The Infection

Sarge and Paul and the other survivors are getting sentimental, she knows. They are getting to know each other. Becoming friends, even. They are forgetting that being sentimental is a luxury at a time like this. They are forgetting that the only reason they have this luxury is because they have been tough as nails. Because they all pull their weight.

She has a sense that the others are leaving her behind. But they are not moving forward. They are regressing. They are becoming what they were before the world ended.

Anne cannot go back.

As she approaches the Humvee, she shrugs the rifle into her hands and approaches more cautiously, the weapon held in the firing position.

She almost trips over the first body. There are four dead soldiers sprawling on the ground amid broken weapons and scattered empty shell casings, coated with soot. Their heads are eerily missing. Something decapitated them and left the rest for the birds.

Inside the Humvee, a tangle of voices compete for expression across the ether, gradually resolving into a single urgent female voice, Patriot 3-2, Patriot 3-2, this is Patriot, how copy, over? The radio blasts white noise for ten seconds. Then the message repeats.

Something rustles in the trees, sighing.

♦

Wendy tramps numbly through the ash along the road, surveying the hellish gray landscape warped by shimmering heat waves. The giant wall of smoke continues to rise over the smoldering ruins of Pittsburgh like a distant storm. Heavy particulates flow steadily up into the sky, riding pulses of heat. The highway races east in a long straight line that dissolves into the smoky haze. Figures toil in the distance—refugees, probably, fleeing the inferno. Tiny headlights glimmer in the ash fall. She wonders what it would be like to lie down in the warm soot in the gulley below the guard rail and surrender herself to the earth. Philip did that, she remembers. He was tough as nails but one day he saw a Wall Street Journal with the wrong date and sat in the ashes and that was that. He had become numb, too. He could not handle seeing his world die. When you find yourself envying the dead, you are not long for it.

Stopping at the hospital was a mistake, she knows. They invested their hopes in its promises, believing they found a place where they could at last feel safe. But that is not the world they live in. All of those hopes—of living instead of barely surviving, of having some sort of future after the end of Infection, of being able to dream again—were blindly and cruelly crushed. In this world, giant faceless things haunt abandoned buildings and duel with armored fighting vehicles in the dark. In this world, entire cities burn to the ground and everything you ever knew and loved is converted into tons of ash floating on the upper atmosphere. In this world, the children are dead. It is best not to hope in this world. It is best to keep moving and never stop.

The only thing giving her strength is that brief moment of contact she experienced with Sarge last night. The memory of that contact is still burning in her chest. She had gone into his room on impulse intent on dropping a hint, maybe flirting a little: I see you, she wanted to let him know. You see me and I see you, too. She found herself kissing him and falling into blissful nothingness. She told herself that the world was ending and love was in very short supply and so you had to grab it where and when you could find it. Wendy and Sarge were made of the same stuff, she thought; that is what attracted her to him. He is a soldier without an army, a centurion still fighting even though his legion is dead; she is a cop in a lawless land. Then she slept in his arms for a short time and had never felt safer. It amazes her how just a simple man could make her feel that safe in a world this dangerous.

Wendy begins to pass a motley group of refugees, mostly young men and women, some of them wrapped in blankets, others carrying backpacks and umbrellas, some decked out in goggles and respirators. All of them are armed with knives and crowbars and baseball bats and even makeshift spears. The soot is beginning to form a paste in her mouth, a grit between her teeth. She spits and wishes she had thought to bring along a canteen.

“Hello,” she says, eyeing them curiously. “You all right?”

The people ignore her, walking by in a daze, their hair and shoulders covered in gray-white ash.

“You’re going the wrong way,” a man says, flashing gray teeth.

One of the women notices her badge and belt and asks her if she is a cop.

“Where are we supposed to go?” the woman says.

Wendy pauses to spit out her gum, which has become gristly with dust. The woman watches it fall into the cinders with longing.

“My advice would be to keep going west,” Wendy tells her. “Get as far away from Pittsburgh as you can.”

“You mean there’s no rescue station on this road?”