The Killing Floor

to stay alive. Christ, we all have blood on our hands. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be here.”

The truth is I lost control.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Anne says.

“All right. Forget why. What I don’t get is what’s going on inside your head. Me, I honestly can’t picture doing what you did. Shit, what do you feel about it? Do you feel anything at all?”

Anne’s mind flashes to pointing her pistol at Jean’s face and squeezing the trigger.

“I don’t feel anything,” she says, a little surprised at the realization.

Marcus nods, taking this in. Another major admission.

“We’re wasting time here,” she says. “Can we go now? Please?”

He says nothing, and they regard each other in the dark, their eyes gleaming.

“I need you, Marcus,” she tells him, her voice strained.

“I’ll come,” he says. “We’ll finish this.”

“Good. Let’s wake up the others.”

“But I want more.”

“More?”

“I want you.”

As much as Anne loves Todd as a son, she has come to love Marcus as a man. The thought of giving herself to him fills her with panic, however. For one thing, it is too soon. Just two months ago, she was mother to three children given to her by a man whom she loved with her whole heart for nearly ten years of her life. She never properly mourned them. She cannot just let go.

On the other hand, no more perfect time exists. She could die within the next five minutes.

“If you want sex, I can give you that.”

“It’s not about that, Anne. I want you.”

He is asking her to feel, but she doubts she has anything to give him. She remembers Sarge in the government shelter, what seems like a lifetime ago, calling the Infected the living dead.

Us? he added. We’re the dead living.

The words shocked her at the time. Now she understands.

How can you ask me to love you, Marcus, when you might die before sunrise?

“I want you,” he repeats. “Don’t we deserve to be happy, even if for a little while?”

“I don’t know what that means anymore. I want to but I don’t know if I can.”

Marcus nods. “All right. Then I’ll settle for that.”

He smiles at her in the dark and Anne smiles back, a rare sight at any time of day.

Ray

While Ray twitches and sweats in a deep snoring sleep with his arms wrapped around Lola, he dreams the Infected are normal again. In the dream they stand outside where he left them, but it is bright and sunny instead of dark, and all of them are well dressed and clean and looking up at the sun, tears flowing down their cheeks as they smile. The men and women look at each other with wide, sparkling eyes. There is no hate here, no rage, just the thrill of freedom.

Lola, accustomed to dreaming of billions of monsters writhing like maggots across the scoured face of a red planet, finds herself at her house in Cashtown, weeding her garden while her children shriek and run barefoot through the sprinkler spray on the lawn. Her husband winks at her as he enters the garage to take out the lawnmower. She vows to hold onto the feeling she has looking at her family—a sense of her soul being filled to the brim with contentment—knowing nothing perfect lasts forever in this world. That night, as they drink wine and barbecue steaks and eat them outside in the cool dusk, she tells herself if she had to pick a day to relive, she would pick this one, this beautiful summer day spent doing almost nothing.

Outside, the other Infected moan in the darkness, free of the dreams of the red planet and the long exodus through space. They dream of the time before, reliving the past. They are free of the bonds of slavery at last, while Infection waits patiently until morning to reclaim its hosts.

Anne

Dawn is coming fast and the bus flies down the road, chasing a paling sky. The V-shaped snowplow retrofitted onto the front, peppered top to bottom with blood, sends the occasional Infected flying into the ditch with a thud. The engine growls as Marcus changes gears with the stick, slowing down and speeding up to navigate occasional wrecks blocking the road. The Rangers peer through the metal firing ports welded over the windows, Anne looking for any sign of Ray Young, the others watching for threats that specialize in the night. The air feels humid but cool against her skin. This has always been her favorite time of the day; it’s a new day, and anything can happen. For as long as she can remember, Anne has been a morning person.

Holding the edges of the seats to stay balanced as the bus bangs over potholes, she navigates the center aisle until she finds Gary, huddled against the window with his arms crossed.

“I’m sorry about Jean,” she says.

“How did you know what we did in the art gallery?”

“I found the evidence. It wasn’t hard to piece together.”

“You shouldn’t have judged her,” Gary tells her. “Her one sin was she refused to accept that things have changed. She honestly thought the whole thing would blow over and her life would pick up again almost where she’d left it. I think she thought once we got to Nightingale, she would find a Starbucks with Wi-Fi.”

Anne frowns. “Jean had bigger sins than that.”

“What we did, we did to survive. We were trapped. It was either that or die. But it wasn’t her. It was me. I was the one who did it. I made a choice. You should judge me, not Jean. Jean just ate.”

Anne nods. Her suspicion has been confirmed. “She just ate.”

“That’s right.”

“And that’s why I judge her, Gary. You, I don’t judge.”

Gary stares back at her stricken, on the verge of tears.

“I killed my friend and then we ate him,” he says. “You need to understand this.”

“You survived.”

“If you call living with that surviving.”

“Can you handle a weapon?”

“I’ve never fired a gun in my life,” he says. “I killed my friend with a knife.”

“We don’t talk about the past,” she says.

“I killed my friend with a knife,” Gary repeats with a shrill laugh. “It actually feels good to say it out loud. I was selling his paintings in my gallery and then a week later I cut his throat so Jean and I could eat him and live. It was hard work. Once I had him down, I had to lean and put all my weight into it. He hardly struggled. He just looked at me in surprise while I did it. I was pretty surprised too. I mean, I was outside my body, watching myself do it. I should be in jail, but here I am, alive, and he’s dead. Do you see what kind of person I am?”

“Are you willing to kill again to survive? If you had to?”

“I want to live,” Gary says after a pause.

“All right. We’ll give you a nine millimeter. If the Infected get close, you point it, you shoot it. You watch our backs, we watch yours. Think you can do that?”

“I can do it.”

“Good,” says Anne. “If you killed a man to survive, I can’t absolve you. None of us are shining examples of virtue; we’ve all done terrible things or we wouldn’t be here. But it tells me you have what it takes. That’s the only qualification that matters these days.”

“Anne!” Marcus calls from the driver’s seat at the front.

She feels the tug of gravity test her balance. The bus is slowing.

“Thank you,” Gary says, crying.