Sarge snorts and says, “I like his spunk. He’s a fighter.”
“Spunk as in crazy,” says the gunner. He has the square jaw of an action movie hero and wears a Dora the Explorer Band-Aid on the left cheek of his stubbled face. “Crazy as in a threat to all of us.”
“If crazy disqualified membership, there’d be no club in this rig. Ha.”
“I thought the plan was we want ‘survivors, not fighters.’ That’s what you said.”
“Fighters are useful, too,” Sarge says cryptically. “We can’t do job interviews, Steve. Let’s invite him on. If he blends, he blends.”
“You’re the boss, Sergeant,” the gunner says, shrugging.
The man roars: “Kids used to play on this street!”
crack crack
Sarge says, “Something about him reminds me of Randy Devereaux. Remember Devereaux?”
“Not really, Sergeant. I hardly knew him.”
“Right,” Sarge says. “You’re right. That’s my bad.” Steve and Ducky, the driver, are new to the Bradley, replacements for the previous crew, who fell down during the Screaming nearly two weeks ago. Two weeks and an eternity. The replacements barely had any contact with the Bradley’s infantry squad, the boys who survived the Taliban and the Screaming and then flew all the way back from Afghanistan to die in a Wal-Mart parking lot in Pittsburgh.
“This is a nice place to live!”
Sarge calls out to him, but the man ignores him. If he does not trust the military, maybe one of the civilians can coax him. Anne volunteers to get out and do the inviting. While the Bradley stands idling, she approaches with her hands up, palms out.
“What’s your name?” she asks.
The man glares at her sideways, frowning, then waves her off. “Aw, you don’t live here neither.”
“My name is Anne. There are five of us plus the crew—”
The pistol cracks in the man’s hand twice, dropping two distant running figures.
“I am making my stand!” he announces to the sky.
“Come on, get in,” Anne says. “You can come with us.”
“I said, step off, bitch!”
Sarge laughs, shaking his head, while the gunner grins.
“But we want you to come with us,” Anne says.
“Too dangerous out there,” the man tells her, waving his umbrella. “It’s raining zombies!”
crack crack
He fires again several times at distant figures running down the street. At long range, barely looking, and does not miss. One of the kills, Sarge saw it clear, was a headshot. The Infected’s head snapped back and he was dead in the blink of an eye.
Steve says, “Is he actually hitting anything with that pea shooter?”
“Yeah, he is. In fact, every shot hit a separate moving target and brought it down at between twenty-five and thirty meters.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not a kidder, Steve.”
“With a handgun, though? Wow, this guy is amazing.”
“No, you’re right,” Sarge says. “He’s crazy. Radioactive.”
He calls out to Anne, who jogs back to the vehicle.
“This is my home! My land!”
crack crack crack
Sarge lowers the telescopic seat and closes the single-piece hatch.
“How long do you give him, Sergeant?”
“I don’t know, Steve. Longer than most. Not long enough.”
♦
Paul runs his hand over his salt-and-pepper stubble and takes in the massive hospital looming against the graying sky. The air is cooling and he can feel the tickle of tiny drizzling raindrops on his face. Dull thunder grinds in the distant ether, as if God is moving his furniture across the floor. Now this is good weather for an apocalypse, he tells himself. A gray sky against which black birds swarm. He found the past two weeks of May sunshine jarringly discordant with the end of the world. The diseased walking blindly past flowers in bloom. (Earth abides.) The dead rotting away on lush green grass and overgrown gardens, slowly eaten by bacteria and insects and birds and animals. By the very soil. (Yes, the earth abides.) Paul wonders if God, who also abides, is as impervious as the weather to all of mankind’s horrible sufferings or if, like the grass and the animals and the insects, his creator is getting something out of it.
♦
The wind picks up and the drizzle turns into a spring shower. The survivors set out buckets to catch the water and decide to wait out the downpour inside the hospital instead of the Bradley. They navigate a cluster of abandoned ambulances and dead bodies and enter what is supposed to be the emergency room but what instead looks like a burned-out slaughterhouse. Signs of extreme violence are everywhere on this place. The floor is littered with charred bodies under a thick layer of ash and dust. The walls are painted with dried blood.
