The Killing Floor

by Craig DiLouie

  “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 c
rumbling 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.

  Wendy

  Wendy plants a final long, deep kiss on Toby’s mouth and breaks away with a gasp.

  “Wish me luck,” Wendy says, pulling on the gas mask.

  “Be careful, babe,” Toby tells her. “We’ll have you covered.”

  “I love you,” she tells him, winking. “It’s show time.”

  She touches the Bradley’s instruments lightly, as if saying goodbye to an old friend, and climbs into the passenger compartment. Toby is already dropping the hydraulic ramp and she keeps moving, exiting at a crouch with her police-issue Glock in her hand.

  A rifle pops to her right and a hopper flies skidding and tumbling across the asphalt. Wendy turns and sees Todd running toward her, pausing to shoot at distant targets. She points at herself and then Ray. Todd gives her a thumbs up and pats his rifle. He will cover her.

  They parked the Bradley in front of a strip mall housing a Thai restaurant, dry cleaners, flower store and 7-Eleven. Across the parking lot, side street and another parking lot, Ray lies with his back against his truck, thirty yards from the office building from whose windows someone shot him, triggering this whole mess.

  Her plan is simple—at least, once she reaches Ray Young. First, she just has to run a hundred yards through Hell.

  Wendy starts running.

  Bullets rip past, taking her breath with them, tracers flashing red in her eyes. Someone shrieks in pain. A fireball blooms in the distance, a single figure making his stand with a flamethrower at the center of a circle of scorched, blackened ground. Over the constant thunder, she hears the ping ping ping of Toby’s AK47.

  She dodges a hopper thrashing howling on the ground, pausing to glance over her shoulder. Toby and Steve lean out of their hatches firing their rifles, while Todd paces her on the left. A hopper comes flying at her and the pistol bangs in her hand, the bullet hitting it midair and sending it tumbling lifeless against the side of a mailbox.

  She does not have far to go now. Wendy puts her head down and launches into a final sprint.

  As she approaches Ray, a pair of hoppers land in front of her, hissing and waving her away.

  “Screw you,” she says, shooting one in the head, then the other.

  She hops over the bodies and holsters her gun, looking down at him.

  “Officer Saslove,” Ray greets her.

  The man kneeling next to Ray turns and glances at her through his faceplate flecked with blood. “You’re taking a chance being near him with just that gas mask,” he says, his face pale.

  “I know,” she tells him, crouching so her eyes are level with Ray’s.

  “Good to see you, honey,” Ray tells her.

  “You need to stop this right now, Ray.”

  “I won’t let them hurt you.”

  “You shouldn’t let them hurt anyone.”

  “Too late for that.” He chuckles. “Whatever you think is best, Ray.”

  “I thought you came here to save us,” she says. “You can still do that.”

  “What do I care?” Ray answers, his eyes blazing. “Nobody ever gave a shit about me. My old man was right. Hit them before they hit you.”

  “Does that include me?”

  Ray smiles. “No, not you, Wendy. I would never let anything happen to you. See all these people? None of them are innocent. But you are. You remind me of how things were.”

  Wendy turns and gazes with longing at the Bradley, where Toby and Steve and Todd are still shooting. She wishes they could all drive away together. Find their island. Try to be happy and forget this long nightmare ever happened.

  He pats the ground next to him, and adds, “Sit with me for a minute. Tell me what you’ve been doing with yourself. Don’t worry about all this other stuff.”

  Foghorns boom in the distance, getting closer. The juggernauts are coming.

  “Please stop this, Ray.”

  “It’ll be over soon. It really is good to see you again.”

  She remembers her promise. Hates herself for making it. Hates the world for making her do it. It’s not fair.

  But it’s meant to be.

  “I need you to do just one thing for me, Ray.”

  “What’s that, honey?”

  She raises her hands and takes off her mask. Lets it slip between her fingers.

  “I want you to save me,” she tells him.

  Ray howls like a dying animal.

  “NO!”

  “Save me, Ray.”

  Then she turns, surprised, as a woman staggers out of the office building at the edge of the parking lot in a cloud of dust, firing a rifle back at the open doors through which she exited moments earlier.

  Anne? Anne, is that you?

  Wendy shields her face as the front of the building erupts and the Demon comes spilling out snorting with crashing wings, clawing up the asphalt.

