The Killing Floor

holes and stinks like old grease, but he puts it on anyway. He checks out the neighborhood through a window. A car is parked at an angle across both lanes of the street below, all of its doors open. The asphalt glistens; it rained recently. The lawns and bushes on the other side of the road look overgrown. Beyond, the bridge invites him back to its scenes of horror. The eastern horizon is no longer blackened by the fires of Pittsburgh, but still shimmers with a polluted brown haze. A flicker of movement down in the street grabs his attention.

A large woman dressed in a filthy halter top and sweatpants limps past the car with her hands clenched into fists against her breasts, one of which sags out of her shirt, scratched and bloodstained. Ray watches her, wondering who she was before the bug turned her into a violent maniac. He feels like he understands Anne a little better now; this woman is no longer human, but a malicious, mindless organism wearing the face of a human, like a mask.

The woman pauses, doing the odd jittery neck roll favored by the Infected. Her head, jerking, turns to the window to look right at him, and tilts to the side, like a dog’s.

He leaps aside, his heart hammering in his chest. He expects to hear feet slapping against the asphalt, the rasping bark, the door crashing open, the pounding on the stairs. His eyes take in details of the bedroom, searching for a hiding spot or a weapon.

Nothing happens. Fighting to control his breathing, Ray glances back at the road. The woman is gone. He snorts.

Maybe I look so bad she thought I was one of them.

He trudges downstairs and puts his boots on, still heavy with dried blood, and walks onto the porch. The abandoned houses stand in silence, bugs buzzing in their overgrown lawns. A deer browses in a garden until bolting across a driveway into someone’s backyard. A light breeze dries the sweat on Ray’s face. He closes his eyes and savors being alive.

There is just this. Nothing else. And that makes this good.

He finds his rifle on the side of the house, wet and spotted with rust, and inspects it. He considers finding some oil and a toothbrush and trying to clean the weapon, but decides to leave it in the grass. Cleaning it would take a long time, and besides, it only has a few bullets. With just a few hours of daylight remaining, Ray feels an overwhelming urge to get moving. He was lucky here, but he has the strong feeling his luck has run out. The open road beckons. His steak knife will have to do until he can find better. The road will provide.

Ray checks out the few cars and trucks abandoned on the streets and writes them off as well. He can fix just about anything with wheels, but none of the vehicles he inspects have keys in their ignitions, and, despite his checkered past, he has no idea how to hotwire a car. The idea exhausts him; the only thing that inspires any energy is getting the hell out of this ghost town as soon as possible.

Guess you’re walking, bro. This is going to take a while. You can hit some houses along the way for some supplies. But it’s time to get moving.

Sticking to backyards, he emerges from town to the north and decides to circle through the woods along Route 22, heading west. Back to Camp Defiance.

He pauses as a foghorn booms close, a vibrating sound he can feel deep in his chest. The sound ignites a flock of birds from a tree, black shapes darting through the air. A distant foghorn answers, then another and another, for miles around it seems.

Ray closes his eyes and listens as if they are communicating something he might understand. For the next few minutes, the air becomes filled with the melodic song of the monsters, a symphony of sounds like tubas and didgeridoos, plaintive and hopeful. Ray smiles, tingling from the vibrations. Their song speaks to him.

We are not alone, it appears to be saying. We are afraid and we may die, but we are not alone.

¦

Shucking his Army surplus backpack heavy with cans and bottles, Ray tramps through a garden eating raw peas and any tomatoes spared by the insects. Unable to eat more, he stuffs his cheek full of Copenhagen dip and lets out a satisfied sigh. He has twenty miles to walk, which will take him two, maybe three days in his condition and carrying the weight of the pack on his shoulders. Climbing over a barbed wire fence, he angles west and starts marching through the trees, knowing Route 22 is about a hundred yards on his left. At the base of an old sawtooth oak, he picks up a good walking stick, a long wizardly staff that helps him find a steady hiking rhythm.

