The Killing Floor (3 page)

♦

Ray tries the front door. Locked. The garage stands open, but its door is also locked. He limps to the side of the house, stumbling over a garden hose sitting in the tall grass like a patient snake, and finds an open window over an overgrown flowerbed. All he has to do is tear out the mesh and pull himself up and over—something he’s done at least a few times during his long career as an asshole—but he wonders if he has the strength to do it now. As if sensing his ambition, the monster growing from his side pulls against his ribcage, warning him to stay put.

Don’t rock the boat, mister,
he can picture it saying,
or I’ll suck one of your lungs through your ribs.

“Shut the fuck up,” he tells it.

Ray returns to the garage and drags out a short ladder, which he props against the window. Even with its aid, his progress is slow and agonizing. By the time he steps gingerly onto the floor of the house’s kitchen, he is drenched in sweat and has given the growth in his side a full-fledged malevolent personality, something other than God to bargain with.

He needs water. The tap in the sink produces nothing but a single constipated groan. He eyes the refrigerator warily and decides not to open it. Its door is plastered with kids’ drawings, a shopping list and a calendar filled with scribbled appointments and X’s leading up to the day of the epidemic. The day all calendars stopped.

“Damn it,” he says, rubbing his eyes. He left his rifle outside, propped against the wall, like the idiot in a horror movie that everyone yells at. There goes his suicide option. His face feels hot against his hand. Fever. His body trembles as his energy drains out of him and the simple act of standing becomes tiring.

“Ray?” a voice calls from behind the wall. “Is that you home?”

“Who’s there?” he whispers.

“Ray?”

“Whoever you are, please don’t mess with me.”

The ghostly shape floats out of the gloom of the dining room, a giant woman in a white nightgown, her short hair mussed from sleep.

Ray blinks. “Mom? What are you doing here?”

“I’m so glad you’re home, sweetie.”

“Are you a ghost?”

His mother laughs. “Of course I ain’t a ghost.”

“Mom, you’ll never guess what I did.”

His mother checks out the kitchen, wearing a sad frown. “Does it smell musty in here? This place needs a good cleaning. So much dust.”

“I’m a cop now. A real cop.”

“So much work to do—did you say you’re a police officer now?”

“That’s right, Mom. At the refugee camp.”

“Oh,” she says with a worried expression. “Well, you do what you think is best.”

His smile falters. “No, Ma, listen. We just blew up the Veterans Bridge. The Infected were coming out of Pittsburgh because of the fire, and we had to blow the bridge to stop them from crossing over and coming after the camp. I volunteered. I was one of the few who survived.”

“Oh,” his mother says again, touching her face. “Whatever you think is best, Ray.”

“Stop saying that!” he roars. The creature inside him awakens and turns over, pulling at his internal organs. The shock strikes his body like lightning. He wakes up on the floor curled into a ball, still screaming. “Don’t say that to me anymore!”

Several monstrous foghorns blast in unison outside, one of them close. The house trembles from the vibrations. The windows shiver in their frames. Glasses and plates rattle in the cupboards. A distant car alarm honks.

His shouting expended the last of his energy, but broke the sudden delirium.
Mom’s not here
.
They put her in one of those mass graves outside of town.
Mrs. Leona Young died during the Screaming, drowning in the bathtub as Ray slept one off downstairs in his basement apartment. So many people died during the Screaming that nobody could give his mother a proper burial. The public health department came to pick up her body for disposal in one of the mass graves the county dug outside of town. The health workers were unable to lift her three hundred pounds, and settled on dragging her from the house on a mattress.
We’re going to need a bigger hole for this one, ha ha.
Even in death, Leona could not find dignity.

“Don’t give up on me, Momma,” he says, crawling out of the kitchen.

Whatever he thought was best was never any good, but she loved him anyway. All that mother’s love, unconditional, abundant, wasted.

The couch in the living room looks deep and inviting. Gritting his teeth, Ray starts his journey across the dusty-smelling carpet, pausing often to rest. He tries to spit, but his mouth is dry.
Maybe I should just give it up. What does it matter where I die?
But he makes it. He may have lived like a dog, but he does not intend to die like one. He pulls his body up onto the couch and sits gasping, his face burning with fever as his immune system wars against the invader in his blood. Outside, the light is failing fast. Night is falling for the last time on Ray’s world.
Time
enough for one last smoke, and then good night and good luck.
He puts a wilted cigarette between his lips and lights it, staring out the big picture windows at the empty street outside.

