The Infection

Cashtown had so many ne’er-do-wells like him that the few upright citizens were hard to tell apart from everybody else unlucky enough to have been born there. Once, the town prospered in steel and timber, but like so many places in America, it fell into ruin due to overseas competition and decades of betrayal of the American worker by big business and the country’s politicians. People passing through left with impressions of rusting, abandoned steel mills, smokestacks and rail yards. Deteriorating housing drenched in American flags. For years, it was just one town in a depressed region where people lived check to check with as much pride as they could muster.

Ray worked as a rent-a-cop for a self-storage facility and frequently got into trouble with real cops. He drank, he smoked, he brawled, he broke things, he screwed anything with two legs. He lived in his mom’s basement and broke her heart with bad behavior and odd jobs and general lack of a future. Probably the only decent thing he ever did was volunteer for the local fire department.

When the Screaming happened, he was sleeping one off. He found his mother dead hours later. She had caught the Screaming while taking a bath and drowned, all alone. There were so many dead that the mortuary could not bury her. The county zipped her up in a shiny black body bag, tagged her, and drove her away in a truck for burial in a mass grave—to be dug up later and buried properly when things returned to normal. Of course, they never did.

During the morning of Infection, he was driving home from his shift when he saw a pack of lunatics in pajamas tackle and tear apart a child fleeing on a bicycle. Suddenly, there were people fighting everywhere. The people who ran the bakery were looking out the window of their store, pointing and murmuring to each other and trying to call somebody on the phone. As Ray drove by, he saw another pack of pajama-wearing lunatics crash through the window, lunging for them.

All Ray could think at the time was, I don’t want that to be me.

The truck radio shouted at him until he turned it off.

He drove home and loaded his rig with everything he could get his hands on. Food, beer, liquor, cigarettes and dip, jugs of water, packets of Kool-Aid, burritos and TV dinners. He restarted his truck, turned on the radio and flipped across the shouting voices until he found the local AM news station, which promptly began emitting the emergency broadcast signal.

He turned off the radio. It’s better this way, he told himself. I don’t want to know.

He drove back to the storage facility, locked the chain-link fence behind him, and then sealed himself inside one of the storage sheds with somebody else’s dusty furniture.

Ray stayed in there for five days until he ran out of booze, the last set of batteries failed in his flashlight, and he could no longer stand the stench of his own waste.

He opened the garage door and emerged into a brave new world.

The camp was already sprawling, bursting out of Cashtown until it reached the self-storage facility. Some of the storage units were being plundered to make room for refugees. He stood there for fifteen minutes, blinking in the sunlight with his mouth open, trying to understand it, his head pounding with the worst hangover of his life. After what he had seen on the first day of Infection, he had thought he would find the town abandoned by the living. Instead, he found a thriving refugee camp with the population of Boulder, Colorado.

Not a very noble way to survive that first deadly week of Infection, but the point is he emerged. The point is he survived

.

There is no honor in survival, but life goes on and life is everything. Nothing else matters. And anybody who thinks differently is a fool—a fool who probably won’t live very long.

Most of his friends were dead. The town had five governments. Four families were living in his mother’s house, which had already been looted top to bottom. Some of them he recognized as his former neighbors. Many of the locals had tried to cash in, selling land to the government and basic necessities to the refugees at outrageous prices, trading everything they had for a pile of paper money that rapidly declined in value until it became virtually worthless. Some of the more important and civic-minded locals, however, became entrenched with the government. They knew Ray and trusted him and they needed to beef up community policing fast.

So Ray became a lawman and, in the process, a true believer in making the world right again. He was good at it. His only regret was that his mother was not alive to see him do it.