The Killing Floor (20 page)

She hears the unspoken accusation clearly.
You abandoned me. Ray didn’t.

“Infection killed her, not him,” Todd adds. “I don’t hold him responsible.”

“Fair enough,” Anne nods, once again suppressing her feelings. “Just stay out of my way when the time comes.”

Jean

She was starving. Someone was going to have to go out for food, but they were too weak to do it. And Prendergast would not shut the hell up.

They’d been stuck in the art gallery for six days. Instead of sanctuary, it had become a tomb. They were dying by inches, surrounded by Prendergast’s massive, horrible paintings.

The artist himself lay spread eagled at the foot of one these paintings, sweating profusely, his wrinkled black shirt riding up to expose his round white belly.

“My work connects the real and the imaginary,” he said.

“Your work idealizes ideology through literary exposure, and yet real ideology is a hidden force, a political prime mover, not something you can frame and point to,” Jean whispered, laboring to speak clearly. “The paintings juxtapose the real and the imaginary in conflict, not connection.”

“The connection is within the conflict of these opposites,” Prendergast insisted. “My work is fascism expressed as a brand. You can buy it, you can use it, you can throw it away.”

Jean closed her eyes. She did not have the energy to say anything else.

At the other end of the gallery, Gary sat huddled against the wall, hugging his knees and rocking, watching them with narrowed eyes that appeared sunken into his skull.

Getting Ricky Prendergast and Jean Byrd together at the gallery had been his idea. He owned the gallery and considered Prendergast the local boy who made good. The artist’s paintings and their declaration of a stark totalitarianism repulsed and attracted at the same time. Their size enveloped the viewer, threatening his or her individuality, and yet were strangely seductive, promising an existence without thought, whispering,
you kind of want this
.

Jean was an East Coast art critic who wrote for several important art magazines. Her pen had made a few careers, and broken more than she could count. She and Gary had fallen into bed together after Grady Tallman’s opening (which she later skewered) in New York three years ago. Hearing she was going to be in Akron, he’d convinced her to visit his gallery in Hopedale and review Prendergast’s exhibition at Wild Arts. After the Screaming screwed everything up from air travel to basic utilities, he’d doubted she would show, but she did.

“You’ll love it,” Gary had told her when she’d appeared at his door first thing in the morning. “His paintings are like propaganda for a fantasy regime built on absolutes. They make you want to punch a Nazi in the face. Wow, Jean, I’m so happy you’re here!”

He’d kissed her, laughing, and handed her a mimosa in a champagne flute. He told her how good she looked in her black and white Chanel suit. She sipped her drink, smiling back at him. Gary was strictly small town, but he was extremely cute, and she had always had a soft spot for him.

Jean had toured the gallery, aware of Gary’s eyes on her, and concluded Prendergast’s work stank. His paintings were childish in their assumptions, their one saving grace, in her opinion, being their rich colors and sheer size made them audacious—suggested maybe they weren’t childish after all, but profound, perhaps even threatening.

Gary had sensed her vibe, mistook it for ambivalence, and told her she would really come around once she met the local genius himself.

Prendergast, a giant of a man dressed in a black suit—his height and size squandered on fat, however, making him appear as if he were made of spheres—arrived late, complaining of the ungodly hour. His big, bright grin, framed by dimples and surrounded by a beard, forced you to like him, if only for a moment. He extended his large, sweaty hand, and Jean shook it. They agreed to have breakfast at the cafe around the corner, and discuss her impressions of his work.

As they’d left the building, a policeman shot a woman sprinting, dropping her to the asphalt. The gunshot electrified them. The cop screamed, waving them back inside, as more howling figures appeared. Before Jean knew what was happening, she was back inside the gallery and Gary was pulling down the metal gates to cover the windows.

The police officer’s pistol had cracked several more times as Gary darted back inside and locked the door, his eyes bulging and his chest heaving, babbling about crazy people in the street. Whatever he’d seen outside, it had terrified him.

Gary did not have a radio or television in the gallery, but they’d had their cell phones, and both Prendergast and Jean had iPad computers. They spent the day surfing and sharing information. They finished the orange juice and champagne, getting drunk and treating the whole thing as an adventure. In a few days, the government would resolve the crisis, they believed, and then they would have a great story to tell when it was over.