Ray looks around, surprised to see no TV. He notices an unopened can of beer on the end table, hiding in plain sight, and blinks away a tear.

“Merry fucking Christmas,” he says.

He opens the beer and smells it. Sips it. Pours some on the bulge in his shirt.

“You like that, you little bastard?”

The growth throbs in response.

The brew is warm and a little flat and not his brand but it is the best beer he ever drank in his life. Finding an unopened beer is almost enough to make him believe in a kind and merciful God. After savoring a few sips, he chugs half of it and belches.

The can falls from his hand to spill foaming onto the carpet.

“Get out of here,” he whimpers, waving his good arm. “Go. Git.”

The picture windows are filled with Infected. They stand motionless, peering in with dark eyes, their breath steaming the glass.

Why don’t they attack?

“Leave me alone,” he cries. “Just let me die in peace.”

Are they real, or am I seeing things again?

Ray curls into a ball on the couch and closes his eyes, pressing a pillow against his face.

Lord, have mercy
, he prays.
Don’t let them eat me.

As he loses consciousness, he begins to change.

Outside, the Infected scream in the dark, slapping their hands against the glass.

Todd

The convoy grinds west along U.S. Route 22 with the headlights off, navigating by moonlight. Near the front of the battered yellow school bus leading the convoy, the boy huddles against Anne’s shoulder, her leather jacket draped over his body, lulled into a gentle doze by the droning engine. Three weeks ago, he was acing tests and dodging bullies in high school; now he is a veteran fighter in a war that is just getting started but has already changed him. Some of the other survivors weep in the dark. Outside, the Infected suffer their own pain. He can hear them wailing in the trees, mourning the lost world, until falling silent one by one as sleep overtakes them.

Pressed against the warmth of Anne’s body, Todd feels safe.

“Where have you been?” he whispers.

She does not answer; he wonders if he spoke the words or only thought them.

“Going back and forth on the earth, and walking up and down it,” Anne finally says.

“That sounds like a quote. Who said that?”

“Satan,” Anne tells him. The angel of light who was cast out of heaven for hubris.

Todd used to coolly remark the apocalypse beat high school, but now realizes how stupid it was to say such a thing to people who lost everything. For most of his life, he had intelligence but little experience; he envied the natural gravitas of adults, whose sense of themselves ran deep with time. Now he understands. He senses the pain behind Anne’s answer. She is no longer just a mother figure for him. She is a woman battling her own demons.

“Why did you leave us?”

Anne fought hard to get Todd and the others to the refugee camp, riding out of Pittsburgh in the back of a Bradley fighting vehicle, only to disappear just as they found it.

“My family died,” she says. “They died because of me. I don’t get to come back.”

“But you did. You found us at the bridge.”

“Blind luck,” she tells him. “I was just passing through with some other survivors. I’m their guardian angel now. In any case, that’s not what I meant.”

“I know what you meant,” he whispers.

Something large collides with the bus, with a metallic
boom
followed by a flurry of screams. Todd clutches at Anne, wide eyed and gasping, his arteries turned into wires carrying electric current instead of blood. The monster snorts like a giant pig, grotesquely loud, its hooves clashing on the asphalt. The driver roars, stomping on the gas. Todd feels the sudden pull of gravity as the bus lurches hard to the left. The hooves strike the side of the bus, making the entire vehicle shiver. The boy buries his face against Anne’s shoulder, biting her jacket. Then the thing falls behind, its hooves clattering, shrieking in the dark.

“What about me?” he cries. “Do I get to come back?”

