But if there is no group anymore, to what or whom is there to be loyal?
A bell tinkles as he enters the store, sending his heart galloping in his chest. The place smells musty. The air feels flat, dead. He accidentally kicks a two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew spinning across the floor. He flinches at the noise, raising his rifle and sweeping the store for targets as he backs against the nearest wall.
Maybe coming in here by myself was not such a good idea, he thinks, gasping for breath. Another scare like that and I’ll drop dead from a stroke.
Having a closer look at the shelves brings further disappointment. Most of the merchandise is still sitting on the shelves or hanging on hooks, but there is no food, water, medicine. Instead, almost all of the stuff left in the store are products specifically marketed to truckers who have to live on the road for as long as a month at a time. Movies and audio books, CB radio equipment, hazmat placards, truck stop exit guides, road atlases, electric frying pans, toasters, DC adapters, coffee makers and TV/VCR systems.
Todd wonders what a trucker would do with a coffee maker and then realizes, looking at the packaging, that all of these devices are DC powered. And the DC adapters allow AC devices to run off of DC. He suddenly has an epiphany. Most appliances do not work anymore because they need AC power, and the only way he knows to make AC power when the grid is down is with an emergency generator that runs on diesel or propane or natural gas. But DC comes from batteries.
They could run all this stuff off of car batteries. Of which there are plenty lying around, courtesy of the fact that their drivers are either Infected or dead.
Looks like being a whiz at science has finally come in handy, Todd tells himself. He slowly realizes that he has hit some sort of jackpot.
♦
Wendy marches resolutely through the smoky haze, her Glock unholstered and held at her side. She is a police officer, still on duty, still protecting life and property. Perhaps the last cop left in Pittsburgh. Perhaps the last government employee still doing anything. Once she left, the crowd debated following her to see what kind of loot might become available, but eventually gave up and resumed their long walk west. Apparently, they did not have much faith that she would be able to stop the bandits and recover their supplies. The truck stop is far behind her now, perhaps a mile, perhaps more. The chemical fog hems in on all sides, reducing visibility to less than fifty yards. Ahead, the headlights of a large vehicle wobble in the rising heat waves.
She hears gunshots, flinching at the sound, and then puts on her game face.
The absurdity of her situation continues to nag at her, however. What is she supposed to do, arrest these people? And then what? There are no more courts, no more judges. No more jails or wardens either. The entire legal system is gone. There is only frontier justice now—the law of the gun, with justice dispensed using bullets. Is that it, then? Is she supposed to kill them? Even sheriffs in the Wild, Wild West had judges and jails and a community they could count on.
She clears her scratchy throat and considers her next move.
Perhaps she should yell freeze, police before shooting them, she thinks with bitter humor. Read them their rights before opening fire and cutting them down in cold blood for maybe doing something that used to be illegal when there used to be laws and a government.
She ain’t no cop, the man said.
Wendy suddenly stops, her mouth hanging open, and returns her Glock to its holster on her belt. Ain’t no cop, he said. And he was right.
The realization of this simple fact feels as pleasant as her heart being torn out of her chest.
I did my best, she thinks, trying to remember the fallen whom she once considered her tribe, but she cannot recall their faces. Even Dave Carver is just a blur. She has a pounding headache and is starting to feel light headed. She should have brought water.
Time to go back, then.
Wendy slowly removes her badge, runs her thumb over its edged details, and puts it into her pocket. This done, she turns and begins walking back to the truck stop.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is not king. He is not king because nobody recognizes him as king. The others do not even know he is there.
Wendy coughs long and hard on the smoke and soot, her lungs on fire. When it is over, a smile flickers across her face. If you are still alive after part of you dies, she thinks philosophically, it is like being reborn. She will survive this.
The gunshots escalate back at the truck and the headlights shake and blink out. Moments later, the first screams echo across the asphalt. The darkness closes in around her.
Wendy breaks into a run, reeling from the sudden understanding that her decision to stop being a cop probably saved her life.
♦
Anne steps carefully between the trees, her body taut and her rifle shouldered and ready to fire. She blinks away the sweat that is slowly pooling under her soaked cap. Her finger twitches near the trigger. Each step is planted carefully, one foot following the other, taking her deeper. She is a hunter now. She does not yet know what she is hunting. Her quarry is present, but not known.
Sighing in the trees. She can hear them now, their guttural clicks. Communication that is like ancient speech, but also as mindless as insect mating. The things scamper playfully through the bushes and leap into the trees, releasing clouds of soot that make the little bastards squeal and sneeze.
They’re like children, she thinks, and then banishes that painful thought. Unlike the other survivors, Anne does not question why she is here. Does not constantly compare herself, the world around her and what she is doing in it to the Time Before. Anne has survived so far because she successfully locked away her past. She does not need to remember it to continue atoning for it. She has learned to truly live in the moment.
