The Killing Floor (33 page)

Ray

Ray has a sense of events spiraling out of control. A moment ago, he was enjoying flexing his power in front of the soldiers, but now he needs their help. His jumpers are deadly and terrifying, but he does not trust them to kill Anne Leary before she kills him. In his mind, she has become the angel of death. He flinches as the whir of the bus engine grows louder.

Fade
, he tells his monsters.
Get out of the way. Hide until I need you.

Ray sees the bus approaching, the driver crouched low over the wheel and ignoring the squad’s warning shots. Then the Stryker’s heavy machine gun opens up, the pounding fire loud and urgent, like a hammer striking an anvil next to his ear. The gun chews up the thin metal, punching gaping holes in its walls and blowing out the seats, which fly away in clouds of cheap stuffing.

Another machine gun opens fire from the roof of the Walmart. Hundreds of rounds stream into the vehicle and rip it to shreds. What’s left of the roof flops away like aluminum foil and slams into the road, dragged along with a grating, ear-splitting screech. The bus appears to disintegrate into pieces as it roars across the final distance, trailing smoke and rolling debris.

“Come on,” Ray shouts into the roar. “It’s just a freaking bus! Kill the goddamn thing!”

He watches the vehicle continue its approach and feels rooted to the spot.

I never had a chance. The woman is indestructible. It’s not fair.

BUMP BUMP BUMP BUMP

He flinches again and spins around as the Bradley fires its main gun, flinging cannon rounds downrange into what’s left of the vehicle. Empty shell casings topple down the Bradley’s metal chest, knocking off a withered wreath of wildflowers someone had placed there. Ray watches the wreath fall away and suddenly he is on the bridge again, watching the Infected come howling at him like an army boiling up straight from Hell, standing his ground and firing because there is nowhere safe to go, and to run is to die.

“Sarge?” he says.
Can it really be you?

The cannon rounds slam into the front of the bus, which flies apart in a series of fireballs. Ray glimpses the crumpled hood flying end over end through the air. Then, miraculously, the rig emerges from the cloud of smoke trailing fire and pieces of metal, heading toward him as if in a final death lunge, the driver’s seat blown away. Then it flips.

The soldiers stop firing, watching the flimsy wreck roll several times and collapse, the culmination of a long streak of smoking debris stretched back along the asphalt like metal road kill. A horde of metal parts continues to clang and tumble along, and then the wreck is finally still.

“Ha!” Ray whoops, clapping his hands. “Ha, ha, ha! You’re dead now, Anne Leary! You’re fucking dead! I win!”

Price and Fielding, lying on the ground with their hands over their heads, return to their feet.

Mr. Young
, Sergeant Rodriguez says over the radio.
Are you all right? Anyone injured over there?

“We’re just great,” Ray tells him, lighting another Winston with shaking hands.

“What now, Mr. Young?” Price says, his eyes wide behind his faceplate. “Are we still your hostages?”

“I don’t know,” Ray says, blowing a stream of smoke and chewing on his lip.

“Give it up,” Fielding tells him. “What you’re asking for can’t be gotten. You’re going to just have to take a chance. Either way, isn’t it worth the result?”

“You really think what I’ve got inside of me could save the world?”

Fielding glances at Price, who nods.

“I believe it,” the scientist says. “I know it.”

We need to talk this out, Ray
, Rodriguez says.
Let’s keep the hoppers out of it for now.

Ray realizes they’re right. It’s time to give up. He’ll never get a guarantee that would mean anything, and he has a real chance to end Infection.

I want to save the world
, he decides.

“That’s weird,” he says, staring at Fielding.

“What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

“You’re one of mine.”

Ray’s chest explodes and his blood sprays across Dr. Price’s suit and faceplate, followed by the sound of a gunshot. Then he’s spinning, spinning, falling to the ground.

Over the ringing in his ears, he hears a woman screaming an inhuman cry of joy.