Jean had slept on the floor curled into a ball, using her purse as a pillow, and woke up starving in the middle of the night. She hadn’t eaten all day, and she felt weak and nauseous. After an hour of pressing her fist against her stomach to try to quell the growls and pangs of hunger, she fell back asleep.

The next day, the street belonged to the crazies, cutting them off from the outside world. Things appeared to be getting worse by the hour. They felt lightheaded and jittery. Their blood sugar levels were crashing. The room stank of bad breath. They drank as much water as they could, and spent hours checking the Internet and talking through their options, each of which led back to staying put inside the gallery doing nothing. As the day wore on, Jean became unable to focus on what she was reading. All she could think about was food. Every time they opened the door, screaming maniacs charged them. They were trapped. For hours, they sat in a fearful silence.

“Maybe we could talk about your impressions of my work,” Prendergast had offered.

Jean had actually appreciated the request. Anything to pass the time.

“I don’t like your paintings,” she’d said. In fact, she was terrified she was going to die surrounded by them, and Prendergast’s
Iron Eagle
, an art deco portrait of an angry stylized war bird surrounded by light beams, would be the last thing she saw. “Sorry, Ricky, but I don’t.”

That was five days ago, before the power went out, before they began to die.

“My work is a complete rejection of post modernism, offering one truth,” Prendergast said.

They had argued for most of that time, but now Jean just moaned. Her body had burned through what little fat remained on her rail thin body, and had begun eating itself to recover proteins it needed to keep her heart and brain and nervous system functioning.

She could not believe how empty she felt. She’d once thought art could change the world. Now thoughts of food occupied every horizon of thought, left room for nothing else. Everything important in her life before the epidemic now struck her as pointless next to food.

“One truth,” Prendergast repeated, “but one that is painful to look at.”

Jean opened her mouth. Her tongue felt like it was covered in moss. Her breath smelled sour.

“Okay,” she whispered. “I like them. I like your paintings. I will write a good review.”

Prendergast lay silent, and then said, “Thank you.”

For what, the capitulation or the argument that took his mind off his contracting stomach, she wasn’t sure. In the ensuring silence, she fell into darkness.

When she awoke, Gary and Prendergast were gone and the gallery smelled like burning meat, overwhelming the open sewer shit smell emanating from the bathroom with its dead plumbing. Her salivary glands squirted, flooding her mouth, and she wondered if this were a mirage—a bitter manifestation of her starvation.

“Gary,” she hissed. If this was a sign of the end, she didn’t want to go alone. She gathered her strength and screamed, “Gary, please!”

He emerged from his office smiling and knelt on the floor next to her. She had a hard time seeing him; her vision had gone blurry.

He unclenched his fist and showed her a sliver of steak cupped in his palm.

“Eat,” he said.

Jean swiped the warm meat from his hand and jammed it into her mouth, swallowing it almost whole. It was amazing. Nothing she’d ever eaten, in fact, had ever tasted so good. It had tasted like God. She licked her fingers and cried.

“I have more food, but you have to go slow,” Gary told her. “I know how hungry you are, but you have to take it slow, okay?”

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you.”

“I chose you,” he said enigmatically. He smelled like smoke.

“How did you get it?”

“After you fell asleep, I went outside to check things out. The crazy people were gone. So Prendergast and I scavenged around the neighborhood and found a butcher shop with some meat in a cooler that was still good for eating. I dug the hibachi grill out of storage; we used to cook shrimp out back for parties. I got it set up in my office. I’m trying to vent the smoke out the window.”

Jean felt alarmed Prendergast was eating it all. “Where is he?”

Gary’s smile turned into a hard line. “Ricky didn’t make it, Jean. We weren’t alone out there. Some of those people were around.”

“I’m sorry,” she told him. “I know he was your friend.” Faced with the prospect of survival, she now regretted compromising her artistic principles by conceding the argument and saying she liked his work.

“Yes, he was. Thanks for that. Listen, the steaks are going to burn. I’ll be back in a bit. You stay here, okay? Don’t move. I’ll bring you more food in just a minute.”

Jean lay on the floor for some time breathing in the odors of roasting meat and moaning with need. Wisps of barbecue smoke drifted in the air like spirits. Burned, medium rare, raw—she didn’t care, as long as she got to eat it. Now she started to panic Gary was going to eat it all, leaving her with nothing. He didn’t understand; she
had
to eat. She had to eat
now
.

