He skips ahead again.
So we’ve got a plague of bedbugs now. The kids all have rashes, and there’s not enough cream to go around, so we’re washing our bedding every day to try to get rid of the pesties. What else? Victor is walking now, and if you can believe it, he’s learned some sign language. Another family taught me a few basic signs for milk, eat, drink and sleep, and I tried them on Victor over the past few weeks. Just when I was about to give up, he asked for milk! Which I give him from the boob, as with everything that’s going on, I decided to keep nursing. I wasn’t even sure what he was doing at first, but sure enough, he kept squeezing his little fist together, which is the sign for milk! He cries so much less because he can tell me what he wants even though he can’t talk yet. Lilia isn’t doing so great right now, though. She asks about you all the time, cries a ton, and has nightmares that make her wet the bed. She’s back in diapers, and sleeps with me now at night. Kristina’s going the other way, thriving like a weed. She’s doing well in the camp school. The one thing that worries me is she’s starting to hoard food a little—she eats as fast as she can, and then squirrels away little bits—raisins, Cheerios, whatever she can get—under her cot.
Rod’s vision blurs with hot tears. His heart aches; he can barely stand it. He can’t believe how much he misses them. Can’t accept how much of them he is missing. They are growing up fast, without a father, in a refugee camp, while he fights this crazy war.
You’re so far away, Rod. I hope you’re safe and that these letters are finding their way to you somehow and giving you some comfort that I know you sorely need right now. I want you to know I’m proud of you, and so are our kids, and we will wait as long as it takes for you to come home. Do not worry about us, Rod. I will look after our little ones. You can keep us all safe by getting rid of these monsters plaguing our country. Fight hard for us, and win, so that you can come back to us by Christmas.
He buries his face in his hands and bawls while Corporal Carlson looks away, trying to give him some dignity. Rod is like every father in that he wants his children to have a better life than him. That is the reason he is here fighting. But he has a feeling that even if they win, his children will face a life of misery. The feeling haunts him.
And yet they are alive. His family is alive. This simple fact gives him all the hope he needs.
Rod is crying because he is happy.
“Corporal,” he says, carefully folding the letters and pocketing them.
“Yes, Sergeant?”
“I think I will get cleaned up before seeing the Captain.”
♦
Showered, shaved and wearing a clean uniform, Rod enters the big building through a cordon of military police armed with billy clubs and flamethrowers. The building has electricity, although it is rationed; only the security lights are on in the gloomy corridors, and its eight floors are accessible using the stairs only. The air is hot, humid and smells like dust and mold.
The corporal sneezes several times, and then they hit the stairs. Refreshed from the catnap, a quick shower and Gabriela’s letters, Rod follows alertly, feeling almost human again, rifle slung over his shoulder and his helmet held in the crook of his arm.
The fourth floor is busy with officers and aides and civilians clacking away on typewriters. Rod grunts with appreciation at seeing civilians contributing to the war effort. Mostly, the Army has been keeping the refugees penned like sheep—under martial law, no less—a complete waste of resources, in his opinion. No wonder they end up rioting. These people are not weak. They survived this long, didn’t they? They just don’t have the training, organization and security of the military. Someone needs to get them organized and into the fight, like those militias he’s been hearing so much about. The Maryland Regulars. The Philadelphia Free Militia. The New Liberty Army. The Virginia Field Army. The Allegany County Partisans.
Natural born killers, from what he heard. And most of them streaming toward Washington to join the final push to liberate the city from Wildfire.
The hot, crowded little office smells like flop sweat and burnt coffee. The window is open and the light is off. Major Duncan sits at his desk, sunlight gleaming on his bald head and glinting on his round wireframe glasses. Captain Rhodes, a gung ho Jane Wayne that Comanche picked up from Army Intelligence, stands behind him with Lieutenant Sims.
Rod knocks.
“Come in, Sergeant,” Duncan says.
He halts two paces in front of the officers and presents a tired salute. “Sergeant Hector Rodriguez, reporting to the commanding officer as directed.”
The officers return the salute, giving Rod a moment to notice the other two people in the room sitting against the wall in office chairs, one of them a hard case in SWAT armor, possibly National Security Agency but probably a mercenary, and the other a pale, blinking specimen in a wrinkled business suit who looks like he hasn’t seen daylight in weeks.
A spook? Rod wonders, but decides against it. The second man is definitely not NSA or CIA. He looks scared. Like he’d rather be anywhere but here. Like a prisoner.
“At ease, Sergeant,” Duncan tells him.
“Thank you, sir,” he answers, assuming the at-ease drill stance.
“Sergeant, of course you know Lieutenant Sims and Captain Rhodes. This here is Dr. Travis Price, a scientist posted at Mount Weather Special Facility, and Captain Fielding.”
“Captain?” Rod says, giving the man a onceover. “First Maniple? Flying Column Corp?”
Few of the private military contractors escaped the Sandbox in the first days of the epidemic. Their dissolving companies pulled some of them out and were forced to abandon the rest. The locals chewed them up until the Army absorbed the survivors on the way back to the States.
Like many soldiers, Rod does not like mercenaries.
