The Killing Floor

They fall silent as he passes. Chickens cluck in a series of pens, filling the air with the acrid smell of shit. Several men swear over a tractor coupled to a water tanker, both of which are stuck in the mud. A teenager pushes a wheelbarrow filled with plastic jugs, surrounded by smaller children splashing through puddles acting out the fight at the bridge, holding back the Infected onslaught while the engineers lay their charges.

“On me!” one of the kids cries. “Come on, we’ll make our stand here!”

Todd smiles at them, idly swatting a mosquito on his neck.

“Are you one of those people from the bridge?”

He turns and sees the teenager pushing the wheelbarrow, staring at him with something like awe. The kid is only younger than Todd by two years at most, filthy and dressed in rags. One of the many orphans of Infection.

“No,” Todd says. “You are.”

He unpins the ribbon, gives it to the surprised boy while the smaller children howl in disbelief, and walks into the compound adjacent to the gate, a hive of constant activity: salvage coming in, waste going out. A five-ton driven by men in bright yellow hazmat suits rolls through the gate, carrying corpses stacked in shiny black body bags. A squad of tired National Guard in olive green rainproof ponchos watches the truck leave, smoking and yawning and rubbing their eyes. Workers unload salvaged goods from a white pickup scarred with hundreds of tiny scratches made by fingernails and jewelry. Men fill out paperwork and hand over receipts. A large American flag hangs wetly from an overhead wire. This land is still the USA.

He finds the bus parked between a Brinks armored car and a pickup truck with a cobwebbed windshield. Dressed in greasy gray coveralls, Anne bends over the engine, talking to a mechanic. Another man paints camouflage colors over the bright yellow skin. A woman scrubs the V-shaped snowplow mounted on the grill, a retrofit enabling the bus to slam into human beings and toss them broken into the nearest ditch. Todd notes the metal plates welded over the windows, creating slits useful as firing ports.

Looks pretty ninja, he decides.

Anne senses his approach and turns to watch him limp stiffly, like a zombie, across the mud. The mechanic, a giant of a man with long blond hair, tightens the grip on his wrench, scowling at him. He takes a step forward but is halted by Anne clicking her tongue.

“Hello, Todd,” Anne says, wiping her hands on a rag.

“Who are these guys?” he asks her, glancing nervously at the mechanic.

“I guess you could call them my crew. Marcus here I brought with me. Evan and Ramona heard about me and came here. They don’t want to stay. They want to go back out.”

“They call us Anne’s Rangers,” the mechanic tells him.

Todd likes the sound of that. “I thought you said there’s nothing out there.”

“I made a deal with Mattis,” Anne explains. “The Camp will supply us with diesel, weapons, some other things. We’ll find more survivors and bring them here. Run supplies and mail to the other camps. That sort of thing.”

Todd nods. “That’s a good job for you.”

“What about you? You staying, then?”

“I want to go home.”

Anne gives him a grim smile. “All right.”

“Is that okay with you?”

“Marcus will get you some gear. Then rest. Tomorrow, we go back out. We can use you.”

“Thank you, Anne.”

The blond giant nods and extends his hand in welcome.

Todd smiles as he shakes it and thinks, I always wanted to belong somewhere.

Marcus

He was a good mechanic and this got him steady work at auto repair shops. Mufflers, brakes and shock absorbers, mostly, plus body repair and painting. After his wife died, leaving him with two growing boys, he quit Sears Auto Center and got a job closer to home as a service technician at a Toyota dealership. He was welding when the Screaming swept through town.

After hours of starting and stopping, swearing and leaning on his horn, Marcus pulled into the high school parking lot and lunged sweating from his truck. Inside, he pushed through the roar of red-faced parents and teachers and into the gym, where the survivors had laid the bodies of the fallen, students and teachers alike, in rows on the floor. Both Jack and Michael lay on their backs, their bodies still jerking in tiny spasms. He swept them up, one boy over each shoulder, and carried them to his truck. A teacher approached to challenge him but dodged aside after seeing the terrible expression on his face and his hands clenched into fists.

On the way home, he listened to the radio. They were calling it a syndrome because nobody knew what the hell it was. There was a lot of talk about exploding head syndrome, frontal lobe epilepsy, nanotech terrorism. None of it made any sense. A doctor said some of the victims exhibited echolalia, the automatic repetition of sounds. His ears perked up at that. After arriving home and getting his boys into their beds, he told them he loved them, hoping to hear it said back to him.

His cousin Kirsten, who worked as a nurse at the hospital, dropped by first thing in the morning to set up bedpans and intravenous tubes. After she left, Marcus could not cope with the empty, funereal silence and went to the liquor store, where he stood for hours in a line that went out the door and around the corner. Returning home, he found his boys lying in the exact same position he’d left them. He changed their bedpans and IV bags, exercised their limbs a little, gave them a quick sponge bath. When he moved Michael’s arm, he noticed his younger son had waxy flexibility, which he’d heard was another occasional symptom of the syndrome. Wherever he put the boy’s limbs, they stayed frozen in whatever position they were last left.

This done, fighting tears, Marcus went back downstairs, poured a few fingers of Wild Turkey bourbon, topped it up with Coke and ice, and turned the TV on. A blowhard on the cable news was saying things like brain drain and national inventory and precipice.

None of it made any sense to him. The world began to blur.

Two days later, he heard shouting on the TV. The screamers were waking up, and they were attacking people. Nobody knew why. Apparently, if a screamer bit you, you caught the disease. Marcus watched Cleveland fall apart for an hour before realizing his kids had woken up as well. He could hear them stomping around upstairs.

Still reeling with hangover, Marcus staggered to the foot of the stairs. He considered calling Kirsten, or maybe the cops, and felt ashamed. Why was he afraid? What was there to be afraid of? The boys were his own flesh and blood.

He climbed the stairs slowly, one step at a time.

“Jack,” he said when he reached the bedroom door. He felt out of breath; he could hardly speak. “Michael?”

He heard snarling on the other side, fingernails scratching at the wood.

“Are you guys okay?” Marcus whispered, suddenly scared of his own voice.

Something large thudded against the wall on his left, making a picture jump off its hook and clatter to the floor. Moments later, something crashed against the door, making it shiver on its hinges, followed by more growling and pacing.

Shit, Marcus thought, afraid to say anything. Terrified to even move. Even breathe. His body would not stop shaking. After a minute, he held up his trembling hand and stared at it as if it belonged to someone else.

I’m afraid of my own sons, he realized. My sons. My own flesh and blood.

It was like being afraid of yourself. They were a part of him.

Even worse, he was afraid he would open the door and they would have hate in their eyes. That they would