The Infection

MEMORIES

Todd wakes up in a bed in a warm, windowless hospital room after a long, dreamless sleep. He is still exhausted but his body is telling him he has already overslept. You’re still here, Todd old man, he tells himself. Still truckin’. Wrapping his blanket around his bare shoulders, he shuffles blearily to a bucket in the corner and empties his bladder. His stomach growls. Outside, he finds Paul in the hallway, whistling as he mops the floor with a strong bleach solution. He finds the sight reassuring. He is not used to being alone.

“Hey, Rev,” he says.

“Morning, Kid.”

“Wow, we just got here and they got you mopping floors already. Too bad there isn’t more need for preachers in the post-apocalyptic world.”

Paul pauses in his work, smiling. “On the contrary, son, a true minister is no stranger to working with his hands. It’s a form of prayer. Good for the soul. You ought to try it sometime.”

“Are you trying to turn me into an atheist?”

“Ha,” says Paul.

“Anyhow, my soul needs some coffee or it’s not doing anything today.”

“Go around the corner and look for the lounge. We got it set up as a common room. I’m sure Anne saved you something.”

“Thanks, Rev,” Todd says, his blanket forming a train on the floor behind him.

“Good to have you back, Kid.”

Todd turns and grins. “The Kid abides, Rev. The Kid abides.”

Ethan plods slowly through the pathology department, marveling at the expensive equipment now gathering dust in the gloomy light of his lantern. Everywhere they go, he sees signs of a world that has fallen down. He is looking for things that they can use but has not found anything. A large centrifuge sits on a laboratory table, its lid open showing test tubes filled with cells, once living and now dead, from an unfinished experiment. People had been working here when the Infected got out of their beds. They left in a hurry. Ethan sees an overturned chair with a crisp white labcoat still clinging to the back. A crushed test tube on the floor.

He pauses in front of a cabinet filled with delicate glassware, test tubes and beakers. They are clean but he feels a primitive fear of touching them. Germs are the greatest threat to his survival right now, and his instincts are not very discriminating. In the corner, an emergency liquid nitrogen tank catches his eye. He stares at it for a long time. The nitrogen is stored under pressure, so they might be able to siphon some of it off into a container to make a crude explosive. If they don’t blow their own hands off first. They might dump it on the Infected and flash freeze them. As long as they don’t freeze their own arm solid in the bargain.

Liquid nitrogen is a dangerous laboratory material, he reminds himself. Probably best to leave it alone. He considered it worth thinking about, however. In this world, everything must be evaluated as a potential weapon. Out of the five basic survival needs, security now ranks first.

Ethan fiddles with a fluorescence microscope but it sits dark, inert, lifeless without electricity. The room is filled with hundreds of thousands of dollars in deteriorating lab equipment. He recognizes an incubator, decides not to open it. It strikes him again that scientists studied disease here. Not scary diseases like AIDS and Ebola, no, not in a lab like this, but dangerous nonetheless: cancer, diabetes, emphysema, bone disorders. The pathologists examined tissues and blood and urine to figure out what was wrong with people. Doctors used these tests to treat people with all sorts of disorders and extend their lifespan. Researchers looked at the smallest living particles in the human body and tried to understand what hurt them and how they adapted to being hurt—knowledge that could be used to diagnose some diseases more easily, treat others, and even cure. Now the healers have all gone, possibly never to return.

Ethan tries not to think of all the great things they might have accomplished.

He once thought he understood what severe stress was like. He and Carol both worked hard at their jobs. They juggled dinner and daycare and doing the dishes. They survived the dramas of raising a little girl who was deep into her terrible twos. Life was full of responsibilities and bills and little errands and phone calls and annoying bank mistakes and miscommunication and petty conflict. It was hard, but he would consider that sort of stress a breath of fresh air after what he has been through in the past ten days with the Sword of Damocles poised over his head, hanging by a thread. The human body was not meant to experience this level of fear for this long. Getting this close to death for too long can turn your hair white, break your mind.

He and Carol would cope as best they could but every so often their frustrations boiled to the surface and they bickered. They bickered as they prepared dinner and as they ate it and as they cleaned up and put Mary to bed. They each knew how far they could go, and no further, to needle the other person without getting a major reaction that would upset their toddler. Every once in a while somebody would go too far, and there would be hurt feelings. When this happened, the bickering escalated and either Ethan or Carol would storm away from the table out of fear of shouting in front of Mary.

