The Killing Floor (16 page)

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.