That means if there’s an even tiny chance you’re right, he will want to give it a shot. If he does, we’ll pull a squad or two off the line and drop them between Typhoid Jody and Washington. It will be their job to find this guy, grab him and bring him to an isolation facility.”

“Perfect,” Travis says, happy to see any effort made. “Since you’ve identified the carrier, do you have any records on him? Anything would help.”

“We have no idea who he is.”

“But you called him Jody.”

Slater laughs, and even the stony-faced officers flanking him crack smiles. “Jody does not actually exist, Dr. Price. It’s a nickname for the Infected going around. More military speak.” He chuckles again. “Let’s talk about why you’re here. If the General decides to send some of our people, you will go with them as mission science adviser.”

“Me? I’m not a soldier. I don’t know how to fight the Infected.”

“Who does? But millions are somehow managing. Now it’s your turn to step up.”

“But you’ll need me here to run the tests after we pick him up,” Travis pleads. “You’re not being very logical about this.”

“I heard you lost your lunch in front of the President of the United States when he asked you what was going to happen after he nuked one of our own cities,” Slater says. “I almost admire you for that. It might have been the only sane thing to do. But it tells me something about you. It tells me you’re a weak sister. You want to see the epidemic put to an end but only if you don’t have to get hurt doing it. So let me put my offer to you another way, Dr. Price: Now would be a very good time to make yourself indispensable to the war effort. Do or die, so to speak.”

Travis nods dully. He’d forgotten his knowledge of the coup makes him a liability to the new regime. “I understand.”

“You’ll have forty-eight hours to find the carrier,” Slater informs him. “Captain Fielding will go with you. Bring him alive, bring him dead, bring his left foot—I don’t care what, as long as you get what you need. If at any point it appears to the Captain you will fail, we will drop every bomb we’ve got on Typhoid Jody and his friends, and the Captain will tie up any final loose ends in the field. Do I need to explain what that means?”

“No,” Travis mutters.

“Don’t look so sad about it, Dr. Price. On the bright side, if you succeed, you will get more resources than you dreamed possible. If your theory is right—shit, Congress will probably award you the Medal of Honor. People will name their babies after you. You’ll never pay taxes again as long as you live. I’ll give you a big, fat kiss myself.”

The officers smile again, like sharks.

“How does that sound to you, Dr. Price?” the Colonel asks. “Does its logic appeal?”

“It’s a great opportunity,” Travis says, feeling sick. “Thank you.”

“See? I told you. Smart guy.”

Travis shudders as he realizes he is about to be released from his imaginary terrors down here in this underground prison and face the very real terrors ravaging the surface. He feels Fielding’s hand slip under his armpit, lifting him from his chair and propelling him toward the door.

I’m still alive. They’re not going to shoot me, at least not right away. I have a chance to win this. I have a chance to survive.

“We’ll let you know what the General decides,” Slater calls after him.

Wendy

The Bradley hums along the road, its crew sweating at their stations and its squad of four shooters raggedly singing a rap song popular when the world ended. Wendy looks at the optical display, scanning repeatedly for targets, chewing on a piece of nicotine gum and blinking at the head rush. She is addicted to the gum, not the nicotine. Her eyes sweep the indicator lights, confirming the vehicle’s big guns are ready to party. Then she glances at the man sitting next to her and smiles like a school girl.

I love you.

She says out loud: “It’s like an oven in here today and I have to pee.”

Toby grunts. “I’ll turn up the air conditioning.”

She laughs. “Now there’s an idea. We spent over a million bucks on each of these things, and nobody thought it might be a good idea to put in some air conditioning? Come on, guy.”

They are in high spirits after the supply drop. They now have a tuned-up engine, full tank of diesel with a good amount of spare fuel, functioning weapons systems and enough ammunition to obliterate anything in their path.

Toby produces a protective mask provided for crew use in the event of a nuclear, biological or chemical attack. A plastic hose dangles from its filter.

“Observe,” he tells her. “This hose connects the mask to an air purifier that has a fan.”

“I’m not peeing into that tube.”

Toby grins. “I have a better idea.”

He removes the hose from the mask and tucks a length of it down the front of her shirt.

“Oh my,” she says.

“Now check this out.”

The commander flips a switch, forcing air across her chest, drying the sweat pooled between her breasts.

“Now we’re talking,” she says. “Welcome to civilization.”

Steve chimes in over the radio: Did you show her the hillbilly AC, Sarge?

Toby laughs. “You’re in the Army now, Wendy. In the Army, we make do, right Steve?”

“That’s all well and good, you guys,” she says, “but I still have to pee.”

♦

An hour later, the amored vehicle idles in front of a red brick school building. The clerestory windows installed along the roofline of the gym, dirty and glinting in the sun, are spray painted with giant, bleeding red capitals: PLEASE HELP US. Toby studies it on his optical relay, rubbing his stubbled chin and scowling. Wendy knows he does not like the risk, but this is the mission; they separated from the convoy this morning to strike northwest, back toward Camp Defiance, and search for survivors. She closes her eyes and listens to the beating heart of the engine, which sends tiny vibrations tingling along the surface of her skin.

“I guess we’d better check it out,” Toby says.

“I’ll go too,” Wendy tells him, pulling off her headset.

