The Infection

After several miles, the Bradley slows, passing a sign announcing buchanan evergreen farm and another marked christmas trees before turning onto a long crushed-stone driveway, speeding towards the distant farmhouse and raising a massive cloud of dust. In the living room, they find the desiccated corpses of a large family lying on the floor, smiling and blue and hugging each other, surrounded by empty bottles of pills. They remove the bodies and burn them in the backyard, coughing soot out of their lungs and marveling at the greenery and lazy birdsong. Anne wants to put more distance between them and Pittsburgh but Sarge tells her they will stay the night here. Paul contemplates the fresh graves and the family photos on the wall, depicting generations that owned this land until Infection, and believes the world is slowly becoming haunted. Or maybe we’re the ghosts and do not even know we’re dead yet, he wonders; survival, after all, has turned out to be a strange purgatory between living and dying. Anne gives Ethan his glasses back, which she forgot she’d scooped up at the hospital, and a fresh T-shirt. She says nothing else, but Ethan, pleasantly numb on painkillers, knows he is accepted again. While Anne unpacks the Bradley, he searches for but does not find his backpack with his family photos, realizing there is now virtually nothing to even note that they once existed. Like the others, he has no home, not even evidence of a past life outside his own unreliable mind. Todd watches the others move about in safety with a smile on his face, biting back witty quips, biding his time. Wendy cleans her Glock and exchanges a long glance with Sarge before going upstairs to take her turn washing in the antique bathtub. The soldiers fortify the house and sit on easy chairs in the living room with a sigh while the others set up the stove and make coffee and drink it slowly in silence, feeling safe for the first time since they left the hospital.

The clock in the living room chimes the hour.

Anne tells them about the refugee camp.

The soldiers she saw on the highway had been attached to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. They had come from a camp. She talked to an officer at the camp on the Humvee radio. It is only a few hours’ drive away, in Ohio, in a place called Cashtown.

Sanctuary. A place where they can finally rest. The real deal: A place where they can be finally, truly safe.

The survivors blink at her, unsure how to respond to this news. After everything that has happened, they are happy simply to be alive and clean and fed in this house. The idea that they might finally end this journey is a lot to absorb.

After several moments of stunned silence, Paul says, “Well, Amen.”

The other survivors laugh and echo the sentiment.

The night passes without nightmares.

The next morning, Anne is gone.

FLASHBACK: ANNE LEARY

“This is outrageous,” she said into the phone cradled between her cheek and shoulder as she flattened a lump of dough with her rolling pin. “Did you call the police?”

Anne had championed the bond to refurbish the park with new playground equipment. If it was one thing she’d learned, it was that playground equipment was not cheap, as in five hundred thousand dollars’ worth of not cheap, but she’d negotiated hard—people had a hard time refusing Anne Leary—and gotten the very best. She felt a sense of ownership over it. Now here was Shana calling to tell her that there were two men at the playground acting suspiciously.

“The cops aren’t answering the phone,” said Shana.

“Our tax dollars at work,” Anne said, rapidly cutting the dough into a ten-inch square and then expertly maneuvering the knife to cut the square into strips a half inch wide.

“The phone lines are all jammed up with that thing going on downtown. People killing each other in the streets. It’s like the Screaming again. It took me eight tries just to get through to you.”

Anne began laying half of the strips on top of her pie filling at regular intervals, pressing the ends into the edge of crust. Afterwards, she would place the other half crosswise across the top, bake it, and produce a perfect blueberry pie with a lattice crust.

“I don’t understand what the fuss is about,” she said. “They said on the radio it’s happening everywhere but if that’s true then it should be happening here. I don’t see anything going on.”

“I don’t know, Anne. Things are apparently pretty dangerous out there.”

“You know how the media is. They sensationalize everything. This is all going to blow over; you’ll see. We got past the Screaming. We’ll get past a bunch of people trying to take advantage by stirring up trouble. We just got to stay tough until the cops sort it out. And if the cops don’t, we will. If the crazies come here, we got to show them they aren’t welcome like last time.”

“I guess you’re right.”

Anne looked up at the ceiling as if imploring Heaven, almost laughing. “Of course I’m right!”