The Infection

Todd did not know what to say. April had violated the first law of the jungle, which is you never praised above-average intelligence. You could be a great athlete, a great musician, a great consumer of twelve-ounce beers, but never a great student. He began to see her as outside the game, operating by different rules. In her last year of high school, she already seemed like an adult. His ears were ringing and his entire being felt warm and flushed at the compliment. He was used to being complimented, but only by authority figures—his parents and teachers, mostly—never by other students. Never by his peers. He began to see himself as outside the game as well, entering a world where a reputation for smarts would be an asset instead of a source of embarrassment and fear. For the first time in a long time, Todd actually felt hopeful about the future.

He suddenly wanted to talk to her all night.

Just then, his dad returned to tell April that her father was outside waiting for her.

Todd looked at her hopefully, looking for more, but the spell was already broken. Tomorrow, they would both return to the same building that defined their lives, and they would have no relationship. He felt like he had been given an unexpected gift, while at the same time cheated.

“Well, I’ll see you around, I guess,” April said.

“Good talking to you,” Todd said formally, meaning every word.

Months later, the game of high school ended with the Screaming. April was one of the majority that did not fall down. Todd still wonders sometimes what happened to her. He hopes she made out okay. She was one of the good ones.

♦

The survivors drift away one by one. Wendy goes back to her room to clean her Glock and refill her magazines with bullets. Sarge wants to work up a sweat with some exercise. Ethan, drunk and slurring his words, scoops up two unopened bottles of wine and announces that he is going to his room to recharge his cell phone. Todd shows Steve and Ducky his crudely stitched forearm and asks them if they ever heard the story of how he got wounded. He asks them if they had to choose between a pistol with thirty rounds and a katana, which would they want to fight a zombie horde with?

The crew shake their heads in irritation and excuse themselves to check on the emergency generator, which they are supposed to shut down in fifteen minutes.

After they leave, Todd grows even more bored. He begins listing all of the things he misses the most. A big, fat, juicy steak, for starters. French fries. Buffalo wings. Anything cold to drink. His PC and his X-box game console. Friday nights at the hobby store. World of Warcraft. Warhammer 40,000.

“I wonder how much time we spend each day doing things and not actually knowing we’re alive,” Paul contemplates, draining the last of his wine.

“So what do you miss the most, Reverend?”

Paul grimaces, shaking his head, and leaves Todd to watch the crumbling, snowy image of the tired general by himself.

♦

Sarge mentally counts his pushups—twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two—his shirt off and his thickly muscled torso slick with sweat. A medallion engraved with the image of Saint George, the patron saint of soldiers and Boy Scouts—and the victims of plague—dangles from his neck. He has been sitting reclined in the Bradley for over a week, which is like being forced to sit on a tiny couch playing a violent video game, one in which people actually die, for ten days straight. His brain is exhausted while his body has been going soft. Exercise will reboot both. Rest means refit.

His mind wanders to mountains looming over a sprawling base built of sandbag bunkers and huts and tents surrounded by timber walls and concertina wire. Chinook helicopters pound over the valley with their Apache escort. A patrol toils over distant hills. Soldiers laugh and clean their gear and piss into PVC tubes stuck into the ground. This is Afghanistan.

“Forget it,” he thinks aloud. “Just forget it.”

The first Chinook falls out of the sky and crashes into the mountain, breaking into pieces and spilling bodies as it rolls down into the valley.

He quickens the pace of his pushups. His heart is racing.

A knock on the door.

The soldiers at the base begin falling down onto the crushed stones.

“Not yet,” he says, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine—

The bodies are screaming.

The person knocks again.

He stops, panting. So close. He had come so close to forgetting.

“Come in,” he says.