The Infection

THE INFECTION

Craig DiLouie

Published by Permuted Press at Smashwords.

Copyright 2011 Craig DiLouie

ISBN: 1934861650

www.PermutedPress.com

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Randy Heller for all his editing support over the years and to Chris Arnone for his superior knowledge of all things mechanical.

Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, ©1996, 2004, 2007. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.

For Christine and Mieka.

PROLOGUE: FALLING DOWN

Ethan was at the end of his patience trying to explain using factoring to solve equations to his high school algebra class when everybody started falling down.

Hacking at the blackboard with a piece of chalk to guide his students through a third example, he heard the first distant scream. The chalk broke in his hand and he accidentally scratched the board with his fingernails, sending a shiver of revulsion through his body.

“Let’s try that again,” he said, peering at his class over his rims of his glasses.

Some of the kids smiled back, suddenly engaged by his personal tone, while the rest slouched at their desks and continued to stare out the window—some longingly, some vacantly—at the green lawn washed in spring sunshine.

Finishing the example, he slapped chalk dust from his hands and said, “Okay, who wants to take a crack at this one? Where would you begin to solve for
x
?”

“Wow,” several of the students shouted at once, sitting up straight in their desks. Two of the boys stood up, looking out the window.

“Come on, guys,” Ethan frowned. “Butts in seats. We’ve only got fifteen minutes left.”

“But there was an accident,” one of the kids told him, his eyes gleaming with excitement. “A bunch of people are lying on the ground.”

A second scream rang out in a classroom down the hall. Ethan wondered what was going on and took a few steps towards the window. Following his cue, all of the kids got out of their desks and stood to get a better look outside.

Another scream. Shouting in the distance. Footsteps pounded the hallway outside. Ethan turned just in time to see two teachers jog by his classroom. A door slammed.

He took several steps towards the hallway, wondering if there was some type of emergency, if he should be doing something special to protect his kids.

“What is that sound, Mr. Bell?” one of them kept saying.

“I don’t know,” Ethan murmured.

“It’s horrible!”

Another shiver ran through his body. He knew the sound. Why did he deny it? It was screaming. Screaming that would not stop. Screaming that just kept going on and on and on. Whoever was screaming was in extreme, unending pain—strong enough to make them howl at the top of their lungs for minutes. And there seemed to be a lot of people doing the screaming—some outside and some inside the school, in the classrooms down the hall.

He suddenly wondered if he should be here at all. His wife was at work. Their toddler, Mary, at daycare. He took another step towards the door. Would he get fired if he left the school?

Trevor Jackson’s face contorted and he fell down screaming, cracking his nose on the floor, blood spurting. The other students jumped back with yelps of surprise, transfixed by the real drama unfolding in front of them. Ethan took several steps back into the classroom and watched helplessly. Trevor was lying on his side, his back arched, his arms outstretched with his hands splayed into claws. His eyes were bulging, leaking tears, while his mouth screamed at a volume Ethan had not thought possible. The sound assaulted him with an almost physical force, pushing him away. He felt the urge to run as fast as his legs would take him. The other students felt it, too, wavering, suddenly aware of the choice of fight or flight.

“Do something!” Lucy Gall shouted at him.

“I’m going to call 911—”

Lucy fell to the ground, her body jerking in little spasms and the crotch of her jeans flooding with piss. Moments later she started to scream loud and shrill enough to damage eardrums. The students shouted at each other to do something. One of the boys got down on his knees and tried to shake her, but then he fell over as well, his eyes rolling back into his skull.

It’s in the ventilation system, Ethan thought. Something is in the air all around us.

Five more kids fell down within seconds of each other, spilling desks and scattering their notebooks.

They began to scream.

Ethan was suddenly outside of his body, watching himself push his way along with the remaining students in a blind stampede to get out of the school. In the hallway, they raced over the trembling, screaming bodies of teachers and students as if they were parts of an intricate obstacle course, and then bolted out of the school’s steel doors and into sunshine and relative quiet.

He froze in his tracks, amazed. The street beyond the lawn was a tangled mess of crashed vehicles. Plumes of smoke rose above the city in the distance. Now new waves of sound assaulted his ears: car alarms, horns, sirens and, rising up above it all, the distant sound of thousands upon thousands of mouths screaming in unison like an auditory glimpse of hell.

This is everywhere, he realized.

He ran as fast as his legs would go, oblivious to the students toppling around him as if cut down by an invisible scythe. The screaming filled him with blind panic now, an irrational fear of the supernatural, as if actual demons were at his heels. A motorcycle roared by, its rider spilling and cartwheeling through the air. In the distance, planes were falling out of the sky. These things barely registered in his consciousness. All he could think about was Mary’s safety. He had to get to her. Please God, spare her, he thought. Take these kids. Take Carol. Take me. If anything happens to my little girl, I will have nothing.

He got into his car and started the engine. The radio began sobbing hysterically at him. He turned it off and that was when he noticed the screaming had stopped. Looking out his window, he saw the lawn covered with bodies, jerking and quivering, while those who escaped Infection walked among them mindlessly, trembling and hugging their ribs and moaning in shock.

