The Infection

by Craig DiLouie

  Their chests explode and they flop to the ground in a smoking ruin.

  “Don’t you touch that boy,” Paul roars, chambering another round and firing. Instantly, more bodies collapse all around Todd, spraying him with blood.

  “ROOMY,” one of the monsters bellows over their heads.

  “Don’t you touch that boy, I said!”

  “Get him up,” Ethan says, rushing in with his rifle.

  “We’ll cover you!” Ray says, firing with both fists.

  Todd opens his eyes, his vision blurred by hot tears, and sees Paul’s face.

  “Hey, Rev,” he rasps.

  “You’re all right now, son. I’ll get you out of here.”

  They hear a rumbling sound they can feel deep in their chests. Paul suddenly gasps, his eyes wide with recognition.

  “You all right, Rev?”

  Paul smiles weakly.

  “God bless you, Kid—”

  He suddenly lurches high into the air and into the gaping maw of one of the Towering Things, which bites down with a sickening crunch, chuckling deep in its throat.

  “No!” Ray screams, firing his pistol up at the thing.

  “The legs!” Ethan calls to him, shooting at the Infected. “Shoot it in the legs!”

  “Rev?” Todd says, trying to stand, his eyes flooded with tears.

  Ray nods and rushes at the Towering Thing, shooting down the Infected running at him until standing almost directly underneath the monster.

  “Die, you piece of shit,” he says, taking careful aim and shooting out one of the thing’s knobby knees.

  The Towering Thing squeals, its leg collapsing under its enormous weight, and falls into the horde with a meaty splash.

  Another sound pierces the air.

  Hackett is blowing his whistle.

  ♦

  Ethan and Ray and Todd leap across the trenches, trailing clouds of dust, the Infected spilling into the open pits behind them, squealing and clawing at the walls. Todd stumbles on the other side, screaming for the Reverend, Ray half dragging him.

  “Go ahead, I’ll cover!” Ethan says, turning and walking slowly backwards while pouring lead into the snarling faces of their pursuers.

  On his left, Hackett and several soldiers run toward him from the opposite lanes, chased by a group of Infected. He slaps a fresh mag into the rifle, chambers a round and fires several bursts, cutting down the pursuers.

  I think I’m finally getting the hang of this, Ethan thinks, and turns again to provide cover fire. Constantly aware of the other survivors, he wonders where Paul is, and feels a sudden stab in his heart as the fact of his friend’s death strikes him again.

  He lowers his rifle for a moment, panting with exhaustion.

  “I’m sorry, friend,” he says, thinking: I hope you’re in a better place.

  Hackett collides with him and he feels the air rush out of his lungs. The world spins and he hits the ground hard. His rifle is gone.

  “Jeez, Sergeant,” Ethan gasps. “You okay?”

  He feels a boot strike his ribs, knocking the air out of him again. Another sinks into his back, sending a lancing pain up his neck. The soldiers are standing over him, kicking him.

  They’re Infected, he realizes.

  Hackett slowly rises to all fours, groaning.

  “Run, run, run,” Ethan hisses at him.

  Hackett turns, snarling, and bites into Ethan’s ankle.

  Ethan screams, flailing. The pain is incredible. He remembers the pistol on his hip and unholsters it, snapping off the safety and squeezing two shots through Hackett’s skull. His eyes stinging with tears of regret, he looks down at his torn ankle smeared with blood and saliva.

  The soldiers have stopped kicking him.

  The virus has entered his nervous stream and is already flowing into his brain. Within moments, he loses control of his limbs and his body begins twitching. The pain in his ankle recedes as his body responds to Infection by flooding his brain with endorphins.

  The soldiers growl, grinning wolfishly, and then run after the others.

  Probabilities. He was a math teacher. He understands probabilities. It works like this: You take enough risks on a long enough timeline, and you will probably lose. It’s that simple.

