The Infection

“I’m sorry I let you down,” he says. “If you want to scapegoat me, that’s fine, too. It doesn’t matter anymore. So do it, if that’s what you want.”

“He knows what he did, Anne,” Paul says. “What’s done is done.”

“Who trusts him?” Anne says, glaring at the other survivors. “Who here trusts him now? This is not about justice, Paul. It is about survival.”

“We all know what’s at stake here. You think we don’t know?”

“Leave him alone,” Todd says shrilly, his voice cracking.

“It could have been any of us,” Paul adds.

He stands over Ethan, holding his shotgun. Ethan realizes these people are not his friends and that he does not really know them.

“Do you want to live or not, boy?” Paul asks him.

“I want to live,” Ethan says through gritted teeth. “But I’m sick of surviving.”

“That’s not an answer,” Paul tells him. “We’ve got to know we can count on you or Anne’s right, we’ve got to part ways right now. It’s a simple question. Can we count on you?”

“Yes,” Ethan says.

“He’s mine,” a commanding voice booms.

Sarge pushes his way into the ring of survivors, his helmet off and holding his automatic rifle in his right hand. The soldier glares down at him.

“You come with me,” he says.

♦

Anne returns her large handgun to its leather shoulder holster and heads back to the Bradley. The supplies she left on the ground are already gray with a light coating of soot, a depressing sight. She feels an overwhelming urge to hit the road. Paul suddenly blocks her path, cradling the shotgun, glaring down at her from his large, grizzled head. The gesture would be enough to intimidate anybody except her. She sidesteps him and continues to the vehicle.

“We need to talk, Anne,” he says. “I have something I need to say to you.”

She ignores him, rummaging through the boxes until she finds a battered PHILLIES cap, red paisley bandana and bottle of water. After fitting the cap on her head, she unscrews the cap of the bottle and soaks the bandana before tying it over her face to cover her mouth.

“We all look up to you,” Paul says. “If things get really bad, we all look to you to tell us what to do. And even if we think you’re wrong, we still do it. Because we believe.”

Anne clasps her metal canteen onto her webbed gun belt.

Todd watches her closely. “Where are you going, Anne?”

Paul says, “But there are some things you don’t get to decide. Like who stays and who goes. You don’t get to make that decision. It’s not up to you.”

Todd adds, “Why can’t we get out of this ash and make some plans? We need a plan.”

Anne squints up at Paul’s face, sizing him up.

“I’m going to take a walk,” she says, picking up her scoped rifle. “You’re in charge.”

She begins walking towards the distant trees.

“I wouldn’t do that by yourself,” Paul says.

“You’re not me,” she says.

“When are you coming back?” Todd asks nervously.

Anne ignores them, marching with a purposeful gait that takes her onto the highway. In the distance, coming and going, she sees tiny figures moving along the road. The only vehicles are abandoned wrecks, their doors hanging open. Her ears still ring painfully from the screaming monster that attacked them.

She needs to be alone for a while. She relishes the sudden sense of space.

They are all going insane one day at a time and each of them—at different times, depending on the individual—will crack under the stress, she knows. This can take many forms. And if one of them cracks, that person could put them all at risk. Like Ethan. He suffered some sort of breakdown and endangered all of them. The man already has a bad habit of firing his rifle with his eyes closed. He is simply not as cool as the others in a fight. Anne was willing to overlook these things, as Ethan has good instincts that warn them about obtuse threats such as the tank firing on them and the worm monster having a second head. He also came up with the idea of the Molotov cocktails. He makes a real contribution. But if he is cracking up, he will be a liability to them. He will take up space in the Bradley, consume scarce resources; worse, he will not cover their backs.

Then they will have to make a tough choice as a group. Anne would rather not wait until people get killed before that decision is made. If it were up to her, the man would have been left behind at the hospital last night. Which would have been sad. But necessary.

About a mile down the road, oily black smoke billows from a burning vehicle in the middle of the highway’s westbound lanes. She peers into her scope and sees a pair of olive green vehicles, one a Humvee with its headlights on and behind it, a military flatbed truck, its cab on fire and pumping smoke. Anne squints, trying to see more, but everything is blanketed in ash. Visibility is steadily diminishing. Across the landscape, tons of ash continue to flutter to the earth in drifting clouds of black snowflakes, rapidly turning into a hellish blizzard swirling through the trees and darkening the sky.

Anne slings the rifle onto her shoulder, digs her hands into her pockets, and begins walking west.