Protect, protect, protect—

Dr. Price

Travis watches in shock as the hoppers flood from their hiding places, bounding across the empty parking lots like a swarm of locusts. The crackle of small arms fire fills the air. Standing over Ray Young, two of the Infected cops level their guns and open fire at one of the windows of the low-rise office building. The third sits on the ground, holding his throat and gurgling as blood flows between his fingers.

Young sits with his back against one of the truck’s tires, legs spread wide, breathing in rapid, shallow gasps. One of the cops topples to the asphalt next to him, a neat hole drilled through his forehead, the back of his skull a smoking, shattered ruin. Young clutches his chest with a bloody fist and stares at Travis, his eyes communicating his desperate need to live.

“Help,” he croaks.

Travis falls to his knees and opens his plastic suitcase, which contains first aid supplies, and stares at it, his face tingling. He feels like he is about to pass out. The last Infected cop appears to do a jig in the air, blood spraying, and then collapses to the ground grinning.

“Fielding, do you know how to treat a gunshot wound?”

Fielding stands over them, fists clenched at his sides, oblivious to the bullets and the monsters flying past. “What do you mean, I’m one of yours?”

“This man is going to die if we don’t treat him!”

Young grimaces in pain. “Thought you were a doctor.”

“I’m not a medical doctor, Mr. Young.”

“Figure it out quick,” Young tells him, “or you’re a dead man.”

Travis takes a pair of scissors and cuts away Young’s T-shirt, exposing the small hole that bleeds down his front. Moving the man as gently as possible, he finds another hole in his back, a little below the first one.

“The bullet passed through.”

Fielding screams, “What do you mean, I’m one of yours?”

Young’s eyes shift to him. “Infected.”

Wadding up a thick bandage, Travis jams it behind Young’s back, and then pushes another against his chest, running tape over it. The man’s face is pale and waxy, but his breathing is steady and his eyes seem alert. Travis has no idea what kind of damage the bullet did inside of him, however. Young needs a medical doctor.

“Doc, what did you do?” Fielding says.

Travis ignores him, watching the hoppers swarm over the Stryker. They rip apart the gunner, tossing shreds of his body high in the air like tissues from a Kleenex box, and then eat their way inside the cupola to get at the rest of the crew.

The big soldier with the flamethrower throws a long jet of fire onto the vehicle, torching the hoppers, which flop to the ground shrieking.

“What did you do to me?” Fielding demands.

The air fills with tracers, flashes of light bursting in all directions, cutting down the leaping creatures. Behind the Bradley, one of Wilson’s people runs with a hopper on her back, another swinging from her outstretched arm, until collapsing a short distance later. The earth around her erupts as bullets kill her and the hoppers both.

Sergeant Rodriguez mows down a pair of hoppers with his shotgun and joins the big soldier with the flamethrower, waving his arm and shouting.

Fielding picks up one of the guns dropped by the dead cops and points it at Travis’s head. “Doc, I’m going to ask just one more time. What did you do?”

Travis turns so that Fielding can see his face through the plate.

“I cut a hole in your air hose. You’ve been exposed the whole time. Young infected you. It was a one in three chance. You’re just unlucky, I guess.”

“Jesus, Doc.” The man’s eyes are wild. “How much time do I have?”

Young shakes his head, staring up at him, breathing hard.

“A few minutes, maybe,” Travis tells him.

“What the hell are you saying? Why, Doc? Why’d you do it?”

“I wasn’t about to let you carry out your orders to kill me if things didn’t work out here. Let’s just say I needed my own guarantee.”

“I’m going to kill you anyway, you idiot. You just killed us both for nothing.”

“You said you would give your life to save the world. See? Ray Young is here. We still have a chance to gain viable samples. If you kill me, you will prevent me from saving the world. So give your life. Go somewhere and die.”

Fielding lowers the gun, considering this.

Travis turns to Young and says, “You’re bleeding through your dressing. I’m going to put another dressing on top of it, okay? We’ve got to stop the bleeding.”

Fielding raises the gun again. Travis stares up at him, feeling real terror for the first time. His gamble failed. The man is going to kill him.