“I guess we’re all going, then.”

They agreed they would stay together no matter what. It is an incredible thing to realize another human cannot live without you. She never felt that way before. Understanding it as she does now, Wendy wonders how so many people survived the first days of the epidemic. The disease took the ones you loved, and then put on their face, demanding you kill them or die yourself. You have seconds to make this decision.: How would you choose?

The threat of this choice is neverending. It can be forced on you at any time. It is the plague’s greatest weapon.

They follow the squad out the back of the Bradley and fan out. After a few minutes of squatting in the heat, Wendy realizes they are looking at her.

“It’s your show,” she tells them, shaking her head. “I’m just tagging along.”

She remembers driving in the back of the Bradley during the first days of the epidemic with Paul, Ethan, Todd and Anne, warring with Anne for leadership of the gang. She was a police officer, and felt it was her responsibility to take care of the others.

Later, marching down a desolate highway in a blizzard of ash falling from the fires of Pittsburgh, she realized she was not a cop anymore. Her precinct was gone, and so was her city with its courts and jails and laws. She had no responsibility to anyone except a detective named Dave Carver, the man who saved her life when the Infected overran her precinct, and that responsibility did not require her to help others, only survive.

Charlie Noel nods and whistles at his shooters, who stand as one and follow, rifles leveled. They look and act like professional warriors, but just a few months ago, Charlie was a traffic cop, Stu Guthrie a bartender, Sharon Yang a paramedic and Ana Cruz an architect. Infection has gone on for so long it is the past that now seems like a dream, not the nightmarish present.

They briefly inspect a pile of bodies rotting away in the hot sun in front of one of the gym doors, partly open and covered in scratch marks and blood splatter. The stench is powerful. They raise handkerchiefs, soaked with cologne, to cover the bottoms of their faces.

“Where are you going?” Toby asks her.

Wendy squats by some nearby shrubs and urinates.

“Told you I had to go,” she grins.

On the road, privacy is a dangerous luxury. If you want to be alone, you will eventually die alone.

Stepping over the bodies, Noel shoves at the door. “There’s something blocking it.” He shoves again and a pile of furniture, stacked behind the door to block it, comes crashing down.

Steve sighs and blows air from his cheeks.

“Let’s do this quick,” Wendy says, gnawing her gum.

“More bodies here,” Noel says, disappearing inside. “Watch your step.”

Wendy follows the others into the gym, ignoring the corpses’ splayed hands brushing against her legs, and gasps at the assault of heat and smell. Their boots send empty shell casings clattering across the floor.

The flashlights converge on the bodies of four men and women, three dressed in casual clothes and one in a police uniform. All shot in the head and partially eaten. Wendy stoops and collects the cop’s badge, pocketing it. Her eleventh, counting her own.

Noel signals his shooters to fan out and clear the room. They call from the dark corners: All clear. No Infected here.

Wendy approaches the other side of the gym, followed by Toby and Steve. The play of their flashlights reveals more giant red bleeding capitals painted on the wall:

GOD FORGIVE US WE TRIED TO SAVE THEM

At the base of the wall, twenty small children lie in a row, all dead from gunshot wounds.

♦

From what Wendy can see, the children were lined up facing the wall and executed. Sickened by the sight, they turn off their flashlights and stand in the dark.

“Jesus,” Noel says, catching up. “Who would do such a thing to them?”

“They did it to themselves,” Toby answers.

“You mean the cop? But why?”

“They were under siege,” Wendy murmurs. “During the first day of the epidemic. Some of the schools had just reopened after the Screaming, remember? They barricaded themselves in with these kids.”

“The Infected found out they were in here and started to force their way through the outside door,” Steve chimes in. “There must have been a lot of them. Too many to keep out. Too many to fight. The Infected must have been in the school too. These people were trapped.”

“The cop held them off until it seemed hopeless, then he shot the kids so they wouldn’t be eaten, while the teachers held the doors closed,” Toby says. “It was a mercy killing.”

“Probably made a game of it,” Wendy adds. “Turn around and close your eyes and don’t open them no matter how loud the pistol shot next to you.”

“And then he killed the teachers and himself,” Toby finishes. “Right at the door so the Infected would eat them and spare the children from even that.”

“It’s horrible,” Wendy says.

“I don’t want the others to see this,” Noel says, his voice cracking.

“Everyone out,” Toby calls across the gym. “Back to the rig. Come on, let’s go.”

Guthrie, Yang and Cruz take the hint and file out blinking into the harsh sunlight. They are not curious to see what the others saw. They have already seen their share of bad things.

“My kids,” Noel says. He does not finish the sentence. He sobs once, wipes his eyes roughly, and turns to follow the others.

“There’s nothing we can do here,” Toby says. “Might as well get back on the road.”

“Hey, one’s alive!” Noel says.

Wendy puts her hand against his chest. “None of them are alive, Charlie. They’re all dead.”

“I saw one moving!” He aims his flashlight, but she steps in front of him, blocking his view.

“You saw a trick of the light. That’s it.”

“Just let me check. I need to be sure.”

“No. Go back to the rig. You don’t want to see a dead girl.”