One night, nobody walked away, and, without really understanding what he was doing, Ethan started shouting.

“Carol, stop it, stop it, just stop it.”

Carol sat back, stunned, while Mary, busily pouring her glass of water into her mashed potatoes, stared at him with eyes like saucers, her mouth hanging open.

Ethan smiled at his daughter quickly, trying to reassure her.

“How dare you shout at me in front of her,” Carol hissed.

“I said I don’t want to argue. So stop it.”

“I’m not the one shouting.”

“STOP IT.”

“Why don’t you shut up?”

They shouted over each other for the next minute until he could not take it anymore and he stormed out of the house, seeing red. He walked for an hour, his mind boiling as he played the argument over and over in his mind, hating it. As his anger began to dissipate, he felt the first wave of panic over what they had done to Mary. He needed to talk to Carol. He hurried home.

Ethan found his wife and daughter upstairs on the rocking chair in Mary’s room. Carol was reading her a story from a hardcover compendium of Curious George stories.

“Are you happy, Daddy?” Mary said.

“I’m very happy,” Ethan said, close to tears.

They gave her a glass of water and tucked her in with her dollies, then turned out the light and left her to sleep.

Carol went downstairs for coffee and Ethan trudged after her.

“I’m sorry I yelled,” he said.

“I’m sorry, too,” she said.

The next thing he knew he was bawling with his head bowed and his shoulders shaking and Carol was holding him, telling him everything was going to be okay.

“I didn’t like the look on Mary’s face,” he said.

That heartbreaking look of confusion, fear, guilt that her parents were fighting.

He had surprised himself by crying. He had not cried in at least ten years, when his mother died. But that look haunted him. That look of broken trust and loss.

“Kids blame themselves for everything,” he added. “I don’t want to fight in front of her. I don’t want to ever fight in front of her again. We’re supposed to be protecting her.”

Carol understood. They promised each other it would never happen again. They made up and went to bed feeling better about their marriage. As Ethan lay in the dark that night, trying to sleep, he vowed to preserve Mary’s pure innocence and joy as long as he could. She would slowly learn over time that the world was a hard and terrible place. But he would fight that world as long and as hard as he could to protect his little girl from its dark truths.

In the third-floor lounge, the other survivors sit around a small table and share a breakfast of peanut butter on crackers and wash it down with instant coffee sweetened with honey and lightened with powdered milk. An espresso machine gathers dust in the corner next to a small refrigerator nobody is interested in opening. Corporate art decorates the walls. The stale air smells like dust. The LED lantern casts long shadows behind a fake potted plant.

“I think we can all agree we need to continue searching the building,” Anne says. “I’d like to lead a team to look for supplies. Food, water, drugs and anything else we can use.”

“If it’s all right with you, I need to sit that one out,” Sarge says.

“Got to work on the Brad?”

“No, I’d like to take my boys and find the emergency generator. We might get some lights going again. Charge our electronics. Maybe even get some news of the outside world.”

“Wow,” Wendy says, smiling. “That would be nice.”

“Hooah,” says Sarge.

“Don’t tell me you have to go into the basement,” Anne says.

Sarge shakes his head. “There ain’t no generator in the basement. If a water main broke or there was some type of disaster where fire hoses or sprinklers would have to be used, it could get flooded out too easy. Hurricane Katrina taught everybody that. No, this hospital has a mechanical penthouse. High and dry on the top floor. That is where it will be. Me and the boys will take care of it.”

The survivors eat quietly. Sarge pours himself more coffee, smiles and adds, “So don’t you worry about me. The only people going into the darkest, most dangerous parts of the hospital today will be you.”

“Don’t leave without me,” Todd says, shuffling into the room. “But first give me some of that coffee and my pants back.”

“How’s the arm?” Wendy says.

“Sore as hell, but I’ll live.”

Anne pats the empty chair between her and Wendy. “Have a seat, Kid.”

Todd sits, grinning in his blanket and glasses and battered SWAT cap, and extends his hand to Anne for a shake. “Todd Paulsen. Nice to meet you.”