She raised herself to her knees, gasping for breath and feeling dizzy, and gained her feet. The floor looked very far away. Then she started walking toward the office, her mouth filling with saliva again.

Jean opened the door, squinting to see better, and gasped.

Gary stood at the barbecue shrouded in cooking smoke, his mouth open in surprise. The room was dim and smoky, but she could see, plain as day, a plate of steaming brown steaks lying on a silver serving tray, the one he used to serve champagne to guests for small showings to important buyers. Two champagne flutes stood filled with water.

He had scavenged a feast for her. This food would bring her back to life.

For a moment, she thought she’d seen something else, something evil and impossible, a trick of the gloomy daylight filtering through the smoke. She thought she’d seen a chopped up carcass hanging from hooks used to mount large and heavy artworks. It’d looked like the body of a naked obese man hung upside down with his head, feet and hands cut off, gutted and bled out, the blood and organs dumped into a large plastic garbage can beneath the body.

Then she blinked, and it was gone.

“You weren’t supposed to see this,” Gary shouted, his voice edged with panic.

“It’s beautiful,” she said, leaning against the doorframe. She couldn’t take her eyes off the steaks. “It’s so beautiful.”

That night, Gary crawled to where she lay, hiked up her Chanel skirt and entered her. Jean put her arms around him, smacking her lips and thinking about her next meal. He had little energy; it was over fast. Afterwards, while they slept huddled on the floor, the carcass invaded her dreams. The pale carcass of a man, chopped and gutted, mounted on the wall like slaughtered cattle. Like an obscene piece of art, provocative and visceral.

Prendergast would have loved it.

Dr. Price

Travis paces his small cell and pushes at the walls in claustrophobic despair, convinced they are closing in a fraction of a millimeter at a time. He wonders if the cell is properly ventilated until he finds himself on all fours, sucking on air and dust trickling in from under the door. Picturing the room imploding and entombing him in solid rock is actually the least upsetting thing on his mind right now. He believes any minute, someone is going to come and make him disappear down the garbage shaft. In his mind’s eye it is Fielding who comes, grinning and wielding a big shiny knife.
Sorry, Doc, orders are orders
.

Travis has a bucket for his waste and a mattress mounted on the wall, but otherwise the room is blank. He has no idea how long he has been stuck here; assuming they are feeding him three meals per day, then he has been in this cell for four days. It is something of a miracle he survived this long.

Not long ago, he witnessed an actual coup d’état. Soldiers handcuffed the President of the United States and dragged him shouting from the room. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs calmly eyed the Cabinet and asked if anyone knew where the Vice President was. It was the VP’s lucky day; he was going to be President. Then someone noticed Travis cowering in the corner.

The funny thing is Travis happens to agree with General McGregor. Detonating nuclear weapons in American cities is a desperate measure that would accomplish little. In fact, it’d be like stabbing yourself in the brain with a knitting needle to get rid of a bad headache. In Travis’s opinion, Donald McGregor is even a hero of sorts; he stopped a madman. But whether Travis agrees or not with the men who staged the coup does not matter. What happened
did not happen
, and that means anyone who knows the truth is a bizarre anomaly that must be corrected, most likely with a bullet in the head.

Sadly, Travis even agrees with the rationale behind his own murder. Outside Special Facility, Wildfire is rapidly paring the Federal government down to the military. Only the military has the command structure and resources to continue functioning on a large scale. The American people do not want the military to run the country, however. They will only follow the President, based on illusions of tradition, leadership, unity. Even most of the military would not obey McGregor’s junta if it openly declared itself in charge. So the President has a “heart attack” and is lionized as a martyr, the Vice President is sworn in, the bombing plan is axed, and everyone tells the same story for the good of the nation.

Through simple bad timing, Travis was given a peek behind the curtain and saw the man working the controls. What he knows could shatter the illusion of civilian control of the military, and with it, unity and loyalty to the government. And for that, he must be eliminated.

The irony of his situation almost makes him laugh. Despite his claustrophobic terrors, deep down he believed he was in the safest place in the country. Then again, he also thought the White House was safe, until it wasn’t.

