The Killing Floor (10 page)

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

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

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

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

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

He has become Infection.

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

Then he understands. They are all the Brood.

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

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

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

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

Dr. Price

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The chase leads him to the mass transit station.

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

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

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

Stay focused. Follow the girl.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A scream catches in Travis’s throat.

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

♦

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

Travis scans the notices hungrily, searching for psychiatric help.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The flashback dissipates, leaving Travis feeling exhausted.

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

“Something like that.”

“What does that mean?”

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

“So the government has a paramilitary organization now.”

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

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

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