Paul aims his shotgun into the darkness, illuminated by the sharp beam cast by a flashlight wrapped around the barrel with electrical tape. The Remington 870 tactical pump shotgun features a short pistol-grip stock and a recoil pad. It packs seven twelve-gauge rounds. He likes the gun because it is dependable and it will stop anything.

They pass the radiology department. Down the corridor, on the right, they find the chapel. Paul blinks at it in surprise. He had completely forgotten that the hospital would have a chapel. The survivors look at him, questioning, and he nods, yes, he would like to see it.

The small room looks like a miniature church, complete with red carpeting, dark wood pews and a stained glass wall that was probably backlit when the power worked. Hymn books are scattered on the floor. Dead flowers are crumbling in their vases and most of the candles are melted. Ethan takes the candles that are still usable and puts them in his bag. The others stand by the doorway, watching Paul, who picks up the hymn books and stacks them carefully on the lectern.

He looks at the arched ceiling overhead and closes his eyes, remembering the last time he spoke as a clergyman. After the Infected rose, he kept Sara tied to a bed for three days, feeding her, bathing her, changing her bedpan, while the world ended outside his window. He even tried an exorcism, commanding demons to abandon her body while she shrieked and panted, straining at her bonds. Time blurred until he realized that people were probably flocking to his church for comfort and there was nobody there to give it. He had a responsibility to his congregation that was just as great. Exhausted from lack of sleep, he put on his clerical uniform and staggered out into the night. People sobbed and screamed in distant houses as he walked to the church in a daze. The Infected were running howling down streets and alleys, breaking into homes and attacking their occupants. Paul arrived at his church only to find it had been attacked. The dead lay in heaps surrounded by clouds of flies. The streetlights shined through the stained glass windows in a ghostly shimmer. The carpet squished wetly under his feet. The Infected had eaten the children on the altar. And he thought, Isn’t this what you wanted, Paul? The End of Days?

The signs of violence were everywhere in this place. There were as many Infected lying on the ground as those who were not. His congregation had put up a fight—for their children and their sanctuary. The massive wood cross mounted behind the altar, the symbol of his faith in a divine sacrifice that had made life everlasting possible, loomed without potency over the carnage. Rage boiled up inside him. Infection had invaded and defiled this holy place. Infection had raped his wife’s blood. And he, personally, had not been touched.

Dawn brought the singing mob marching down the street out of a haze of smoke, sweeping him along. Middle-class suburbanites carrying shotguns and baseball bats and crowbars and kitchen knives and garden tools. They shouted and sang and waved banners proclaiming: we are the majority and defend our homeland and we shall not be moved. One carried a Bible and a large wooden cross. There were hundreds of them. The vanguard roared and dragged along eight Infected, who snapped and struggled against handcuffs and ropes tied around their necks. The men stopped in the middle of an intersection, threw the ropes over the traffic signal, and promptly began hauling the Infected kicking and gasping into the air. Paul pushed his way through the clapping mob for a better look until he was satisfied that Sara was not one of the victims. The air smelled like smoke. The Infected hung by their necks, jerking and twitching until they died. The mob cheered, some shooting at the corpses with their guns, others singing “The Star Spangled Banner” until everybody joined in, tears running down their cheeks. Paul was finding it hard to breathe. Several people noticed his clerical collar, shook his hand and began shoving him to the head of the column, chanting, “Bless us! Bless us!” A man with a mullet and a hunting bow, standing on the hood of a car, pulled him up with one hand and clapped him on the back. Paul looked down upon the cheering crowd in anger and did not trust the Spirit. What could he say that they wanted to hear? Should he tell them that God was on their side and approved of them murdering their brothers and sisters in broad daylight? Should he rouse them to torture and murder more of them with a hymn, maybe “Onward, Christian Soldiers”? Then he realized how scared they all were. The faces looked up at him hungrily; if ever they needed the strength and hope of Christ’s love, it was now. They were quiet now except for the cries of their babies. A pair of military jets roared overhead in the gray, smoky sky, followed by the boom of distant explosions. His heart opened. He raised his hands and blessed the mob.

“Your war is just,” he told them.

For a war to be truly just, its soldiers must kill with love, not hate, he thought. This was perhaps the first war in history where the combatants killed those they loved most.

