The Killing Floor

Wendy wrenches her eyes from her display and says, “Sit the fuck down, sir.”

Lieutenant Chase blinks and glares at Toby, who shrugs. “You heard the lady, sir.”

As the young officer returns to the passenger compartment to retake his seat with the squad, Toby sighs and says, “So are you going to tell me what’s eating you today?”

“Nope,” Wendy tells him.

¦

The fighters shoot out the skylights in the Costco to create smoke vents, chop up some of the empty shelves, and settle into lawn chairs around their cook fires. The beards, sunglasses, bandanas and leather make them look more like a biker convention than a military force. The women look even fiercer than the men, some of them wearing bits of armor and body paint and necklaces of ivory monster teeth. At any one time, roughly six hundred men and women to serve in the New Liberty Army. Outside, the sentries stand guard on the beds of the trucks arranged in a line in front of the store. Inside, a boom box blares an old Jimi Hendrix song, rebellious and nostalgic. The fighters swap war stories and pass around chewing tobacco and mason jars filled with grain alcohol. Franks and beans and Ramen noodles bubble in pots set over the fires, filling the store with the rich smell of camp food. The fighters play cards for hundreds of dollars looted from the cash registers. They trade toilet paper for cigarettes, chocolate bars for antacids, silver dollars for porno mags and Percocet. A man tries to sell a handful of gold wedding bands, but gets no takers. Everyone knows carrying such things around is bad luck.

Each night they are alive is cause for as big a party as they can put together with whatever they have on hand. Tonight, the fighters are happy to be camping inside, away from the rain and the mud and the mosquitoes. The New Liberty Army is a nomad army, always on the move, living off the land and leaving a vast swathe of death and destruction in its wake. They are an unforgiving army; wounded fighters are left behind with a gun and a little grub to die or get well. Their sole mission is to purge Infection from the region, scavenge what they can, and then move on. They are hard men and women, civilians who fight like professionals. An army of psychopaths, a legion of the insane, a homegrown militia of monster slayers. These people are here because they can do nothing else. They are damned. They don’t mind killing; some of them enjoy it. Some hotwire mannequins with dynamite, and laugh when the flash and boom turn the Infected into jelly and pieces of bone. Some mutilate the dead. What some of them do to infected women, Wendy doesn’t want to know. Most have lost everything and hold a grudge.

Anne would fit right in here, Wendy muses.

And yet it is a tranquil army, one where many of the old divisions do not exist, or at least have been put aside. She remembers Paul telling her about the demonstrations at Camp Defiance and the old hates pulled into the new world they lived in, some of them even amplified. Some believe God hates the Infected, while others believe the Infected are specially chosen instruments of divine wrath. Some argue abortion can no longer be justified during a time when more people are dying than being born, while others argue the option of abortion makes even more sense in this harsh, dying world. On and on. None of that stuff matters in the New Liberty Army. Nobody cares Toby and Wendy are a mixed-race couple, for example, or that Billy Weaver’s crew is openly gay, or that the Ackleys are Jehovah’s Witnesses. They are united in their single purpose to stamp out the plague, without mercy, with fire and shot.

She walks away from the others, picking through the shelves looking for something useful. With hope, she’ll find some gum. Looters have already been through the store, however, and taken almost everything. The candy aisle has been stripped clean. It’s not over, however; you just have to know where to look. Getting down onto all fours, she feels under the bottom shelf, her hand sweeping through the dust, until settling on something. Bingo.

She pulls it out and holds it up in the dim light. It’s a Tootsie Pop. Not gum, but it will do.

“Wendy Saslove?” says a man’s voice.

Wendy stands, feeling a little silly and also foolish for having made herself so vulnerable. The last time she dropped her guard, she was on patrol with Jonesy back at Camp Defiance, working as a police officer for Sergeant Ray Young in Unit 12. She was violently attacked by three scumbags, two of whom she beat senseless, the third she fought off after he attempted to rape her. She hadn’t felt safe since that night unless in Toby’s arms or in the gunner’s station of the Bradley.