  He looks at the gun still gripped in his hand. Despite the weakness and spasms, he retains some control of his body. He should end it now, before he becomes one of them.

  He raises the pistol slowly to his head.

  Infected begin to race past, snarling, their feet slapping on the wet asphalt and splashing through puddles of blood. Ethan slowly raises himself onto his elbow and aims the gun at them, firing methodically. A running figure spins like a top before toppling to the pavement.

  His hand suddenly flops back to the ground, the gun forgotten.

  The world is bathed in shades of red, terrifying and beautiful.

  The first wave of despair passes through him. Now he understands why the Infected cry out at night. They are filled with sadness. Incredible, impenetrable, inconsolable sadness.

  The sadness of memories of an entire life just out of reach.

  The sadness of slaves.

  Then the rage begins. The pure hatred.

  The hunger. The need.

  The urgent, directive hum of the Brood.

  Ethan hisses, spraying spittle, struggling to stand. He knows there are things on this bridge that have not yet received the viral gospel.

  There they are, murdering his people, each death an extinguished vector. He sees figures advancing towards him, running and shooting. Small arms fire crackles across the bridge.

  A woman stands over him now, looking down at him wearing a sad expression. She holds two smoking pistols in her fists.

  His face contorts into a hideous grimace.

  “Anne,” he growls. “Good to see . . .”

  The small moment of pleasure passes almost instantly. He glares up at her with hate, trying to push himself off the ground. She falls to one knee, meeting him halfway.

  “Ethan, listen to me,” she says close to his ear.

  He shakes his head and snarls. “Go . . .”

  Within moments, he has already forgotten who she is. All he knows is that she is a terrifying monster in the eyes of the Brood. A monster that destroys vectors for the Brood. A monster that is a threat to the Brood. A monster that must be tamed by becoming a host for the Brood.

  Assimilate, the Brood hums. Assimilate and grow in safety in a fertile host.

  The monster says: “Your family is still alive.”

  The red veil suddenly lifts and he gasps as the faces of Carol and Mary flash through his mind. He sees Mary in a bathing suit running through a series of sprays in a water park, Carol laughing as she unpacks lunch on a picnic table.

  “Mary,” he growls deep in his throat.

  Mary turns and rushes towards him.

  “Daddy!” she squeals.

  The sun in his eyes, so bright.

  What a perfect day that was.

  Ethan’s head bursts as Anne pulls the trigger.

  ♦

  Todd staggers through hell, shouting for Paul and Ethan while the engineers retreat with pistols and crowbars and baseball bats, forming a tightening protective circle around Patterson, who struggles to connect the firing wires to the blasting machine, the right side of his face swollen to twice its normal size.

  Help is arriving. Fresh troops have formed a ragged line and are shooting into the ranks of the Infected, which break apart under the withering fire. The soldiers are from the two buses they left behind at the Ohio end of the bridge. There are civilians here, too, whom he does not recognize. He wanders among the Infected, which drop bleeding to the ground around him.

  He shouts the names of his friends.

  Get down, get down

  Fire in the hole

  The trenches in front of him erupt in a blinding flash, followed by a deafening crash. A massive tremor buckles the bridge, knocking him off of hi
s feet to land hard on the asphalt.

  He struggles back onto his hands and knees, feeling lightheaded.

  Come on, kid, a voice says, tiny and distant.

  He blinks and sees Ray Young frowning down at him, his mouth working, his steelers cap smoking. The man hauls him roughly to his feet.

  The garbled, muffled sounds of the world rush into his ears with suddenly clarity.

  “The bridge didn’t blow! We got to move! You hear me? It didn’t blow!”

  Todd turns and sees a Giant lumbering towards him, bellowing its foghorn call, stomping the ground, its tentacles swaying like whips.

  “We got to get out of here!” Ray tells him.

  They failed. It’s over. And his friends died for nothing.

  “Come on, kid!”

  The horde continues its mad rush across the bridge, led by the titan.

  Todd collapses to his knees, dragging Ray to the ground with him.

