The Killing Floor

“Are you blind?”

A man roars: “That’s my mother! Put that gun down!”

The shooters raise their guns. Ray flinches at another round of gunshots. The cop and a bystander collapse to the ground. People are running, trying to get away.

“Stop it!” a woman shrieks, hugging a wailing toddler against her chest. “Stop it!”

The people on the ground stop twitching. They sit up, looking around in a daze. Slowly, they get back onto their feet.

Ray’s vision shrinks to the size of a small circle.

“Aw, shit,” he says.

Screams rise up from all over the east side of the camp, an exciting wall of sound, like being in a football stadium during a dramatic play. The dogs go berserk, yelping and howling. The first gunshots follow within seconds, a random pattern that rolls into an avalanche.

This is everywhere.

The Infected stand with their arms at their sides, hands clenching and unclenching rhythmically, heads darting to follow the progress of the fleeing survivors. The voice droning over the speaker on the telephone pole stops and a deafening air raid siren begins to wail.

The Infected are running.

Two women drag a man down, one pulling his hair out in fistfuls while the other scrabbles at his clothes with her nails, looking for a place to bite. A fleeing woman runs into a plate glass window and bounces off it, stunned; a teenager in a hoodie lands on her back, gnawing at her scalp. A man’s pistol clicks empty just before a pack surges over him. A tow truck roars down the street, Infected swarming over it, running down anything in its path. A dozen people wrestle in a pile at the curb. A dog with bloody jaws hovers at the edge of the melee, snarling and barking, lunging in to bite and tear the flesh of the Infected.

Ray pulls out his carving knife and turns in place, waving it vaguely at these threats.

A man staggers past, blood trickling down his forehead, wearing the dazed, panicked expression of someone who has just been bitten. The man stops, turns and frowns at Ray, his face twitching. He begins to chew his lips.

Move, bro, a voice screams in Ray’s head.

He runs back to the police station but pauses at the steps leading up to the main doors. Dark shapes struggle inside. A shotgun blasts twice, and then goes silent. The shape of a man fills the doorway, hunched and snarling, blood splashed down the front of his shirt.

“No,” Ray says, horrified. “God damn it, no!”

Tyler Jones jogs down the steps and stops in front of Ray, his face bright with fever. Ray glances at the knife in his hand, but cannot make himself cut the old man.

“Look at me,” he pleads. “I’m Ray Young. I’m your friend.”

Something like recognition flashes in Tyler’s eyes.

“That’s right,” he goes on. “It’s me.”

Tyler’s head jerks as if trying to see something more interesting behind Ray, and lunges snarling after a screaming woman. Ray watches him go in amazement and realizes the street is filling with Infected.

A military helicopter hovers low over the rooftops, its thundering rotors sending bits of garbage swirling through the air. Ray holds up his hand to shield his face against the wash, watching the Blackhawk turn in place until the machine gunner, crouched behind his M60, comes into view. Another soldier, crouched next to him, makes a chopping motion with his hand.

A burst of smoke appears in front of the roaring gun. The air buzzes with flying metal. People collapse where they stand, large parts of them missing.

A storefront explodes with a burst of light, raining the street with glass, as Ray throws himself onto the ground and covers his head with his hands.

The Blackhawk stops firing and moves on, searching for fresh targets.

Ray refuses to move. Lying on the road with his face pressed against the warm asphalt, he is going to stay right there and hide in plain sight for as long as it takes.

Feet stomp the ground as people run past him with howls of rage.

This is the last moment of your life, he keeps repeating in his mind, while praying it isn’t.

Anne

From a nearby hilltop, Anne studies the death throes of Camp Defiance through binoculars. A drifting pall of smoke hangs over it. Helicopters circle low, pulling the smoke into fantastic swirls, dropping missiles that burst on the ground in sudden flashes. Gunfire crackles along its length. Two Chinook transports rise above the airfield in a hard ascent, one of them wobbling unsteadily in the air, people cartwheeling out of the back in a swift return to the earth. The muffled screams never stop, rubbing her nerves so raw she has to fight the urge to join in.

This has been going on for hours. FEMA 41, Camp Defiance, is devouring itself.

Her Rangers stand in a line behind her, hands over their mouths, gasping as an explosion rips apart a patch of ground on the north side, hurling bodies and debris into the air. Jean, whom they picked up in Hopedale two days ago, cries hysterically in Gary’s arms, dressed in her wrinkled Chanel suit. Ramona and Evan lean against each other until standing cheek to cheek, watching. Marcus, the toughest of them all, wipes tears from his eyes. Anne spares a glance at Todd, standing ramrod straight and pale with his hands over his ears, watching the open gates with rigid hope as vehicles emerge singly and in groups, going south. One of the vehicles veers off the road, crawling over the muddy field, tiny figures struggling in the cab.

The Chinooks pound overhead, heading east. The hum of their powerful rotors drowns out the screaming for a few minutes. Anne gasps with relief.

Hundreds of camps have been set up across the country, she knows, possibly thousands. She tries to tell herself the human race can survive the loss of even this massive battle. That they can still win the war. But this corner of southeastern Ohio has just gone dark. It belongs to Infection now. And Anne and her team are in no man’s land, at ground zero. She knows they should already be back in their bus and moving. She returns the binoculars to her eyes and stays.

“What are we going to do?” Marcus says.

“It isn’t over,” she says.

“Can’t we do anything to help them?” Todd asks her.

Anne shakes her head, watching a squad of soldiers emerge at the top of the wall and begin climbing down the other side to safety. Even the Army is bugging out.

“Erin,” he says, and sobs, covering his face, giving in to the feelings he has been holding at bay all day. “What’s happening to her?”

“It isn’t over,” she repeats, but it is.

She tries not to think of the children. Everyone knows the Infected do not convert them. They eat them. Thousands of children are in the camp. Her hand flickers to her scars, where she scratched her face in grief when she discovered the dead bodies of her own children six weeks ago.

As the endless day grinds on, the others drift away to process what has happened and mourn lost friends. When the sky dims toward twilight, only Todd remains with Anne, watching, hoping for his miracle.

Camp Defiance is dead. A convoy of military vehicles shot their way out an hour ago, and then the entire camp fell silent.

Anne rubs her stiff and tired arms. A lone figure emerges from the camp gates and moves south. She raises the binoculars to her eyes and swears under her breath.

In her magnified view, the man runs splashing through the mud, looking over his shoulder with blank terror. She would recognize that mean face anywhere, even without the ballcap.

“Do you know him?” Todd says. “Who is it?”

“It’s Ray Young.”