The Killing Floor

them dead, Miss High and Mighty. The moment passes, and he finds he no longer cares. He turns and regards the vast blue sky and remembers something Paul, the chain-smoking preacher, said to him: The earth abides. The thought makes him feel warmly detached.

“Do it, if that’s what you want,” he says. “I can’t stop you. In fact, I’m honestly too tired to give a shit.”

Do it now, he prays. Do it before I change my goddamn mind.

Ray tenses and waits for the gunshot to split his head open. The sky has never looked so blue. The muddy river flows deep under his feet. Birds chirp in distant trees. The earth abides: He tries to hold that thought and make it his last but his scalp starts to itch. He can almost taste the metal of the bullet coming out the front of his face, taking his teeth with it. The more he thinks about it, the more it fills him with mindless, screaming terror. In a moment, he will enter oblivion.

The dead don’t even dream. They don’t even know they’re dead. They are a person and then they are nothing. Just meat.

“No,” he moans, sobbing.

Behind him, boots splash among the dead. Anne is leaving without a word.

Ray exhales. He realizes he was not breathing. Mercy, indeed. He wonders why she did not go through with it, but it does not matter why. All that matters is he has a little more time. Time for what? He pulls another cigarette from his crushed pack and lights it with a cough. Time enough for one more smoke. Funny how he used to worry about lung cancer.

Gunshots echo across the bridge, sending his heart lunging into his throat. The others who’d gotten infected are taking Anne up on her offer of mercy. He hears the rest of the survivors piling their gear and casualties into the truck beds. They will not let the monsters take their dead. The bodies will be buried in a special place where nothing will be able to dig them up and eat them.

Soon, Ray will be alone with the hundreds of Infected still crowding the edge of the shattered bridge, growling and reaching for him with outstretched hands. Behind them, smoke blackens the horizon, where heat waves ripple into the sky as Pittsburgh continues to give up its ghost.

Everything is busy becoming something else.

For him, the change will happen soon.

¦

The convoy of heavy vehicles drives away. Ray wanted them to leave, but now feels tired and lonely. Around him, the dying have stopped moving, congealing into a single rigid mass. It is hard to distinguish individuals among the piles of torn and mangled bodies. He sees a hairy wrist with an expensive watch, and suppresses the urge to lift it. It has no value to him now other than to remind him he is running out of time.

The sun hangs low in the sky. Tonight, the real monsters will arrive, sniffing the air, and eat the dead. He wants to be somewhere else when they come. His instincts tell him to seek out a private place to curl up and die.

He works his way onto his hands and knees, gasping at the pain in his side. The puncture site has swollen to the size of a grapefruit, waiting patiently to be born. Behind him, the Infected on the other side of the torn bridge stop clawing and hissing and begin to moan. He reaches his feet through sheer willpower, hugging his throbbing ribs, and sees the Infected reach out to him as if pleading.

“What the hell?” he says. He finds this raw display as unnerving than their constant rage.

A distant monster bellows like a foghorn, reminding him that not all of the children of Infection wear human faces.

Get out of here, his instincts warn. Even now, he obeys the will to survive. If the juggernauts find him, they will grind him into paste and suck the blood from the remains.

Ray staggers among the bodies, trying to keep his footing. He finds a rifle lying on the ground, picks it up and peers through the scope, aiming at a woman wearing the shreds of a nightgown. He wonders if it still works.

One way to find out—

The rifle fires with a metallic crack. The back of the woman’s head explodes, splashing the Infected behind her with smoking pieces of bone and brain. The shell casing rings on the asphalt. The woman crumples to the ground, rolls in a tangle of limbs, and tumbles into the river.

“That was for Ethan,” he says, certain now he is holding what was the teacher’s rifle. Ray hardly knew the man, but they fought together on the bridge, and Ethan became infected covering him and the others as they fell back to fire the charges and destroy the bridge.

He detaches the magazine and counts three bullets. He hopes it will be enough to get him to Steubenville and into a nice soft, clean bed to lie on and die. He sneezes on the puff of gun smoke and swears at the shock of pain arcing through his chest.

“Kill all you bastards,” he mutters.

His mother’s voice: You do what you think is best, Ray.

“Damn straight.”

The Infected reach out to him, moaning and wailing, their eyes glimmering in the growing twilight. Come back, they seem to say. Don’t go just yet. Ray coughs and spits a gob of black phlegm. It is easy to forget sometimes they were once average people. That they were loved.

The foghorn call booms across the dead landscape, closer now, sending a jolt of adrenaline through his system. Time to go. Now.

He starts walking. It is difficult to move; the right side of his ribcage feels like a giant fishhook is stuck in it and someone is trying to reel it in. The cancerous grapefruit throbs hotly, continuing its relentless growth.

He carries a special strain of the bug. He was not bitten; he was stung.

Some of the Infected do not look like people. The only way to describe them is to call them monsters. One particularly horrible species of these things, called a hopper by most people because of their oddly articulated legs allowing them to leap high into the air—but also going by the names jumper, imp, goblin and humper—stung him during the fight on the bridge. He imagines trying to explain it to Tyler Jones back at the Camp Defiance police station, where he worked as sergeant of Unit 12.

Well, Tyler, think of a whining hairless monkey the size of a German shepherd tearing you a new asshole and then fucking it with a syringe full of acid.

And that was just the beginning. The injected material immediately got busy converting his cells to start another hopper growing right out of his rib, like Adam making Eve.

Congratulations, Ray. You’re going to be a daddy. And when it’s born, it will eat what’s left of you. At that point, you’ll be so drained, all you will be strong enough to do is watch.

Is this really worth surviving for?

Breathing hard, he staggers off the bridge and stares blankly at the outskirts of Steubenville: several white buildings, houses, gas stations, distant smokestacks and church steeples under a dimming sky. From here, the town has no visible scars from the epidemic. No charred homes half burned to the ground, no abandoned wrecks of vehicles, no piles of corpses drawing flies in the heat. The only oddity is the eerie quiet, the lack of any living human. Nonetheless, he feels watched. The waning summer sun casts long shadows across the features of this ghost town. He hobbles along the street, passing under dead traffic lights, tears streaming down his face, driven by a need to survive he no longer understands.

Goodbye, sun.

The blue house calls to him. It reminds him of his mother’s house back in Cashtown. This house, he decides, will be a good place to die.

¦

Ray tries the front door. Locked. The garage stands open, but its door is also locked. He limps to the side of the house, stumbling over a garden hose sitting in the tall grass like a patient snake, and finds an open window over an overgrown flowerbed. All he has to do is tear out the mesh and pull himself up and over—something he’s done at least a few times during his long career as an asshole—but he wonders if he has the strength to do it now. As if sensing his ambition, the monster growing from his side pulls against his ribcage, warning him to stay put.

Don’t rock the boat, mister, he can picture it saying, or I’ll suck one of