  “No!” he says.

  “Come on!”

  “No! No!”

  He pushes the man away from him, scrambling on all fours, and stops to shake his fists at the Infected, screaming and crying.

  “You killed my friends! I fucking hate you!”

  “We’re going to die here if we don’t move,” Ray pleads with him.

  Todd stands shakily, shrugging off Ray’s hand again, and unholsters his pistol.

  “You killed all my friends and now I’ll kill you!”

  Todd aims his pistol at the behemoth crashing towards him and fires, screaming. Ray appears next to him, screaming his head off, firing with both hands until his guns click empty.

  The Giant lunges into a gallop, roaring, filling the air with its stench.

  Within moments, the monster looms over them.

  And falls through the earth with a groan.

  The broken section of the bridge detaches cleanly and tumbles seventy feet until swallowed by the waters below. The monster falls with it, lowing plaintively and flailing until crashing into the river.

  Todd raises his fist, whooping like a savage as the Infected continue to run at him, toppling over the edge into the river below, shrieking like bats.

  “Ha!” he screams at them. “Ha! That’s what you get!”

  He finally falls to his knees among the rubble and bodies, crying hysterically.

  “You killed my friends,” he says.

  I didn’t know you very well, he thinks, but you’re the only ones who really knew me. You listened to me when nobody else did. You saw me. You depended on me. You accepted me.

  Like nobody ever did.

  “All for a goddamn bridge,” Ray says in disgust. He drops his pistols onto the road and walks away shaking, leaving Todd alone.

  Moments later, Anne kneels next to the boy and puts her arm around him. After some time, he curls up into a ball on the ground, his head on her lap, and falls asleep.

  In the distance, over the stomping feet and snarling breath of the Infected hordes, she hears the metallic scream of amored treads.

  ♦

  Ray sits on the corner of the edge of the bridge among the dead and dying, his feet kicking in empty space, looking down at the river. He briefly ponders the water, the clouds, the sun hanging low in the sky. The wind whistles through the gap, sweeping dust into the water. Across forty feet of open space, hundreds of Infected still crowd the other side of the span, moaning and reaching out to him as if pleading. He resurrects a mangled cigarette from the crushed pack in his shirt pocket and lights it, inhaling deeply and blowing a long stream of smoke. A cigarette never tasted so good. What I wouldn’t give for an ice cold beer, he thinks, almost salivating. Ice. Cold. Beer.

  Life is good. It’s even beautiful.

  And way too short.

  The pain in his side is incredible. He can feel the virus growing there, converting his cells into a monster waiting to be born. One life ends, and another begins.

  I’ll fight it, he vows. And maybe I’ll win.

  He heard that the Hoppers grow right out of your body as if it were topsoil, sucking it dry, and then eat what’s left when they are born, the way baby spiders in some species consume their own mothers after they hatch. By that point, you’re so drained that all you can do is watch.

  It’s a lousy way to go. He’d rather die of bone cancer.

  The first time he does something really good in his life, he has to die for it.

  A noble sacrifice. Right. Big fucking deal.

  We ain’t the three hundred Spartans, he thinks. There ain’t no legends being born here. The country is filled with heroic chumps sacrificing themselves for a future that will be dominated by all of the ignorant, selfish assholes who hid and did nothing. In a week, most of the good citizens of Camp Defiance will forget all about it. And even if they didn’t, even if they built a goddamn pyramid here in my honor, I’d still be dead. I gave my life when all that matters is staying alive.

  It’s too bad. I really wanted to see what I could do.

  I was just starting to feel like I had some potential as a human being.

  EPILOGUE: ON THE ROAD

  Sarge and Wendy sit on the Bradley’s warm metal skin on a thickly treed hilltop overlooking the desolation that was once Steel Valley. Sarge inspects the scorched land with a pair of binoculars while Steve stands guard nearby with a rifle. They see no sign of life, Infected or otherwise. The entire region appears to be dead, barren. They will be driving past Pittsburgh today along a southern route and they need to take a look at the road to see what is ahead. To the northeast, the city is still smoldering and blasting heat into the sky like a massive furnace and bleeding its toxins and rubble into the Ohio River. The land is carpeted in gray ash and cars half melted into the road.