“But you might be wrong,” Noel says, his eyes wild. He turns to Steve, his voice pleading. “I saw her move. I need to make sure she’s not still alive.”

“I’ll check,” Steve says. He turns on his flashlight, and just as quickly turns it off. “Wendy’s right, Charlie. The girl is dead. I’m sorry, man. Come on, I’ll go with you.”

Wendy listens to their footsteps echoing across the empty spaces. She turns to the body of the girl in the pink dress and watches her little face wink and nod in the dark. She knows the face is not moving.

The maggots are. Wendy can hear them rustling.

When she is sure Steve and Noel are gone, she covers her face with her hands and weeps.

♦

Toby wraps his arms around her, but it is not enough this time.

There is nothing here for them except death. They should get back to the Bradley, but Wendy lingers, staring at the blackened bodies of the children and wondering who they were before they were killed and left to rot here in this oversized tomb.

“Are you okay?” Toby whispers, but she does not respond.

Wiping her eyes, she wonders what kind of lives they might have had if they hadn’t died. If the school hadn’t reopened. If they hadn’t come to school that day. If they’d gone to a different school. If Infection had never happened.

So much life needlessly destroyed, like ants crushed by a giant’s foot.

Will I ever have children? she wonders. If I did, would they survive longer than these kids?

Would I one day be forced to tell them to face a wall with a gun in my hand?

“We should go,” Toby says.

I’m done with this fucking war. I mean it this time. I want out.

Shrugging out of his embrace, Wendy points to the corpses.

“Toby, look at this.”

“It’s nothing we haven’t seen before.”

“I want you to look at it,” she says. “Really look.”

“Wendy, please.”

“Look.”

“I don’t want to!” he snaps, then sighs. “Come on, Wendy, what’s the point? Do you want me to say the world is shit? Yes, it’s shit. I used to see things like this in Afghanistan even before Infection. It doesn’t matter. This is the world now. It’s filled with fucking dead kids.”

Wendy shakes her head. “I don’t want to live in it anymore.”

His eyes widen. “Don’t talk like that. Don’t you ever talk like that.”

“You’re worried about me killing myself? If we stay in this world, we’ll die soon anyway. It’ll catch up to us. Look at what happened to Camp Defiance. Staying here is suicide.”

“It’s the only world we’ve got.” His tone is pleading now. “I don’t understand. What else is there? We’re alive today. What else could we hope for?”

“If we stay in the NLA, one day the Bradley will break down or we won’t be able to find gas, and we’ll end up in one of those Technicals. Those guys die like flies. Who knows how long we’d last?”

“They aren’t as good as us. We’ve made it this far, haven’t we?”

“Training and skill don’t mean anything on a long enough timeline. Eventually we would get unlucky, and then we would die or become infected. It’s not a forgiving game.”

“All right,” he agrees. “You want to leave the NLA. And go where?”

“The fall of Camp Defiance tells us the refugee camps aren’t safe anymore.”

“Been there, done that in any case,” Toby snorts. “Both of us have. No, thank you.”

“Well, if that’s the world, then we make a new world,” Wendy tells him. “I’ve been thinking about it. We could round up some survivors with skills we need, drive down south where it’s warm all year around, and find a nice island for ourselves.”

Toby sighs as he finally understands what she wants. “You know I’d like nothing more than to do just that, babe,” he says. They are whispering now, as if afraid to wake the sleeping dead. “But the fight is here. We’re taking it back. We’re winning, making real progress. Don’t you feel it? So many towns have been cleared.”

“Come on, Toby. We’re barely scratching the surface. The fight never ends. It will never be over. Look what happened to Paul and Ethan. They died on that bridge to save the camp, and the whole camp fell a few weeks later. None of it means anything. Eventually, the bug is going to win.”

“You’re asking me to abandon my duty to my country. To the children who are still alive.”

“Just as I abandoned my oath to the public,” she tells him. “To protect and to serve. I’m not police anymore. The last real police died in this room. And you’re not in the Army.”

“But I thought we had a responsibility to other people. I thought we believed that together.”

Wendy no longer cares about the survival of the species. How can I explain this to him? It is a hard thing to think, much less say to another human being. All she cares about is seeing Toby and the others in her group survive. That’s all the responsibility she can handle anymore.

“If there was something decisive we could do, I would say let’s do it,” she says. “I would give up my life. But there is nothing like that. There is only death, and more death, until the end. Just like Paul and Ethan. What is the point? The one responsibility we have is to each other and the rest of our group. We have to find happiness while we can. I don’t believe we are dead already, Toby. I am alive and I want to stay alive. And I want to be happy while I can. It’s why I chose you.”

Toby stands in the dark, saying nothing for a while. Finally, he takes a deep breath. “Is your mind made up about this?”

“It is, Toby. I’m sorry.”

She didn’t want it to sound like an ultimatum, but that’s what it is. She hopes he does not call her bluff, because she knows she could never leave him.

But it must happen. We have to go. We’ve gotten away from the NLA, with supplies and a full tank of gas. It’s meant to be.

“As long as we stay together,” he says. “That’s all I want.”

She smiles, her eyes stinging with tears. “Hell, Toby, we’re practically married at this point.”

“All right then,” he says, letting out another long sigh. Wendy can sense something breaking in him, releasing, letting go. “So, have you picked out an island yet?”

