The Infection

It is true that as individuals, while he trusts the other survivors and feels comfortable with them, he does not know them well, even after days of fighting together against terrible odds. All anybody talks about is how they plan to survive the next ten minutes. It is not like people are going to open up during the apocalypse about their hobbies or where they went for vacation last summer or their favorite flavor of ice cream. They have intense flashbacks, but never talk about their separate pasts from the Time Before. The past right now seems less real than the demon that attacked them last night. The past is also too painful to recall willingly, bringing to mind too many lost things. Todd likes the other survivors, but his interactions with them, while intimate, have been largely superficial. He feels his deepest connection with the group itself—feels safest, in fact, interacting with the others through the medium of the group.

But if there is no group anymore, to what or whom is there to be loyal?

A bell tinkles as he enters the store, sending his heart galloping in his chest. The place smells musty. The air feels flat, dead. He accidentally kicks a two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew spinning across the floor. He flinches at the noise, raising his rifle and sweeping the store for targets as he backs against the nearest wall.

Maybe coming in here by myself was not such a good idea, he thinks, gasping for breath. Another scare like that and I’ll drop dead from a stroke.

Having a closer look at the shelves brings further disappointment. Most of the merchandise is still sitting on the shelves or hanging on hooks, but there is no food, water, medicine. Instead, almost all of the stuff left in the store are products specifically marketed to truckers who have to live on the road for as long as a month at a time. Movies and audio books, CB radio equipment, hazmat placards, truck stop exit guides, road atlases, electric frying pans, toasters, DC adapters, coffee makers and TV/VCR systems.

Todd wonders what a trucker would do with a coffee maker and then realizes, looking at the packaging, that all of these devices are DC powered. And the DC adapters allow AC devices to run off of DC. He suddenly has an epiphany. Most appliances do not work anymore because they need AC power, and the only way he knows to make AC power when the grid is down is with an emergency generator that runs on diesel or propane or natural gas. But DC comes from batteries.

They could run all this stuff off of car batteries. Of which there are plenty lying around, courtesy of the fact that their drivers are either Infected or dead.

Looks like being a whiz at science has finally come in handy, Todd tells himself. He slowly realizes that he has hit some sort of jackpot.

♦

Wendy marches resolutely through the smoky haze, her Glock unholstered and held at her side. She is a police officer, still on duty, still protecting life and property. Perhaps the last cop left in Pittsburgh. Perhaps the last government employee still doing anything. Once she left, the crowd debated following her to see what kind of loot might become available, but eventually gave up and resumed their long walk west. Apparently, they did not have much faith that she would be able to stop the bandits and recover their supplies. The truck stop is far behind her now, perhaps a mile, perhaps more. The chemical fog hems in on all sides, reducing visibility to less than fifty yards. Ahead, the headlights of a large vehicle wobble in the rising heat waves.

She hears gunshots, flinching at the sound, and then puts on her game face.

The absurdity of her situation continues to nag at her, however. What is she supposed to do, arrest these people? And then what? There are no more courts, no more judges. No more jails or wardens either. The entire legal system is gone. There is only frontier justice now—the law of the gun, with justice dispensed using bullets. Is that it, then? Is she supposed to kill them? Even sheriffs in the Wild, Wild West had judges and jails and a community they could count on.

She clears her scratchy throat and considers her next move.

Perhaps she should yell freeze, police before shooting them, she thinks with bitter humor. Read them their rights before opening fire and cutting them down in cold blood for maybe doing something that used to be illegal when there used to be laws and a government.

She ain’t no cop, the man said.

Wendy suddenly stops, her mouth hanging open, and returns her Glock to its holster on her belt. Ain’t no cop, he said. And he was right.

The realization of this simple fact feels as pleasant as her heart being torn out of her chest.

I did my best, she thinks, trying to remember the fallen whom she once considered her tribe, but she cannot recall their faces. Even Dave Carver is just a blur. She has a pounding headache and is starting to feel light headed. She should have brought water.

Time to go back, then.