The Infection

by Craig DiLouie

  Anne blinked at the voices. It was daytime, she realized; time had blurred again. Beams of morning sunlight streamed through a row of punched windows near the ceiling. The room was a vehicle service garage. People milled around aimlessly, bartering candy and cigarettes, settling disputes with swift and furious beatings, emptying their waste into a row of portable toilets, washing themselves with sponges and tepid water poured into plastic bowls. The air smelled like old motor oil and human waste and fear. People huddled around radios and argued over the news, then drifted away. Colorful public health notices plastered the walls, orange and red and yellow, reminding her to wash her hands and avoid the Infected and approach law enforcement and military personnel calmly, without sudden movements, and with her hands over her head.

  She realized that she was not in some type of government fortress but instead an old-fashioned refugee camp, and a temporary one at that. How long had she been here? How long had it been since her world ended? She felt lightheaded, like she had not eaten in days. She thought of a blueberry pie sitting on a kitchen counter, covered in flies.

  “The authorities are in control,” a voice said. “Help is coming. Don’t give up hope.”

  The skinny, shell-shocked kid was some sort of government official and he was handing out lists of evacuation centers printed on clean yellow sheets of paper.

  “This one’s been overrun,” somebody said in a disgusted rage. “I was fucking there.”

  “The next one on the list is five miles from here.”

  “Might as well be on the Moon.”

  “The only safe place is right here. I’m not going anywhere.”

  The kid ignored them, continuing to hand out his yellow sheets and deliver his simple mantra of hope with an unconvincing smile.

  He held one out until Anne accepted it. His dead face warped into his plastic smile and he said, “The authorities are in control. Help is coming. Don’t give up hope. Report any suspicious behavior.”

  Nobody else seemed to be in charge. The cops who’d brought her here were gone. Even the kind woman wearing a blue Wal-Mart apron who eventually brought her rations appeared to be some sort of volunteer. Then she saw several men working the room, shaking hands and looking concerned and writing things down in a notebook. This ad hoc leadership committee gradually grew close enough for her to hear one of them, a gentle-looking overweight man wearing large glasses, tell people that they had to get organized.

  “Why?” a man said belligerently.

  A woman sitting on a cot said: “You’re just like them.”

  The overweight man blinked, adjusted his glasses and said, “Them?”

  “The government.”

  “But we’re all alive because of the government,” he reasoned. “They brought us here and gave us food and water, blankets, medical supplies. We’re trying to get organized in case the supplies run out and the government can’t send us anything else.”

  “Like I said,” the woman said triumphantly.

  Anne shook her head in mild disgust. At least these guys are doing something, she thought. She recognized something of herself in them.

  “But I could use some batteries if you got any you could spare,” the woman went on.

  Anne noticed an armored fighting vehicle parked at the far end of the garage and decided to take a closer look. Wrapping the blanket around her tightly and hiding her half-full water bottle in her back pocket, she wandered through the dense smells and noises of the camp until she found an empty spot where she could sit and put her back against a concrete pillar with a clear view of the impressive war machine. Three soldiers stood hunched over the engine, arguing in language so technical it was almost foreign. Anne thought they looked more like mechanics than soldiers. She watched them while she slowly sipped her bottle of water. They cleaned engine parts with rags and occasionally studied the crowd around them like engineers looking for cracks in a dam.

  She planned to stay close to them. It was obvious to her that the man she’d heard arguing this morning was right: This place would not last very long. If anything happened, the safest spot in the room would be behind the soldiers and their weapons. She hated herself for thinking this. Anne cursed herself for wanting to survive.

  She watched them work on their vehicle for the next three days. During that time, the refugee population rapidly dwindled to less than a hundred souls. The cops never came back to bring in more people, and as food and water began to run out, the portable toilets filled to overflowing, and petty crime escalated, many people left to take their chances trying to make it to one of the evacuation centers.

  On the third day, the Wal-Mart woman brought Anne her daily ration—this time only a bottle of water and an energy bar.

  “Sorry it’s a bit meager this morning, love,” she said. “But don’t worry. We’re expecting another shipment later today, I’m told. The government promised.”

  “So things are getting better outside?”

  An expression of fear flashed across the woman’s face, quickly replaced by a sunny smile.

  “Of course!” she said.

  The mood was tense in the shelter. People were furious that the rations had been cut to almost nothing, and were looking for somebody to blame. Mothers demanded milk for babies that screamed in their hunger. Rumor spread that several women at the far end of the room had been raped in the night. Most of the refugees wanted the portable toilets cleaned and the corpses, zipped up in shiny black body bags arranged in nice neat rows against the east wall, removed. Some of the men were threatening each other over accusations of using more than their fair share of supplies. People were crowding around the leadership committee demanding answers. Eventually, the overweight man with glasses fought his way through the mob and approached the soldiers timidly.

  “May I speak to the commander?” he said, his voice tight and thin.

  “I’m Sergeant Toby Wilson, sir,” one of the soldiers said in a booming baritone, extending a large hand. “You can call me Sarge.”

  The man shook the commander’s hand with enthusiasm, beaming at the warm reception.

