The Killing Floor (29 page)

Wendy

They set up the Coleman stove in the abandoned warehouse and heat some of the MREs, or meals ready to eat, the Army provided as part of its supplies for the NLA. Sitting in a circle on the cement floor, they eat in a thoughtful silence, the Bradley crew watching Todd, Todd studying the blue ring of fire on the Coleman. This is fine with Wendy; she just wants to look at him. They all know it is a miracle they found each other again.

He has grown up a lot in the past two months, but at this moment he looks like an exhausted boy on the verge of tears. She is not even sure why she missed him so much. They fought and scavenged in the same group for just two weeks. Once they reached Camp Defiance, they split up with hardly a goodbye.

But they went to hell and back. For those two weeks, they were a tribe, relying on each other with their very lives. Wendy remembers standing in a dark hospital corridor with him, guns readied, waiting for the Infected to attack. She held her Glock against his head after the monster bit him, praying he would not become infected and she would not have to put him down. They escaped while Pittsburgh burned, pursued by the Demon. They made it to Defiance and later fought a horde to save the camp.

The simple fact is she feels safe with him there.

And yet he makes her a little sad, too. He makes her remember Paul and Ethan and how they died on the bridge. Deaths that now seem utterly pointless, seeing as the camp fell anyway.

Wendy tells Todd about their journey to Camp Immunity near Harrisburg, where they told Ethan’s wife about his death on the bridge, and how they joined up with the New Liberty Army, taking the fight to the Infected all over southeastern Ohio.

Todd nods and accepts a cup of coffee from Toby.

“You’re going to be okay, Kid,” Toby tells him. “You got your whole life ahead of you.”

“We’re leaving soon,” Wendy says.

The boy glances at her.

“We’re leaving the war,” she continues. “We’re done.”

Wendy studies him for a while. He watches her intently, waiting.

“Where are you going?” he finally says.

“South. We’re going to find an island. A state park or something, where it’s warm all year around. Make a stand. Live as long as we can.”

She and Toby heard the bombing, saw the smoke, and decided to check it out, which led them straight to Todd. There can be no other reason they found each other like this.

It’s meant to be.

“You should come with us,” she says.

Todd

Wendy’s idea is the same as their original plan back in Pittsburgh, before they learned people were resisting, before the Army came home to wage its impossible war against Infection. They would leave humanity to fend for itself, and find a place for themselves. Find sanctuary with people you could trust to watch your back, and survive as long as possible. Not just survive, but
live
, on their own terms, not in some miserable, overcrowded refugee camp. It is either the wish of a dreamer or the most rational thing he ever heard.

Sarge said he has his whole life ahead of him. At seventeen, it is hard for Todd to understand what that means. It is the kind of thing someone who has been alive a long time would say. He remembers Anne saying she does not get to come back.
What about me? Can I leave the road and build a new life somewhere?
Anne and Paul taught him your demons can never touch you if you keep moving. It’s dangerous on the road, but some of the worst monsters are in your head.

And yet finding a remote place that is defendable and self-sustaining is possibly the one rational course left. People like Sarge and Wendy are best equipped to survive not just today, but what is coming. In just a year, civilization could finally collapse, Todd believes, at least in the North. Everywhere he has traveled, people were using up what they had while producing nothing, and nobody seems to be planning ahead for the lean times coming in the winter. Salvage is not enough to keep the nation going. Winter, hunger and disease may finish it.

The nightmare, sadly, is about to get worse, with no end in sight. The apocalypse is taking its sweet time, but this is still the end of the world. The final collapse will come suddenly, and then the human race will no longer be able to stage large-scale organized resistance to Infection. Out in the open, humans will become part of the food chain, somewhere near the bottom.

We will all go down together, and we will go down fighting
.

In the first days of the epidemic, he saw a small band of exhausted police fight until a mob of Infected overran them. They shot at the Infected, and when they ran out of bullets, they clubbed at them with the butts of their guns. They knew the entire time their fight was futile, and yet they did not submit to the inevitable. They fought back, tooth and nail, to the final second.

FUTILE BUT BRAVE; that will be our epitaph.

The one logical alternative to going down with the ship is to find a good place, dig in and hold onto it for as long as possible. Fortify it, make it self-sufficient, and defend it with people you can trust with your life. If there is one thing Paul’s death taught Todd, it is people don’t matter, only certain people do. If there is one thing Erin’s death taught him, it is to take whatever happiness you can get for as long as you can get it.

Wendy is right. They should go. Todd wants to join them.

One hope still exists, however. One major hope for the human race.