Anne shushes him and strokes his hair until he regains control of his breathing and his heart stops hammering in his chest.
It’s all right
, the voices shout in the dark.
We’re all right now. What about the others? They’re still behind us, thank God.
Someone else says,
What was that thing? What was it?
Nobody answers. Nobody talks about the monsters. To talk about them is to give them your power. You start a conversation ready to fight to survive and end it ready to give up. Todd smells tobacco burning as survivors light cigarettes in the dark. As the others settle into an uneasy silence, Anne tells him, in a warm whisper close to his ear, a story about a woman who was a simple housewife—a loving mother, a devoted wife, a respected neighbor—who had everything until suddenly she didn’t. When Infection arrived, she refused to accept what was happening. She sent her husband out into the storm of violence on a fool’s errand. She left her kids with a neighbor to go search for her husband and realized, too late, she had left them to die. The woman wanted to die herself but could not overcome her instinctive need to survive. And so she made her survival a mission—a mission of vengeance.

Todd listened closely, his body slowly uncoiling as he relaxed, but now says nothing. He does not ask her if that is how she got the scars on her face. Her story makes sense to him. He spent two weeks with her in the back of the Bradley. She has the fury of Captain Ahab—if Moby Dick were a virus. Most people are just trying to get by these days, just trying to survive. Anne is at war. Her enemy is one of the tiniest forms of life on the planet.

“Is that why you hate them so much?” he says.

“Who?”

“The Infected, obviously.”

“I don’t hate them, Todd.”

“Never mind,” he says, frowning.

“Todd, those poor people deserve nothing but our sympathy.”

“Then why do you like killing them so much?”

“Is that really what you think?”

“Well,” he says.

“I enjoy nothing about it. But they’re already dead. The second the bug takes them, they stop being people. Everything that makes them who they are dies. As far as I’m concerned, they’re the walking dead. It’s not the people I kill. It’s the virus controlling them. That’s my enemy.”

He does not understand.
The Infected are evil, yes
, he reasons,
but they wear the faces of our loved ones. Perhaps there is something of those people left inside. Even if they only remember themselves when they dream, does this not still make them human?

When he shot Sheena X in the face on the first night of the outbreak, he was not killing a virus, he was killing his friend. When Anne executed Ethan on the bridge at the end of the battle, how could she not see the man, but just the virus controlling him?

“Thank God,” the driver shouts back at the survivors, switching on the headlights. “It’s the camp! We made it!”

Todd tightens his hold on Anne. “Are you coming this time?”

“For a while,” she tells him.

“Can I stay with you?”

“Todd, I’m going to get back on the road as soon as I can scrounge up a few things. You know what it’s like out there. There is no life. It’s no place for you.”

I want to be safe
, he wants to tell her, but does not know how to explain how he feels. He knows he will be safer in the camp. But he feels safer on the road, close to his fears.

Even after everything, he already feels its call to stay out here among the monsters.

Get on the road and keep moving, and they will never get you.

He remembers Sarge, the battle-hardened commander of the Bradley, falling apart during the orientation session at the camp. He stopped moving, and it nearly broke him.

Even the strongest sometimes are not strong enough to fight themselves.

Anne shakes her head. “All right, Todd. If you don’t feel right tomorrow, come and find me and we’ll talk.”

Todd nods and sits up, sniffing and wiping his eyes with the palm of his hand.

“Camp Defiance,” the driver says, pointing.

The sprawling camp looms ahead, the ragged outline of its makeshift walls and watchtowers silhouetted by the warm glow of searchlights and thousands of cooking fires. The warm breeze carries the sound of cheering crowds. Random snatches of machine gun fire. The smell of wood smoke. Overhead, helicopters roar through the night.

Home,
Todd thinks.
I want to go home. Where is home?

♦

The convoy grinds to a halt in front of the gates, churning dust that swirls like angry ghosts in the headlight beams. A machine gun rattles on the wall, tracer rounds spitting toward the distant trees. The sound of cheering grows in volume, responding to a voice squawking through a megaphone. The bass line of a pop song vibrates through the vehicle. Despite the notes of celebration, at night the camp has the atmosphere of a siege slowly being lost. Blinding white light floods the bus and then fades out. The gates open with a bang of gears.

“Show time,” Anne says to Todd, nudging him with a wink.

Todd smiles at the inside joke. Sarge always said that before a scavenging mission.

“Welcome to FEMAville, Anne,” he says.

This is the place he fought the horde to save. The place for which Paul and Ethan died.

