The Infection

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 his 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.