The Killing Floor (5 page)

Looks pretty ninja
, he decides.

Anne senses his approach and turns to watch him limp stiffly, like a zombie, across the mud. The mechanic, a giant of a man with long blond hair, tightens the grip on his wrench, scowling at him. He takes a step forward but is halted by Anne clicking her tongue.

“Hello, Todd,” Anne says, wiping her hands on a rag.

“Who are these guys?” he asks her, glancing nervously at the mechanic.

“I guess you could call them my crew. Marcus here I brought with me. Evan and Ramona heard about me and came here. They don’t want to stay. They want to go back out.”

“They call us Anne’s Rangers,” the mechanic tells him.

Todd likes the sound of that. “I thought you said there’s nothing out there.”

“I made a deal with Mattis,” Anne explains. “The Camp will supply us with diesel, weapons, some other things. We’ll find more survivors and bring them here. Run supplies and mail to the other camps. That sort of thing.”

Todd nods. “That’s a good job for you.”

“What about you? You staying, then?”

“I want to go home.”

Anne gives him a grim smile. “All right.”

“Is that okay with you?”

“Marcus will get you some gear. Then rest. Tomorrow, we go back out. We can use you.”

“Thank you, Anne.”

The blond giant nods and extends his hand in welcome.

Todd smiles as he shakes it and thinks,
I always wanted to belong somewhere.

Marcus

He was a good mechanic and this got him steady work at auto repair shops. Mufflers, brakes and shock absorbers, mostly, plus body repair and painting. After his wife died, leaving him with two growing boys, he quit Sears Auto Center and got a job closer to home as a service technician at a Toyota dealership. He was welding when the Screaming swept through town.

After hours of starting and stopping, swearing and leaning on his horn, Marcus pulled into the high school parking lot and lunged sweating from his truck. Inside, he pushed through the roar of red-faced parents and teachers and into the gym, where the survivors had laid the bodies of the fallen, students and teachers alike, in rows on the floor. Both Jack and Michael lay on their backs, their bodies still jerking in tiny spasms. He swept them up, one boy over each shoulder, and carried them to his truck. A teacher approached to challenge him but dodged aside after seeing the terrible expression on his face and his hands clenched into fists.

On the way home, he listened to the radio. They were calling it a syndrome because nobody knew what the hell it was. There was a lot of talk about
exploding head syndrome, frontal lobe epilepsy, nanotech terrorism
. None of it made any sense. A doctor said some of the victims exhibited
echolalia
, the automatic repetition of sounds. His ears perked up at that. After arriving home and getting his boys into their beds, he told them he loved them, hoping to hear it said back to him.

His cousin Kirsten, who worked as a nurse at the hospital, dropped by first thing in the morning to set up bedpans and intravenous tubes. After she left, Marcus could not cope with the empty, funereal silence and went to the liquor store, where he stood for hours in a line that went out the door and around the corner. Returning home, he found his boys lying in the exact same position he’d left them. He changed their bedpans and IV bags, exercised their limbs a little, gave them a quick sponge bath. When he moved Michael’s arm, he noticed his younger son had
waxy flexibility
, which he’d heard was another occasional symptom of the syndrome. Wherever he put the boy’s limbs, they stayed frozen in whatever position they were last left.

This done, fighting tears, Marcus went back downstairs, poured a few fingers of Wild Turkey bourbon, topped it up with Coke and ice, and turned the TV on. A blowhard on the cable news was saying things like
brain drain
and
national inventory
and
precipice.

None of it made any sense to him. The world began to blur.

Two days later, he heard shouting on the TV. The screamers were waking up, and they were attacking people. Nobody knew why. Apparently, if a screamer bit you, you caught the disease. Marcus watched Cleveland fall apart for an hour before realizing his kids had woken up as well. He could hear them stomping around upstairs.

Still reeling with hangover, Marcus staggered to the foot of the stairs. He considered calling Kirsten, or maybe the cops, and felt ashamed. Why was he afraid? What was there to be afraid of? The boys were his own flesh and blood.

He climbed the stairs slowly, one step at a time.

“Jack,” he said when he reached the bedroom door. He felt out of breath; he could hardly speak. “Michael?”

He heard snarling on the other side, fingernails scratching at the wood.

“Are you guys okay?” Marcus whispered, suddenly scared of his own voice.

Something large thudded against the wall on his left, making a picture jump off its hook and clatter to the floor. Moments later, something crashed against the door, making it shiver on its hinges, followed by more growling and pacing.

Shit
, Marcus thought, afraid to say anything. Terrified to even move. Even breathe. His body would not stop shaking. After a minute, he held up his trembling hand and stared at it as if it belonged to someone else.