People at the edge of the crowd began to scream. Infected were rushing out of nearby lawns and gardens into their midst, punching and biting. Shotguns and handguns roared in a motley cluster of shots, followed by triumphant shouting. Several people began trading punches over a bitten and newly Infected teenage girl lying twitching on the ground.

“Brothers and sisters,” Paul sang to them. “The Lord is with you. Do not be afraid.”

More Infected ran into the crowd, sending tremors of panic rippling through it. Some people ran away while others huddled closer together for protection. They stumbled over the newly Infected that lay twitching under their feet. A swarm arrived howling, and the mob began to break and tear with screams and gunshots and running feet. The fighting went on and on, the mob slowly dissolving like a wounded whale surrounded by sharks, flailing and dying one bite at a time. Soon, Paul found himself alone, watching the last clumps of people throw away their banners and flee, abandoning dozens of bodies on the ground. A small knot of fighters made a stand in a smoky haze, shouting at each other and firing their shotguns, until the Infected overran them.

Paul opens his eyes and is back in the hospital chapel, his face upturned towards the ceiling.

He offers a silent prayer for the dead and then sings aloud in a rich baritone voice, “Amen, amen, ah-ah-men.”

The other survivors stare at him wearing stricken expressions. Wendy wipes her eyes with the palm of her hand. Paul wonders if he said something while reliving that horrible day so vividly. He realizes his own face is wet and that he has been crying. He realizes that he was not singing at all. He was moaning. He did not remember what happened so much as relived it. But he cannot remember what happened afterwards. The fighters made their stand and they died in the smoke. Then nothing more.

They all know about flashbacks. The experiences are so real, so visceral, that they can swear they have discovered a legitimate form of time travel. But unlike the type of time travel one might find in, say, the movies, with this type of time travel, they cannot change the outcome. They are doomed to relive the past repeatedly without being able to change it. And no matter how many times they visit the past, they will never truly comprehend it.

The survivors enter the gift shop guns first, clearing it the way Sarge taught them—fanning out along the walls and circling back to the door.

“Clear,” they sound off, then start looting.

Ethan is again struck by the sensation that the world has become a giant museum dedicated to the day the world ended. The magazines and newspapers sitting in their racks still trumpet dramatic headlines about the Screaming. He runs his fingers over the greeting cards, pauses in front of a selection of stuffed animals and shiny balloons that proclaim it’s a boy! and feel better soon! and happy mother’s day!

Behind him, Wendy opens a dead refrigerator and begins emptying its bottled water and juices into cloth shopping bags packed onto a wheelchair, which they are using as a cart. Paul lights a cigarette with a tired sigh and sits on a stack of magazines. Todd scoops up candy and gum and shoves it into another bag. Anne prowls the other shelves with her flashlight, snatching up aspirin and nail clippers and deodorant.

Todd holds up his bag of candy, shakes it, and says, “Trick or treat.”

Ethan says, “Do you think they remember who they are?”

“You mean the Infected?” Todd says.

“Yes. Do you think their consciousness has been replaced, or that they are still trapped inside their bodies, forced to do things they don’t want to do by the virus?”

“I would hate to think they were still in there watching themselves attack people and being helpless to stop it,” Wendy says. “Either way, killing them is a mercy.”

“Maybe when the Infected dream, they remember who they are,” Todd says. “It would be nice to think that.” He quickly adds, “Or completely horrible.”

Ethan picks up a stuffed animal, squeezes it, and drops it to the floor. “I’m wondering if they still love us. If they recognize us and love us while they attack us even as we recognize them and love them while we kill them.”

Paul’s head jerks up and he stares at Ethan.

Anne says, “Nobody likes these questions.”

Paul says, “They’re the only questions worth asking.”

The door to the mechanical penthouse is locked. Sarge and the crew go out to the Bradley to recover the demolition kit, which contains a few blocks of C4 plastic explosive and detonators. They are going to cut and mold a wad of C4 onto the doorknob, stick a detonator into it, let the wires run out until they get to a safe place, trigger the detonator, and BOOM. The soldiers have a casual but deep appreciation for the stuff. You can throw it and kick it and it will not blow up on you. Light it on fire and it burns nice and slow and you can heat an MRE on it if the area is properly ventilated, as Sarge did many times in Afghanistan. Mold it wherever you want it to go in whatever shape you want it, pop in the detonators, and you can take down buildings.