She faces the large, bearded man, feeling the reassuring weight of her Glock on her hip, her hand near her pepper spray and side-handle police baton. She is a beautiful woman; she has been told this enough times to be sure. Most of the men are afraid of Toby, who is something of a living legend in the outfit, but a few made a move on her anyway when his back was turned. They didn’t know Wendy was a cop before she became a volunteer gunner. Too bad for them: She stomped them so hard, many of the boys grew even more afraid of her than Toby.

“I’m Dennis. Dennis Warren.”

“Nice to meet you, Dennis,” she says.

“I joined the outfit about a week ago.”

“I’ve seen you around,” she says. “How’s everything?”

“I don’t mean to bother you or anything, but I heard you were a cop. Over in Pittsburgh.”

Wendy relaxes a little. “That’s right.”

“I just wanted to say thank you.”

She knows what he wants to do, so she asks the question. “For what?”

He wants to tell her his story. That’s always what they want when they mention they find out she was a police officer.

There were four of them trapped in a supply closet in an office building, two women and two men, one of them a cop suffering a severe concussion, floating in and out of consciousness. Outside, an Infected man scratched at the door like an animal, grunting, while the survivors gaped at the noise, sweating and paralyzed and feeling nauseous. One of the two women worked in Finance; Dennis didn’t know her name, even now, but he had seen her around the building for years and always thought she was pretty. She was trying to help the cop. She said there were dozens of Infected out there, maybe even a hundred. She insisted on this until Dennis believed her. He was out of his mind with fear. The Infected heard their voices and pounded at the door, screaming loud enough to send fresh waves of adrenaline through Dennis’s body. His brain went numb with fear. One little bite, he knew, and I’m as good as dead. The Infected outside wanted to bite him. The door trembled on its hinges. The center splintered. The woman took the cop’s gun from its holster and aimed it at the door, her arm shaking, taking deep breaths. Leave us alone, she screamed. Stop it! The Infected outside howled in a blind rage and crashed against the door. She said it was no use. She said the Infected would get in and tear them into pieces. Best to end it now. Janet, I’m so sorry. The gunshot blasted in Dennis’s ears, making him flinch. When he opened his eyes, Janet sat on the floor gaping at nothing, her brains splashed up the shelving behind her and coating the neatly stacked Post-Its and legal pads and pencil sharpeners. I’m sorry, the woman with the gun said, turning back toward Dennis with eyes glazed with shock. I never got your name. Dennis lunged and wrestled her to the floor. Don’t hurt her, he told himself. He felt like he knew her after sharing elevators with her for two years. He’d always had something of a crush on her. She fought like an animal, pulling on his tie until pain lanced through his neck, trying to free her wrist so she could shoot him or herself in the head. Kill me, she begged. Quick, before they get in. I don’t want to turn into one of them. Dennis slapped her hard. He just wanted to make her be quiet, but she kept screaming and clawing at him. Everyone just settle down now so I can think, he said, hitting her again. His hoarse whisper sounded like someone else speaking. He wrapped his hand around her throat and squeezed for a while to stop her screaming. Just be cool for a minute. He couldn’t think straight. She stopped struggling. Oh shit. Oh shit, I didn’t want that. Crying now, he untangled her fingers from the grip of the cop’s gun and pointed it at his own head as the door splintered further and the Infected face appeared snarling in the hole. Dennis blinked in surprise; it was Paul Dorgan, VP of Product Development. Wait, a voice said. Dennis turned and saw the cop pushing himself up trembling onto one elbow. Give the gun to me. I’ll do it. The cop accepted the Glock, raised it calmly and fired through the hole. The body fell heavily to the floor.

“If the cop hadn’t been there,” Dennis says, “I would have died in that closet. Simple as that. The fear made us crazy. I was out of my mind. I owe that man my life.”