The Infection

The street in front of the school is filled with activity. A group of bored soldiers glances at him, sweating in their helmets, and then go back to talking among themselves. They barely look a day older than him, just beefy kids. Several children sit on the cracked sidewalk, drawing with pieces of colored chalk. Another group of kids, orphans of Infection quickly going feral, pull a red wagon filled with empty plastic jugs and bottles. Whatever grass might have grown here is now gone, trampled into dried dirt that floats in the air as dust. A military five-ton truck rolls down the street, ignoring a stop sign, beeping at the lazy crowds. Several men are working on a large machine, their tools and parts laid out neatly on a filthy white blanket. Dogs are barking inside a mom and pop shop across the street converted into housing. A loudspeaker attached to an old telephone pole, dangling a tangle of wires, squawks instructions on how to avoid cholera, followed by an ear-splitting screech. A moment later, a Britney Spears song begins playing, tinny and offering more nostalgia than entertainment in this time and place.

Todd is irritated at the other survivors. They could not even stick around to stay goodbye. You’re on your own again, Todd old man, he tells himself. You were doing just fine before joining up with them. You were ninja, surviving on your own, as you’ve always done. You will do it again. The improbable umbilical cord was not meant to last. It had been a relationship born of necessity, nothing more. Now it is time to be a nation of one again.

He consults his map, a virtual city carefully drawn in madman scrawl, his to explore. He identifies the school, situated on a road that forms one of the camp’s major arteries used for motorized transport between the central hub and the distribution and health centers. He finds his new home, a speck in one of the endless shanty towns, revealed by a blotch of highlighter. Then he locates the nearest general market, where he intends to launch his career as a trader.

The other survivors are haggard, tired, broken. Just look at Sarge, he thinks, the man who fought a horde of screaming Infected by himself and saved our lives: damaged goods. Todd is young and taut and mentally flexible and much, much more resilient than he looks. If anything, the apocalypse has been almost kind to him. Already lean, he is starting to put on a little muscle and with it, more confidence. He feels powerful. He looks at the kids running by in packs and the soldiers passing around a cigarette and thinks: My generation will survive this. Will be defined by it. And we will define the age in turn.

♦

Paul hitches a ride hanging onto the side of a garbage truck as it grinds down one of the camp’s main arteries, raising a choking cloud of dust. The truck has been assigned to collect the dead for disposal. Its sides are decorated with crowded layers of outlandish graffiti, much of it incorporating grotesquely painted skulls and bones. He let the driver bum a cigarette and in return found out why the dead are burned in pits outside the city. The reason, he was told, goes back to the camp’s origins, when many people, raised on horror films, postulated that the Infected were zombies—hungry things that rose from the dead. Although it has been disproven, the practice stuck. Even if the people here want to bury the dead now, they cannot. There is simply not enough space.

A rock glances off of the side of the truck with a metallic boom, making Paul flinch. Another sails by close to his head, almost making him fall into the dust. The cab’s passenger-side window rolls down and a rifle protrudes, carefully sighting on a target among the tents.

No more rocks are thrown at the vehicle.

The truck lurches over the potholes, trembling in its metal skin. It makes three stops to pick up bodies lying stiff in the sun, their faces pale and their skin flaccid and waxy under sheets of plastic. For years, Americans sanitized death. Few people actually saw the dead in their natural state, bloated and drawing flies with their stench. They saw them laid out on velvet in fine caskets, dressed up in their best clothes, preserved like Egyptians.

The truck finally slows in front of a large wood church. A hand reaches out of the window and points to the front doors.

Paul jumps off, pounds the side of the truck to signal the driver that he can go, and waves. The hand waves back and the truck continues down the road.

Free of the truck’s exhaust, the camp’s ever-present smells of cooking, wood smoke and sewage return with a vengeance.

He breathes deep, figuring he might as well start getting used to it.

The doors are open and he walks in eager to do something.

Moments later, he finds himself staring down the barrel of an M16 rifle.

“Where do you think you’re going, Father?”

Paul frowns. “It’s Reverend, not Father, and I’m going to the place where I’ve been assigned by the authorities to live and work.”

“Let’s see your papers.”