“When the first Infected woke up and spread out into the city, the first responders brought the victims of the violence here, to the hospital,” says Ethan. “Gift-wrapped for the rest.”
“It looks like some concerned citizens then showed up and firebombed the place,” Wendy says, kicking at the ash and raising a small cloud of black dust.
The place gives them the creeps. The hospital seems eerily deserted except for the charred dead. It is not hard to imagine doctors and nurses hurrying across this noisy room to greet hardworking first responders bringing in broken and dying people for life-saving treatment. But this is where Infection started. After the Screaming, the people who fell down were brought here and to the ad hoc clinics. Three days later, they woke up and slaughtered and infected the people who had been working around the clock to keep them alive. They slaughtered and infected their own families coming to visit. Then they went out into the city in the early morning hours, driven by the virus’ simple programming: Attack, overpower, infect.
Now it is a killing floor. A dead place. Sarge regards a wheelchair crumpled in a corner, the walls above it riddled with bullet holes. Wall-mounted electronic medical devices hang uselessly. Disturbed by movement, black ash swarms in drifts in the air, acrid to the nose and bitter on the tongue.
Ethan studies the faces of the other survivors, searching for encouragement and finding none. The others look as damaged as he feels. The place has an almost supernatural aura about it. As familiar as the hospital is in some ways, in many ways it feels like the unknown.
♦
Paul wishes the dead had come back to life to eat the living. That there was truly no room in hell anymore and the end of days had come. Because then there would be evidence of a supernatural cause instead of just a bug created in a lab by men to kill other men. There would be evidence of a hell and true evil and Satan. And if there is a Satan, there is a God, and if there is a God, then death is not the end, but the beginning. Man’s suffering over a lifetime is nothing compared to an eternity of bliss in God’s direct presence. To see the dead rise is to see the end of days and with it, the end of faith—the beginning of certainty. With such certainty, Paul would willingly walk into the embrace of the dead and let them tear him apart and eat him. Did Christ not suffer more on the cross? What use is this old fleshly cage when paradise awaits the spirit?
His wife had always laughed at him when he would watch quasi-religious films about Satan visiting the earth and trying to trigger the end of the world, only to be stopped by an action hero with a shotgun. He would cheer for Satan to get on with it. He would yell at the action hero: Why are you fighting God’s plan? Let Satan win already so we can all go to heaven!
♦
“We can’t stay in this room,” Sarge says, finally breaking the spell. He crosses his arms and nods to Anne. “What’s our next move?”
Anne shakes her head, looking back at him with raised eyebrows.
“We treat this like climbing a mountain,” Wendy says. “It’s too big. So we conquer it in stages. But first we need a base camp.”
“Sarge has military experience, Wendy,” Anne says quietly. “I thin
k we should ask him what he thinks we should do.”
Sarge nods at the transfer of authority, which he expected. “There are some simple tactics for taking down a building. Wendy, that analogy of yours was actually very good.”
“Go ahead, Sarge,” the cop says. “It’s your show.”
“All right,” he says. “Here’s how I see it. There are three things we need to do. One: secure a piece of this building for ourselves. Two: strip it down of anything that we can use that will keep us alive. And three: avoid obvious signs that the building has new ownership. We all agreed on that?”
The survivors nod.
“The crew and I will get the rig under cover. Out of sight, but not too far. Anne and Paul, find a janitor’s closet and get as much bleach as you can. Then find a broom.”
“You want us to clean this room?” Paul says, incredulous. “Just the two of us?”
“No. Later on, we’re going to make it exactly as it was before we showed up. We’ll need to get rid of our footprints and we’ll need the broom for that. Okay?”
They nod.
“And while you’re doing it, take a look and see what kind of supplies might be around that we can come back for later,” Sarge adds.
“Got it,” Anne says.
