The Infection (9 page)

“Would you rather be alone?” Anne asks him.

Todd shakes his head numbly. He is already alone.

Anne says, “Here, let me help you.”

She takes the sponge, wrings it out, and begins wiping down his face and neck.

Somebody knocks at the door. Sarge enters carrying his helmet, filling the space with his large frame.

“We need to talk, Anne.”

Anne glances at Todd and shakes her head slightly.

Sarge nods. He squats in front of Todd, who cringes, his expression vacant.

“How’s the arm?” he says, pointing at the bandage covering the boy’s wound, which Sarge carefully cleaned and stitched up with needle and thread.

Todd does not answer.

“Keep it clean, soldier,” the soldier adds. “The bug going around ain’t the only infection we got to worry about.”

“I’ll take care of him,” Anne says. “You might want to check on Wendy.”

Sarge appraises Todd with a hard stare and a tight smile. “I just wanted to say you did real good today, Kid. You’re a tough little sumbitch, you know that?”

After he leaves, Anne nudges him and whistles.

Todd smiles.

♦

Wendy sits on a sheet of plastic on the edge of the bed in another recovery room, her hands shaking. Slowly, she removes her Batman belt—heavy with handcuffs, gloves, gun, TASER, baton, leather notebook, extra magazines and pepper spray—and sets it carefully on the plastic beside her. She takes off her badge and pins and places them next to the belt. She unbuttons her uniform shirt, balls it up and puts in a plastic bag. She unhooks her bra, grimy and soaked through with sweat, and hangs it to dry out. After a quick but thorough wash, she examines herself in the mirror, brushing her wet, tangled hair. She recognizes the face and body but her eyes look like somebody else’s. Her face and perky chest earned her a lot of attention from the other cops but prevented them from fully accepting her. Wendy knows she is physically beautiful; she heard it said enough times to be sure. She knows it made them want her. She knows it made them angry. Then it saved her life when the man who had hurt her most told her to leave and save herself when the Infected came howling through the door.

She raises her left arm and frowns, inspecting a thin red line across her ribs. The creature’s razor-sharp teeth grazed her flesh. Not deep enough for stitches but enough to draw blood. Enough to plant virus and infection.

Christ, she was about to shoot Todd in the head and she was on Infection’s doorstep herself.

Would she have done it?

If she had to do it, then yes, she would have. Murder one or help to murder all.

Would she have then shot herself if she felt herself turning?

Yes, she told herself. More readily than shooting one of the others, in fact. The realization surprises her.

Most of the other cops never accepted her and yet she was still a cop. Many cops at the station had an us-against-them mentality about the communities they policed. Wendy was trained in that culture and adopted it as her own. She was still one of “us.” Nobody had as much authority as she had when she patrolled the neighborhoods. Up until she held her gun against that teenage boy’s head, she saw the other survivors as civilians, people who were not her equals but instead her ungrateful charges. She no longer feels that divide. We are becoming a tribe, she thinks.

Somebody knocks and she tells them to wait a moment while she pulls on a black T-shirt, making a mental note to put antiseptic on the cut given to her by the monster, which carried God knew what germs in its rancid mouth besides Infection.

Sarge enters the room, glancing up and down and nodding appreciatively. It is so subtle that he does not realize he is doing it, but Wendy can read the language of attraction without trying. She pointedly looks away, pinning her badge to her belt. The soldier clears his throat and gets down to business immediately.

“I brought you some more water so you can wash your hair if you want,” he says.

“Just did it. See?”

“Roger that,” he says. “Well, take it anyway, for later. It’s rainwater.”

“Does the building not have any water in its tank?”

“It does. A lot, in fact, but we’re saving it for drinking and cooking. Tonight, we are washing with good old rain.”

“Well, thank you,” she tells him. “So what’s our situation?”

“Steve and Ducky swept the rest of the floor. It’s clear. No Infected and no giant slugs with teeth either. I think we’re secure. Now we’re clearing out the bodies and cleaning up the place.”

“You need a hand?”

“No, no, no. This is just a social call. You rest. You’ve been through hell.”

The cop sits on the bed, sighing. “All right.”

“Hey, uh, Wendy . . .”

“Yes?”

The soldier takes a deep breath and says, “I wanted to say thanks.”

“For what?”

“For what you said about my boys yesterday. I appreciate what you said. So, thanks.”

♦

Ethan, Paul and the Bradley’s crew drag the bodies downstairs on plastic sheets, change spilling out of the corpses’ pockets. This work done, they mop with a strong bleach solution. The gunner and the driver retreat to one of the recovery rooms to set up the Coleman and try to get supper going. The idea of food makes Ethan want to vomit. Wincing at the sting of the bleach, he and Paul decide to try the roof. The hospital has turned out to be a chamber of horrors, and they are craving some fresh air and a little time and space to wrap their heads around everything they have seen.

He immediately regrets it. The stairwell is pitch black. The air is stale and musty. He cannot remember how high the floors of the hospital go, or what fresh terrors await him up there in the dark. His clumsy footfalls sound like thunder in the stillness. After three flights, his knees and lungs begin to protest.

He cannot stop thinking about the wormlike creature that attacked them. That these things were another of the horrible children of Infection is obvious. But are they a mutation, a freak? Or an entirely new life form? Were they once men? Or has the virus jumped species? He has a terrible feeling that the emergence of this creation may be a sign of a fundamental shift in the ecology of the planet. The Infected violently spread disease and cannibalize the dead; they are a plague and an enemy that has humanity on the run, and that is bad enough. But this is new. The balance of nature is changing. A new world is coming in which humans are no longer at the top of the food chain. The thing appeared to be a bottom feeder, another eater of the dead. There is plenty of food to sustain a large population of these monsters, depending on how much they need to eat. What will happen when they can no longer feed on the dead?

