The Infection (13 page)

They move quickly, rifles shouldered and aimed, communicating by hand signals only. Papers and loose trash flutter across the parking lot. The parking garage where they hid the rig under a tarp does not appear to be occupied, but swarms have a way of appearing as suddenly as a flash flood. They are used to playing it safe. Caution is now second nature to them.

Once they are back in the hospital, the soldiers begin to relax a little.

“Are we safe here, Sergeant?” Duck says. “In this building?”

“Safe enough at this moment.” This is Sarge’s stock answer to that question. He credits staying alive and sane this long with taking this hellish journey one day at a time. One moment at a time. Speculating about what you do not know is a waste of time and energy that you need to stay alive.

“I mean, are we going to stay a while?”

They begin climbing the stairs. Sarge shrugs and says, “I think we should. It’s a good place.”

“I thought the idea was we would train a civilian combat team and use them as security until we found some friendlies.”

“That’s still the plan, Ducky.”

“The civs seems to think we’re going to live here.”

“Yes, we are still trying to find the Army,” Sarge says. “No, we do not need to advertise this fact to the civilians. Do you even know where the nearest friendlies are? Because I sure as hell do not. Our battalion technically does not exist anymore. We’ve heard nothing on the net in days.”

The soldiers reach the top floor and pause to catch their breath. The gunner drops to one knee and starts rigging the C4 charge.

“There’s always the camps,” Steve says as he works. “The FEMA camps. The closest one is in Ohio, right?”

“Which we do not even know still exist, Steve. If they ever did. We’ve heard of lots of refugee camps and Army elements that either moved by the time we showed up or were never there in the first place. I am not interested in risking our safety for any rumors, especially if it means driving all over Ohio on a quarter tank of gas.”

“Hey, I’m with you. I’d like to stay. I wouldn’t mind if we bunkered down here until the whole thing blows over. Let the gung ho mo-fo’s take care of it.”

“I don’t want to stay here forever. The Army is out there still fighting somewhere and we’ve got to find them and help. But these people need a rest. We need a rest.”

“Roger that,” Steve says.

“I look at it this way,” Ducky says as they retreat down the stairwell. “Every hour we sit here, more people die that we could be helping. So how long are we staying if we are staying?”

“At least a few days,” Sarge says. “A lot can change in a few days. We are still taking this one day at a time.” He remembers what the Boy Scouts taught him about having the right frame of mind for survival: Stop, think, observe and plan, or STOP.

“What if we decide to move on but the civs want to stay?”

“I do not know, Ducky. I honestly do not. They’re not in the Army.”

“Fire in the hole!” Steve announces. The soldiers crouch and plug their ears.

The C4 explodes with a clap of metallic thunder that rolls down the stairwell, followed by a wave of smoke and dust and a strong chemical smell. The warped metal door hangs on one of its hinges, then snaps off and flops to the side.

The soldiers stand and dust themselves off.

“The truth is we really need them,” Sarge says. “They’ve gotten good.” He smiles grimly. “In fact, I would hate to piss them off.”

♦

God is good, and death is evil, so why does God allow people to die? That was a question Paul had never been able to answer during his ministry. When he was ten years old, a plane crashed, scattering burning metal and body parts across miles of scorched and bruised earth, killing more than two hundred people, including his mother. He experienced the full gamut of grief, from denial to anger to bargaining to guilt. The guilt was the worst. He had been asleep when she left for the trip and it haunted him that she could be taken away so suddenly, without even a final goodbye. By the time he reached the acceptance phase, he had aged beyond his years. He had aged beyond his years because he had become aware of death and the fragility of life.

A minister came to the house frequently in the weeks following the crash, offering consolation to Paul and his father.

“If God loved my mom, why did he let her die?” Paul asked him.

“I don’t know,” the minister said. “What I do know is that it was her time to cross over.”

“To Heaven?”

“To be with God, who made her. Your mother did not die. She underwent a transition. It is painful that you will have to wait to see her again. But you will see her again.”

Paul wrestled with his next question, feeling insecure about asking it.

Finally, he said, “Is God going to make me die, too?”

The minister smiled. “We all die, Paul,” he answered. “But you won’t die for a long, long time. The world is a hard place. But it is also wonderful. You’ve got a lot of things to do here.”

Paul spent the next few days thinking about what Reverend Brown said. By the end, he not only began to accept the loss of his mother, he decided to become a minister. He loved superheroes, could not get enough of them on TV and in comic books. But here was a real superhero, somebody who fought the evil of death every day and helped other people conquer it.

He turned out to be good at being a minister. He spent hundreds of hours in grief counseling with dying people and their families. He offered whatever comfort he could. When they had nobody else, he spent more time with them and even helped with chores and bills. As a minister, this was his mission, to help wherever he could, and he felt he made a real difference in people’s lives. He helped the dying accept what was happening to them, and to Paul, there was simply no greater gift than some degree of confidence that they were not dying, but crossing over, not into oblivion, but to a better place, to wait for loved ones they left behind.

And yet a part of him always felt like a sham because he, himself, remained terrified of dying.

Rita Greene was not a regular churchgoer, but when she was diagnosed with bone cancer and rushed into a painful treatment regime including chemotherapy and surgery removing part of her pelvis, her family asked if Paul would visit with her, and he agreed.