“Thank God for you, Toby Wilson.”

“I love you, Wendy.”

She grins, plants her hands on his chest, and kisses him on the mouth.

Ray

Ray creeps out of the farmhouse breathing hard and feeling his heart pound in his chest. Hundreds of Infected mill aimlessly in the morning light, filling the air with their random, anguished cries. They stagger along without purpose, bumping into each other and growling. Some trample the garden while others lie in the tall grass. A few hold their heads with both hands and scream as if suddenly remembering who they are and what happened to them. Each moment brings more tramping out of the cornfield, grunting and wailing.

Last night, they reached out to Ray as if pleading. Their eyes followed him as he retreated into the house, shaking with the disbelieving laughter of a maniac. They moaned softly, a sound like humming, as he entered a coat closet and curled into a fetal ball in the dark and the dust.

The tiny space was hot but at least it was quiet. He started awake repeatedly until exhaustion overcame him. He dreamed of standing with Todd on the bridge, screaming his head off; he woke with a sore jaw from hours of grinding his teeth, and the hopper sting in his side, shrunk to the size of an egg, throbbing gently as if keeping time with a favorite song.

Now Ray inches away from the farmhouse, at the mercy of thousands of Infected. He glances over his shoulder to confirm the open back door is directly behind him, in easy reach, in case he needs to make a run for it. Last night, a miracle: The Infected did not take him. Today, they appear to be ignoring him. But this does not make them predictable. At any moment, they might turn on him, snarling, and decide to have Ray on a stick for breakfast.

He gags, slammed by a solid wall of stink. Oblivious to discomfort, the Infected eliminate their waste in the clothes they were wearing the day they were converted. Their bodies emit a sour stench that makes him think of rotting food and warm, old milk turned into thick cottage cheese chunks by runaway bacteria. One of the Infected passes close by, studying him vaguely before continuing on her way, taking little excited bites at the air.

He can hear them breathe. The wheeze of air entering thousands of lungs. Some of them cry out with the sadness of slaves. Others shriek before lapsing into silence. The spaces in between are eerily quiet. Just the insects and the birds.

Feeling bolder, he walks along the edge of the crowd for over an hour, studying their faces one at a time. The Infected continue to ignore him. Some stare at their feet; others blink at the sun. They don’t look very scary. They look like sick people. Like very sad, very sick people. Like him, they came from Camp Defiance; he recognizes a man who sold mead in one of the trading booths. He wonders how they ended up here.

What is so special about this house? And what is so special about me that the Infected don’t want me for one of their own?

♦

Survival trumps any interest Ray has in solving the mystery. He made it this far, and he’s not about to quit as long as his luck is holding up. He retreats back into the house to do some exploring. As soon as it gets dark, he hopes to sneak through the crowd and strike a path toward Mason, where he knows Camp Nightingale was established. He feels an overwhelming urge to be around normal people who will protect him. Before he goes, he needs to gather up supplies.

The house smells dusty and Ray experiences a vague sense of alarm entering the kitchen. It is abandoned, but it is still not his house. He feels like an invader here. A clock ticks on the wall. Through the sheer white curtain covering the kitchen window, he can see the tightly packed Infected roaming about on their mindless errands. The refrigerator is plastered with holiday cards and photos of smiling people he doesn’t know.

First, he needs food and water. He takes a plastic bottle from a cardboard box that had been used as a recycling bin, and puts it under the tap. The faucet spits and shoots enough water to fill most of the bottle before the pipes groan and run dry. He takes a sip and decides to down all of it.

Skipping the refrigerator, he opens one of the cupboards, hoping to find some food.

“Shit!” he screams.

A large, greasy rat tumbles from the cupboard and scurries under the sink.

“Give me a heart attack,” he says, and laughs.

The boxes of food have been torn open, their contents half eaten. The cupboard smells like rat turds. He can hear the little bastards writhing and sneaking inside the other cupboards, and decides not to open them. He’s not hungry enough yet to fight rats for cans.

“No grub for Ray,” he sighs.

He spends the next few hours wandering around the house, picking up items and then putting them back where they belong. Surprisingly little salvage turns up. The only useful item he finds is a replacement for his T-shirt in an upstairs dresser drawer, and a new backpack.

A door bangs open downstairs. He peers over the banister, listening for footsteps. Nothing. He walks down a few steps and listens again, then a few more.

At the bottom, he sees the Infected filling the living room, looking at him.

The moment he appears, they raise their hands in supplication, groaning.

Ray runs through the kitchen door, leaps down the back steps and lands hard on his feet, gasping for air. He does not remember running. He didn’t even think about it. He just moved.

The Infected are not oblivious to him. At least some are interested in him. He wants to know why. Steeling himself, he waves at the nearest Infected tottering past, stumbling over a garden hose.

“Hello?” Ray says.

Several of the Infected stop and stare at him, baring their teeth. He extends his knife with one hand while wrapping the other around his head, covering his eyes. He peers out and realizes they have gone back to ignoring him. For all he knows, snarling is how the crazies express polite interest. He wonders if he should try again.

“I’m Ray Young,” he says. He points to his chest and adds, “My name is Ray.”

