The Infection

“What about our Bradley?” Sarge says, glaring at her.

Kayley’s smile disappears, replaced by a hard line.

“I think you mean our Bradley, Sergeant. That machine was manufactured for the Army and belongs to the people of the United States. You are a soldier and if you try to leave, your superiors may let you go, or they may decide to shoot you for desertion. I don’t know. But I can tell you for a fact that the people in charge here are not going to let you drive out of camp with a multimillion-dollar piece of military hardware that could be used to save American lives.”

“This is bullshit,” Sarge says. “It’s a trap.”

“The trap is in your mind, Sergeant Wilson.”

Sarge turns to the other survivors and says, “Come on, we’re leaving. They can’t stop us.”

None of the survivors move, not even Wendy, who believes Kayley explained the camp’s position perfectly and is now feeling reassured rather than threatened. Sarge gapes at them, sweat pouring down his face, seemingly disoriented and unsure of what to do next. He bumps against his desk and knocks it over with a crash that makes the other survivors flinch.

“It’s not safe here,” he pleads, his breath suddenly shallow.

Wendy stands and peers into his face.

He says quietly, just to her, “This is a bad place.”

The man is visibly shaking.

“You are among friends here,” Kayley says. “You are perfectly safe.”

Wendy glares at her briefly and says, “Could you shut the hell up, please?”

She returns her attention to Sarge, slowly reaching out until she is touching his face gingerly. She holds his face in her hands.

“Tell me,” she says.

His eyes avoid hers until finally connecting.

“I’m scared,” he says, taking a deep, shuddering breath.

“I’ve got you, baby,” she tells him. “Look at me. Look at me.”

The other survivors look away. Nobody judges him. They have all been where he is now. Everybody has post traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, these days, with its bad sleep, depression, guilt, anxiety, anger, hyper vigilance and fear. Wendy still cannot sleep at night without flashing to the Infected bursting howling into the station. She is amazed that after everything Sarge endured, it is now that he cracks, and here, where he is finally safe.

But she understands. The truth is none of the survivors is comfortable in this place. The very sudden change from survival to safety—not just safety, but society, with rules and customs—is nothing short of an abrupt shock to the system. None of them fully trust it.

And yet it is not evil. It is, in fact, their best chance at survival.

“I’m sorry,” Sarge says.

Wendy now believes she understands why Anne did not come with them to the camp. We are all broken, she thinks. None of us may belong here.

♦

Holding Sarge’s face, she suddenly remembers the man in the SUV during the morning of Infection, when Pittsburgh woke up to a war zone. Her station had already been overrun and Wendy walked the streets alone, on foot, shrugging off people begging her for help. The cars were snarled bumper to bumper all along the four lanes of North Avenue and were even stacking up on the sidewalk and jamming into the narrow median, their horns bleating like panicked sheep. Others raced through the trees in the adjacent park, skidding in the mud and going nowhere fast.

The Infected ran among the vehicles in the jam, peering into the cars as if window shopping before punching in the glass with bloody knuckles. Wendy saw the Infected swarming over a nearby wrought iron fence, emitting a communal howl that made her heart rate skyrocket and her legs turn to jelly. Although her conscious mind was still in pieces, it registered in the back of her mind that Allegheny General was on the other side of that fence; the Infected were still waking up and streaming out of the hospital’s doors even now, like rats.

Wendy unholstered her service weapon and fired once, twice. A man yelped and flopped off of the fence, quickly replaced by another in a paper hospital gown, his legs smeared with his own shit. I don’t have enough bullets, she thought.

People were abandoning their cars and running into the park swinging purses and briefcases or holding hands, turning the traffic jam into a parking lot. She turned, distracted by the sickening sound of crumpling metal and a gunned engine straining against an impossible load.

A man was driving a shiny red 4x4 SUV on a lifted suspension, three tons of glass and steel with a little evergreen air freshener swinging from the rear view and a specialty license plate reading XCESS over the standard visitPA.com. He was panicking and trying to ram his way out of the press of honking vehicles. The acrid stench of muffler exhaust and burning rubber filled the air. He backed up his vehicle, his face and his mouth working behind the windshield, and then stomped his foot on the gas and rammed into the car ahead of him, shoving it forward less than a yard and jolting himself with whiplash.