“Wendy, Ethan and the Kid will go up to the third floor, seal themselves in, and then start clearing it of anything living.” Sarge grins. “Then we all get to do some cleaning. We will need to scrub that level from top to bottom with bleach and air it out before we can move in. But only the rooms on the side of the hall away from the windows. Don’t clean the rooms with the windows, since again we don’t want to advertise to anybody that the building has new ownership. Just seal those rooms and leave them. Okay? Once we get all that done, we can do some exploring.”
The survivors agree. It is a good plan.
♦
When Paul’s wife fell down during the Screaming, he arranged for her care in their home. The next day he visited the hospital, where exhausted first responders and volunteers were still delivering scores of twitching bodies, and tried to provide counseling and strength to the families of the victims. He expected the Spirit to tell him what to say but nothing came. Feeling hollow, he rolled up his sleeves and helped empty bedpans for hours. That night, he held a special service. The church was filled to standing room only, the few regulars and the many fair-weather Christians he was accustomed to seeing only at holiday services, many of them holding candles. There was no music or singing because the organist had fallen down and Paul had not arranged for a new one. There would be no collection plate because the ushers had fallen down and Paul had not replaced them either. Paul simply wanted to speak for a few minutes, and offer comfort to his flock through the power of prayer. He had no sermon planned. The Spirit would move him, would speak through him. Looking at all the anguished and weeping faces on the benches, he began by asking rhetorically why this happened.
For long, agonizing minutes, the Spirit said nothing. He was on his own.
He cleared his throat and said, “John, chapter thirteen, verse seven: ‘Jesus replied, “You don’t understand now what I am doing, but someday you will.’”
Several in the congregation nodded, encouraging him to continue, but he fell silent. It was not enough for him to say the Lord works in mysterious ways. Not nearly enough.
Why would God allow this to happen? He could not fathom it. The standard arguments raced through his mind justifying God’s existence in a world in which God allows evil to happen to good people. God’s creation has free will and that includes the free will to do evil. But what evil did his Sara do? God allows evil to thrive in a world corrupted by original sin. But were not the sins of Adam and Eve and everybody since, including Sara, washed away by the blood given by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ? Evil is complementary to good. But how could Paul see anything good in a world without his beloved wife?
God is testing us. God is trying to teach us something.
No, he decided. God is not just teaching.
God is punishing.
Paul told the congregation, “The good book also says: ‘And if you fail to learn the lesson and continue your hostility toward me, then I myself will be hostile toward you. I will personally strike you with calamity seven times over for your sins. I will send armies against you to carry out the curse of the covenant you have broken. When you run to your towns for safety, I will send a plague to destroy you there, and you will be handed over to your enemies.’ Leviticus chapter twenty-six, verses twenty-three to twenty-five. I intend to learn why these verses were written. I intend to learn the lesson God is trying to teach us through such harsh discipline.”
His congregation did not like his message. They did not want to be forsaken. They wanted answers. They wanted comfort and mercy. They stared back at him with terror.
The Old Testament God of justice was back, and Paul, who had worshipped and studied and preached the good news of the New Testament God of mercy and love all his life, did not know what God wanted from him. For two days, he prayed. Sometimes he prayed for understanding. But mostly he prayed that God would show mercy and bring his Sara back to him.
Two nights later, his wife got out of bed in her nightgown, her face gray and her eyes black and cold as a serpent’s, and lunged shrieking for his throat.
♦
The survivors climb the stairs to the third floor. Wendy and the Kid volunteer to clear it while Ethan guards the stairs so that nobody can get in or out. They left him huddled in a corner, terrified at being alone.
The Kid walks ahead of Wendy, scoped carbine shouldered and ready to fire, jerking the barrel back and forth as he scans for targets, although he is not paying much attention to what he is doing, instead imagining what he looks like to the beautiful blond cop. He wonders if Wendy is impressed with his warrior skills. He wishes his carbine had a laser sight. She walks behind him, treading slowly, holding her Glock in her right hand and a flashlight in her left. Their footsteps disturb a thick layer of dust carpeting the ground.