Some of the Infected stop and stare at him.

“Ray,” he says. “Young. My name.”

He cringes under their gaze, feeling ridiculous. The Infected study him, their heads bobbing, as if looking for the ideal spot to sink their teeth. Just as quickly, they lose interest and resume their wandering, leaving him feeling even more puzzled. He decides to try an experiment.

He picks the scrawniest man within view and stands in front of him. The man makes a half hearted growl and licks his chops, prompting Ray to take a cautious step backward, his heart skipping a beat. Staring over Ray’s shoulder, the man tries to go around, but Ray holds him in place by his shoulders. The Infected yelps, but does nothing.

“It’s like I ain’t even here,” Ray says, feeling bolder.

The man stares over his shoulder with glazed eyes.

“You’re not so bad now, are you?” Ray says, giving the man a little shove, angry he’d been terrified for nothing. The Infected blinks, disoriented by the sudden attack. Ray laughs harshly and pushes him again. “You’re not scary at all. All bark and no bite!”

The Infected lurches backward, holding its hands up to defend its face. He’s afraid of me, Ray realizes. The thought makes him feel stronger.

“You screwed things up, you know that?” He leans in, pushing the man again. “Totally screwed it up!” Again. “Screwed it up real good, you son of a bitch!”

Why? Why did this happen? Why did you do this?

Driven by sudden rage, Ray believes this man made the world end. Every death, every lost friend, every ounce of misery and fear, was all this man’s doing. Blood pounding in his ears, he shoves the Infected to the ground, kicks him once, and spits on him.

He draws the knife from his belt, but the rage fades, leaving him feeling drained.

“I hate you,” he says, his vision blurring with tears.

All around, the Infected howl and rush at him with hands splayed into claws.

Ray is jostled roughly as the hot, sweaty bodies press in all around, eyes gleaming with hate. His arms forced against his sides, he cannot use the knife to defend himself. An elbow slams into his chest. He can hardly breathe. The Infected snarl through their noses like wild animals. Ray pushes back at them, struggling to stay on his feet.

Someone screams shrilly, ending in a choking gurgle. The man he pushed is being stomped to a pulp by a ring of snarling Infected. One of them hunches over the man’s neck, slurping at an arterial fountain of blood. The others stop kicking at his body and reach down to tear off pieces of clothing and flesh and shove them into their mouths.

Roaring a string of obscenities, Ray doubles his efforts to get away from the crowd now swarming toward the fallen body and groaning with pleasure as they tear it to shreds. They chew on pieces of muscle, cartilage, cotton, denim. A woman holds a hairy strip of scalp over her head like a trophy, screaming a long stream of gibberish before consuming it.

Ray lunges from the crowd, falls to his knees and pukes long and hard into the grass.

Oh God, it’s me, he realizes. It’s me. It’s my fault. I didn’t want that to happen, but it did.

He remembers the Infected on the bridge, reaching out to him as if pleading. The Infected at the wall, trying to tell him something, oblivious to the arc of the flamethrowers. The Infected slapping their hands against the window of the house where he fought Infection.

He did not beat the bug. The bug won, and has been using him all along.

I infected all of these people, he understands.

And now they belong to me.

Cool Rod

The Hellraisers sit on the sidewalk with their backs against the wall of a burned-out bookstore, sweating in M50 gas masks with their rifles held on their laps, taking five. Ash flutters to the ground like snow in Hell; their uniforms are grimy with the stuff. Waves of heat radiate down the street, making them feel like they are being cooked in a microwave. A battalion of heavy tanks got lost and tore through Georgetown two nights ago, shooting everything they saw with Biblical flashes of light, and set fire to the entire district. The fires fizzled out, but not before filling the air with a solid, eastward-moving wall of smoke, heat and ash to greet the Dragoons’ advance, hence the M50s. Saving this city, it seems, requires the Army to destroy it one block at a time.

An M88 Hercules recovery vehicle fills the street with its massive bulk, its thousand-horsepower engine growling as its seventy tons maneuver into position to tow a disabled Stryker. His back against a brick wall, Rod studies his squad and realizes they are spent. He can see it in their worried, bloodshot eyes, barely visible through the dirty lenses covering the top half of their black Darth Vader facemasks. They have fought hard and accomplished incredible things.

But you can win only so many times before it feels like you’re losing.

Rod closes his eyes and feels his mind drift in the dark, searching for a happy thought.

The monsters boil up from the shaft, their wings buzzing—

The surge of adrenaline jerks him from his doze. He sits panting, his body electrified, until he notices the skinny soldier standing over him.

“You all right, Sergeant?” the kid drawls.

Rod wags his head, trying to get rid of the overwhelming feeling of dread left behind by the dream. “What do you want, troop?”

“LT says he wants to see you. I’m to show you the way.”

The squad watches him stand, collect his weapon and follow the kid into the maze of giant vehicles idling in the heat, like cattle watching one of their own being led away to the killing floor of the slaughterhouse.

Georgetown still smolders in the northwest. Charred bits of garbage and clothing flutter to the earth, some of it burning as it falls, touching the ground as cinders. Rod walks through air filled with smoke and vehicle exhaust that drifts but never leaves. He feels dried out, tired and grimy to the bone.

