The Killing Floor

“Why did you leave us?”

Anne fought hard to get Todd and the others to the refugee camp, riding out of Pittsburgh in the back of a Bradley fighting vehicle, only to disappear just as they found it.

“My family died,” she says. “They died because of me. I don’t get to come back.”

“But you did. You found us at the bridge.”

“Blind luck,” she tells him. “I was just passing through with some other survivors. I’m their guardian angel now. In any case, that’s not what I meant.”

“I know what you meant,” he whispers.

Something large collides with the bus, with a metallic boom followed by a flurry of screams. Todd clutches at Anne, wide eyed and gasping, his arteries turned into wires carrying electric current instead of blood. The monster snorts like a giant pig, grotesquely loud, its hooves clashing on the asphalt. The driver roars, stomping on the gas. Todd feels the sudden pull of gravity as the bus lurches hard to the left. The hooves strike the side of the bus, making the entire vehicle shiver. The boy buries his face against Anne’s shoulder, biting her jacket. Then the thing falls behind, its hooves clattering, shrieking in the dark.

“What about me?” he cries. “Do I get to come back?”

Anne shushes him and strokes his hair until he regains control of his breathing and his heart stops hammering in his chest. It’s all right, the voices shout in the dark. We’re all right now. What about the others? They’re still behind us, thank God. Someone else says, What was that thing? What was it? Nobody answers. Nobody talks about the monsters. To talk about them is to give them your power. You start a conversation ready to fight to survive and end it ready to give up. Todd smells tobacco burning as survivors light cigarettes in the dark. As the others settle into an uneasy silence, Anne tells him, in a warm whisper close to his ear, a story about a woman who was a simple housewife—a loving mother, a devoted wife, a respected neighbor—who had everything until suddenly she didn’t. When Infection arrived, she refused to accept what was happening. She sent her husband out into the storm of violence on a fool’s errand. She left her kids with a neighbor to go search for her husband and realized, too late, she had left them to die. The woman wanted to die herself but could not overcome her instinctive need to survive. And so she made her survival a mission—a mission of vengeance.

Todd listened closely, his body slowly uncoiling as he relaxed, but now says nothing. He does not ask her if that is how she got the scars on her face. Her story makes sense to him. He spent two weeks with her in the back of the Bradley. She has the fury of Captain Ahab—if Moby Dick were a virus. Most people are just trying to get by these days, just trying to survive. Anne is at war. Her enemy is one of the tiniest forms of life on the planet.

“Is that why you hate them so much?” he says.

“Who?”

“The Infected, obviously.”

“I don’t hate them, Todd.”

“Never mind,” he says, frowning.

“Todd, those poor people deserve nothing but our sympathy.”

“Then why do you like killing them so much?”

“Is that really what you think?”

“Well,” he says.

“I enjoy nothing about it. But they’re already dead. The second the bug takes them, they stop being people. Everything that makes them who they are dies. As far as I’m concerned, they’re the walking dead. It’s not the people I kill. It’s the virus controlling them. That’s my enemy.”

He does not understand. The Infected are evil, yes, he reasons, but they wear the faces of our loved ones. Perhaps there is something of those people left inside. Even if they only remember themselves when they dream, does this not still make them human?

When he shot Sheena X in the face on the first night of the outbreak, he was not killing a virus, he was killing his friend. When Anne executed Ethan on the bridge at the end of the battle, how could she not see the man, but just the virus controlling him?

“Thank God,” the driver shouts back at the survivors, switching on the headlights. “It’s the camp! We made it!”

Todd tightens his hold on Anne. “Are you coming this time?”

“For a while,” she tells him.

“Can I stay with you?”

“Todd, I’m going to get back on the road as soon as I can scrounge up a few things. You know what it’s like out there. There is no life. It’s no place for you.”

I want to be safe, he wants to tell her, but does not know how to explain how he feels. He knows he will be safer in the camp. But he feels safer on the road, close to his fears.

Even after everything, he already feels its call to stay out here among the monsters.

Get on the road and keep moving, and they will never get you.

He remembers Sarge, the battle-hardened commander of the Bradley, falling apart during the orientation session at the camp. He stopped moving, and it nearly broke him.

Even the strongest sometimes are not strong enough to fight themselves.

Anne shakes her head. “All right, Todd. If you don’t feel right tomorrow, come and find me and we’ll talk.”

Todd nods and sits up, sniffing and wiping his eyes with the palm of his hand.

“Camp Defiance,” the driver says, pointing.

The sprawling camp looms ahead, the ragged outline of its makeshift walls and watchtowers silhouetted by the warm glow of searchlights and thousands of cooking fires. The warm breeze carries the sound of cheering crowds. Random snatches of machine gun fire. The smell of wood smoke. Overhead, helicopters roar through the night.

Home, Todd thinks. I want to go home. Where is home?

¦

The convoy grinds to a halt in front of the gates, churning dust that swirls like angry ghosts in the headlight beams. A machine gun rattles on the wall, tracer rounds spitting toward the distant trees. The sound of cheering grows in volume, responding to a voice squawking through a megaphone. The bass line of a pop song vibrates through the vehicle. Despite the notes of celebration, at night the camp has the atmosphere of a siege slowly being lost. Blinding white light floods the bus and then fades out. The gates open with a bang of gears.

“Show time,” Anne says to Todd, nudging him with a wink.

Todd smiles at the inside joke. Sarge always said that before a scavenging mission.

“Welcome to FEMAville, Anne,” he says.

This is the place he fought the horde to save. The place for which Paul and Ethan died.

The vehicle rolls into the compound and comes to a stop, the rest of the convoy stacking up behind it. The driver turns off the engine and opens the door, allowing the omnipresent camp smells of cooking food and open sewage to waft in. Bulbs on wires strung between wooden poles light the area, surrounded by moths. Music blares from a speaker mounted on one of the poles in a tangle of thick wires: Queen’s “We Will Rock You.” Todd peers out the window and blinks in surprise at the cheering faces. Holy crap. They’re cheering for us.

A military officer climbs aboard the bus and speaks to the driver, who shakes his head, turns in his seat, and points at Anne. The officer approaches, introduces himself as Captain Mattis, and fires questions, his voice barely audible over the roar: Lieutenant Patterson? Sergeant Hackett? Sergeant Wilson?

Dead, dead and trapped on the other side of the river, Anne tells him.

“Too bad about Wilson.”

“He’ll make out all right,” Anne says. She knows Mattis is noting the loss of the Bradley more than its commander.

“So who are you, then?”

“Just passing through with some other people. We heard the shooting and helped out.” She tilts her head toward Todd. “He made it. Some engineers, some National Guard. That’s it.”