The Killing Floor (2 page)

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

The agent said nothing.

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

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

Then he realized what was happening.

“Hey, wait,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

The helicopter lurched into the air.

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

I just want to live
.

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

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

Three Weeks Later

Part I. Typhoid Jody

Ray

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Todd will be all right,” Anne says.

“Where is he?”

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

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

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

“So that’s how it is,” he says.

“It’s just an offer.”

“Of what, exactly?”

“Mercy.”

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

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

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

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

It’s not fair.

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

“I don’t want to die,” he tells her.

“You’re already dead.”

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

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

The woman winces.

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” he moans, sobbing.

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

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

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

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

Everything is busy becoming something else.

For him, the change will happen soon.

♦

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One way to find out—

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

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

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

“Kill all you bastards,” he mutters.

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

“Damn straight.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is this really worth surviving for?

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

Goodbye, sun.

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