A helicopter drifts overhead, its rotors stirring the ash thick as a sandstorm.

Thank God for these masks. Just need the new air filters.

“Over here, Sergeant.”

The kid leads Rod through one of the blasted-out windows of a shattered diner. Rod’s boots crunch on broken plate glass. The restaurant was designed with a retro flavor, with lots of chrome and vinyl. Neon signage sits dark and unused along with a jukebox. It is a disorienting sight; parts of the diner look the same as the day the epidemic started. A chalkboard announces specials and dollar-ninety-nine giant milkshakes. The stools in front of the counter are empty and inviting. On the walls, framed posters of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean have been defaced with obscene graffiti by another unit passing through. Lieutenant Willie Sims sits at one of the red booths with Jared Kelley, the new platoon sergeant, who raises his hand in greeting.

“How are your men doing, Rod?” says Sims, his voice muffled by his mask.

“We’re still here, sir,” Rod answers, taking a seat opposite the officer. In the past, he usually reported his boys were itching for a good fight, in the hopes of getting something solid to do in the field. But not today. Today, he is hoping to avoid asking his squad to do anything even remotely dangerous.

The new platoon leader is a straw-haired, overgrown Iowan the Hellraisers call Techno Viking, a second lieutenant from the Third Armored Cav who recently earned his silver bar. Rod likes the gentle giant who is his new platoon leader. The man listens to the non-commissioned officers, cares about his troops, and has no crazy personal ambitions other than to keep as many of them alive for as long as possible.

Sims’s standing order is to kill anything that moves, and let God sort it out. This is not crazy bloodlust, but simple survival. The fact is they are fighting a war of extermination.

It’s called total war. In military speak, a war with an unlimited spectrum. In civilian terms, it means we fight without pause or quarter until the enemy is all dead or we are.

Rod taps his gas mask and adds, “Any word on the new filters, sir?”

“Negative,” Sims tells him.

“We can’t do our jobs if we can’t breathe.”

“I hear you, Rod. We’ll just have to make do until we get back to base.” Lines form around his eyes and Rod guesses he is smiling. “Not that I could tell the difference. I feel like I can’t breathe in this mask at any time.”

“You get used to it, sir,” Rod tells him.

“That’s what my platoon sergeant keeps saying,” Sims says, glancing at Kelley.

“You should have been around when we were using the M40s,” says Kelley, an old-timer like Rod. “Made you look like a giant insect. You could barely suck enough air to breathe. We had to run five K in one as part of the training. Half the guys puked into theirs.”

Rod laughs, a muffled barking sound coming through the mask. Kelley has tons of stories like this; he’s been in the Army since Jesus was a corporal.

Sims leans forward, planting his elbows on the table. It’s time to get down to business.

“Sergeant,” he says, “I’ve got a job for you and your men.”

Rod closes his eyes for several seconds. “Sir, I am hoping there is another way to do what needs doing. My boys have zero fight left. They need a good rest.”

“I know I’ve been leaning hard on you,” Sims says. “And you’ve done an amazing job getting your squad this far without even a scratch. But you are the best I got and I need your men to give a little more today.”

Orders are orders. Rod is a professional.

“What do you need?” he growls.

♦

It’s a recon mission. The heavy smoke cover is preventing their birds from seeing what’s happening on the ground. Captain Rhodes wants eyes all the way up to the Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway, the projected edge of the advance by the end of the week.

The engineers cleared the road as far as the first few blocks. Third Squad advances along the empty street in a wedge formation with the flamethrower on point and Rod and the RTO, the radio/telephone operator, not far behind.

Rod watches them with paternal fondness and high expectations that they survive and become everything he thinks they can be. He wants them to kick ass; he wants them to live. He has led a dozen like Specialist Sosa, the overconfident big kid; even more like PFC Arnold and PFC Tanner, naive eager beavers; a few overthinkers like Corporal Lynch, always concerned with why certain orders are being issued; and too few like Corporal Davis—quiet, reliable men who know how to get things done under extreme stress. They are just like every other squad of big, dumb kids he has led during his career as a professional soldier. But they are his.

He knows the boys are calling him Cool Rod behind his back. After the fight at the hotel when they lost Pierce and so many others, they eyed him with a level of respect bordering on reverence. It was perhaps the one good thing to come out of that day—conquering the reputation he earned in Germany. Since then, they have fought every day, and between Rod’s leadership and a hell of a lot of plain luck, Third Squad has taken no casualties. Now they think he’s a god.

Rod does not care what they think, as long as they follow his orders and cover their sectors.

Visibility remains poor because of the smoke. On the left, a construction site reveals itself, giant cranes soaring into the murk, scattered orange traffic cones, a sign that says WAYNE CONSTRUCTION. Someone spray painted SCHOOL IS OUT FOREVER on the side of a trailer. Sosa chuckles, shaking his head. Rod remembers they are in Foggy Bottom, somewhere on the George Washington University campus.

As they near the next intersection, a wall of vehicles emerges from the gloom. This is as far as the engineers cleared the road; from here on out they will be in the shit. Cars and vans and trucks sit parked, many of them at angles, some seemingly fused together. Their drivers fought for every inch before abandoning them in this endless apocalyptic parking lot.

