The Killing Floor

interior smells like dung. It doesn’t take long for things to fall apart, Ray realizes. By the time we’re all dead, most of what we’ve built will crumble into dust.

He returns to the road, scanning the trees on both sides for ambush, but he’s not used to living so close to fight or flight, and zones out, thinking about everything and nothing. For some reason, his thoughts turn to Lola Rivera. He dreamed about her while he fought Infection, he remembers. He dreamed his entire life, it seems. It would be nice to believe some kindly force made this happen to teach him something about his life so he would make the most of this second chance, but the memories had a forced quality about them, as if they were being taken from him. Ray woke up feeling exhausted, docile, violated. All of the fight was sucked out of him. I don’t want anything, he understands, and experiences the shock of this, being a man of constant need and habit, a creature of deep drives and dark urges.

Now all he wants to do is continue living. Nothing else but live. Breathe in, breathe out.

Whatever the source of the dreams, without his rage, he can only look back on his life with remorse. He regrets what he did to Lola, how he treated her. After he sucker punched Bob at the bar and made bail, he went to the hospital and told Lola he did it because he still loved her. Every day, he went, and said he’d do it all over again, just to have her back. Eventually, something in her snapped and she gave herself to him. That night, while lying beneath him on his bed, she opened her eyes and, seeing only spite written on his face, realized he did not love her. She wept until he threw her out in a fit of anger. Rage came so easily to him, the urge to lash out instead of do the right thing. It was his automatic defense against both love and shame.

You do have a second chance here, bro. Maybe when you get back to camp, you can try to make things right with a few people, if they’re still alive.

He finds the idea surprisingly appealing.

As the sun dips low in the sky, he finds the exit for Cashtown and walks off the highway, pausing to flinch at the bang of a high-powered rifle. Ray grimaces with relief. He is not far from Camp Defiance now. The rifle shot was one of the snipers in the watchtowers doing his monotonous, grisly duty.

As he gets closer to the camp, the air fills with white noise, the sound of thousands of people and vehicles punctuated by the distant pop of gunfire. The breeze delivers the faint but familiar odors of wood smoke and human waste. He breathes deep, enjoying a sudden rush of memories. Tyler in his ridiculous red suspenders, chuckling over a book, his reading glasses perched on the end of his nose. Doug Foley loading shells into his shotgun between nips of Jagermeister, getting ready for patrol. Jonesy licking his hands and slicking back his hair in front of the mirror, announcing he has a hot date. Boy, are they going to be surprised to see me, Ray thinks, feeling good for the first time since he woke up.

Topping the next hill, the camp spills across the horizon, a mass of densely packed buildings and tents and vehicles all shrouded in a haze from thousands of cook fires. Mountainous walls of heaped sandbags, tractor trailers and barbed wire, buttressed by watchtowers, surround the bulging mess like an old belt, keeping it from vomiting onto the neighboring smoking fields, keeping Infection out one day at a time. Ray gazes at it for several minutes, wiping away a tear. Never did this sprawling dung heap look so good to him, not even when he crawled out of the storage locker, fleeing his fears lived over days in darkness.

He spots a series of windmills churning over the southern side, near the big circus tent, the start of a power grid. When he left to blow up the Veterans Memorial Bridge at Steubenville, the windmills were just a plan championed by the do-gooders. The people must be starting to accept they’re going to be here for a while. Ray wonders again how long he has been gone, decides he doesn’t care. The camp is still here; that’s all that matters.

He gasps, unable to breathe, wondering how fast he can run back into the trees. A man stands rock still fifty yards down the road, dressed in a ridiculous Santa costume, one arm frozen in a wave. It takes him several moments to realize it’s a store mannequin, one of many dotting the no man’s land surrounding the camp as bait for the snipers. The Infected make a beeline for the color red. Ho, ho, ho, welcome to FEMAville. BANG. Splat.