Boots clomp in the corridor, growing in volume. Instead of a tray of food being thrust through the slot, the lock rattles. Someone is coming in.

Travis realizes how little he will be missed after he is gone. He has no wife or children, no other family, no real friends, not even a hobby. A quiet academic at the University of Chicago, he wrote a paper about Iran’s potential nuclear ambitions that found favor with hawks in the Walker Administration. After Walker won his second term, his people tapped Travis to join the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Travis had always hoped his study of nonproliferation would earn him some type of notoriety, but he never expected it would lead to a chain of events culminating in his execution by a junta now controlling what’s left of the government.

All the knowledge he gained, leading to nothing. What has he done? Faced with the prospect of his death, he feels like he never lived. Is his life worth so much more than the woman the Secret Serviceman threw out of the helicopter?

His one regret, watching her be left behind to die, will go to the grave with him. It was the one time in his life he ever felt real empathy for another human being.

The door groans open, letting in a draft of air. Travis blinks at the figure dressed in black.

“Time to pay the bill, Doc.”

Just as he feared, it is Fielding.

♦

Travis submits to handcuffs, his face burning with shame. Fielding grins; the son of a bitch is enjoying this. Travis braces for a lecture about karma, but it never comes. Instead, Fielding orders him to walk down the corridor. As he walks, Travis fantasizes about turning and knocking his captor unconscious, and then escaping to the surface, or making a brilliant case for keeping him alive, after which Fielding puts his own life on the line to help him escape the General’s justice.

Any resistance would be a futile gesture with a man like Fielding, however, who would likely respond by beating him senseless and frogmarching him to his execution. Head bowed, Travis keeps moving, fuming at his lack of options.

“Stop here, Doc.”

Fielding slides his gloved hand under Travis’s armpit and pulls him toward a metal door, which he opens with a mocking gesture of welcome.

Under the glare of fluorescent lights, three broad-shouldered military officers in camouflage fatigues sit behind a desk, their backs ramrod straight. Their gray-flecked crew cuts, stern white faces and astronaut builds make them all look the same.

Fielding lifts Travis’s shoulder again, forcing him to walk on his toes to a simple steel chair facing the desk. Travis notices the black stains on the concrete floor under the chair and stifles a yelp of panic. Fielding shoves him into it and remains standing somewhere behind him.

The officer in the center places his elbows on the desktop and rubs his leathery hands together before clapping once to call the meeting to order.

“Dr. Price, I am Colonel Slater. This is Major McMahon, and this is Major Buckner. We have asked you to come here today because the General thinks you’re a person of interest. So they tell me you’re a scientist. I’m curious. Tell me, Dr. Price: What do you think of our current situation?”

Travis blinks. “You mean—?”

“I mean in the country.”

Travis studies the man’s face briefly, searching for clues about what he wants to hear for an answer, but gives up. The soldier’s rigid expression tells him nothing.

“I think we have less than a year before the winter finishes us or them.”

Slater regards each of the men next to him in turn before returning his hard gaze to Travis. “See? I told you he was smart. Please elaborate, Dr. Price.”

“We’re putting everything into winning Washington, but it’s a morale boost at best, not something we need to fight a war,” Travis mutters, trying to muster the energy to speak. “We should retrench in regions that produce things we need, such as the grain belt. We should draft people to fight instead of herding them into refugee camps. We should put those who cannot fight to work rebuilding industries we shipped overseas years ago. We need to be able to make everything ourselves now, weapons and ammunition in particular, and we need to do it fast. All fiat currency is worth nothing. Goods are becoming scarce. The government is going to have to start paying in room and board and some type of new money based on a gold standard, and it might have to employ almost everyone in the country for a few years. But even if we did all of this, and did it now, we cannot sustain even what little we have saved. When the winter comes, we will suffer another mass die off. Our one hope is it will be harsher for the Infected so we have a fighting chance in the spring. We’re so occupied with getting things normal again we fail to realize that no matter what happens, Infection has already permanently changed the world.”

He stops talking, hoping at least something he said was pleasing to this man who holds his life in his fist. The officers chew on his speech.

“So you think our current strategy pretty much sucks,” Slater says.

“I did not use that word,” Travis says. “And I may not have all of the facts.”