  Todd

  Todd shoulders his carbine and fires. The little corpse skids to a stop against his boots and he leaps over it, shuddering in disgust. Its erect stinger continues to stab at the ground. Even dying, Todd knows, these things are a threat.

  A massive roar rends the air, vibrating deep in his chest. He turns and sees Wendy crouched next to Ray, while Sarge and Steve run toward her from the Bradley. Beyond Ray’s truck, a woman retreats from the office building, shooting into the massive dust cloud billowing from its collapsing face.

  Anne.

  It was his idea to pursue Ray and try to bring him to the authorities based on the theory his body might contain a new strain of the bug. His theory was simple: If Ray infected others using spores, weren’t those spores evidence of Infection? Evidence that could be used to isolate a pure sample of the organism? A pure sample that could be used to produce a cure?

  Sarge and Wendy agreed. When they found Dr. Price and the soldiers, Todd felt overjoyed. Excited. Vindicated. This is it, he believed. The moment we win the war. We will look back on this day and say, “This was when the tide turned.”

  Then Anne shot Ray and destroyed what could be mankind’s last hope.

  Cruz is dead; he can see her body from here. He heard Noel scream just moments ago. Someone fires from Yang’s position, but Guthrie has disappeared. Ray is shot and possibly dying. The soldiers are fighting for their lives.

  They died for an idea. Todd grew up with the proverb that the road of good intentions is paved with the dead, but had never truly understood it. Now he does.

  The dust cloud rolls outward from the building like a massive wave. Todd catches a glimpse of a hideous thing inside the cloud, a massive horn jutting from where its eyes should be, bellowing in pain and rage. He knows what it is. Demon.

  Todd raises his rifle and fires into the dust. On his left, Sarge and Steve start shooting.

  Run, Anne, he wants to scream. Run as fast as you can.

  Anne stops running, throws down her rifle, and pulls out her Springfields, making a stand against the monster.

  She is firing both guns as the dust cloud rolls over her. Then the shooting stops.

  She can’t be dead, he reasons. She can’t be killed. It’s impossible.

  Nearby, juggernauts stampede through the auto dealership, crashing through the vehicles with tentacles waving, flinging cars and glittering clouds of safety glass into the air.

  It’s over. We’re dead.

  He watches them come. As much as he hates them, they really are quite beautiful.

  Ray

  As the dust cloud flows over him, turning the world brown, Ray asks Wendy if she believes in second chances.r />
  “I’m living proof,” she says, glaring into the dust with wide-eyed fear.

  “What about you, Doc? Do you believe in second chances?”

  “I believe in redemption,” the man answers.

  The scientist has stopped treating him. Ray knows he is dying.

  “Me too,” he says, blood spurting from his mouth.

  He believes in second chances. He believes in redemption. He just wishes it mattered.

  When you know you’re going to die, not a whole hell of a lot matters, even saving the world.

  He thinks about what Fielding, the government agent, said when he realized he was doomed: I don’t give a shit about the world if I’m not in it.

  “Ray, please,” Wendy says, tears streaming down her cheeks. “It’s not too late.”

  He smiles, remembering the vision of Anne Leary firing her guns as a massive shadow swept over her, just as the brown cloud covered them both.

  I won. I beat her.

  “There’s nothing more that I can do,” Price tells him.

  “Too bad it’s not enough.”

  “Are you going to kill me now too?”

  “No, I’m not going to kill you. At least you tried.”

  “I want redemption,” Travis says. “I want that just like you. I also want to live.”

  Ray closes his eyes. “Bingo.”

  Wendy squeezes his hand. “Ray, you can still make things right.”

  His eyes flutter open and he takes in her beautiful face, wet with tears. He can hear Sarge and Steve calling her name in the swirling, blinding dust.

  The Demon roars, drowning out their voices.

  The rage is gone now, spent. Ray feels calm. He knows what is coming, and accepts it. And he finds he does care what kind of world he leaves behind.

  “I remember,” he says. “You want me to save you. All right. I can do that.” He closes his eyes and whispers, “Go.”

  “Where?” Wendy asks him with alarm. Then she understands.

  The children of Infection are leaving. The gunfire slackens off as the hoppers retreat into the forests surrounding the town. A group of them hiss at her as they lope past, bounding over the truck and disappearing.