The Killing Floor (12 page)

“Dr. Price, is it?”

Travis blinks again and sees twenty stern-faced people seated around a conference table, observing him with open distaste. Some wear military dress uniforms with chests crusted with medals, what men like Fielding would call a fruit salad.

The man sitting at the center is President Walker. He is older, grayer, more tired than Travis remembers. But still formidable.

“Yes,” Travis says with a weak voice, then clears his throat. “Yes, Mr. President.”

“You realize everything you see and hear in this room is classified.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“Based on your area of expertise, you already enjoy a number of special clearances. Today, you’re going to be privy to information classified as Top Secret. Understood?”

“Absolutely, Mr. President.”

“Good. You’ve kept us waiting long enough. You may begin.”

Travis approaches the screen at the front of the room, his stomach doing flips.
This is it
, he realizes. He is meeting the President of the United States. The world is ending, and his nation needs him. Nobody listened to his theory, but now he gets this one chance to make his case. The President will be grudgingly persuaded before committing to decisive action.

Dr. Travis Price saves the world.

On the screen, he sees a map of downtown Miami overlaid with a bull’s eye pattern rendered in shades of red.

What does this have to do with the monsters?

“I don’t understand,” Travis says, staring at it.

The President grunts with irritation, folding his large hands.

Goodall places his elbows on the table and says, “Dr. Price, your area of expertise is the weaponization of nuclear fission, is this correct?”

“Nuclear nonproliferation,” Travis mutters.

The Director reads highlights from his resume, focusing on his support of exercises by the Office of Nuclear Counterterrorism and the Nuclear Emergency Support Team, as well as development for the Radiological Assistance and Consequence Management at the Los Alamos Lab.

“You are one of the nation’s leading experts on the effects of nuclear device combustion on populations in urban centers,” Goodall says.

“That is accurate.”

“Good. Then explain the graphic on the screen, if you please.”

The realization makes him gasp. Even with the world coming to a violent end, the terrorists could not give up their grudge against the Great Satan.

They finally did it. They blew up an American city.

“Who did it?” he says, his face reddening. “What kind of madman would do this?”

Even in collapse, America could, and would, retaliate. He heard America still maintains twenty-four-hour flights of strategic bombers able to drop nuclear warheads virtually anywhere in the world.

Goodall smiles. “This is purely a hypothetical, Dr. Price.”

“Hypothetical, sir?”

“Options,” the President grunts. “All options are on the table.”

“I see,” Travis says, feeling sick.

Terrorists did not bomb Miami. The President wants to bomb Miami. Miami, and perhaps other cities as well.

Pure madness. Things must be worse on the surface than he thought. The cities are filled with Infected and have become breeding grounds for the monsters.

Drop the bomb, and they all go away.

But so do the cities themselves, and millions of survivors still living in them.

During the Cold War, a U.S. Minuteman missile crewman once asked the chain of command how he could verify whether a launch order was coming from a sane President. The generals removed him from his post.

If I voice any dissent, I wonder what they’ll do to me?

“This graph shows the effects of detonation of a one hundred fifty kiloton device at ground level in North Miami,” Travis murmurs. “That’s the average size of a single warhead in the U.S. nuclear arsenal.”

“Speak up, Dr. Price,” Goodall says.

“It’s about ten to fifteen times the size of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Everything in the center ring would be exposed to explosive force equaling fifteen pounds of pressure per square inch of overpressure. Everything would be destroyed. People, buildings, everything.”

The bomb explodes in an intensely hot fireball, creating a giant crater hundreds of feet deep and sucking tons of earth into a massive mushroom cloud. Within the blast, buildings and people, normal and Infected alike, vaporize in a flash, becoming part of the cloud. Structures and bodies fly apart in the earthquake and sudden change in pressure. Debris rockets through the air with the force of bullets. Shattered windows turn into flying knives of glass. Miles away, thousands of fires burn, merging into raging firestorms. Flesh melts in the fierce heat; internal organs cook; brains boil. The smog blots out the sun. Dirt and ash rain down as radioactive particulates for miles in every direction, even farther on the winds.

“At a little over a mile from the blast, buildings would suffer heavy damage, and intense heat from the blast would start numerous fires. At a little over two and a half miles, covering El Portal in the south, Pinewood, Golden Glades, most houses—would be—crushed flat—”

His stomach leaps into his throat. He stumbles toward a metal garbage can and vomits. Behind him, he hears a woman mutter,
Christ
.

“Excuse me, I’m not well,” Travis says, wiping his mouth.

“You may continue when you’re able,” says the President, and turns to ask another man at the table a question about his afternoon schedule.