  “Nice to meet you, Sarge. I’m Joshua Adler.”

  “So what can we do for you, Mr. Adler?”

  “Me and some of the other guys, we’ve been trying to get things organized.”

  “Uh huh. We’ve been watching you do that.”

  “Well, you must know that our supply situation is getting bad. The government said they would be coming back with more. Now, I’ve drawn up a list of supplies . . .”

  The man fumbled with a notebook until Sarge held up his hand.

  “Mr. Adler, we have nothing to do with that. We don’t know anything about it. We’re just here to get our rig working again. It needs professional civilian maintenance. Seeing as that’s not going to happen, it’s on us to fix it using whatever we can find around here. That’s taking time.”

  “I see. . .”

  “We almost got it figured out and we’re hoping to return to the field as soon as we can. Getting back where we can be useful is our top priority.”

  “All right, I understand, uh, Sarge, but maybe you could tell me if you have any news of things on the outside—”

  “It’s bad,” said Sarge.

  “Bad?”

  “Bad as in really, really bad. Bad as in we are losing this fight.”

  “So who’s in charge?”

  Sarge shrugged. “I guess you are,” he said.

  At the other end of the garage, the doors opened, letting in a blast of cool, clean air and three soldiers armed to the teeth and wearing bulky MOPP suits complete with goggled respirator masks that gave them a vaguely buglike appearance.

  “Stay where you are,” one of the soldiers announced, his voice muffled by his mask. Anne could not even tell who was speaking from where she was sitting. “Please stay calm.”

  The first soldier appeared to be the leader. Gripping a pistol in his clenched fist, he walked through the people crowded among the cot
s looking into their faces, as if searching for something, while the other soldiers followed toting automatic rifles.

  Joshua excused himself, signaled to the other men in the leadership committee, and worked his way through the crowd to the soldiers.

  “Captain,” one of the soldiers said.

  The leader turned and raised his pistol. “Sit down, sir,” he commanded.

  The soldiers standing behind him swept the room slowly with their rifles.

  “But we’re—”

  The Captain slid the bolt back in his service weapon, chambering a round. “Now, sir,” he added.

  Joshua abruptly sat on the ground with the other men, paling.

  The soldiers continued to walk through the crowd, the Captain leading the way, looking each of them in the face before moving on. Everybody was quiet, watching the soldiers, except for a few babies that cried softly in their mothers’ laps.

  Finally, the Captain pointed at a man and said, “I got one here.”

  One of the soldiers reached and grabbed the man by the arm, pulling him.

  “Where are you taking this poor man?” a woman demanded.

  “He’s Infected, Ma’am,” the Captain said. “Come on, Parker, get him up.”

  The people nearest the man cried out and shrank away from him, leaving him to struggle weakly against the soldiers. He was obviously sick; his face was shiny and red with fever. Finally, one of the soldiers thrust the butt of his rifle into his head and he fell limp, moaning.

  They began to drag him out of the garage.

  “Wait,” Anne said. “Officer, wait! What are you going to do to him?”

  The Captain replied, “Sit down and shut up, Ma’am.”

  “I think she likes you, Captain,” the soldier named Parker said.

  “Watch out, she’s going to report you to her PTA,” the other added, laughing.

  “He’s just sick,” she pleaded. “He’s not one of them.”

  The Captain raised his pistol and aimed it at her face.

  “Maybe you’re Infected.”

  A man stood behind the soldiers and approached the Captain. Anne could tell instantly from his black suit and white collar that he was a clergyman.

  “Now, hold on a minute, sir,” the man said.

  The Captain turned, gave the clergyman a quick once-over, and said, “Are you Catholic?”

  The man blinked, caught off guard. “No, son, I am not.”

  “Then I don’t give a rat’s ass what you have to say.”

  The pistol flashed in the man’s hand, striking the clergyman in the face and knocking him to the floor. Anne, still standing, exchanged a quick glance with Sarge, who stood by his Bradley with his crew, wiping his hands with a greasy rag. The man shook his head slightly.

  Anne swallowed her rage and returned to her seat on the floor as the soldiers dragged the sick man out of the garage and the clergyman lay groaning, cupping his face in his hands.

  The roar of the gunshot penetrated the walls and rang in her ears.

  Later that day, about half of the refugees packed their meager belongings and left the shelter after a long, bloody fistfight between some of the men who were leaving and those who were staying over whether the remaining supplies should be divided up. The Wal-Mart woman ended the dispute by announcing that there were no more supplies. Nothing. Not a crumb. Those who remained were broken people, lying on the cots staring at the ceiling, including Joshua, holding a dirty wet rag against his bleeding nose, one of his eyes almost swollen shut.

  The following night was long and uneventful except for people sobbing quietly in the dark. The room stank with the ammonia smell of piss. They were doomed and they knew it.

  The next morning, the doors burst open again and a group of men and women entered the garage carrying rifles and pistols and wearing a motley collection of military uniforms. The refugees shrank from them, screaming shrilly.

  “Anybody here need a ride?” one of newcomers called out, grinning.

