The Infection

Anne replies, “That tank is going in the same direction we are.”

♦

The atmosphere is still filled with soot and ash from fires burning in the city, making the sunset spectacular with lurid alien colors. The survivors camp for the night in a service garage at a car dealership. After clearing the building, they black out the windows with paint and make sure all of the doors and windows are locked up good and tight while ensuring proper ventilation for their cook stove. Every nook and cranny of the Bradley’s interior is filled with the tools of survival, which they carefully unload to establish their camp: flashlights and batteries, Coleman stove and propane tanks, waterproof matches, utensils, bedrolls and gallon jugs of water. They set out a chemical fire extinguisher and battery-operated carbon monoxide and fire detectors.

Cockroaches scuttle from the light into dark spaces. Empty cans, wrappers and rotting food litter the floor. Others have used the garage as a refuge before them, fellow nomads who left behind graffiti messages and photos of loved ones covering part of one wall. Paul and the Kid explore the wall with their flashlights. The light beams play across the photos of the dead and missing, smiling in happier times before Infection.

if you see this man dale, tell him jesse is alive and heading north to the lake. the infected are not people anymore: kill them or become them!! if you act like you are infected they will not attack you. this is a lie!!! if you see this boy, please take care of him and tell him mommy’s ok and loves him very much!!! infection takes less than three minutes. the army is shooting anything that moves so keep your head down! kill them all!! youngstown is free of infection. lie!! repent, folks, the end is near here!!!!

The survivors often have access to information such as the messages that others have scrawled on this wall in fear and boredom and need. As usual, almost none of it is useful.

“Do you think it’s true, Reverend?” the Kid says. “Are the Infected not people anymore?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do they even have souls? Or have they already crossed over?”

“I don’t know that either, Kid.”

“What are they, though? Are they still men? Or animals? Machines?”

This time, Paul does not answer. His flashlight illuminates the faces on the wall, some of whom are dead, others Infected. It is hard to say what they are, he thinks. Whatever they are, they are not human, but they are still our loved ones. We still love them, perhaps even more than before Infection. When somebody is gone, it is easy to remember only the good things about them. No wonder so many people can’t pull the trigger, and accept death or Infection themselves. When Sara came at me, I couldn’t do it either.

“Is killing them murder, Reverend?”

“No,” Paul says.

♦

Ethan takes out his dead cell phone and stares at it intently, wishing it would ring, before returning it to his pocket. He thinks of Philip, sweaty and grimy, sitting in the back of the Bradley with his tie neatly knotted at his throat and his briefcase open on his lap. As the disaster unfolded, the businessman tried for days to call his broker to buy stock in home security and healthcare companies. He drooled over the killing he would make shorting the airlines. He saw home-based power generation as the next big thing. He speculated about pharmaceuticals and trucking and water and agribusiness. The other survivors listened politely, blinking.

Philip’s broker in New York would not answer the phone, making him steadily more anxious. Philip said economics was simply the study of who got the pie. Infection, like the Screaming, was just another economic shock creating new winners and losers, and those who could shift their investments from the losers to the winners quickly would earn the biggest return. But that required a broker who would answer his goddamn phone. It seemed particularly important to him that he convince Anne of his theories, but Anne would listen wearing the expression one usually brings out when rubbernecking a crash, and say nothing.

Philip started shouting into the dial tone, demanding share prices in Remington and Glock and Brinks. Then the grid failed and he lost his signal. He was cut off now and became quiet and morose. In Wilkinsburg, while picking through the ruins of a convenience store, he saw a copy of The Wall Street Journal with the wrong date, sat in the ashes, and let the Infected take him.

♦

They found the dead man in a dark corner, his feet sticking out from under a tarp, which they now pull back to reveal a desiccated corpse sitting with its legs spread and the top half of its head exploded up the walls behind it. The corpse wears a brown uniform. This man was an employee of the Allegheny County sheriff’s office. His gun is missing. Somebody has taken his shoes.

Killed, or killed himself.

Wendy kneels next to the corpse and unpins the man’s star-shaped badge.

“What are you doing?” Sarge asks.