The vehicle rolls into the compound and comes to a stop, the rest of the convoy stacking up behind it. The driver turns off the engine and opens the door, allowing the omnipresent camp smells of cooking food and open sewage to waft in. Bulbs on wires strung between wooden poles light the area, surrounded by moths. Music blares from a speaker mounted on one of the poles in a tangle of thick wires: Queen’s “We Will Rock You.” Todd peers out the window and blinks in surprise at the cheering faces.
Holy crap. They’re cheering for us.

A military officer climbs aboard the bus and speaks to the driver, who shakes his head, turns in his seat, and points at Anne. The officer approaches, introduces himself as Captain Mattis, and fires questions, his voice barely audible over the roar:
Lieutenant Patterson? Sergeant Hackett? Sergeant Wilson?

Dead, dead and trapped on the other side of the river
, Anne tells him.

“Too bad about Wilson.”

“He’ll make out all right,” Anne says. She knows Mattis is noting the loss of the Bradley more than its commander.

“So who are you, then?”

“Just passing through with some other people. We heard the shooting and helped out.” She tilts her head toward Todd. “He made it. Some engineers, some National Guard. That’s it.”

“The mission was a success, though,” Mattis says.

Anne nods. “The Infected won’t be crossing that bridge.”

“Outstanding.”

“Is that what all this is about?”

The Captain sighs. “Not exactly. The good citizens are celebrating because the military has arrived. Army units are dropping at refugee camps around the East Coast. A single company showed up and now everyone thinks it’s going to be over in a few days and they can go home.”

“It’s about time the Army pulled its weight, in any case,” Anne says.

Mattis smiles and shrugs. As a military man, he can say no more.

“People at the camp know what you did, though,” he tells her. “Word’s been going around all night about it. It’s a day of wonders.”

“It’s the worst day of my life,” Todd says.

“You saved all of us,” Mattis goes on, holding out a box. “You’re giving these people hope, son. That’s an important thing. Make sure you get your ribbon.”

Anne holds one up and laughs, startling Todd, who never heard her laugh even once in all their time together.

“It’s a dog show ribbon,” she says.

“Best of breed, to be exact,” Mattis admits with a smile.

Todd stares at the purple and gold ribbon clutched in his hand. He can hardly speak; it’s ludicrous. “What the heck is this?” he demands.

“We can’t pay you. We don’t have anything to pay you with. All we can do is try to honor you. Everyone at the camp knows about what you did and that you are wearing these ribbons. You’re going to have a hundred and thirty thousand people treating you like a hero for the next few weeks. Extra food, extra showers, you name it.”

Anne takes the ribbon from his hand and pins it to his T-shirt. Mattis stands back and salutes.

“Welcome home, son.”

One by one, the survivors stagger off the bus and are welcomed by the cheering crowd. They huddle together, blinking tears. The more the people applaud, the more the survivors cry. Someone whistles and Todd flinches. He keeps seeing gray faces lunge out of the crowd. Faces of the Infected howling for his throat, spraying spittle rich with virus.

No, no, no. You’re way too young to be this screwed up, Todd old man
, he tells himself. Yet it takes every bit of mental energy he has not to yank out his pistol and start shooting.

“If you don’t feel right in the head tomorrow, come and find me,” Anne says. “I’ll be here.”

“Wait,” Todd says, scanning the crowd. “Where’s Ray Young?”

He turns back, but Anne is gone. And Ray is nowhere to be found among the sea of empty, grinning faces. Someone presses a warm can of beer into his hand and tells him to drink up.

“Ray!” he cries.

A girl walks out of the crowd. He catches a glimpse of her blue eyes and wild red hair before she cups his face in her hands and kisses him. The crowd applauds heartily and whistles, the sound blending with the roar of blood rushing through his ears.

“Erin,” he gasps. “It’s you.”

“Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

She takes his hand and leads him through the clamoring mob. Hands clap him on the back and seek out his to shake. He gives someone the can of beer. As they reach the rear of the crowd, they disappear into the darkness, navigating by the dim light of cooking fires. Erin appears to know the maze by feel alone.

Todd can smell her on the breeze. His hand sweats against hers. She leans against him as they walk through the warm, humid night, and he becomes aware of her chest pressed against his arm. He remembers she does not wear a bra.