“I gave it some thought, Doc,” Fielding tells him, his face a mask of rage. “I realized I don’t give a shit about the world if I’m not in it—”

The man disappears in a blur, the gun cracking once, burying a bullet in the asphalt. Travis blinks in shock several times before realizing Fielding is at the bottom of a pile of hoppers. The man screams as they rip into him with their teeth and tiny hands, stingers pounding.

“Doc,” Young says. “Hey,
Price
.”

He stammers several times before answering, “Yes?”

“Heal me, or you’re next.”

Anne

Anne crouches next to the window, tears streaming down her cheeks. She shot the bastard, she shot him good, and he’s dying now, but Marcus is dead, dead like everyone else she ever loved, and now that the tears have come, they won’t stop, flowing down the channels created by her scars.

A hopper launches itself against one of the room’s windows, cracking the glass and bouncing off with a scream. The next crashes through in a burst of glass shards and falls to the carpet writhing and spraying blood. A third peers into the window on her other side, hissing at her with its jagged mouth as she shoves the barrel of her rifle against its forehead and squeezes the trigger, splashing the contents of its little skull across a photocopier.

More scratch at the walls, trying to figure out a safe way in. Anne can hear their glottal clicks and grunts. In the distance, she catches a glimpse of an arc of fire streaming from a flamethrower. The air is still filled with gunfire. Ray must have summoned every monster from miles around. The hoppers, being fast, got here first. Others will follow. Already she can hear the booming foghorn calls of the juggernauts. When they get here, anyone still out in the open is going to be slaughtered.

It’s time to make a quick exit if she wants to live. Sadly for her, Anne appears destined to survive this fight as well. She backs away from the front of the building, her rifle banging in her hands as the hoppers appear in the windows. It is hard work without someone watching her back, but it is work that is second nature to her, work that she’s good at.

Even now, with the hoppers pouring through the windows into the withering fire of her rifle, she sobs, mourning Marcus, the man she believes died to save the world from the plague spreader. At the end, when he saw the soldiers and realized their desperate plan was certain to fail, he told her to jump off the back of the bus and save herself, and then stepped on the gas for his suicide run while she rolled away and disappeared into the office building.

The rest was surprisingly easy.

Anne swore she would kill Ray Young for what he did to Camp Defiance, and she has fulfilled her oath. She wonders if it was worth the cost. All of her Rangers are dead. Todd is missing. What if Marcus had taken her up on her offer to go to Nightingale? He was strong; he could have made it. They might have had a life together. Is it possible she could ever be happy?

I don’t get to go back
, she knows, shooting a hopper in the face.

She hears another window shatter somewhere to her left. The hoppers have found another way in and are hunting her among the cubicles. Anne continues to retreat into the gloom, backing toward a door under an EXIT sign, which she knows accesses the stairs and offers a route to the rear of the building.

The creature flies hissing at her. She catches a glimpse of mottled gray flesh and large black eyes before putting a round through it, sending it spinning among the cubicles. She turns and shoots another two creeping up on her other side, arms outstretched like children wanting a hug.

As her back connects with the door, she feels a tremor jolt through the building, bumping her body an inch off the ground. Then another.

Something’s wrong.

A violent, agonized roar rakes her ears, sending massive vibrations through her body that leave her feeling shaken.

“Demon,” she whispers, paling.

The building shakes, filling the air with dust. Something is crashing through walls and pounding the floor with giant feet. Behind Anne, a workstation shelf collapses, spilling staplers and tape dispensers and photos of smiling children.

Anne backs away from the door, eyes wide with terror.

The monster roars again. The building continues to shake violently, spilling light fixtures and pieces of acoustical ceiling tile into the workstations. She can hear drywall crumbling into dust on the other side of the door.

Anne has stopped crying. A wave of calm washes over her. She is going to need everything she’s got if she’s going to escape.

And if I can’t escape, if this is my time, I’m ready for that too. Tom, Peter, Alice and Little Tom, I’ll be with you soon.

She turns and runs back toward the front of the building.

Behind her, the wall explodes, flooding the room with a thick, rolling cloud of dust.