It took a 25-mm cannon to kill it . . .

They reach the top of the stairs and find the door unlocked. Some of the hospital staff must have fled onto the roof to get away from the Infected rising out of their beds. But the roof is bare of the living or the dead. Ethan walks carefully, feeling exposed under the massive twilight sky.

The rain has mostly stopped but the ground is still wet and the air feels heavy and humid. They walk to the parapet. Over the roofs of the houses and low-rise buildings, they see downtown Pittsburgh in the distance, across the river. The tall buildings stand dark and derelict. The Grant Building is on fire and veiled in white smoke, an incredible sight. Pillars of smoke rise up from a dozen smaller fires scattered across the city. They hear the distant crackle of gunfire at the Allegheny County Jail to the east.

“Reverend, why did those people leave their photos in that garage?”

“I don’t understand you.”

“The parking garage where we stayed last night. People passing through there before us left photos of their families and friends on the wall. Why did they do that?”

“Just saying goodbye, I guess,” Paul answers.

“I don’t think I want to say goodbye,” Ethan says.

Paul shakes his head and says, “I don’t even know how.”

Bonded by their grief, the men watch the sun go down and the Grant Building burn in the twilight. Even after everything they have gone through, it is still sometimes hard to believe what has happened to the world they once lived in. People and buildings and phone calls and TV shows and grocery shopping and the normal pace of life. The gray sky occasionally spits. Over time, the warm rainwater collects in their hair and on their faces, slowly washing away the ash and the filth. They stand there without speaking for over an hour, Paul slowly chain smoking his cigarettes.

This high up, the apocalypse seems almost peaceful.

“The end of the world doesn’t happen overnight,” Paul says, nodding. “It takes time.”

The sky is quickly turning dark. They decide to turn back. Ethan notices that somebody sprayed the words HELP US in bright orange paint across the hospital roof.

“It may never end,” he says, feeling homesick.

FLASHBACK: WENDY SASLOVE

The Screaming changed everything. Millions of people lay helpless and twitching on the ground. Thousands died in accidents. Fires burned out of control. Entire towns suffered without electricity or running water. Devastated survivors walked numbly through the streets. Distribution of everything from food to Internet access to Social Security checks was completely disrupted. Entire industries such as insurance folded overnight. Government and businesses struggled to continue operating as one out of five people simply fell down, broke everything in the process, and took all their knowledge with them in a massive brain drain. The country reeled from the shock.

Seventy thousand people fell down in Pittsburgh alone. The police department was devastated. Roughly three hundred out of nearly nine hundred police officers had either fallen down or simply taken their guns home, locked their doors and refused to return to duty. Burglaries were up as people broke into homes abandoned by the fallen. Arson was rampant as communities, terrified of another outbreak, burned homes with the screamers still inside. Frightened people were taking their guns to the local grocery store, which devolved into scenes of panic buying and looting. The cops remaining on the job dug in, marked their territory and held it with force. They cracked skulls and exchanged gunfire with street gangs and vigilantes. They cleared the streets and protected firefighters and helped to recover the fallen. The police stations became forts in hostile territory. They were used to dealing with murderers and drug dealers and other criminals. Now everybody was the enemy.

The cops worked around the clock. In just three days, they already made a difference. The power was on, food was being delivered to stores, and the fires were under control. For now, that was enough. They were gearing up for another big push to recover the fallen. Humans can live up to nine weeks or longer without food, but cannot go more than about six days without water. Thousands were still missing and had to be found and transported to one of the new emergency clinics as quickly as possible.

Meanwhile, people continued to gather at the hospitals each day. Most were pilgrims searching for missing loved ones. It was common to find screamers without any identification on them as their wallets were stolen. Sometimes, screamers were found without any clothing at all, as they had been raped while lying helpless on the ground. The pilgrims arrived filled with hope, clutching photos of friends and family, and stood in line all day waiting their turn to go inside, sit in front of a computer, and try to track down their loved ones in the SEELS database. As a counterpoint, several hundred people also arrived each day shouting and carrying angry signs and concealed weapons. Terrified of another outbreak, they demanded stronger isolation measures for the fallen, calling for their removal to quarantine camps outside the city.

These two groups of people naturally hated each other and were kept separated by an aggressive line of police officers mounted on horses. A line of riot police guarded the front of the hospital, intimidating in their black body armor, helmets with clear plastic visors, yard-long hardwood batons and tactical riot shields. Three-man arrest teams formed a second line.

Wendy was in one of these teams. In the old days, the cops used to form a line and charge, bashing skulls until the street emptied, but the tactics changed over the years. Now snatch teams were sent into the crowd to strategically arrest troublemakers and remove them from the scene. The idea was to prevent a protest from turning into a riot that could suddenly rage out of control. They barely had the resources to counter protests. A large-scale riot might spread and become the end of law and order in Pittsburgh. They had arrested eight people already, rushing into the crowd behind her body shield while the two men with her took down the troublemaker they wanted.

Word was being passed down the line that the new Mayor had had enough of the protests and was cutting off all public access to the hospital at four o’clock.

The cop on Wendy’s left, Joe Wylie, shook his head and spit.

“Bullshit,” he said. “This ain’t no Nazi state. Shit, I lost people in the Screaming, too. These people have a right to find their family.”

“We don’t have the manpower,” said Archie Ward. “Or, in Barbie’s case here, girl power.”