Travis does not hear the answer. His stomach lurches again, producing a trickle of bile. He spits several times before standing and facing the room with watery eyes, his face burning with embarrassment.

“I apologize, Mr. President. I may have a touch of flu.”

“Tell us about the fallout,” the President says.

“Fallout,” Travis says mechanically, as if he has never heard the word before. “Yes. For a surface burst, outside of ground zero, the area impacted by the blast and the initial nuclear radiation will be less severe than, say, an air burst of similar yield. Local fallout can be dangerous over a large downwind area, however—”

A single gunshot cracks, startling them. The President’s advisers gasp, some already half standing. The President glares at the door.

People are shouting outside in the waiting room.

“John,” the President says to one of his people. “Go take a look.”

“I don’t think we should open the door, Mr. President. You would be exposed.”

“It’s all right, John. I think our people have things under control now.”

The door opens from the outside, giving Travis a clear view. The waiting room is filled with men and women in black body armor. One of the Secret Service agents kneels with his hands on his head, while the other lies grimacing on the floor with a soldier hunched over him, applying a tourniquet to his leg. The other men in suits cower in their chairs.

The President watches them, his face turning from red to purple.

“WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON HERE?”

The soldiers glance at him. The wounded agent cries out in pain. Two men in desert combat uniforms enter the conference room, pistols holstered on their hips.

“Mr. President,” the first man says, taking off his cap.

“General,” the President says. “Glad you’re here. What’s the meaning of all this?”

General Donald McGregor, the chairman of the joint chiefs, is a wiry stringbean of a man compared to the President, but just as intimidating. Travis once met him during nuclear terrorism exercises. He is a ruthless son of a bitch, much like Fielding, and with incredible power at his command.

The General pauses in the doorway, taking in the red rings radiating from downtown Miami on the screen. Travis steps away from it, trying to disappear. McGregor frowns. His eyes flicker to meet the President’s.

“That, sir,” he says, pointing at the screen, “is not going to happen.”

The man behind the General whistles. Soldiers in black body armor file into the room, carrying automatic weapons.

Ray

Unsure of whether he is struggling toward air or plunging deeper into abyss, the man swims against warm tidal currents. Light sparkles in the thick, murky depths. He lets go and drifts weightless toward consciousness.

Ray awakes gasping for air, sucking it greedily into his lungs.

The light, so bright it is blinding.

He does not know anything; it is like being born.

Mysterious dark shapes coalesce into normal things. A television set. A bookshelf packed with books, knickknacks and a bowling trophy. A table lamp. A large picture window covered in smeared handprints, making the world outside appear shrouded in gray fog.

He closes his eyes and tries to return to those warm currents, but his curiosity betrays him, forcing him up into a sitting position. Throbbing pain at the base of his skull makes him groan. He looks at his dirty hands and remembers how he got here.

I’m supposed to be dead. How long have I been on this couch?

The light outside—Christ, it’s the sun.

He survived the night. The Infected are gone. He touches the monster in his side, now just a raw, achy swelling covered in flaky skin. His touch ignites a horrible itch inside the growth, which scratching just makes worse.

Fine. Itch all you want, you little bastard. I beat you. I won. I’m alive.

His body rejected the growth, or perhaps the growth rejected him. Too much smoking or drinking, who knows. He never heard of someone becoming infected by a hopper and surviving it. Then again, after Infection, Ray’s world got a whole lot smaller. Maybe people survive it all the time in Colorado. Maybe California has no epidemic at all. He wouldn’t know.

The floor is covered with empty bottles and jars of food and multiple sets of muddy footprints. People brought him food and water while he slept. His mouth tastes like raw sewage and his teeth feel mossy. His pants are crusted with his own waste. The ammonia smell of his piss makes his eyes water.
Something is not right here. How long have I been out?

Feeling frail and shaky, he peels off his clothes, hardened to the consistency of cardboard, and retches at the sight of his waste caked in his pants and clinging to his ass and thighs. It feels good to be naked, however; the house is hot and his body is covered in a slick sheen of sweat.

After gaining his feet, he plods into the kitchen, half expecting to see his ghostly mother doing dishes in the sink, and pulls a squat, ugly looking steak knife from a drawer.
Safety first.
The window is still open and the outside air smells fresh and clean. He finds a bathroom and spends several minutes examining himself in the mirror with blunt surprise. A gaunt lunatic stares back at him. His acne-scarred cheeks are sunken. His handlebar mustache is now part of a beard. His shaggy hair has grown even longer, greasy and lank, a full-on Jesus mane.

Has he been here for days, weeks? Who was feeding him this whole time?

