The Infection (24 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

♦

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

They are close to giving up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

♦

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

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

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

She clears her scratchy throat and considers her next move.

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

She ain’t no cop
, the man said.

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

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

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

Time to go back, then.

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

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

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

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

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

♦

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The forest suddenly comes alive with hoots and shrieks.

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

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

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

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

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

Her dog had an almost supernatural talent for catching Frisbees.

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