The Infection

They steadily gained on him, yelping. They almost sounded happy. He ran blindly now, dropping his pack, seeing stars and gasping for breath. He had left the baseball bat in the car. One of the men appeared at his side, snarling. Moments later, he lunged and tackled a mannequin Ethan just passed and began beating and biting it. Another pushed over a second mannequin and began stomping on its face. The rest snapped at Ethan’s heels. Inspired, he saw a mannequin at the end of the aisle and ran straight for it, his legs burning from a lack of oxygen.

The mannequin’s fists belched flame and smoke. Ethan threw himself onto the ground as his pursuers toppled around him.

Ethan lay on his back, dripping sweat and gasping, unsure of whether he was going to laugh or cry when he finally caught his breath. He felt like his adrenal glands had been wrung out to the last drop. He looked up at his savior, a petite brunette dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans, her hair cropped in a military-style buzz cut. She had a hard look about her, as if she had been born to kill people and had been doing it for years. Her face was disfigured by fresh scars. Her eyes looked old.

She helped him onto his feet and handed him one of the pistols. She pointed at the wounded men who writhed and keened on the floor in widening pools of blood.

“Finish them and you can join us,” she said.

That was how Ethan met Anne.

THE HOSPITAL

The Bradley mounts the steel cantilever Liberty Bridge and begins crossing its five-hundred-foot main span over the Monongahela River at a careful pace. There are few abandoned cars cluttering the four-lane bridge but Sarge does not want to take any chances. He knows that a National Guard artillery unit destroyed several bridges in the area in a misguided effort to contain the spread of Infection, and does not want to drive through a big hole and plummet more than forty feet into the muddy waters below.

The density of vehicles thickens as they approach the other side of the river, blocked by abandoned makeshift barricades. Piles of stiffening corpses draw flies in front of a machine gun mounted behind a heap of sandbags. The Bradley speeds up and drives through the scene, popping skulls under its treads.

The Bradley enters the South Hills neighborhoods. Sarge opens the hatch for a look around in the open air and sees more barricades and piles of corpses. Some of the barricades apparently held; some were overrun. Either way, it did not matter. Even if they held, Infection was everywhere, eventually making barricades meaningless. Plastic bags and bits of garbage dance in the air, carried on the wind. A shredded T-shirt hangs on the branches of a tree, waving bye-bye at him, while another tree burns energetically like a giant torch, scattering heat and sparks and ashes. A pair of military jets fly high overhead, reminding him that the government is still fighting its own people.

The houses here are covered in graffiti. After the Screaming left more than a billion catatonics twitching on the ground all over the world, volunteers in these communities worked with local authorities to search each house for people and get them to a place where they could receive care. Orange posters are still taped to streetlight poles encouraging citizens to call tip lines to report SEELS for pickup. Black Xs are still sprayed on many doors marking houses that have been searched and cleared of victims of SEELS. The tragedy is that by helping the screamers avoid starvation and dehydration, these good people unwittingly aided in their own destruction. Some houses have other graffiti on them; as people fled their homes, they sprayed messages, and other refugees added their own, using the houses for communication. Names and dates. Missing persons. Directions and wayfinding. Going south. Avoid the police station. Bill, I’m going to get grandma. Other messages warn travelers of infestations, give opinions on everything from purifying water to effective killing methods, or offer trade. Some of the graffiti are simple tags. Newly formed militias claiming territory. Boasts of kills and time served. Totemic symbols scrawled by people in a hurry. Arrows. Biohazard signs. Skulls and crossbones.

The Infected stumble and hold their heads, wailing in a constant state of metaphysical pain. They glower and bare their teeth at Sarge as he drives by in the armored vehicle.

♦

The survivors find the tall, muscular man on his front porch wearing a bathrobe and boxer shorts, shouting and waving a pistol in his right hand and a battered, folded-up umbrella in his left. All of the neighboring houses have a large black X painted on their front doors; the Screaming apparently wiped out this community and left this man as its sole survivor.