I’m alive
, says the leering lunatic in the mirror.

Dude, you are seriously fucked up.

His caregivers left him two buckets of water. He’s not sure if these are any good for drinking but they look all right for washing. Squatting in the tub, Ray soaks a toilet scrubber with tepid water and liquid soap and scrubs his body until the water turns black and he feels somewhat clean. He scrapes his mossy teeth with his fingernails, gargles and spits the mess into the sink.

Upstairs, he finds a T-shirt and jeans that fit, and puts them on. His STEELERS hat is riddled with charred holes and stinks like old grease, but he puts it on anyway. He checks out the neighborhood through a window. A car is parked at an angle across both lanes of the street below, all of its doors open. The asphalt glistens; it rained recently. The lawns and bushes on the other side of the road look overgrown. Beyond, the bridge invites him back to its scenes of horror. The eastern horizon is no longer blackened by the fires of Pittsburgh, but still shimmers with a polluted brown haze. A flicker of movement down in the street grabs his attention.

A large woman dressed in a filthy halter top and sweatpants limps past the car with her hands clenched into fists against her breasts, one of which sags out of her shirt, scratched and bloodstained. Ray watches her, wondering who she was before the bug turned her into a violent maniac. He feels like he understands Anne a little better now; this woman is no longer human, but a malicious, mindless organism wearing the face of a human, like a mask.

The woman pauses, doing the odd jittery neck roll favored by the Infected. Her head, jerking, turns to the window to look right at him, and tilts to the side, like a dog’s.

He leaps aside, his heart hammering in his chest. He expects to hear feet slapping against the asphalt, the rasping bark, the door crashing open, the pounding on the stairs. His eyes take in details of the bedroom, searching for a hiding spot or a weapon.

Nothing happens. Fighting to control his breathing, Ray glances back at the road. The woman is gone. He snorts.

Maybe I look so bad she thought I was one of them
.

He trudges downstairs and puts his boots on, still heavy with dried blood, and walks onto the porch. The abandoned houses stand in silence, bugs buzzing in their overgrown lawns. A deer browses in a garden until bolting across a driveway into someone’s backyard. A light breeze dries the sweat on Ray’s face. He closes his eyes and savors being alive.

There is just this. Nothing else. And that makes this good.

He finds his rifle on the side of the house, wet and spotted with rust, and inspects it. He considers finding some oil and a toothbrush and trying to clean the weapon, but decides to leave it in the grass. Cleaning it would take a long time, and besides, it only has a few bullets. With just a few hours of daylight remaining, Ray feels an overwhelming urge to get moving. He was lucky here, but he has the strong feeling his luck has run out. The open road beckons. His steak knife will have to do until he can find better. The road will provide.

Ray checks out the few cars and trucks abandoned on the streets and writes them off as well. He can fix just about anything with wheels, but none of the vehicles he inspects have keys in their ignitions, and, despite his checkered past, he has no idea how to hotwire a car. The idea exhausts him; the only thing that inspires any energy is getting the hell out of this ghost town as soon as possible.

Guess you’re walking, bro
.
This is going to take a while. You can hit some houses along the way for some supplies. But it’s time to get moving.

Sticking to backyards, he emerges from town to the north and decides to circle through the woods along Route 22, heading west. Back to Camp Defiance.

He pauses as a foghorn booms close, a vibrating sound he can feel deep in his chest. The sound ignites a flock of birds from a tree, black shapes darting through the air. A distant foghorn answers, then another and another, for miles around it seems.

Ray closes his eyes and listens as if they are communicating something he might understand. For the next few minutes, the air becomes filled with the melodic song of the monsters, a symphony of sounds like tubas and didgeridoos, plaintive and hopeful. Ray smiles, tingling from the vibrations. Their song speaks to him.

We are not alone
, it appears to be saying.
We are afraid and we may die, but we are not alone
.

♦

Shucking his Army surplus backpack heavy with cans and bottles, Ray tramps through a garden eating raw peas and any tomatoes spared by the insects. Unable to eat more, he stuffs his cheek full of Copenhagen dip and lets out a satisfied sigh. He has twenty miles to walk, which will take him two, maybe three days in his condition and carrying the weight of the pack on his shoulders. Climbing over a barbed wire fence, he angles west and starts marching through the trees, knowing Route 22 is about a hundred yards on his left. At the base of an old sawtooth oak, he picks up a good walking stick, a long wizardly staff that helps him find a steady hiking rhythm.