They move quickly, rifles shouldered and aimed, communicating by hand signals only. Papers and loose trash flutter across the parking lot. The parking garage where they hid the rig under a tarp does not appear to be occupied, but swarms have a way of appearing as suddenly as a flash flood. They are used to playing it safe. Caution is now second nature to them.

Once they are back in the hospital, the soldiers begin to relax a little.

“Are we safe here, Sergeant?” Duck says. “In this building?”

“Safe enough at this moment.” This is Sarge’s stock answer to that question. He credits staying alive and sane this long with taking this hellish journey one day at a time. One moment at a time. Speculating about what you do not know is a waste of time and energy that you need to stay alive.

“I mean, are we going to stay a while?”

They begin climbing the stairs. Sarge shrugs and says, “I think we should. It’s a good place.”

“I thought the idea was we would train a civilian combat team and use them as security until we found some friendlies.”

“That’s still the plan, Ducky.”

“The civs seems to think we’re going to live here.”

“Yes, we are still trying to find the Army,” Sarge says. “No, we do not need to advertise this fact to the civilians. Do you even know where the nearest friendlies are? Because I sure as hell do not. Our battalion technically does not exist anymore. We’ve heard nothing on the net in days.”

The soldiers reach the top floor and pause to catch their breath. The gunner drops to one knee and starts rigging the C4 charge.

“There’s always the camps,” Steve says as he works. “The FEMA camps. The closest one is in Ohio, right?”

“Which we do not even know still exist, Steve. If they ever did. We’ve heard of lots of refugee camps and Army elements that either moved by the time we showed up or were never there in the first place. I am not interested in risking our safety for any rumors, especially if it means driving all over Ohio on a quarter tank of gas.”

“Hey, I’m with you. I’d like to stay. I wouldn’t mind if we bunkered down here until the whole thing blows over. Let the gung ho mo-fo’s take care of it.”

“I don’t want to stay here forever. The Army is out there still fighting somewhere and we’ve got to find them and help. But these people need a rest. We need a rest.”

“Roger that,” Steve says.

“I look at it this way,” Ducky says as they retreat down the stairwell. “Every hour we sit here, more people die that we could be helping. So how long are we staying if we are staying?”

“At least a few days,” Sarge says. “A lot can change in a few days. We are still taking this one day at a time.” He remembers what the Boy Scouts taught him about having the right frame of mind for survival: Stop, think, observe and plan, or STOP.

“What if we decide to move on but the civs want to stay?”

“I do not know, Ducky. I honestly do not. They’re not in the Army.”

“Fire in the hole!” Steve announces. The soldiers crouch and plug their ears.

The C4 explodes with a clap of metallic thunder that rolls down the stairwell, followed by a wave of smoke and dust and a strong chemical smell. The warped metal door hangs on one of its hinges, then snaps off and flops to the side.

The soldiers stand and dust themselves off.

“The truth is we really need them,” Sarge says. “They’ve gotten good.” He smiles grimly. “In fact, I would hate to piss them off.”

God is good, and death is evil, so why does God allow people to die? That was a question Paul had never been able to answer during his ministry. When he was ten years old, a plane crashed, scattering burning metal and body parts across miles of scorched and bruised earth, killing more than two hundred people, including his mother. He experienced the full gamut of grief, from denial to anger to bargaining to guilt. The guilt was the worst. He had been asleep when she left for the trip and it haunted him that she could be taken away so suddenly, without even a final goodbye. By the time he reached the acceptance phase, he had aged beyond his years. He had aged beyond his years because he had become aware of death and the fragility of life.

A minister came to the house frequently in the weeks following the crash, offering consolation to Paul and his father.

“If God loved my mom, why did he let her die?” Paul asked him.

“I don’t know,” the minister said. “What I do know is that it was her time to cross over.”

“To Heaven?”

“To be with God, who made her. Your mother did not die. She underwent a transition. It is painful that you will have to wait to see her again. But you will see her again.”

Paul wrestled with his next question, feeling insecure about asking it.

Finally, he said, “Is God going to make me die, too?”