Rod splits the squad. Fireteam A advances first and pauses at a defensible location, and then provides overwatch for Fireteam B’s advance. Their gear clatters as they wade into the mass of vehicles.

On the left and right, high-rise apartments flank the street. Rod tilts his head back, but cannot see the tops of the buildings. The sun is just a yellowish splotch smeared on the sky like an infected wound. Frantic pounding draws his attention to one of the windows. A pale young woman stares down at him from a second floor window, slamming her fists against the glass.

Lynch follows his gaze and turns to glance at him. Refugee, Sergeant?

Rod shakes his head. Nope, Infected. He considers calling it in, and decides against it. The woman is no threat. In Kandahar, they reported continual random snatches of gunfire from the areas they patrolled each night. Sometimes a mortar burst or a machine gun. In DC, they call in foghorns, screams, distant roars, stray monsters, roving swarms of maniacs.

Sosa snickers and hisses at Arnold, “I think she likes you.”

Huffing under the weight of his flamethrower, Arnold shakes his head and says nothing, too tired to respond.

Ahead, a car door slams: Tanner, on point, clearing a path for them. The column threads its ragged course between the vehicles. They step over abandoned luggage. Sosa spots a pack of cigarettes on the ground and pockets it. The woman continues to pound on the window over their heads. The sound multiplies.

Rod glances back and sees more people at other windows, banging on the glass with their fists. As they clear the van, he sees even more in the building on his left as well.

Lynch glances at him again and Rod gestures forward. Keep moving. We’ll be fine as soon as we pass these buildings.

People stand at most of the windows now, fists pounding like war drums. The sound becomes a roar. Over the drumming, Rod hears the tinkle of broken glass on the sidewalk.

“Pick up the pace, Tanner,” he calls out.

Glass shatters overhead.

“Heads up!” Davis shouts.

A dark shape flutters through the smoke and lands heavily on one of the vehicles to their left, which groans and sags under the impact. Arnold cries out in terror, the grimy lens on his facemask dotted with sprayed blood.

Another body flies through the air in a rain of broken glass.

Tanner shoots at it, misses. The rest of the squad opens fire.

“Cease fire!” Rod roars, furious at the lack of fire discipline.

The boys obey the order, panting in their masks.

The gunfire shattered many of the windows. Bodies fall like human missiles, limbs flailing. Glass rattles across the cars. The crash of the impacts multiplies until it is continuous. A car alarm wails its grating alarm. Others join in.

The boys begin firing again, but this is not combat. The onslaught is nothing they can fight.

It’s an avalanche. We can either weather it or get out of the way.

“Off the street,” Rod roars, pushing at Sosa’s shoulder until the man obeys.

He pulls his fireteam to the right side of the street while Davis pulls his to the left. Rod peers through the grimy glass windows into the building’s lobby. No threats there.

“What the fuck is this?” Tanner screams, gaping at the bodies falling onto the cars, shattering windshields and splattering across the crumpled metal. “WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?”

Sosa grips the back of his neck and forces him to look away while Arnold and Lynch bend close, telling him he’s okay, everything is going to be okay.

“It’s not okay,” Tanner sobs. “Nothing about this is fucking okay.”

“Stay frosty, vatos,” Rod tells them. “All that noise is going to attract attention.”

He feels vibrations in the soles of his feet. The sensation migrates up his legs to his knees. Ash dances on the asphalt. He turns and pulls on the building’s front doors. They’re unlocked. He holds one open and waves the fireteam inside.

“Get in there! Move!”

The soldiers enter the lobby, half dragging the dazed Tanner, and deploy into firing positions. Rod turns and sees Davis directing his men into the burned-out building across the street. The downpour of bodies has stopped. An incredible roar reaches his ears, the crash and pop of crumpling metal and shattering glass. The traffic jam trembles, cars shifting by inches.

Inside, his fireteam tenses, ready to open fire at whatever is coming.

“Get down,” he says.

They look at him.

“Eat dirt!” he roars.

The air fills with a long blast of foghorns.

The thunder grows in volume until they are certain the world is ending. The first juggernaut bounds across the roofs of the vehicles, crumpling their frames under the impact of seven tons of flying muscle and bone. The rest of the herd follows, tentacles flailing around their brontosaurus bodies, crashing over the cars and flattening the traffic jam into crushed metal.

As the last monster leaps across the wreckage, Rod lunges to his feet and rushes to the RTO, yanking the handle from the field radio and shouting, “Hellraisers, Hellraisers, this is Hellraisers 3. How copy?”

Jared Kelley’s voice responds: Hellraisers 3, this is Hellraisers 5, go ahead, over.

“Large herd of Bravo Mikes inbound on your position from M Street. Estimated size forty, fifty adults, moving at gallop speed, over.”

Rod waits during the long pause as Kelley processes the fact a stampede of about three hundred tons of monster is bearing down on his position at twenty-five miles an hour.

“Bravo Mike” is the current Army slang for “big motherfucker.”

Solid copy, out.

“They’ll be all right, won’t they, Sergeant?” Sosa asks him.

“I don’t know,” Rod answers, feeling shaken and humbled. He has not heard of Bravo Mikes attacking the line en masse. As far as he knows, this is the first time it has ever happened.