We could find a cure.

And for this reason, it is not time to leave just yet. He has one more thing to do.

He still wants his revenge on Infection.

“Ray Young is alive,” he tells them.

Cool Rod

Dear Rod,

We’re all okay.

A man dropped by the dorm today to tell us that the Marines have retaken the White House. It won’t be long now, he said. Soon, our nation’s capital will be free again.

He called the infected people demons. I’m not sure I’m willing to go that far. They may be crazy and evil now, but they still look like us. They used to be us. They are so sad.

The monsters we hear about are another story altogether. They sound like something out of Hell. Have you seen any during the fighting? The kids try to scare each other during the day by pretending to be monsters, and it makes them laugh, but at night they’re terrified. Sometimes, late at night, you can hear the real monsters howling outside the wall.

Victor was starting to make such a racket at night that he now sleeps with me and Lilia, and then Kristina didn’t like that so now we all sleep on the floor on an old mattress. Okay, I admit, a part of me likes it. I make them feel safe, and they make me feel needed. The more they need me, the more it takes my mind off other things, like the end of the world.

I’m sorry I sound so down in the dumps in this letter, Rod. Most times I write, I put a big smile on my face because I want you to not worry about us. Things aren’t great, but we’re doing okay. We’re alive and we have enough to eat, and that’s plenty to be thankful for these days. You have enough going on in the war without wondering if your family is all right, because we really are.

It’s just that every day things get a little harder. The other night one of those things got inside the camp and the MPs were chasing it around with flamethrowers. They had it surrounded—this horrible, hoofed, screaming thing—and they were shooting it with jets of fire. We were hustled into the rec center, where we stood shoulder to shoulder in the dark until the coast was clear, and came out to find our dorm tent had burned clean to the ground and all our possessions were floating away in the dark as ash and sparks on the wind. Our photo albums are gone, Rod. All those years of memories. Our entire past. I now have only one photo of you to keep me company at night and remind our kids that they have a daddy, and it’s falling apart from all of us holding it so tight.

Today, a salvage crew brought in a truckload of clothes to replace what we lost in the fire. I try not to think that the clothes our kids are wearing once belonged to other kids who are now probably dead. Dead and eaten, from what I hear the crazies do to children.

If the Marines have taken the White House, I hope that means you’ll win this important victory, and get to rotate out for a few weeks of rest. You could come home and live with us for a while. I really need you, Rod. There was a fire and the photo album is gone and now I can’t stop crying. I feel like it wasn’t just pictures but our past that got burned up and forever lost. Right now, our past is all I have of you.

As time goes on, I feel your absence ever so much. You should be with your family right now. Your place is here. I freely give up this demand, my right as your wife, in the hopes that you will win and be able to save not just us, but the entire country. Do your duty, Rod. The wolves are at the door and your family is counting on you to put this to an end. Fight hard, without mercy. Kill them all. Do whatever it takes to win, no matter how hard, no matter how horrible. Put this to an end. And then come home to us so that we can build new memories.

I love you more than myself. Your children miss their father. We are all praying for you.

Your loving wife,

Gabriela

Anne

Sitting cross-legged on the road, Anne cleans and oils her weapons by starlight while her team sleeps fitfully on the bus, dreaming their bad dreams. With swift, deft movements, working by feel, she reassembles her rifle and dry fires it. The forest crowding the road is alive with the song of insects and nocturnal critters scampering through the undergrowth. The air feels warm and wet against her skin. Most people are terrified of the night these days, but not Anne. She welcomes it. The Infected can hide in it, but so can she. In the dark, Anne becomes a hunter.

The asphalt feels warm against her ass and legs. She finishes her granola bar and washes it down with a few chugs of Red Bull. This is what passes for breakfast, but Anne does not mind. Food is for fuel, not pleasure, these days. And speed is paramount; it is time to get back on the road and narrow Ray’s head start. She reloads the rifle and stands, dusting her pants and stretching like a cat. In the dark, she feels calm, thoughtful and safe, as long as she does not think too much about the past.

About two months ago, she started her day serving breakfast to her husband and three small children in their kitchen. After dumping the dishes into the sink to soak in steaming water, she started rolling out pie dough. Her friend called to tell her there was trouble downtown—mobs of people running amok, doing horrible things to each other. By the end of the day, her husband disappeared and her children lay slaughtered in a neighbor’s living room. Three days later, she surfaced from a state of shock in a deteriorating government shelter. By the end of the week, Sarge taught her the basics of sniper craft, and she began the killing. She learned from the pros who worked the camp watchtowers. She often volunteered for a shift in the towers herself, practicing range finding, estimating elevation and wind. With endless practice, she turned murder into an art. Mostly, she has a knack for it. Some people have a natural talent for certain things. It is a strange thought, considering how she came to be a killer, but sometimes she feels she was born to do this.