The minister smiled. “We all die, Paul,” he answered. “But you won’t die for a long, long time. The world is a hard place. But it is also wonderful. You’ve got a lot of things to do here.”

Paul spent the next few days thinking about what Reverend Brown said. By the end, he not only began to accept the loss of his mother, he decided to become a minister. He loved superheroes, could not get enough of them on TV and in comic books. But here was a real superhero, somebody who fought the evil of death every day and helped other people conquer it.

He turned out to be good at being a minister. He spent hundreds of hours in grief counseling with dying people and their families. He offered whatever comfort he could. When they had nobody else, he spent more time with them and even helped with chores and bills. As a minister, this was his mission, to help wherever he could, and he felt he made a real difference in people’s lives. He helped the dying accept what was happening to them, and to Paul, there was simply no greater gift than some degree of confidence that they were not dying, but crossing over, not into oblivion, but to a better place, to wait for loved ones they left behind.

And yet a part of him always felt like a sham because he, himself, remained terrified of dying.

Rita Greene was not a regular churchgoer, but when she was diagnosed with bone cancer and rushed into a painful treatment regime including chemotherapy and surgery removing part of her pelvis, her family asked if Paul would visit with her, and he agreed.

He came to her home and sat by her bed while she shook with a fever that was not a fever but instead a side effect of her treatment. The drugs she was taking killed growing cells in her body, both the fast-growing cancer cells and the normal, healthy cells in her mouth, stomach, intestines, hair follicles. Some days, he was told, she felt so well she would be out in her garden working on her daffodils. Today was a bad day. The fact was she was declining fast.

They exchanged small talk while he tried to put her at ease. He gave her a compilation CD of jazz, which her son said she liked to listen to while tending her flowers. He explained to her the reason he was there and that she should consider him another form of support.

Rita said the hardest part for her was the weight loss, her hair falling out, the general sickliness. She hated looking in the mirror and seeing what the cancer and its treatment had done to her. Plus she was a woman who liked to get up and do things. She hated being inside, trapped in bed.

“Are you afraid of what comes next for all of us?”

“No,” Rita said. “We all got to go sometime. It’s my time, is all.”

“How are you feeling about leaving Jim behind?”

“He’s a good boy. He’ll find his way.”

“You’re a very strong person,” Paul said.

Rita coughed. “I got no choice about it.”

“And do you feel you are right with Jesus?”

“I don’t believe in Jesus, Reverend,” said Rita.

Paul stared at her, stunned. “But of course you do.”

“No, I don’t.”

“You’ve been worshipping at my church for years.”

“That’s right. But I never really believed any of it.”

“Oh,” he said.

“No offense, Reverend.”

“You don’t believe you’re going anywhere special, and yet you’re not afraid?”

“Why should I be? Like I said, I got no choice.”

Paul regarded her for several moments, unsure of what to say. Based on his experience ministering to the dying as well as the living, he had always agreed with the sentiment that there are no atheists in foxholes. Rita Greene was proving a rare exception.

“Reverend,” she said. “Read me that passage from Ecclesiastes. The one about the seasons.”

“Um,” Paul said. “Of course.” He cleared his throat and recited from memory, “‘For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven.’”

“Mmmm,” Rita said, smiling and closing her eyes.

“‘A time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant and a time to harvest. A time to kill and a time to heal. A time to tear down and a time to build up. A time to grieve and a time to dance…’”

He stopped. Rita had fallen asleep.

Her son Jim met him in the kitchen. He was a large man who worked in construction. He told Paul that he was taking it hard. They sat at the kitchen table to talk.

“Chondrosarcoma,” Jim said with revulsion. “I never heard that word before a week ago. And here it comes, the thing that’s going to kill my mom. Goddamn cancer.”

Paul nodded.

“Hey, Reverend,” Jim added, “what do you say to people when you do grief counseling? What technique works the best?”

“Well, the hardest part is giving our loved ones permission to die,” Paul told him. “Some people go on trying to interact with their loved one even after they’re gone. They’ll go on talking to them because they don’t know how to move on.”

“So what do you say to these people to help them?”

Paul took out a pen, pulled a napkin from a neat stack on the other end of the table, and drew a thick black line on it.

“It’s a line,” Jim said.