The ash blankets the treetops and drifts in the air, obscuring everything green and creating a virtual twilight. Anne closes her eyes for a moment, and when she opens them, she sees the eyes glimmering in the haze. Dozens of staring red eyes burning in the gloom, the dark spaces of the forest. She takes another step forward.
Foliage thrashes as the creatures scamper across the treed ground. The air fills with guttural clicks and squeals. Even the squeals sound like language. They know she is here. She is no longer hunting, but observing. There are too many to fight; it is not worth the risk.
Anne raises her rifle slowly and peers into the scope, conducting a slow sweep until stopping at a small group clustered at the foot of a massive oak. The crosshairs come to a rest on a blank little elven monkey face, blandly chewing, its mouth stained. As if sensing it is being watched, the creature bares bloody teeth and glares with pure malice, without real intelligence. She moves the rifle and begins watching the others shove handfuls of some furred animal into their mouths.
She cries out, her eyes flooding with hot tears, before she can stop herself. She falls to her knees, weeping openly with racking sobs, her shoulders shaking with each burst.
The forest suddenly comes alive with hoots and shrieks.
“It’s just a dog,” she says. “Just somebody’s old dog.”
Anne stifles the next sob, sniffing loudly and wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. Within moments, she regains control of her breathing. She hates them with every ounce of her being. She raises the rifle, aims it at a snarling face, exhales and squeezes the trigger.
The rifle fires with a flash and bang that fills the forest with an echoing, rolling roar. The creatures rush and bound through the undergrowth, hooting and shrieking, gathering for a charge. The acrid smell of cordite fills the air.
She fires again, the rifle lurching hard against her shoulder. She sees the skull explode before the view in the scope jumps in a haze of smoke.
“I’m going to kill you!” she screams at them with incredible volume, her voice ringing through the trees. “Do you hear that, you little freak bastards?”
Her dog had an almost supernatural talent for catching Frisbees.
“God damn you,” she sobs, tasting salt and soot in her mouth as they rapidly close the distance in great leaping bounds. “God damn you for what you’ve done.”
Anne raises her handguns in both fists and rains death upon them.
♦
Paul pulls a large sack out of the Bradley and curses loudly as it splits open in his hands and spills cans, bags of rice, water bottles, medical tape, hand sanitizer, tampons, mosquito repellant and a box cutter onto the gritty asphalt. Everything is coated in a sprinkling of soot. He can feel the ash settling on his hair and shoulders, finding its way under his shirt, mingling with his sweat and turning into a grimy paste coating his back. This project is converting him to paganism. Getting these supplies sorted is like something out of a Greek myth expressing the usual cruelty of the gods towards those who worship them.
He reenters the hot, dim interior of the Bradley, his back aching at having to walk stooped, and rummages through the three neatly rolled MOPP suits that he found earlier. The soldiers at the government shelter wore suits like this, and they had respirator masks. He finds one with the filter already attached and pulls it over his head. The inside smells like a men’s locker room and it feels mildly suffocating, but it seems functional enough. He no longer feels like he is breathing sandpaper. He raises the mask until it rests on top of his head, sits and lights a cigarette, tossing the match on the floor and coughing.
Where are you, God?
Paul has not prayed in weeks, ever since Sara came at him with her hands stretched into claws. He always found conversing with God directly a path to inner peace and unlocking the solutions to problems.
Why have you forsaken us?
He wonders if this is some type of test for humanity and possibly for him personally. If it is, it is not a fair test. Imagine a school where the students have to guess what the question is on a test before they give their answer.
Dear God, help me to remain your servant. I only want to serve you and glorify you through good works and spreading the good news of your son’s resurrection.
He thinks about that. What has he done to help, other than endless work with the shotgun? He wonders if he is still invited to Heaven. Jesus’ teachings do not appear to apply to this holocaust. Those who followed to the letter God’s prohibition against killing died fast.
He had been so close to giving up entirely. He remembers standing near a wall in the government shelter while the other refugees were being evacuated. The people crowded against the doors while Paul pretended to pray over rows of body bags lined up neatly against the wall. He intended to stay behind after the others left. He wanted to stay behind because he was going to zip himself up inside one of those bags and lie there, pretending to be dead, until God came for him.
Instead, Anne taught his hands to war.
God already ended one wicked age with water, a great heaping flood that covered the earth and drowned it. Then the waters gave and Noah, stepping down from his ark, saw the washed-away ruins of the great cities covered in rags of seaweed, the thousands and tens of thousands of bloated bodies half-buried in the mud.
Noah had been tested. And yet God had talked to Noah.
Speak to us, Lord. Tell us what you want.
He steps on his cigarette and thinks bitterly that perhaps there is a Noah out there, building his fortress for the righteous, and Paul is simply not invited.
He is no Noah. He knows that. He feels he has much in common with Job, however.
God asks Satan what he thinks of Job, a truly pious man. Satan answers that the only reason Job loves God is because God blessed him with riches, health and family. God gives Satan permission to test Job. First, all of his property is destroyed. Then a wind kills all of his children. Job continues to praise God, lamenting that as the Lord gives, so the Lord takes. Satan next afflicts him with boils. Sitting in cinders, Job laments but forgives God.