So rapid was the transmission of the mysterious virus that swept the world over a period of just forty-eight hours, so sudden the onset of disease, that scientists would later claim that it must somehow be linked to human-engineered nanotechnology. Some kind of weapon that escaped the lab. The government traced the origin of the pandemic to a village near secret facilities in China, but they would never find out the truth. And Ethan would never teach again.

After three days, the screamers woke up.

THE SURVIVORS

They are refugees forced from everything they consider home, searching for a safe place. They have become nomads, living on whatever they can find. But mostly they are survivors. They are good at surviving because they are on the road and they are still alive. They have done the things one had to do to survive. They have all killed people or they would not be here.

They have not lost anybody since Wednesday, when they lost Philip in Wilkinsburg. There are five of them now sitting ramrod straight in the loud, hot, dim passenger compartment of the armored personnel carrier, passing around a bottle of water, their rifles between their knees. They sit in a tense silence, their mouths slack, sweating in air that is twenty degrees hotter than the unseasonably warm May weather outside, air that stinks of sweat and grime and diesel combustion. Between the engine, the squeal of the treads and a steady drumming sound, they have to shout to make themselves heard, and nobody has the energy to do that. The drumming grows louder, punctuated by sharp metallic taps, until it drowns out the Bradley’s five-hundred-horsepower engine. The survivors are perpetually one second away from screaming.

The tapping sound is from jewelry. Bracelets and watches and wedding rings.

The survivors wonder if they have killed everything for which they want to live. Wonder if it might grow back again, given enough time, if only they can find sanctuary.

♦

The survivors are adaptive. People who will do whatever it takes to survive naturally do not trust other people. But to travel the road one must be with a gang, and to survive the experience day after day, as they have, that gang must function as a single protective organism. Each of them has been tested by violence and if they failed, they all would have died. They know this. At this point, after what they have seen and done, this sense of responsibility to each other is what keeps them from collapsing into hysteria or catatonia. Fear, sorrow, guilt, rage: These and other emotions are just as dangerous as the Infected outside, and must likewise be killed.

They are going to the Children’s Hospital based on a theory. They have the Bradley, weapons, and the illusion of safety as long as the rig’s engine keeps humming and its treads keep moving. They need supplies, though, especially water and diesel. They need to find a place unspoiled by Infection, where they can rest. The simple fact is they cannot keep fighting like this. You can only win so many fights before it starts to feel like you are losing.

They sense a subtle shift in the atmosphere, a sudden drop in temperature. Outside, it begins to rain. The drumming gradually fades as the Infected lose interest in pounding on the vehicle with their fists. They fill the air with their plaintive cries as they melt away into the rain.

♦

Anne alone does not appear to be stripped to a single, bare electric wire. She sits in the back near the exit ramp, across from the cop, a place of respect among the survivors as whoever sits there is the first to leave the vehicle and the last to reenter. The others admire and try to imitate her cool. Sarge may be the commander of the Bradley, but they consider Anne to be their leader because without her example and unfaltering aim with the scoped rifle, they would all be dead.

She has two long scars on her left cheek and a short one on her right, still fresh. The survivors assume that she is ex-military, imagining a romantic and violent past. Anne does not tell them that she has an overwhelming feeling that once they finally stop moving and find a place of rest where they can be truly safe, she is going to burst inside out with one long, deafening scream of guilt, terror and anguish.

♦

Hours earlier, they found Sarge’s infantry squad in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart, mangled like road kill around a large, strange device and surrounded by a carpet of dead Infected tangled up in a line of concertina wire. The dead stared wide-eyed into oblivion. Many of the bodies were badly burned and emitted a sickening sweet barbecue odor. Bits of charred clothing, stuck to the concertina wire, trembled in the light breeze. A few Infected stumbled blindly among the remains, gnawing on human meat from a dismembered arm or leg. Crows shrieked in protest as the Bradley approached at forty miles an hour. At the last moment, an enormous flock of the birds exploded into the air, dribbling morsels of flesh from bloody beaks as they filled the sky.

Sarge cut down the few Infected in the area with several bursts from the Bradley’s coaxial machine gun. Outside, he warned the survivors not to step on any of the bodies.

Of course we won’t, they told him. We will respect your dead.

“It’s not a matter of respect,” he said. “These people are rotting. Gases are building up inside their bodies. See how bloated they are? They can burst and spray fluids. You could get sick.”

Six days ago, the Bradley dropped off the squad of six soldiers—who were supposed to operate on their own in the field for three hours—and then withdrew for badly needed repair of a steering problem. The soldiers were testing a non-lethal weapon against the Infected that used active denial technology. They deployed a line of concertina wire, set up their device and blasted a klaxon to attract the attention of any Infected within hearing range.

The device, shaped like a large hoe attached to the face of a basketball backboard, is a transmitter that beams energy waves which penetrate the skin and produce an intense burning sensation. The idea is whoever is subjected to this reflexively tries to avoid the beam and submits. It did not work on the Infected. The Infected only became enraged and attacked until their flesh began to sizzle and even then they still attacked until they fell down.