The Kid suddenly bends over with an explosive sneeze, followed by another.
“Shit,” he says, his face burning. “Sorry about that. That wasn’t very ninja.”
The cop smiles grimly. “We’re not trying to be ninja. We’re here to clean up, not sneak around.”
“Oh, right.”
“You know, I’m never going to get used to calling you Kid.”
His mind is reeling. “You don’t like it?”
“I’d rather call you by your real name.”
“It’s Todd,” he says quickly. “But don’t tell anybody else.”
“I promise,” she says with a smile. “It’s our secret.”
He says nothing, flustered and afraid he might blurt out something stupid and irrecoverable.
Wendy motions for him to stop. “You ready to shoot that gun, Todd?”
He nods.
“Then let’s clear this hallway.” The cop calls out, “Hey! Hello? Anybody home?”
A woman bursts out of one of the recovery rooms, dressed in hospital scrubs stained with dried blood down the front, and begins jogging towards them with a bark. The survivors flinch, their hearts racing. Immediately, the ammonia smell of piss assaults their nostrils, making their eyes water.
“Who?” says the Kid.
“You,” says the cop.
The Kid wishes he could have set his rifle to full auto and let it rip like in the movies, but Sarge said not to do that. Sarge said you do not need suppression. You just need to stop somebody, running right at you, with as few rounds and as little energy as possible.
The Kid does not aim at the woman’s head, which offers only a small, lurching target. Instead, he aims at her center torso and squeezes the trigger, firing a single burst of three bullets.
The center of the woman’s chest explodes and she stumbles, wincing and smoking, before bouncing off a wall and toppling to the floor.
The man turns the corner and l
unges at them from behind. Wendy wheels and fires her Glock. The bullet enters his left eye socket, scrambles his brain and shoots the mess out the back of his head. He collapses instantly without a sound, dead before he hits the floor.
“Nicely done,” the Kid says weakly, feeling drained.
“I swallowed my gum,” Wendy says.
The corridor suddenly echoes with howls and the tramp of sneakers, dress shoes, high heels, bare feet. Wendy and the Kid freeze, breathing hard, standing back to back with guns ready.
A lot of people are coming.
♦
Sunlight cannot reach this part of the building where it is now perpetual night. The corridor connects the emergency room with the guts of the hospital. Paul and Anne explore its length, searching for supplies, anxiously aware of the sound of their breathing and footsteps. Paul lights the way with a highway flare, revealing bloody handprints on the wall in glaring detail. Beyond several feet, the light is quickly swallowed in the gloom. Bodies lie on the floor surrounded by small clouds of flies. The air reeks of bleach and rot. Water drips loudly somewhere close. A door slams, far away. Paul’s shoes crunch on the scattered remains of a smashed jar of tongue depressors. Rats scamper along the walls before disappearing into the dark.
“I made a mistake, Reverend,” Anne says, shattering the silence.
“What kind of mistake?”
“The kind you regret.”
Paul grunts. He does not know what to say. This is survival. He does not think it is possible for somebody to be alive today without having regrets. He is trying hard to keep his moral compass aimed in the right direction but the harsh truth is morality is a luxury at a time like this. There is plenty of guilt to go around. He wishes there were just a little forgiveness. But even guilt is a luxury reserved for those still alive and feeling safe enough to experience it.
He pauses in front of a door and holds up his flare.
“‘Custodial,’” Paul reads. “I think this is it. It’s unlocked.”
Too late, he realizes that Anne was not talking to him as a fellow survivor. She was speaking to him as a man of the cloth. Sorry, lady, he wants to say, that well has run dry at the moment. He realizes that he knows so little about the people on whom his life depends on a daily basis. He glances at this petite woman holding her powerful scoped rifle and the satchel filled with ammo and thinks, take the gun away and she could be a housewife. A dentist. An actress doing local theater. President of the PTA. The only part of her he has really cared about, however, is her natural talent with the rifle that has helped keep him alive for so long while other men, better men, have died.
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