“I’m not a merc,” Fielding says. He does not elaborate.
“Captain Fielding is paramilitary,” Duncan tries to explain.
Rod lifts his eyebrows at this, but says nothing. Something big is being planned; the excitement in the room is as palpable as the scientist’s anxiety. They’ll get around to explaining things to him if he stays quiet.
“Rod, we have a special job for you and your squad,” Duncan says. “This one comes straight from the top, and it could end the war.”
Rhodes and Sims grin at this.
“Yes, sir,” Rod says, his heart pounding.
Duncan turns to Rhodes. “Go ahead, Captain.”
“About twenty-four hours ago, we spotted a uniform mike who carries the Wildfire Agent, but is not showing symptoms,” she explains. “About two hundred miles northwest of where we’re standing. As far as we know, the man is unique. First, he spreads Wildfire through the air, and second, the Infected appear to be aware of and submissive to him. How and to what extent, we don’t know. Dr. Price here feels if this man can be captured, the scientists may be able to isolate a pure sample of the Wildfire Agent. If they can do that, they might be able to make a vaccine, a weapon, even a cure. Is that about right, Dr. Price?”
“Yes,” Dr. Price says, clearing his throat. “That’s right.”
Rod nods, considering what he’s heard. About two hundred miles, Rhodes said. As far as we know, the man is unique. The Infected appear to be aware of and submissive to him. How and to what extent, we don’t know. Dr. Price feels they may be able to isolate a pure sample of the Wildfire Agent. If they can do that, they might be able to make a vaccine.
With so many qualifiers, he thinks, my situational awareness has not gained a single inch.
“The mission,” Rhodes adds, “is to locate, contact and recover this individual for the purpose of obtaining a biological sample. Preferably alive.”
And then we save the world and everyone gets a pony. Shit, even the Big Green Machine doesn’t believe in this saving Private Ryan bullshit. Otherwise, they’d put Special Forces on it. They’d throw everything they had at it. Not yank a single tired-out squad off the line and dump them in
the middle of no man’s land to find some guy who infects anyone who comes near him, and is now surrounded by, and appears to control, an untold number of Jodies.
After dealing with all that, we just have to convince the unidentified male to surrender to a bunch of soldiers so that scientists can experiment on him in a government lab.
I’m sure this guy, alone and scared shitless, will be just fine with that!
The idea is so crazy he has to resist the urge to laugh openly at it. The Army seems to have found a very creative way to get him killed.
Dr. Price glances at him, his eyes filled with anxiety.
Rod chides himself. What did you expect—that it would be black and white? It’s a chance, and nothing more. In this war of extermination, a chance is everything.
Major Duncan appears to sense his hesitation. He clears his throat and says, “Sergeant, I know you and your men have been through a lot in this war, and that this mission offers a great deal of risk for uncertain gain. I want you to consider something. Do you know the biggest threat to our forces right now? The leading source of casualties among our fighting men?”
Rod realizes the question is not rhetorical, and scrambles to think up an honest answer. “The monsters,” he says. “The hoppers in particular, sir.”
“The correct answer is suicide, Sergeant. Our people are killing themselves in record numbers.” The Major takes off his glasses and cleans them with a handkerchief. “Let me ask you another question. Do you know why we still pay our personnel in dollars, and accept those dollars at the PX for goods available at normalized prices?”
“The dollar’s the national currency, sir.”
The man puts his glasses back on and regards Rod with a grim smile. “Gold is the closest thing this country has to a national currency right now, Sergeant. Gold and things you can touch—food, water, toilet paper. Hell, bullets are so valuable these days they should be the currency. So why bother with paper money, when so many people in the country have given up on it? I’ll tell you the answer this time, Sergeant. One word: Morale. The illusion everything is normal. We pay dollars to soldiers to clear ground and scavenge goods, which we then sell to these soldiers in return for their dollars. We do a lot of things like that to maintain the idea that things are still normal, right down to busting balls about dress and appearance. But we all know they’re not normal. This war is taking a massive toll and it’s only just started. The fact is, Sergeant Rodriguez, we are falling apart a little bit every day. Even as we continue to gain ground, we are losing the war for the hearts and minds of our own people.”
Rod nods in understanding. He underestimated this officer. For a rear echelon type, Major Duncan appears to know what he is doing.
“Do you catch my meaning, Sergeant?” says the Major.
“I understand if there’s any chance to win this fight, we have to take it, and my boys are up to whatever it takes to get the job done,” Rod tells him. “You can count on it, sir.”
“Aieeyah, Sergeant,” Duncan says, while Rhodes and Sims nod.
Rod meant every word he said. It’s a long shot, but any shot at all is enough to make me a believer at this point. After all, there are no atheists in foxholes.
Anne
The bus trembles and bangs over potholes marring the sun-dappled road. Anne studies the forest and open fields through the windows with her detached telescopic sight. A white-tailed deer bounds through the distant growth, fleeing the metal monster with its grinding hum.
“They could be anywhere,” Todd says, studying the same ground with the binoculars.
Anne wants to tell him to stay focused on the mission, which is to find and kill Ray Young before he can infect more innocent people. But she knows what Todd is going through.
