The Killing Floor

boarded the helicopter, grabbed the arm of a young woman sitting near the door, and pulled her from her seat. She burst into tears, obeying meekly until she stood in the opening looking dazedly at the crowd, mascara running down her face, her hair frayed around braids coiled into a bun. The roiling mob glared back at her in a state of fierce panic. The agent said something; she screamed and clawed at his face until he shoved her off. People surged around, trying to help. She continued to wail. The sound of it made Travis want to throw up.

Then he realized what was happening.

“Hey, wait,” he said.

The agent slid his hand under Travis’s armpit and squeezed, propelling him toward the open door of the helicopter.

“You can’t do this,” Travis pleaded. “You have to let that woman on too!”

The agent said close to his ear, “Don’t try my patience.”

If you want to live, live, he seemed to say. If you want to die, die. Don’t play games with me. I have to stay here. I’m a dead man doing his duty.

His face burning with rage and shame, Travis climbed into the helicopter and took the woman’s seat, avoiding the eyes of his fellow passengers. He sensed someone staring at him. He glanced up and locked eyes with John Fielding.

The helicopter lurched into the air.

He looked away, feeling Fielding’s cold gray eyes boring into him as he fought back another urge to vomit. The machine banked in its long ascent, giving him a window view of the crowd surrounded by swirling debris. A sob ripped through him.

I just want to live.

The helicopter was still turning. Below, Travis saw a shiny black Lincoln Town Car, little flags fluttering on its hood, approach the South Lawn at high speed, pursued by a horde of running people. Some high-ranking official or diplomat seeking sanctuary. The vehicle accelerated as it neared the fence, then veered sharply as Secret Service agents opened fire on it. Moments later, the car crashed through and coasted to a smoking halt among the trees.

The Infected were streaming across the lawn into the guns of the Secret Service when the helicopter straightened out, cutting off his view.

Three Weeks Later

Part I. Typhoid Jody

Ray

The battle is over. The dying writhe in piles, softly hissing.

The man sits on the jagged edge of the broken six-lane bridge connecting West Virginia and Ohio, his feet swinging in empty space. His old work boots feel heavy and hot on his sore feet. A warm breeze moans across the gap, clearing the smoke from the air and drying the gore covering his body to a crust. Seventy feet below, the river is still clotted with corpses. Nobody will ever cross this bridge again. Less than an hour ago, he and his team blew a massive hole in it with several tons of TNT to stop the hordes, still pouring from the burning ruins of Pittsburgh, from continuing west toward the FEMA 41 refugee camp, otherwise known as Camp Defiance.

Just like the three hundred Spartans, he reflects with a harsh laugh, cupping his hands to light a cigarette with his steel lighter. Camp Defiance is saved. They’ll write legends about us. An incredible thing, but in the big scheme of things I’d rather not be dying.

Ray inhales and coughs, his ears still ringing from the blast. Forty feet away, the Infected crowd the far side of the broken bridge, snarling and clawing at the air, still trying to get at him. They are people, once like him, now turned into monsters compelled by their viral programming to seek, attack, overpower, infect. An overweight man in a business suit loses his footing and falls shrieking into the river. Ray glances down and thinks, There goes another CEO. His gaze lingers on the sunlight sparkling on the brown currents and feels the urge to jump. Back on the bridge, a howling, hulking brute in bloodstained overalls takes the businessman’s place.

Something blocks the sun; despite the heat of July, he feels a slight chill on his back. He takes a final drag on his cigarette and tosses it into the wind before turning to squint at the woman standing over him, the sun glaring around her head like a halo. Pain lances across his ribs, radiating from his wound.

“You must be Anne,” he says, wincing. “You’re Anne, aren’t you?”

The woman nods. She is five-five and dressed in a black T-shirt tucked into dark blue jeans. Two large handguns are holstered snugly against her ribs. A black baseball cap rides low over eyes glinting like cold steel. Her face is disfigured with fresh scars running down her cheeks like scabbed tears. A cloth pad is sewn over the right shoulder of her T-shirt, put there to absorb the recoil of her sniper rifle. She carries herself like a soldier but he knows the truth, which is that less than three weeks ago, Anne Leary was a suburban housewife with three small children. She and her people showed up at the end of the fight, buying them enough time to finish the demolition.

If the PTA were a bandit army, Ray thinks, she’d fit right in. As its general. “Todd told me about you. How is the little pecker, anyway?”

“Todd will be all right,” Anne says.

“Where is he?”

“On the bus. Sleeping. He doesn’t know.”

Ray nods, running his hand over his handlebar mustache and stubble. It’s better Todd doesn’t. “He’s a—” He almost said Todd is a better man than him. He probably should have. The kid fought like a maniac during the battle. “He’s just a dumb kid. Take good care of him.”

Ann unholsters one of her guns and taps her thigh with the barrel. Ray frowns.

“So that’s how it is,” he says.

“It’s just an offer.”

“Of what, exactly?”

“Mercy.”

He snorts with laughter; Anne does not strike him as the merciful type. The woman stares down at him as if he is a block of wood. She knows he is infected. To her, he is not a real person anymore. All she sees is the organism in his blood. For his part, all he sees is a cold-hearted bitch all too happy to put a bullet in his head.

On the other hand, it would be a mercy. He has a few hours at most to live and they promise to be insanely painful, culminating in the final horror of being eaten alive by the thing growing inside him.

Bone cancer would be a pleasant death compared to what I got ahead of me. But a few hours of pain is still life. And living is still better than dying.

“So that’s what I get for what I done here today?”

It’s not fair.

Anne shrugs. All of that does not matter. The only cure for the bug is death. The one choice you have, if you get one at all, is how you want to go.

“I don’t want to die,” he tells her.

“You’re already dead.”

Anger burns in his chest. She reminds him of the busybody neighbour who always gave his mom a hard time about her dog barking. The upright citizen type who called the cops on him when they found him sleeping one off on the bus stop bench. A lifetime of judging and now this, the final insult.

“Yeah? What about Ethan? Was he already dead too, when you shot him?”

The woman winces.

He feels a brief moment of triumph. That’s right: When it’s your friend, it’s not so easy to call