  “Sam!” a woman cried, flinging herself into the man’s arms.

  “I told you I’d find you,” he said, tears streaming down his face. “I told you.”

  “We’ve got buses outside, enough for everybody,” announced another member of the gang, a woman with a bandaged head. “There’s a FEMA camp on the way to Harrisburg and we’re starting a convoy. If you want in, pack up your things now. We’re out of here in ten.”

  The refugees crowded around asking questions. They must have been satisfied by the answers, because all of them grabbed whatever possessions they had and hurried out the door to the line of commuter buses idling outside.

  As the last of the refugees headed towards the door, one of the them called out to Anne, “Last chance, lady!”

  She shook her head.

  The man waved and shut the door. Anne sighed with something like relief. The atmosphere, previously tense and stifling, became peaceful. The room suddenly seemed so much larger without the others filling it.

  “Why didn’t you go?”

  Anne noticed the clergyman had also stayed behind.

  “It shouldn’t be that easy,” she said.

  “You might be right. I’m not sure if I trusted them either.”

  “No,” Anne said. “The others had no choice but to trust them. I have a choice. It should not be that easy.”

  The clergyman nodded. He approached and sat on a nearby cot with a heavy sigh, touching the bruise on his face gingerly. Anne got a good look at him. He was a big man, with short, white, frizzy hair and a weathered, stubbled face. She guessed him to be in his late fifties.

  “What about you?” she asked. “Why didn’t you go?”

  He shrugged and said, “‘Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.’ That’s a fancy way of saying I agree with you.”

  “I liked that. Was that the Bible?”

  “No. Paradise Lost. John Milton.”

  They introduced themselves. His name was Paul.

  The Bradley commander approached.

  “I think we’ve just about got the rig fixed,” he told them. “If you don’t mind, later on today we’d like to start her up and drive her around a bit. We’ll open the service door a little to ventilate, but it’s going to be loud and smell bad anyway.”

  “It’s all right,” Paul said, wandering off to contemplate the rows of corpses, still in their body bags, which lay waiting for transport that would never come.

  Anne said, “Sergeant, how could you be so callous when they were dragging that man outside to be murdered in cold blood? You knew he wasn’t Infected.”

  The soldier shrugged. “I could give you a dozen reasons, Ma’am. Let me ask you a question. Why were you willing to risk your life to save him?”

  She thought of several reasons—the man was innocent, his murder was immoral, a society is judged by how well it defends its weakest members—but all of them rang false and hollow in her mind. She snorted. “What was I really risking?”

  Sarge smiled grimly and nodded. “That’s what I thought. In Afghanistan, when things got really bad, the only way we could get through was to accept the idea we were already dead.”

  “Jesus,” she said, recoiling.

  “Those people out there,” Sarge said, pointing. “The Infected. They’re pretty much the living dead. But us? We’re the dead living.”

  “How can you say we’re already dead?” Anne said, panicking at the thought. She thought about it for a moment. “How could you do it? Doesn’t it change you?”

  “Yes,” Sarge said. “It changes you. But.” He shrugged again. “You survive.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why survive if it’s not really you anymore?”

  “Why me? Why you? Somebody’s got to live, Ma’am. Somebody’s got to carry on. That’s all we need to know. That’s all we’re ever going to know. Somebody’s got to live or the whole thing is pointless.”

  “What is?” Anne wondered
.

  He blinked in surprise. “The human race, of course.”

  “That’s a lot of responsibility.”

  “If we don’t accept it, we might as well let them win now and get it over with.”

  He cleared his throat and told Anne how he had taken his unit into the field to test a non-lethal weapon, and how radio dispatches suggested some type of disaster. He and his crew subsequently lost contact with the Army. They were on their own. They had a new mission in mind for themselves. They wanted to return to the mission site and try to locate their lost boys.

  “We won’t survive out there long on our own,” he explained. “We need infantry to protect us. In return, we offer protection. The Bradley’s mobility, its armor and cannon.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Well, I guess I’m saying I want you to join up with us.”

  “I want to help you, I really do, but I’m not a soldier,” she said. “Never been one either.”

  “I want you to pull together some civilians and run them as a squad. We have weapons. I will teach you how to use them. If we find our guys, then two days, max. Maybe three.”

  “What about him?” Anne said, looking at Paul praying over the bodies of the dead.

  “I think he’s suicidal,” Sarge said. “But if you want him, you can have him. See how this works?”

  “But why me?” she said. “If you knew me, you wouldn’t pick me for something like this.”

  “I am picking you based on what I know. You don’t fear death. You’re tough; you’re not looking for easy answers and for everybody else to take care of you. And you’ve got a good head on your shoulders. You sat down instead of getting yourself killed helping that man, so I don’t have to worry about you welcoming death or even actively seeking it.”

  “Well,” Anne said in amazement. “I can see you’ve thought this through.”

  She realized she wanted this. Had, in fact, been sitting here for days waiting for something like it to present itself. The chance to really do something. The chance to fight back and stop the plague in its tracks.

  The chance to kill every one of these monsters for what they did to her kids.