“They can’t be far from here,” she says. “We’ve got to keep searching.”
“Of course. It just feels a little hopeless with so much ground to cover.”
“Stop the bus,” she says. “I think I’ve got them.”
“You’re kidding,” Todd says, leaning forward, trying to see what she sees. The forest on the right drops off in a steep slope, revealing a valley divided into farms covering the land like faded patches on an old quilt. “I don’t see anything.”
“There,” she points as Marcus pulls onto the shoulder of the road.
“That smoke? That could be anything.”
“Not smoke. Dust. You were saying?”
“Wow,” Todd says with a grin.
She resists the urge to tousle his hair.
A dust cloud could mean a lot of things. It could mean cattle, but she knows the cattle herds are gone from the area, eaten by survivors and the Infected. It could mean a refugee camp, but if there were one there, she would have heard about it. It could mean a convoy of vehicles, but the dust is too concentrated and localized.
By process of elimination, it is most likely a massive crowd of people.
These are the Infected of Camp Defiance, migrating east. Assuming they are following Ray, then he should be there as well, like Moses leading his people to the Promised Land.
“If I see Erin, I’ll let you know.”
“Promise me you’ll look,” Todd says.
“Promise.”
Marcus cranks the handle, opening the door. Anne touches his shoulder and hops down onto the road, rifle slung over her shoulder and her boots crunching stones.
“You need me to watch your back?” he asks her.
“No thanks, I’m good,” she says. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”
“You be careful,” he says, and she feels his desire.
“I will,” she says, holding his gaze.
“We’ll be here,” Jean calls from back of the bus. “Like sitting ducks.”
Marcus grins, shaking his head. Anne rolls her eyes at him before turning and marching into the woods. The sooner I dump you in someone else’s lap, Jean Byrd, the better. Maybe they’ll understand how bad you had it during the epidemic.
For now, I’ve got bigger fish to fry.
She disappears into the trees, still tingling from the way Marcus looked at her, excited and afraid at the idea of his feelings coming out into the open. Stay focused. The gloomy forest envelops her, thrusting her into a darker, far more dangerous world.
Shrugging her rifle into her hands, she jogs through the foliage. The air smells like moist earth and greenery. The air is cooler here under the shade of the forest canopy, but more humid, covering her in a slick sheen of sweat. Her cap feels wet against her forehead. After fifty yards, she crouches, sweeping the foliage with the barrel of her rifle.
She hears a nasal grunt. Something else responds with a series of glottal clicks. Anne knows of just one thing that uses this form of speech. Hoppers.
She finds the little band hunched in a circle around the carcass of a dead deer, tearing off pieces of meat and chewing, their little cheeks bulged with meat. The monsters look like the product of a bizarre genetic experiment—hairless, barrel chested, albino baboons with legs shaped like a cricket’s. They wobble when they walk, as if struggling, little arms outstretched for balance. When they sight their prey, they are capable of multiple jumps high into the air. Their wide mouths are lined with rows of jagged teeth.
Once they land on their victim, they bite and wrap their legs to prevent him from tossing them away. They then stab him with the erect stinger between their legs. This stinger injects a parasite that grows to become another hopper.
Anne hates the hoppers nearly as much as she does the Demon, the fiercest monster of all. She hates these particular creatures because they are parasites. Bottom feeders. Cockroaches.
As much as she would love to gun them down, she cannot afford to draw any attention to herself. If she shoots, more might show up, not to mention a hundred thousand Infected she believes are marching across the valley just past the next rise.
She goes around the hoppers, staying as close to the ground as she can.
Anne has big
ger fish to fry today.
♦
Ahead, sunlight glares through the trees. Soaked with sweat after her journey, Anne slows as she approaches the edge of the forest, pausing every few paces to study her surroundings. The last thing she needs is to leave the woods and run into a pack of Infected.
She emerges at the top of a treed hill overlooking a farmhouse and surrounding cornfields swarming with Infected moaning in the sunlight. The horde seems endless, trampling the fields into ruin, large enough to raise a dust cloud seen from miles away.
So this is where you went.
The sight is breathtaking. So many people. So many lives destroyed just so that a mindless organism could survive a little longer. Sarge would have described the scene as a target rich environment, but she is not here to kill Infected.
Anne is looking for Ray Young, the man who caused all this.
She takes a drink of water from her canteen, breathes deeply, and gets to work. Peering into the eyepiece of the telescopic scope mounted on her rifle, she studies the crowd.
This might take a very long time. Might as well conserve energy.
She detaches the scope from her rifle and puts her back against a large tree, scanning the shifting crowds while she eats a granola bar.
Erin?
The girl drifts among the Infected with her arms at her sides, wearing a lost expression.
At least Todd will get some closure.
A flicker of movement far behind her catches Anne’s eye. A group of Infected swarm over each other, covered in blood, eating one of their own.
Something is moving on their left. She shifts her scope.
Ray Young jogs away from the Infected, looking terrified.
A smile flickers across Anne’s lips.
Got you, you son of a bitch.
She pockets her unfinished snack and reattaches the telescopic sight. Ray stops at the farmhouse and sits on the steps.
The Killing Floor Page 22