“I tell people that their past is on one side of the line and their future is on the other,” Paul explained. “I tell them they have to acknowledge that they are crossing this line and that things have changed. They’ve got to let go and begin to accept the change so they can move into the future.”

Jim grunted, letting the visual sink in.

Paul looked at the line and imagined that it did not separate the past from the future, but life from death. On the left, a tiny life of joy, hardship, searching and wandering. On the right, either eternal joy in union with the Creator, or eternal oblivion—an endless, mindless, terrifying darkness—each of us alone, each of us forgotten, each of us nothing.

The hospital appears to grow larger and more complex as the survivors explore its depths. They mark their progress with a can of fluorescent paint. All of the phones are off the hook. Ethan picks one up and places it against his ear just to rediscover the old, familiar act. He dials his home number and listens. The phone does not ring. Nobody answers. He places the phone carefully back on the receiver. Then he hurries to catch up with the other survivors, who have stopped in front of a door.

The sour, rancid smell of the dead is strong here. Ethan places a rag soaked in cologne over his mouth and nose and fights the urge to gag.

“We have to check every room,” Anne says.

The others nod, reluctantly, and step inside.

Ethan instantly regrets it. He slowly explores the walls with his flashlight. They are covered with crayon drawings on construction paper, crude depictions of homes and mommies and daddies and family pets and suns with big yellow rays coming out of them. Sprayed with dried blood.

“Oh Jesus,” he says. “Oh, Jesus.”

“This was the daycare,” Wendy whispers.

Like a trapeze artist afraid of vertigo and falling a long way, Ethan tells himself not to look down. For some reason, the Infected do not want prepubescent children. They do not try to infect them. It may be that the virus does not see them as viable hosts. Or perhaps the virus places a higher value on them as nutrition, for the Infected murder children and feed on their remains.

He knows the floor is littered with rotting meat and bones. Little skulls.

Ethan suddenly cannot breathe.

Anne shines her flashlight in his face. “Ethan?”

He moans, swatting at the light.

“He’s losing it. Get him out of here.”

As the survivors retreat from the daycare, Wendy steps on something soft, which pops with an organic squeaking sound.

She aims her flashlight down and illuminates the floor.

“Anne,” she says, her voice thin. “Oh God, Anne, come quick.”

The floor is littered with translucent, fleshy sacs filled with a mucus-colored slime. As the beam of light from Wendy’s flashlight crosses the sacs, pale worms inside the fluid become agitated and thrash, making the sacs wobble and stretch.

The sacs are eggs. The room is infested with eggs.

Anne appears at her side, looks down, and says nothing.

“What do we do?” says Wendy. “If they hatch, we’re dead.”

For a single long minute, Anne does not answer, holding a bandana against her face, her eyes wide and watery.

“Destroy them,” she says finally.

The soldiers sweep the gray concrete walls with light, looking for signage that will help orient them to the layout of the hospital’s mechanical equipment floor. The rooms are filled with boilers, pumps, piping and makeup air units used to provide heating and cooling to the building, all of it sitting dormant under an exposed ceiling coated with fireproof foam.

Sarge does not doubt that the hospital has emergency backup power. All hospitals have it because outages can happen unexpectedly, causing monitors, oxygen pumps and other life-saving equipment, not to mention cordless phones and data servers, to suddenly fail. What he does not know is if the generator burns natural gas or diesel.

If gas, it might have a backup propane tank that would be useful for heating water and cooking. But if it is diesel, then they can refuel the Bradley as well as produce electricity.

Sarge stops in front of two bright yellow nine-feet-tall, twenty-ton machines that look like a cross between a tractor and a train locomotive. The hospital has two generators wired in parallel, each rated at two thousand kilowatts, and what appears to be a big backup fuel tank.

“Hallelujah, boys,” he says, grinning. “It’s diesel.”

The soldiers laugh and whoop, then hang their lanterns and get to work inspecting the generators. They are natural grease monkeys and know their way around internal combustion engines. They begin checking the oil and batteries and measuring how much diesel is in the tanks. Each of the generators nominally holds a hundred fifty gallons, while the Bradley holds one-seventy-five. And that does not count what is in the backup tank. It has been ten days since the Infected put this hospital out of business, so the fuel may have deteriorated a little, but it should be all right. Sarge guesses that both generators at full loading would probably operate all the critical stuff in the hospital for about eight hours. With the fuel in the storage tank, however, that could be extended to twenty-four, maybe forty-eight.