In the distance, he sees a figure running toward the wall. A woman doing the hundred yard dash, hoping to get in and spread her disease. The effort strikes him as both heroic and suicidal. The echoing roar of a single rifle shot rolls across the fields. The figure spins and falls. Ray watches as the woman continues to drag her broken body along the ground, still fighting for her cause even while she bleeds into the mud. Behind the wall, life in the camp goes on as if nothing happened.

The cracked road plunges down the hill and leads straight to the gates. All he has to do is walk down there and he’s home. But he is unsure how to get there without getting shot. It’s too dangerous to move now.

Best to wait until dark, he decides. The hour just before dawn.

¦

Ray wakes during the night to the sound of machine gun fire. It stops abruptly, leaving him wondering if he dreamed it. He wipes drool from his mouth and sits up, slapping a mosquito on his cheek. A flare traces a burning arc over the distant fields, washing the ground in a bright, eerie glow. Shadows gradually infect the light, lengthening as the flare continues its long descent. Ray sees figures moving in a mad rush. The machine gun starts up again, sounding tinny and ghostly across the fields, like someone clapping chalkboard erasers together. Tracers burst in the dark. The figures now lie on the ground, melting into the darkness as the flare falls to the earth.

For several minutes, Ray sits in the dark waiting, but nothing happens. It strikes him his plan to wait until the hour before sunrise would work better if he actually knew what time it was. He gazes at the night sky but there is no Moon, no stars. Massive clouds still blanket the atmosphere, the tail end of the storm passing over this part of the world on its way to the Atlantic. The lights of the camp are his only beacon.

Something tramps through the woods behind him. Whatever it is, it’s tall enough to rustle through the branches of the trees, snapping twigs that rain onto the forest floor. Ray hears a deep, nauseating gurgling, like what he would imagine a motorcycle idling underwater to sound like. The gurgling ends in a throaty chuckle. Ray knows the sound; it is one of the tottering monsters that ate the Reverend on the bridge. The rustling becomes violent thrashing. The thing smacks its wet lips. Leaves flutter to the ground around Ray, tickling his face.

Time to move. Now.

Ray lopes from the woods at a brisk pace, trying to stay as low to the ground as he can, grunting under the weight of the backpack. He pauses to shrug it onto the ground behind him and keeps moving, breathing hard.

The machine gun fires again. He throws his body into the mud face first, but the tracers flicker into the woods to his right. He grunts, gets back onto his feet and keeps going, running blindly now, the camp lights swimming in his gaze. He hears feet splashing to his left and hurls himself down again as a flare bursts high overhead, turning night into day. Face pressed into the mud, he hears the crash of rifle fire and bodies falling. A body thrashes nearby in the muddy water. The machine gun joins in, sending bullets plopping into the earth around him.

Hail Mary, full of grace, hail Mary, full of grace, hail Mary, Jesus and God—

The firing stops. The gates are just fifty or so yards ahead.

Screw this.

“Don’t shoot! I ain’t Infected! Don’t shoot me!”

No answer. That’s not good.

On the other hand, nobody’s shooting at me either.

Ray gets onto his feet, shaking violently, and raises his hands. Standing in the flare’s light, he feels like he is on stage, in full view of an audience he cannot see.

“I’m coming in now,” he announces, marching forward. “Open the gates for me.”

“We can’t,” someone shouts from the wall, using a megaphone.

Ray staggers to a halt. “What do you mean?”

“The gates stay closed until sunup. That’s the law. It won’t be long. Just hang tight.”

“Come on! I’m Ray Young! I’m a cop. I almost died to save this goddamn place.” He is babbling like a madman, but cannot help himself. “I blew up that goddam bridge in Steubenville—”

Muzzle flashes pop along the wall like paparazzi. Ray flinches, but realizes they are not shooting at him.

“Hurry up,” the voice shouts through the megaphone. “Come on.”

He turns and sees a small group of Infected racing into the dying light of the flare, their eyes black and their yellow faces twisted in hate. Two of them disintegrate into smoking body parts, flopping to the ground.

Another flare bursts high overhead, revealing a hundred more running behind them.