  They are refugees forced from everything they consider home, nomads living on whatever they can find. But mostly they are survivors. They are good at surviving because they are on the road and they are still alive. They have done the things one had to do to survive. They are going to Camp Immunity, near Harrisburg, to find Ethan’s family and tell them that he is dead and that he never gave up searching for them. That he never gave up hope. His little girl has a right to know who her father was, how he died so that thousands might live.

  They do not intend to stay in Immunity. The only sanctuary they trust now is the Bradley.

  Wendy runs her fingers along the deep scratches in the turret made by the claws of the Demon. The grooves remind her of the empty spaces inside her that appeared when she learned Paul and Ethan were dead. It is still unfathomable to her that they could die, even in this dangerous world. They had become larger than life in her mind over the past weeks, closer than family. Now she feels their absence like an amputated limb or a missing gun. Her mind still wants assurance they are there, covering their sectors, with her world being a little safer because of it.

  Sarge touches her shoulder. Wendy wipes her eyes with the palm of her hand and tries to smile.

  “They live here,” he tells her, touching his heart.

  “It should have been me.”

  “No,” he says. “It shouldn’t.”

  Wendy looks down at the charred wasteland that was once a thriving city and wonders why she is alive when so many died. She does not see anything special about her. She cannot accept that she deserves it.

  Sarge adds, “They didn’t die for nothing. They died so that many more could live and that’s the noblest way to die.”

  She squeezes his hand and sighs, feeling strangely sick and empty, starving but unable to eat anything, her mind searching for its own sanctuary.

  Maybe she will find it on the road.

  The Bradley was not trapped on the West Virginia side of the river. The vehicle has an inflatable pontoon that encircles the rig and can turn it into a boat propelled by its treads at four miles an hour. But they did not go back to Defiance.

  Anne radioed to tell them the mission had succeeded. She had been leading another group of survivors to the camp, tak
ing them through Steubenville for supplies, when they heard the sounds of battle. She found the soldiers at the buses on the Ohio side of the river arguing over whether to abandon their position and support their comrades. Anne rallied the soldiers and led both them and her team of survivors in an assault that bought Patterson enough time to finish blowing the charges. Just what Wendy would expect her to do. She is a natural leader.

  Anne said she was going to take Todd back to Defiance with the other survivors, and then head back out to find more. Todd said he wanted to go with her.

  After breaking radio contact, Sarge told Wendy and Steve he could never go back. That he could never feel safe there. That the only place he could stand being is here, on the road.

  They agreed instantly to come with him.

  “I believe in you, Toby,” she says.

  “It’s just us now,” he tells her.

  “We’ll find others and start again.”

  “A tribe, right?”

  He puts his arm around her and she snuggles close, her eyes glassy.

  “A tribe,” she agrees, and sighs.

  “We’ll be together.”

  “No matter what.”

  Odd that they should reject the security of the camp for the brutality of the road, which just claimed two of their friends. They know it is insane, but they feel safe out here. They understand it. And strangely, they feel they must go on facing it in order to continue earning the right to be alive when so many died.

  Survival, it seems, is also a state of mind. And it carries a steep price.

  “Sarge!” Steve calls out.

  “What’s up?”

  The gunner grins at him. “Listen.”

  The pounding of rotors in the distance, growing louder.

  Sarge and Wendy turn and see five black objects moving slowly across the sky in formation.

  “God,” Sarge says, raising the binoculars to his eyes. “I can’t believe it.”

  “What is it? Toby, what is it?”

  He lowers the binoculars slowly, smiling in a daze. “Chinooks. Big helicopters, troop carriers, moving west.”