Finally, unable to endure, he curses the day he was born. He realizes his life has no meaning and believes there is nothing for him to do but die. He does not understand why God created man to suffer.
It is a good story. Paul can relate to all of it.
God comes in a whirlwind and tells Job that it is not for him to question God, as God is king of the universe, not accountable to his creations for anything, including their approval.
Paul had always thought that it was a cop-out, that God gave Job a terrible answer that basically boiled down to: I’m God and you’re not, so do not ask me to justify myself.
But at least it was an answer.
Talk to us, God. If you will not even talk to us in this time of darkness and sorrow, why should we give you any allegiance?
The Jews grappled with the Holocaust for more than sixty years, trying to reconcile their belief in a just and merciful God with the millions gassed and shot and fed to the ovens in the death camps. Paul wonders what humanity will make of God when and if this plague ever ends. If God does not need Man’s approval, he may sacrifice it.
The Old Testament God rewarded such waywardness in his creation with pestilence and slaughter. But as Job basically said, what else can you do to me that has not been done?
Paul dons the respirator mask and steps out into the early twilight created by massive smoke clouds slowly writhing across the sky, as if tormented. He spends several minutes watching as the green landscape continues its slow dissolution into a gray wasteland. He thinks of the other survivors wandering across this wilderness, alone and without hope. This is a place where people face themselves and learn what they really are. In war and adversity, we learn our true nature as humans. On our deathbed, our curse as earthly beings. In a place like this, we gaze into a mirror at our image rendered naked in cruel honesty—at who we really are as people.
His knees popping, he bends and begins brushing soot off of the supplies and organizing them for repacking into the Bradley. Lanterns, Coleman stove, propane tanks, rifle bore cleaner and lube, first aid, duct tape, cord, string, roll of sheet plastic, bags of salt, vitamins, toilet bucket, powdered lime, coffee pot, aluminum foil, soap, Ramen noodles, beans, waterproof matches, bolt cutters, energy bars, bedrolls, flashlights, his tattered copy of the Holy Bible.
Lord, would you have destroyed Sodom if I was there?
Abraham argues with God to spare Sodom and Gomorrah, saying he should not destroy the innocent along with the wicked. He asks God if he would destroy the city if fifty innocent people live there, and God says he would not. He asks God if he would destroy it if forty-five innocent people live there, and God says he would not. And so he bargains with God, forty, thirty, twenty, finally settling on ten. Paul always wondered why Abraham does not ask for mercy if even one innocent man or woman lived there.
Paul decides that he must make himself a righteous man to save the world from God’s wrath, but he does not know how. This is a world where the righteous are easily culled.
He prays for guidance, but again, God does not answer.
♦
“Oh Lord,” Ethan says.
He remembers seeing stories on the news about poor kids from the developing world who were flown to hospitals in the United States to have giant benign tumors removed. The kids were grotesques, carrying twenty to third pounds of flesh on their faces. The tumors were large masses of tissue forming as a result of cancer cells reproducing at an abnormally accelerated rate.
&nbs
p; Ducky has something similar growing out of his hip, but it is not a normal tumor. It is a monkeylike creature curled up into a fetal ball, breathing, apparently asleep. Ethan can see where the driver cut the pants of his uniform to release the constantly growing creature. Now he understands why the soldiers were carrying the driver here, away from the other survivors. They do not want the others to see Ducky like this.
Sarge asks the driver how he is feeling. Ducky’s gaze shifts to Sarge but otherwise his expression does not change.
The gunner shakes his head. “He barely has enough energy to breathe right now,” he says.
Sarge looks at Ethan pointedly. “So. You’re the smart one. What do you think?”
Ethan examines the thing growing out of Ducky’s hip, careful not to touch it. It is like cancer, but more than that: a parasite. He cannot believe his eyes; it appears that the man’s entire body has been completely rewired to give everything it has to the growing creature. The thing has apparently reorganized Ducky’s organs and is pressing on his bladder, making him piss himself nearly continuously, a sickly, foul-smelling pink fluid.
Fascinating, almost miraculous, from a purely scientific standpoint. Horrific, and utterly revolting, from a human standpoint.
“We don’t have much time,” the gunner says.
“Time’s up, doc,” Sarge says. “Can you fix him?”
“I don’t understand what it is exactly you expect me to do here.”
Sarge extends his service knife to Ethan.
“Can you fix him?”
Ethan almost laughs, but stops himself. Sarge is not the kind of guy you laugh in front of when one of his people is dying.
Sarge adds, “I sterilized it. It’s clean. And we got plenty of alcohol and gauze.”
“He can’t survive an amputation.”
“Ducky’s a tough sumbitch.” He smiles weakly at the driver. “We’ll booze you up good, Ducky. You won’t feel a thing.”
“Sarge, I’m sorry about your man,” Ethan says carefully. “But there’s nothing anybody can do.”
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