He came to her home and sat by her bed while she shook with a fever that was not a fever but instead a side effect of her treatment. The drugs she was taking killed growing cells in her body, both the fast-growing cancer cells and the normal, healthy cells in her mouth, stomach, intestines, hair follicles. Some days, he was told, she felt so well she would be out in her garden working on her daffodils. Today was a bad day. The fact was she was declining fast.

They exchanged small talk while he tried to put her at ease. He gave her a compilation CD of jazz, which her son said she liked to listen to while tending her flowers. He explained to her the reason he was there and that she should consider him another form of support.

Rita said the hardest part for her was the weight loss, her hair falling out, the general sickliness. She hated looking in the mirror and seeing what the cancer and its treatment had done to her. Plus she was a woman who liked to get up and do things. She hated being inside, trapped in bed.

“Are you afraid of what comes next for all of us?”

“No,” Rita said. “We all got to go sometime. It’s my time, is all.”

“How are you feeling about leaving Jim behind?”

“He’s a good boy. He’ll find his way.”

“You’re a very strong person,” Paul said.

Rita coughed. “I got no choice about it.”

“And do you feel you are right with Jesus?”

“I don’t believe in Jesus, Reverend,” said Rita.

Paul stared at her, stunned. “But of course you do.”

“No, I don’t.”

“You’ve been worshipping at my church for years.”

“That’s right. But I never really believed any of it.”

“Oh,” he said.

“No offense, Reverend.”

“You don’t believe you’re going anywhere special, and yet you’re not afraid?”

“Why should I be? Like I said, I got no choice.”

Paul regarded her for several moments, unsure of what to say. Based on his experience ministering to the dying as well as the living, he had always agreed with the sentiment that there are no atheists in foxholes. Rita Greene was proving a rare exception.

“Reverend,” she said. “Read me that passage from Ecclesiastes. The one about the seasons.”

“Um,” Paul said. “Of course.” He cleared his throat and recited from memory, “‘For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven.’”

“Mmmm,” Rita said, smiling and closing her eyes.

“‘A time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant and a time to harvest. A time to kill and a time to heal. A time to tear down and a time to build up. A time to grieve and a time to dance . . .’”

He stopped. Rita had fallen asleep.

Her son Jim met him in the kitchen. He was a large man who worked in construction. He told Paul that he was taking it hard. They sat at the kitchen table to talk.

“Chondrosarcoma,” Jim said with revulsion. “I never heard that word before a week ago. And here it comes, the thing that’s going to kill my mom. Goddamn cancer.”

Paul nodded.

“Hey, Reverend,” Jim added, “what do you say to people when you do grief counseling? What technique works the best?”

“Well, the hardest part is giving our loved ones permission to die,” Paul told him. “Some people go on trying to interact with their loved one even after they’re gone. They’ll go on talking to them because they don’t know how to move on.”

“So what do you say to these people to help them?”

Paul took out a pen, pulled a napkin from a neat stack on the other end of the table, and drew a thick black line on it.

“It’s a line,” Jim said.

“I tell people that their past is on one side of the line and their future is on the other,” Paul explained. “I tell them they have to acknowledge that they are crossing this line and that things have changed. They’ve got to let go and begin to accept the change so they can move into the future.”

Jim grunted, letting the visual sink in.

Paul looked at the line and imagined that it did not separate the past from the future, but life from death. On the left, a tiny life of joy, hardship, searching and wandering. On the right, either eternal joy in union with the Creator, or eternal oblivion—an endless, mindless, terrifying darkness—each of us alone, each of us forgotten, each of us nothing.

♦

The hospital appears to grow larger and more complex as the survivors explore its depths. They mark their progress with a can of fluorescent paint. All of the phones are off the hook. Ethan picks one up and places it against his ear just to rediscover the old, familiar act. He dials his home number and listens. The phone does not ring. Nobody answers. He places the phone carefully back on the receiver. Then he hurries to catch up with the other survivors, who have stopped in front of a door.

The sour, rancid smell of the dead is strong here. Ethan places a rag soaked in cologne over his mouth and nose and fights the urge to gag.

“We have to check every room,” Anne says.

The others nod, reluctantly, and step inside.

Ethan instantly regrets it. He slowly explores the walls with his flashlight. They are covered with crayon drawings on construction paper, crude depictions of homes and mommies and daddies and family pets and suns with big yellow rays coming out of them. Sprayed with dried blood.

“Oh Jesus,” he says. “Oh, Jesus.”

“This was the daycare,” Wendy whispers.

Like a trapeze artist afraid of vertigo and falling a long way, Ethan tells himself not to look down. For some reason, the Infected do not want prepubescent children. They do not try to infect them. It may be that the virus does not see them as viable hosts. Or perhaps the virus places a higher value on them as nutrition, for the Infected murder children and feed on their remains.

He knows the floor is littered with rotting meat and bones. Little skulls.

Ethan suddenly cannot breathe.

Anne shines her flashlight in his face. “Ethan?”

He moans, swatting at the light.

“He’s losing it. Get him out of here.”

As the survivors retreat from the daycare, Wendy steps on something soft, which pops with an organic squeaking sound.

She aims her flashlight down and illuminates the floor.

“Anne,” she says, her voice thin. “Oh God, Anne, come quick.”

The floor is littered with translucent, fleshy sacs filled with a mucus-colored slime. As the beam of light from Wendy’s flashlight crosses the sacs, pale worms inside the fluid become agitated and thrash, making the sacs wobble and stretch.

The sacs are eggs. The room is infested with eggs.

Anne appears at her side, looks down, and says nothing.