Which is good in one way, because it is all Anne has left. Hurting Infection, in fact, is one of the few things that make her feel something besides guilt and loss.

The guilt of allowing her children to be slaughtered, the loss of everything she loved. The guilt of letting Ray Young live, only to see him return and slaughter tens of thousands.

Ray Young has become Infection. All that matters now is catching and killing him before he does even worse because Anne, in a moment of weakness, showed mercy.

Stepping onto the bus, she slaps Marcus’s boot and steps back as the man lunges awake, growling in the dark with a knife in his hand.

“Time to go,” Anne tells him.

“Anne? Christ, it’s still pitch black out there.”

“It’ll be light in less than an hour. We already spent too much time here.”

“Wait a minute.” Marcus sits up and rubs the sleep from his eyes. “Listen, Anne. I need to know you’re okay.”

“Since when I have ever been truly okay since you’ve known me?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I’m upset, Marcus. There’s a guy who can control the Infected, and spreads Infection, as far as I know, just by looking at you, and he’s on his way to Washington, DC, where our military is in a fight to the death to take the city back.”

“Look, you think we don’t get it about what kind of threat Young poses to all of us, but we do. We get it. It’s just hard to put your life on the line for something, you know? And that’s what you’re asking us all to do here. You’re asking us to die for this. Most of us would rather go somewhere safe and let someone else figure it out.”

Anne blinks at him. She forgot most people still place a high value on their lives.

“The stakes,” she says finally, unsure how to finish the statement.

“We’ll get him,” Marcus assures her. “We will, or the Army will.”

They remember the planes roaring overhead, the distant thunder, the rising wall of smoke on the western horizon, veiling the setting sun.

“We both know he got away before they dropped those bombs.”

“Anne, let me get to the point. I’m worried about you.”

“I’m worried about Todd.” For Anne, even this is a big admission.

“He can take care of himself.”

“He ran off to snoop around a horde of a hundred thousand Infected, and then was close to ground zero when the bombs fell. Marcus, I’m worried.”

“Let’s talk about you. Anne, you shot and killed a woman today.”

“So what? I’ve shot lots of people.”

“Jean was a crazy, but she wasn’t Infected. You shot her in cold blood and didn’t even blink. As far as I know, that’s a first even for you.”

“You know what she did in the art gallery.”

“Jean and Gary did what they had to do to survive. You’ve never judged anyone before for what they’ve done to stay alive. Christ, we all have blood on our hands. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be here.”

The truth is I lost control.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Anne says.

“All right. Forget why. What I don’t get is what’s going on inside your head. Me, I honestly can’t picture doing what you did. Shit, what do you feel about it? Do you feel anything at all?”

Anne’s mind flashes to pointing her pistol at Jean’s face and squeezing the trigger.

“I don’t feel anything,” she says, a little surprised at the realization.

Marcus nods, taking this in. Another major admission.

“We’re wasting time here,” she says. “Can we go now? Please?”

He says nothing, and they regard each other in the dark, their eyes gleaming.

“I need you, Marcus,” she tells him, her voice strained.

“I’ll come,” he says. “We’ll finish this.”

“Good. Let’s wake up the others.”

“But I want more.”

“More?”

“I want you.”

As much as Anne loves Todd as a son, she has come to love Marcus as a man. The thought of giving herself to him fills her with panic, however. For one thing, it is too soon. Just two months ago, she was mother to three children given to her by a man whom she loved with her whole heart for nearly ten years of her life. She never properly mourned them. She cannot just let go.

On the other hand, no more perfect time exists. She could die within the next five minutes.

“If you want sex, I can give you that.”

“It’s not about that, Anne. I want
you
.”

He is asking her to feel, but she doubts she has anything to give him. She remembers Sarge in the government shelter, what seems like a lifetime ago, calling the Infected the living dead.

Us?
he added.
We’re the dead living.

The words shocked her at the time. Now she understands.

How can you ask me to love you, Marcus, when you might die before sunrise?

“I want you,” he repeats. “Don’t we deserve to be happy, even if for a little while?”

“I don’t know what that means anymore. I want to but I don’t know if I can.”

Marcus nods. “All right. Then I’ll settle for that.”

He smiles at her in the dark and Anne smiles back, a rare sight at any time of day.