If the bug has a lot more monsters to throw at us, the U.S. military may have just lost the initiative in this fight. We will stop being attackers, and start being defenders.

Gunfire erupts to the southeast. Fifty-cal machine guns pound in the distance, followed by the WHAM WHAM WHAM of bursting grenades. The sounds roll down the street, filling the air with white noise.

It’s over quickly; the firing stops.

Rod counts his ducklings and, satisfied they’re all present and in one piece, orders them back onto their feet. They pause at the doors, waving at Davis and the other fireteam across the street, all of them shifting their gaze to the giant metal pancake blanketing the road. Getting across the wreckage is going to be like walking across a field of knives.

Treading with painstaking slowness over the jagged edges, slicing their uniforms and legs, they work their way back to the part of the road that is cleared, and jog toward their lines.

Minutes later, the outline of a Bravo Mike emerges from the gloom, lying on its side and defecating in its death throes. The soldiers give it a wide berth and find themselves confronted by a looming hill of dying monsters, their tentacles still thrashing. They hear men screaming.

“Over here,” Davis calls from the flank.

He shows them a way around. Further down the street, they find more of the monsters lying dead or dying among trampled human remains. Several sprawl broken across the front of the Hercules. Beyond, even more lie among Stryker vehicles flipped onto their sides or jammed against each other. One vehicle has been shoved half inside the front of a Thai restaurant.

Men scream for medics. Soldiers run everywhere. A military ambulance lurches to a halt and discharges stretcher bearers moving at a sprint.

“Make a hole! Make it wide!” several soldiers shout at them as they race past, carrying a screaming man with a shattered leg. Rod jumps aside and catches a glimpse of bone jutting from torn fatigues.

Rod watches them go and feels an unnatural rage take hold of him.

What a waste of the world’s finest combat infantry.

“What are your orders, Sergeant?” Davis asks him.

“Sergeant Rodman!” Lieutenant Sims calls. He and Kelley stand in front of the diner where they gave Rod his orders less than an hour ago.

Rod jogs over to the Lieutenant with his squad in tow.

“Good to see you and your men back in one piece, Sergeant,” Kelley says.

“You too,” Rod responds. He tells the boys to get inside the diner and wait for orders, then turns to Sims. “How bad is it, sir?”

“As bad as it looks. We’re still sorting it out. We made out okay, but First Platoon lost some good men.”

“The big bastards slammed into the Hercules,” Kelley says. “It was like watching tomatoes thrown against a wall. The guys were cheering. Then the rest of the Bravo Mikes just ran right over it. Plowed straight into Comanche.”

“The Captain appreciates your heads up on the radio,” Sims says. “That was good work.”

“Thank you, sir,” Rod says impatiently. “What can we do to help here?”

“Nothing,” Sims tells him. “They’re taking us off the line.”

“To hell with that,” Rod snaps, feeling the rage surge inside him again. “We can help the docs get the wounded into their vehicles for evac.”

“Rod, our people are in good hands,” Kelley says. “We’re getting a lot of help. We’ve got to let the docs do their job. We’d just be in the way.”

Rod sets his jaw. “Then we’ll go back out and finish our recon.”

“We’re done here, Rod,” Sims says. “We’ve done everything we can. Now get your men ready to move. Got it?”

“Aieeyah, sir,” Rod mutters.

He turns and gazes across the chaotic scene still playing out around them: the dead smeared across the asphalt like road kill, the wounded being loaded onto stretchers, the soldiers wandering around dazed and crying until their comrades come to comfort them.

What a waste.

“Fuck this,” he hisses under his breath.

Every time we win back some of this city, we get a little closer to losing all of it.

♦

The men ran at him in their torn and bloodstained uniforms, faces flushed, eyes gleaming with fever. Rod and Lieutenant Pierce watched them come, rooted where they stood. They were talking about redeploying stateside when the base alert siren started to wail; the Lieutenant’s friendly question still hung in the air: What’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get home? Gunfire popped across the base. Soldiers fought with each other everywhere in view; a few of them were shooting. At first, Rod thought a couple of soldiers had gone nuts—not uncommon after the trauma of the Screaming three days earlier—and were shooting up the base, while the unarmed soldiers were trying to stop them. Then he realized something was wrong; the unarmed mobs were attacking everyone. They were coming for him. Rod raised his shotgun and roared at the snarling pack to stop or he would fire on them. The crowd resolved into the faces of the men he led for a year in Afghanistan, glaring at him with open hatred. His shotgun sagged in his hands, still a part of him, but now forgotten. Seeing the men he kept alive on Baghdad’s mean streets for a year, howling at him in a blind rage, shocked him to the bone. These are my guys and they want to kill me, he thought. They’re coming to kill me and I don’t know what I did to deserve it. Pierce was screaming, What do we do? What do we do, Sergeant? Rod stared back into the eyes of his men and thought, I’m sorry for whatever I did. Pierce’s rifle fired with a metallic crack and puff of smoke, dropping one of the sprinting figures. Shit, he said. I just shot somebody. They won’t stop. They just keep coming. Rod? Rod? As the pack closed the final yards, the man blew air out his cheeks, shouldered his weapon, and shot them down with cold efficiency.