The officer laughs. “It’s even worse than you know. There were actually people in the government who did not want the military to be recalled. They were worried about our bases overseas. It’s easier to leave, they said, than to ever return.”

Travis realizes he is expected to say something. “I don’t think the military strategy ultimately matters.”

Slater’s leans forward. “Why do you say that?”

“Ultimately, bullets cannot win this fight, only science can.”

“Ah, right. The elusive cure, the Holy Grail.”

“Or a vaccine, or perhaps even a weapon.”

Slater smiles grimly at that. “Dr. Price, I’d like to show you something.”

The door opens; a soldier pushes a projector into the room on a wheeled cart. Crouching, the man taps a few keys on a laptop, which produces a grainy video image on the wall showing a compound filled with soldiers and workers in hazmat suits. Men load body bags onto a truck while others unload salvaged panes of glass from another truck. Another figure in a hazmat suit feeds clothes from a garbage bag into a fire burning in a metal drum. Travis does not know who these people are or where they are other than they are somewhere on the surface.

The video has no sound. The room is quiet except for one of the officers clearing his throat. Travis can hear Fielding, still standing behind him, breathe through his nose.

Sensing this is some type of test, Travis studies the image intently. He blinks in surprise; a man has collapsed and other figures race across the compound to see what’s wrong. Half of them never make it, falling as they run. All around the compound, people topple to the ground and lie twitching. Travis recoils, making his chair squeak loudly; it is like the Screaming. The survivors gesture at each other. One of the soldiers is shooting the victims in the head. Others gather around, waving at him to stop, unaware the rest of the fallen are returning to their feet.

“This is FEMA 41,” Slater says, startling him. “A refugee camp in southern Ohio, yesterday morning, at about oh-six-twenty.”

The video switches to a view of people scrambling around a lot filled with campers and trailers. People have been living here for some time; the space in front of each camper is cluttered with tarps and coolers and other junk laid out like a never-ending yard sale. Two of the figures tackle a third and fall into a fire pit.

“They never had a chance,” Slater adds.

“So it would appear,” Travis mutters. The violence is shocking; he swallows hard to keep from throwing up.

The video changes again, showing a mob of Infected surging over a retreating knot of police firing at them with shotguns. The bottom of a helicopter comes into view. Dozens of figures fly apart, filling the air with body parts. The image shakes. Smoke obscures the camera’s eye just before the picture cracks and turns to electronic snow.

This is not satellite imagery
, Travis realizes.
They had cameras at the camp
.

“I think Dr. Price gets the idea. Corporal, skip to the next part.”

“Sir,” the soldier says, tapping keys.

The video changes to a view of an empty field cut by an old road. A vehicle lies on its side in the distance. A man enters the image, staggering across the mud while glancing over his shoulder repeatedly. Seconds later, he exits the image on the right.

“This is right outside the eastern gate,” Slater tells him. “Now wait for it.”

Travis watches a trickle of people wander onto the scene in the same direction as the running man. The trickle becomes a flood. From their jerky movements and the way they stumble into each other, Travis can tell they are infected. The image fills with a massive crowd following the running man. Hundreds, then thousands.

“In every major camp in the country where we sent troops, we set up a sophisticated video surveillance system feeding data to local commanders and analysis teams here at Special Facility,” Slater explains. “Our commanders use this data for rapid detection and response to outbreaks and riots. The cameras on the wall teach us how to improve camp defenses. In this case, it gave us a blueprint for how we lost more than a hundred thousand people to Wildfire.”

“That man in the compound, the first who fell,” Travis says. “Was he the index case?”

“You mean was he the first person in the camp who showed symptoms of Wildfire?”

“Yes,” Travis says. “The primary case. Victim zero.”

“He’s the first one who showed symptoms, that’s right,” Slater tells him. “But not the first who caught the bug.”

“Are you suggesting an Infected entered the camp who was asymptomatic?”

“Like a Typhoid Mary, you mean?”

“Yes. A carrier.”

“The analysis team narrowed it down to a single uniform mike—an unidentified male. This man entered the camp a short time before Wildfire appeared. And he was the last to leave. That was him we just saw.”

Travis stands, unable to contain his excitement. “But how? How did he spread it to so many people so fast?” Other questions race through his mind:
Why didn’t the Infected attack him? Why are they following him?