I’m afraid of my own sons,
he realized.
My sons. My own flesh and blood.

It was like being afraid of yourself. They were a part of him.

Even worse, he was afraid he would open the door and they would have hate in their eyes. That they would look at him as if they didn’t know him.

In the end, he had no choice. He opened the door.

“Boys? It’s your dad. I’m coming in now. Take it easy, okay?”

Jack came at him first, hands splayed into claws. Marcus pushed him onto the nearest bed as Michael lunged at his legs. He kneed his younger son in the face, hard enough to make him yelp, and would have apologized if Jack weren’t flying at him again. He shoved Jack to the floor, trying to buy time some to figure out what he was going to do. He was stronger than them, but he knew how much energy they had; they could keep this up for hours, while he was already breathing hard and sweating.

Retreating into the hallway, he slammed the door as the boys launched themselves against it, and moved a massive dresser from his own bedroom to block it. He listened to them howl and scrabble at the wood with their nails.

“You can bang on that door all you want,” he said. “I’m not letting you out.” The father in him felt the urge to add, “until,” but until what?

Until never.

His body tingled with shock. His own children were trying to kill him. They had turned into the monsters he saw eating the dead on the cable news. He stumbled downstairs feeling fuzzy, as if he were floating. A part of him had been amputated, leaving nothing behind. The TV was still on, showing another talking head saying things like
we’ve lost contact with John
and
apocalypse.
Marcus poured another tall bourbon and Coke and wondered how long the door and dresser would hold his kids before they broke out and came for him.

The world blurred again. A tank rolled past the house on shrieking treads. People swarmed on top of it, clawing at the armor, trying to get in. Inside, dishes rattled in the cupboards. Pictures fell off the walls and crashed to the floor.

So this is the way the world ends
, he thought.

The blowhard on the TV was saying,
God help us all
, when the power failed and plunged the world into darkness. Marcus sat on the couch sipping his bourbon in long stretches of silence periodically shattered by distant screams. The air smelled like smoke.

No son of mine is going to be a monster
, he decided. His boys needed mercy only a loving father could give.

He drank until he had the courage to do what needed doing.

As dawn paled the sky, he lurched to his feet and searched until he found Michael’s baseball bat. He hefted it, feeling the weight in his large hand.

Then he went upstairs to say goodbye to his sons.

Cool Rod

Back in Kandahar, the Fifth Dragoons played death metal battle anthems like “Bodies” and “Die Motherfucker Die” as they rode into battle in their Stryker vehicles, pumping up their courage and scaring the shit out of the Afghans. Now, roaring along the service road adjacent to Ronald Reagan National Airport near Washington, DC, the boys of Comanche Company are listening to the plaintive sound of “Paranoid Android” and still searching for the right note.

Sergeant Hector Rodriguez—Nimrod in elementary school, Hot Rod in high school, Cool Rod in the Army, and just plain Rod to his friends—doesn’t mind. To him, this is a Radiohead war. Surreal music to go with the surreal scenery: a desolate, post-apocalyptic America. He feels like a sailor on a submarine, returning home after fighting a nuclear war, only to find his country destroyed.

In any case, at least it’s not Enya. Some smartass cranked up “Only Time” as they stormed the airport a week ago, and nobody challenged it. It actually fit their mood.

The small VDT screen mounted next to the driver shows a digital map of the southeastern quadrant of Arlington, Virginia. Blue icons reveal friendly forces, so massively concentrated at the airport, now a forward operations base, that it is hard to pick out their column of LAV IIIs turning north onto Crystal Drive. There are no red icons. It is assumed the enemy is everywhere, dispersed in small formations.

In neat white letters on the back of his green helmet, the driver has stenciled, how’s my driving? call M2-BOOM. The Stryker commander stands on a platform with the upper half of his body outside the vehicle so he can operate the fifty-caliber machine gun.

Rod scans the anxious faces of the eight beefy kids sitting with him in the hot interior of the vehicle. They look formidable enough. His squad of shooters is armed to the teeth, highly trained, part of a military that once projected American power almost everywhere on the planet. Modern legionnaires, lean and fit and hungry. He wonders if they will have what it takes to shoot and kill American civilians. Not just some, but hundreds, even thousands.

More specifically, they will be battling monsters. How do you train for that? Rod had been forced to sit through endless PowerPoint presentations discussing the type of monsters encountered and known capabilities and weaknesses. Few traditional tactics apply. The enemy knows no fear. Flanking accomplishes nothing. Ground cover is not important anymore, just concealment. Flamethrowers, which fell out of military use in 1978, are starting to be manufactured again in fortified factories. Shotguns and pistols are in high demand. The bayonet is making a comeback. Some soldiers are being trained as
mules
—lightly armed troops solely responsible for carrying spare ammunition.

