The Killing Floor

Erin was Todd’s port.

Everything he’d enjoyed doing as a troubled, geeky teenager before the epidemic was gradually forgotten along with the millions of other things people liked doing, such as going to the movies, ordering takeout from a Chinese menu, buying flowers for a date, catching up on reruns of a favorite series. Even the things Todd found exciting about the epidemic—the boyish thrill of living without school or parents, shooting guns, living life dangerously, the freedom of the apocalypse—had all turned sour with repeated use. Todd was growing up in a world filled with risk and death. A world he looked at with the resentment of a boy cheated of his inheritance. Erin was the only thing in that world offering him any real happiness, and now Infection has taken her from him, just as it took his parents, Sheena X, Paul, Ethan and so many others.

The vehicle shudders as it drives over rubble and shards of timber. Unknown to the people of Camp Defiance, the storm that lashed the camp several days ago was the northern front of a small tornado ripping through southern Ohio. Most of the buildings here took damage; some of the weaker structures were crushed flat. The road is blanketed with leaves and branches, wires, furniture, soggy books, broken plates, shattered electronics, the bloated bodies of people and cattle.

The bus drives over it all with a crunch.

¦

The Rangers would visit Camp Defiance for a day or two and then return to the road for as long as a week. The more Todd stayed away, the more Erin wanted him. Each time he left, she cried and screamed and called it quits. After sex, he studied her body, feeling helpless. His happiness with her felt as fleeting as life itself, and just as doomed. He believed someday she would leave him not because of his separate life on the road, but because he was not who she thought he was. Todd believed she was too good for him, and would one day realize it.

His life among the monsters appeared to be a constant source of attraction to her. Erin called him the coolest guy she knew. She said how all the other guys she’d ever liked had the trappings of being a bad-ass. Todd had none of the trappings, and yet he was the biggest bad-ass she knew.

He would just laugh. If only you really knew, he would say. If only you saw what was out there. You wouldn’t think I was bad-ass. You’d think I was certifiably bonkers.

She told him she loved him. Isn’t that enough? she said. What more proof do you want? Stop trying to think and feel and choose for me. I know how to think and feel and choose. And I choose you. I am giving myself to you completely. Just accept it.

Like a fool, he did not allow himself to believe her. He survived the end of the world, but still suffered from the low self-esteem that had plagued him in high school. Now Erin was dead or infected in the camp with its massive walls and watchtowers, and he was alive out on the road, the most dangerous place in the world.

He remembers scavenging around Pittsburgh with Anne and several other people in a Bradley fighting vehicle during the first weeks of the epidemic. After settling into a building they hoped to make their home, Todd asked the Reverend what he missed most from the time before Infection. Todd started listing off a lot of things—Buffalo wings, wargaming, computers, ice cream.

What about you, Reverend? he asked. What do you miss the most?

Paul grimaced, excused himself, and left the room. At the time, Todd put his brooding down to the dark, odd behavior of people whose age placed them closer to their death than their birth. His own dad had him when he was forty; for most of Todd’s childhood, his dad seemed paranoid the world was going to end, that his family would be attacked or robbed, that the government was going to take everything away from him and give it to lazy poor people.

Then, one day, his dad stopped caring about these things. His dad realized his own parents were dead, some of his friends were dying, his brother was fighting cancer. His attitude went from, Fight for what’s yours to: We’re next. He no longer seemed paranoid. He seemed resigned. That’s what Paul was like when Todd asked him what he missed. Resigned to his fate.

It wasn’t until later Todd realized the one thing Paul truly missed was his wife, Sara, who had become infected.

Now, above all things, above even his parents, Todd misses Erin.

Now he finally understands loss.

¦

Marcus parks the bus in front of the hangar and lets it sit idling. The survivors stir, gathering weapons and equipment, but nobody gets off. He kills the engine and they sit and listen to the pulse of insects for a while. After several minutes, Anne says, “All right, let’s move.”

Todd exits the bus and jogs to his designated position, sweeping the area with his carbine. Regardless of his despair, he has a job to do, and people’s lives depend on him staying alert. He scans his sector looking for threats. The airport is a disaster, covered in a jumble of leaves and branches and scattered equipment. The orange windsock and antennae jutting from the dark control tower have been swept away. He notices a small metal sign, bent double but still standing: LEARN TO FLY HERE!

He sees no Infected. Maybe I won’t have to shoot anyone today.

Marcus opens the hangar doors with a grind of metal. Todd lowers his weapon and jogs back to help unload their gear. The survivors fall into the routines of survival, filling buckets with water from the rain barrels they installed under the building’s rainspouts, collecting and cutting firewood, servicing the bus’s engine. The safe house is just as they’d left it. Nobody says a word unless it is necessary. Night is falling, and they have to get inside.

One by one, however, they stop moving. The Rangers gather on the tarmac, gazing at the eastern horizon. The cloud cover glows like burning coals, reflecting the light of vast fires on the ground. The story of the battle of Washington, written on the sky.

“Let’s get a move on,” Anne tells them.

Todd shoulders his rifle and helps Evan bring a cooler into the building. Inside, their footsteps echo across the massive, empty space.

The Rangers settle in for the night, eating a hasty supper around their small fire, listening to monotone voices on the radio mourn the fallen and encourage all Americans to continue to fight Infection. Nobody says a word. Any conversation taking place is the internal kind. The silence suits Todd just fine. The fall of the camp calls for a night of silence just to process it.

Then he realizes Anne is staring at him. He looks away, feeling like he failed some sort of test. Like the others, he is a little afraid of her.

And yet he understands her a little better now.

He is learning how to hate.

Wendy

The juggernaut gallops on its four thick legs through the half-empty parking lot of the Lebanon Costco, scattering garbage and vehicles and making the ground tremble. It stops, its lungs swelling against its ribcage. Dozens of tentacles sag from the body, swaying tentatively, as if groping. They straighten and shiver, flailing, blasting like foghorns.

The sound fades, replaced by the growl of advancing machinery. A Technical—a pickup truck with a heavy machine gun bolted onto its bed—races through the empty adjacent dirt lot, sending a rooster tail of mud flying behind it. The driver wrestles with the wheel while the gunner holds on for dear life. On the other side of the parking lot, another Technical, a Toyota with bumper bars welded onto its face, slams through a snarl of shopping carts under a dead light pole, sending them flying with a crash of metal.

The gunners open up at the same time, sending rounds arcing across the parking lot to fall into the flank of the monster, punching holes through hide and muscle.

The drivers whoop at the sight of the elephant-sized thing limping away on legs thick as tree trunks. They step on the gas and lean on their horns while men in the passenger seats shout reports into radios. They are pushing the thing into the rest of their combat team, which even now is circling the other side of the Costco.

The monster lows in pain, so white now it is almost translucent, leaving a trail of blood that fills the air with a copper scent. One of the trucks splashes through it moments later.