As the sun falls toward the horizon, his eyes roam the landscape, searching for shelter. Wind rustles through the branches and the atmosphere feels moist against his skin. The sun drops behind western rain clouds, dimming air already darkened by the forest canopy, and Ray quickens his pace as a few random drops splat on the rim of his STEELERS hat. He emerges from the trees onto a grassy field covered with a riot of dandelions. At the other end of the field, a farmhouse stands quiet, its windows boarded up, three rotting bodies drawing flies on the porch steps. A tire swing sways from the stoutest branch of a massive oak tree.

He pauses here, listening to the buzz of insects in the tall grass. The world is so lush and beautiful it is sometimes hard to believe it is coming to an end. Then he remembers the world is not ending, just its dominant species.

The sky continues to blacken. Moist wind strikes Ray in the face, carrying a few drops of rain, and he opens his arms to it. The air feels electric. The clouds rumble with distant thunder, a melancholy sound. He takes a deep breath and decides to try the barn to ride out both the night and the rain. The house appears occupied and dangerous. Get too close to that place, he might get a lungful of buckshot, looking the way he does right now. He studies his hands—workman’s hands, hairy and powerful—and realizes his survival and recovery from Infection is not a get-out-of-jail-free card. He might have to fight again, and kill again, if he wants to make it home alive. Ray has a lot for which he wants to live. Nothing ambitious, just a deep, abiding appreciation for breathing in and out. When he thinks about his fever over the past few days—weeks?—it terrifies him because he remembers little of it. He dreamed; many of the dreams were horrible. But mostly, just darkness. Trying to remember those long days of nothing is like trying to remember the time before he was born.

Rain pelts the roof as he enters the barn. Rats flee squealing from his advance, melting into the dark spaces. The building has a rich smell of farm animals and hay and old dung, but the smell is stale, a memory; the animals are long gone, the hay is rotting. Ray sniffs the air again just to be sure, but detects no sour milk stench, the calling card of the Infected. Something crunches and scatters under his boots, and he looks down, only to wish he hadn’t; the floor is strewn with little piles of bones and children’s clothes. Bloodstains have turned the dirt floor the color of rust. The barn was a nest, then; a pack of the Infected killed here, ate here, slept here, but they moved on long ago. Ray waves away a small cloud of buzzing flies and thinks about burying the bones, but he is tired and it is getting late.

“Sorry,” he grumbles, spitting a stream of tobacco juice into the dust. Ray feels like an empty husk. Something in him died when the bug took him. Or maybe he was reborn, and is still finding out who he is. Either way, he has no fight in him anymore.

He climbs a ladder leading to the hayloft, pulls it up after him, and spreads out his old rolled-up blanket on a bed of moldy hay. He pulls off his boots and then his socks and sighs with relief despite the stink, wiggling his toes. Fishing in his pocket, he finds a couple of Band-Aids and applies them over the blisters on his heels. Minutes later, he falls into a deep, blissful sleep to the soothing sound of rain pattering on the roof. Mosquitoes feast on his blood during the night.

The next morning, Ray pisses hard into the hay, smokes a stale cigarette, and cuts open a can of cold SpaghettiO’s pasta, which he eats with a plastic spoon. The air is warm and humid; his body is already slick with sweat. His legs are sore and a part of him wants to sleep the day away again. He stares into space scratching at his bug bites until boredom drives him back down the ladder and into the farmer’s yard. Beyond, winter wheat stands hunched and wet under a dim, heavy mist that shrouds the distant fields and woodlands.

He decides he likes the mist. The mist could be his friend. As long as it lasts, he can hide in it. The house still stands quiet, but Ray is certain he is being watched. He feels a sudden urge to wave, or better yet flip them the bird, but doesn’t have the energy for it.

Shouldering his pack and gripping his walking staff, he disappears into the treeline.

♦

Minutes later, the mist surrounds him like a living thing. It feels cool and wet in his lungs. He cannot see more than a few feet in front of him but has the skin-crawling sensation he is still being watched. He is in danger here. Coming into the mist was a mistake, but it is too late to go back. He already no longer has a sense of where he started.

He closes his eyes and pictures sitting at a big desk in the station’s holding pen, where Unit 12, his old police unit at Camp Defiance, made its home. He and Tyler and his kid Jonesy and all the other guys in the unit, Cook and Salazar and the rest, laugh at some joke as they pass around a can of warm beer they scrounged up.

Ray just wants to go home. He does not have the stamina to live under constant threat like Anne and Todd. He needs people. He wants to be in a nice, safe place among friends.

Over time, his inability to see amplifies his hearing. Things tramp through the forest all around him. His own footfalls sound loud to his ears, as if he is walking on garbage bags filled with crumpled paper. But standing still is worse than making noise. Standing still is worst of all.