As the sun falls toward the horizon, his eyes roam the landscape, searching for shelter. Wind rustles through the branches and the atmosphere feels moist against his skin. The sun drops behind western rain clouds, dimming air already darkened by the forest canopy, and Ray quickens his pace as a few random drops splat on the rim of his STEELERS hat. He emerges from the trees onto a grassy field covered with a riot of dandelions. At the other end of the field, a farmhouse stands quiet, its windows boarded up, three rotting bodies drawing flies on the porch steps. A tire swing sways from the stoutest branch of a massive oak tree.

He pauses here, listening to the buzz of insects in the tall grass. The world is so lush and beautiful it is sometimes hard to believe it is coming to an end. Then he remembers the world is not ending, just its dominant species.

The sky continues to blacken. Moist wind strikes Ray in the face, carrying a few drops of rain, and he opens his arms to it. The air feels electric. The clouds rumble with distant thunder, a melancholy sound. He takes a deep breath and decides to try the barn to ride out both the night and the rain. The house appears occupied and dangerous. Get too close to that place, he might get a lungful of buckshot, looking the way he does right now. He studies his hands—workman’s hands, hairy and powerful—and realizes his survival and recovery from Infection is not a get-out-of-jail-free card. He might have to fight again, and kill again, if he wants to make it home alive. Ray has a lot for which he wants to live. Nothing ambitious, just a deep, abiding appreciation for breathing in and out. When he thinks about his fever over the past few days—weeks?—it terrifies him because he remembers little of it. He dreamed; many of the dreams were horrible. But mostly, just darkness. Trying to remember those long days of nothing is like trying to remember the time before he was born.

Rain pelts the roof as he enters the barn. Rats flee squealing from his advance, melting into the dark spaces. The building has a rich smell of farm animals and hay and old dung, but the smell is stale, a memory; the animals are long gone, the hay is rotting. Ray sniffs the air again just to be sure, but detects no sour milk stench, the calling card of the Infected. Something crunches and scatters under his boots, and he looks down, only to wish he hadn’t; the floor is strewn with little piles of bones and children’s clothes. Bloodstains have turned the dirt floor the color of rust. The barn was a nest, then; a pack of the Infected killed here, ate here, slept here, but they moved on long ago. Ray waves away a small cloud of buzzing flies and thinks about burying the bones, but he is tired and it is getting late.

“Sorry,” he grumbles, spitting a stream of tobacco juice into the dust. Ray feels like an empty husk. Something in him died when the bug took him. Or maybe he was reborn, and is still finding out who he is. Either way, he has no fight in him anymore.

He climbs a ladder leading to the hayloft, pulls it up after him, and spreads out his old rolled-up blanket on a bed of moldy hay. He pulls off his boots and then his socks and sighs with relief despite the stink, wiggling his toes. Fishing in his pocket, he finds a couple of Band-Aids and applies them over the blisters on his heels. Minutes later, he falls into a deep, blissful sleep to the soothing sound of rain pattering on the roof. Mosquitoes feast on his blood during the night.

The next morning, Ray pisses hard into the hay, smokes a stale cigarette, and cuts open a can of cold SpaghettiO’s pasta, which he eats with a plastic spoon. The air is warm and humid; his body is already slick with sweat. His legs are sore and a part of him wants to sleep the day away again. He stares into space scratching at his bug bites until boredom drives him back down the ladder and into the farmer’s yard. Beyond, winter wheat stands hunched and wet under a dim, heavy mist that shrouds the distant fields and woodlands.

He decides he likes the mist. The mist could be his friend. As long as it lasts, he can hide in it. The house still stands quiet, but Ray is certain he is being watched. He feels a sudden urge to wave, or better yet flip them the bird, but doesn’t have the energy for it.

Shouldering his pack and gripping his walking staff, he disappears into the treeline.

¦

Minutes later, the mist surrounds him like a living thing. It feels cool and wet in his lungs. He cannot see more than a few feet in front of him but has the skin-crawling sensation he is still being watched. He is in danger here. Coming into the mist was a mistake, but it is too late to go back. He already no longer has a sense of where