Everything is changing. They must unlearn everything they know, then relearn it fast or die.

As the soldiers notice Rod’s attention, they look away. The whine of the rig’s Caterpillar diesel engine fills the dim passenger compartment.

It’s going to take time to earn their trust. They can hate him for what they think he did. That is fine. But they must believe he is competent, and follow his orders, or he cannot lead.

Most of the boys in Fifth Stryker Cavalry Regiment’s Company C are orphans from other outfits. Rod and Lieutenant Pierce, assigned to Comanche’s Second Platoon, the Hellraisers, are the sole survivors of Battle Company’s Third Platoon. Rod is new to the Hellraisers and some of these soldiers are new to each other, the result of higher command consolidating understrength units on the fly after the catastrophic losses the regiment took in Germany during the first days of the epidemic. The regiment had flown to Ramstein Air Base as a pit stop on their way home after a violent year in Afghanistan. Then the Screaming struck down one out of every five of them.

Three days later, the screamers rose from their beds.

Many soldiers could not fire on their comrades. They tried everything to subdue them without using lethal force. They wrestled and clubbed them and shot at their legs and gradually became infected themselves. Rod knows soldiers ultimately fight and die for the guy next to them. Why else would they do it? Death is final, and it is eternal. Looking death in the eye, country and apple pie and bringing democracy to the Middle East don’t seem as important as they did at the enlistment office. So they do it for the other guys in their foxhole. It is a brotherhood bred not from the rigors of war, but from facing death together—a will to survive demanding mutual support and sacrifice.

The Infected left their beds and attacked their comrades.

Many of the soldiers could not shoot.

Rod’s old squad had revered him back in Kandahar, calling him Cool Rod for his icy calm in a fight. But when his boys came running at him, he had not been able to shoot them. The entire platoon had been infected, along with a number of support personnel, and they ran at him and the Lieutenant in a wave. The young officer shot them down, killing thirty-one uniformed men and women, a heroic act in a battle where heroes eventually became despised. The Infected could not be subdued. They had to be killed. It was a horrible necessity, and anyone who pulled the trigger had blood on their hands. These boys see him as a monster.

Rod claimed the kills and Pierce did not contradict him. Pierce thought Rod was protecting him, but he was really protecting himself. If he admitted he froze, he could no longer lead men into battle. He would rather his new squad see him as a devil than a coward.

The boys glance at Rod with distrust, wondering if he would sacrifice them, if they got infected, as readily as he did his entire platoon.

Devil or coward. Soon he will be confirmed as one or the other. Because the Hellraisers are going to shoot American civilians today, and he will be asked to pull the trigger.

♦

Rod opens the hatch over his head and takes a look outside. The Stryker column snakes along the road at a reserved thirty miles an hour. They are in no hurry. Ten feet both high and wide and nearly twenty-five feet long, the squat metal titans look like ungainly boats on eight giant rubber wheels. Most are still clad in cages of slat armor to protect them against rocket-propelled grenades and piled with gear, making them look like something from
The Road Warrior
. The commander of the next vehicle in line grins at Rod under his Ray-Bans and spreads his arms as if to say,
Look at all this. Can you believe this shit?

The combat engineers spent two days clearing a twelve-foot-wide path through what was a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam of abandoned cars and trucks choking Crystal Drive all the way to their objective. Judging from the scattered luggage, these folks were probably trying to get to the airport, which had already been shut down. The vehicles, stripped of gas and useful parts, are now piled along the sides of the road awaiting towing. It is like driving through a junkyard. Rod scans the wreckage for improvised explosives out of habit. Bodies are entombed in some of the cars. Loose trash floats and rustles on the breeze.

The plaintive notes of a religious song fall on his ears from one of the lead vehicles. It’s “Ave Maria,” Rod realizes with a frown. Christ, what a downer. And yet it fits.

Ave Maria, gratia plena.

Hail Mary, full of grace. Roger that.

The Strykers ahead disappear into a wall of black smoke billowing from a distant hill of burning corpses, and Rod follows, emerging coughing on the other side. The entire city is shrouded in haze, ashes of torched people floating on currents of hot air. An automatic cannon booms in the distance, drowning out the crackle of small arms fire that is so omnipresent it is only noticeable when it stops. Fighter jets roar through the distant murk, barely visible in this false twilight at nine hundred hours. One of the fighters breaks formation, veering toward the earth like a bird of prey to fire a missile at a target on the ground. Light flashes on the horizon.
BOOM.

The battle for the capital is in full swing.

On his right, C130 cargo planes drop from the sky in a steady stream of screaming metal and disappear behind Terminal B of the airport, where they will land and disgorge even more troops and equipment. Rod’s regiment has been bivouacked in Terminal A for the past few days, one of the first units to arrive, and it is already getting crowded. The troops swarmed Washington’s key facilities and most defendable and sparsely populated patches of ground—Reagan Airport, East Potomac Park, Theodore Roosevelt Island. The engineers began the herculean task of clearing the major arteries. This beachhead secure, the invasion force now needs to expand to make room for more troops as well as civilian refugees starting to trickle in.

Something about the whole operation
still smacks of a massive Army foul-up. Oops, we invaded ourselves by accident. Nice going, General Stupidity, you’re relieved. General Chaos will take it from here.

He can’t get used to it.

A foghorn booms in the west, answered by another in the south. Rod knows they are not real foghorns. They are giant monsters browsing their way through the city. He can’t get used to that either. An MH60 Blackhawk gunship catches up to the column and paces it, the thumping of its rotors drowning out even the foghorns. It will provide top cover for the rest of the trip.

It’s good to be back in the USA one way or the other. They all feel this way. They are back on sacred ground, that much closer to the people who matter most to them. They are home. When they captured the airport, a grizzled veteran dropped to his knees and kissed the tarmac.
Mecca’s the other way, Sergeant
, one of the boys said, slurring the word as
Sarrunt
as so many of them did, but nobody laughed. Rod nearly kissed the ground as well. Leading his squad across the tarmac, he half expected to see the Washington Monument wrapped in monstrous tentacles or the Lincoln Memorial covered in vines or half buried in apocalyptic sands. Instead, he saw a typical airport with stately jumbo jets at rest among fuel trucks, water trucks, ramps, hoses and other white utility vehicles. Some scattered luggage offered the only clue something was wrong. That, and the total absence of people. Everything was abandoned. The city appeared to have been converted into a massive, derelict parking lot.

The column winds through an artificial canyon formed by rows of boxy office buildings, street-level retail stores and the ever-present piles of cars pushed to the side of the road. One of the buildings boasts in large letter signage that it is the corporate home of general dynamics. Rod grins. They’re the company that makes the Stryker. The vehicles pass their maker. Minutes later, the column grinds to a halt in front of another large building and sits idling.

This is their objective. Seven floors. Three hundred and forty rooms.

The Crystal Palace Hotel.

♦

The plan is to unfuck America, starting with Washington, DC, their new area of operations. That is how Captain Mack, call sign Outlaw, put it during the mission briefing back in Germany. The Brass dubbed the invasion Operation Yellow Ribbon, but the grunts call it simply the Home Front. It is the largest and most complex military operation in America’s history, involving units staging from around the world, and thrown together in less than a month.

Rod considers liberating Washington to be a symbolic gesture. There is nothing special about the city itself. No weapons manufacturing, food production, vital scientific facilities. The scuttlebutt is the Brass did not want to do it. The generals wanted to fight a campaign somewhere else with less risk to gain a secure foothold on the mainland and gain experience fighting this new enemy. The President, however, wanted something big and decisive to raise morale.

“We’re going to take it back,” Captain Mack told them.

Washington
. Rod can feel the raw power in the air, even with the city fallen to the Wildfire Agent. Talk about symbols and myths. Washington was where taxes came from. Where the establishment ran the country. Where politicians clowned and fought in neverending political theater. It was a bag of dicks, in Army parlance, even before Wildfire. Some guys Rod served with over the years considered Washington a foreign power. For his part, he cannot help but feel massive anger and pride actually being here. Anger at seeing his capital in the hands of the enemy. Pride at being part of a massive invasion force that will take it back.

This is the first army in the history of the world, Rod muses, called to war to fight a virus. A war fought not over religion or resources or territory, but pure survival.

Mack said the Regiment would be fighting within miles of Arlington Cemetery, where thousands lie buried having died fighting for freedom.
Let’s do America proud
, he told them.
Let’s do the Army proud. Our families are back there. Our homeland is under siege. It’s time to take it back.

Standing at attention on the tarmac, the boys roared the regimental war cry.

AIEEYAH!

An hour later, they filed onto Russian-made AN-124 cargo planes for the long flight to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. After refueling, they hopped to Ronald Reagan National Airport ready to fight, crossing a Potomac swarming with Coast Guard cutters and supply ships, only to find the facility already secured by a unit of Marines and combat engineers, now banging away at Infected on the roads and clearing the traffic jams.