“The tanks are at around eighty percent,” Steve says, grinning.

“Hot dog,” Sarge says.

They are sitting on a lot of fuel.

“It’s about time luck got on our side,” Ducky says.

Once they get it working, the generator will burn its fuel to generate force that turns a crankshaft. The crank will turn a rotor inside a stator, which will create a steady magnetic field. As the rotor passes through the field, electrical current will be generated in wires that it houses. The current will flow to whatever circuits they assign for loading. If it works, they will have light, refrigeration, cooking, air conditioning, heat and power for electronics.

“All right, let’s find the breaker panel and set up our loads,” Sarge adds. “Then we can take this baby out for a spin.”

Wendy peels off her grimy clothes, dumps them in a bucket and tosses in some washing liquid she found next to a pile of bloody laundry. Anne also strips down until she is naked, then stands under one of the showerheads.

“Wow, it feels good to be out of those clothes,” Wendy says. “It also feels scary. I’m not sure I like it.”

Anne points to the inflamed cut along her ribs. “Where did you get that?”

“Worm teeth,” Wendy says. “I didn’t know I had it until after. I don’t think the worms are infectious. Either that, or Todd and I are very lucky.”

“Well, that cut is infected with something. You got a fever?”

“Honestly, I’ve felt feverish ever since the Screaming. Almost two weeks ago.”

“Make sure you take care of it. Your immune system is weak from the stress and lack of sleep. If your temperature goes up, take some antibiotics.”

Wendy nods and for the first time is aware of Anne’s nudity. The end of the world and its forced survival diet has been kind to her, burning off her excess fat and leaving sinewy muscle on the woman’s petite frame. Anne has the body of a gymnast.

“You’re beautiful,” Wendy says, smiling.

Anne blinks in surprise. A smile crosses her face, but her hand flickers at the scars on her left cheek, and the moment passes quickly.

“I might have been once,” she answers.

“Come on, ladies, let’s go,” Todd calls out from the locker room. “I haven’t touched a bar of soap in two weeks!”

“Don’t let him peek, Reverend,” Wendy says. “We’re counting on you to protect our honor.”

“Your honor is in safe hands for exactly three minutes plus drying time,” Paul calls back. “Let me know when you’re ready so I can start counting down.”

Wendy and Anne turn on the faucets, which groan for several moments before spitting out gobs of cold water and then a steady stream.

“You can start it now!”

Wendy steps under the faucet and is instantly electrified by the sensual feel of the water and its cold bite on her skin. Closing her eyes, she finds it easy to imagine being under a waterfall. The building’s water was designated for drinking and cooking only but Sarge said very quick showers would be a great way to celebrate their taking the hospital back from Infection and reminding them of what they are surviving for; the others eagerly agreed to the luxury. Wendy closes her eyes and feels the water drumming against her head and shoulders. Lathering up her hands with a bar of soap, she begins to wash herself, laughing.

“Two minutes!”

Wendy pours a handful of shampoo into her palm and massages her scalp. Soapy gray water pours out of her hair and down the drain. She marvels at how precious water is now. Standing under the downpour, she feels rich with its wealth. Drunk on the luxury of being able to use it to wash herself like this.

“One minute!”

“Shit,” she says, frantically beating and rinsing her dirty clothes before Paul calls time and they turn the faucets off.

“Now can I peek?” Todd says.

“No!” says Wendy, adding to Anne, “We’re going to have to find that kid a girl soon.”

The women towel down, put on hospital scrubs and slippers, and hang their clothes up to dry. Then she grins.

“You know, for a few moments there, I actually forgot all about it,” Wendy says.

Anne says, “I don’t want to forget.”

Eleven months after entering the Academy, Wendy was sworn in and told to report to Zone One. The Northside neighborhoods would be her territory for the foreseeable future. Her first day finally arrived. She woke up after only a few hours of sleep filled with energy and too nervous to eat anything. She downed a cup of coffee and took a hot shower. She tied her hair back into a bun and again considered getting it cut short. She carefully laid out and then put on, piece by piece, over black bra and panties, her crisply ironed uniform and pins and badge and Batman belt, conscious of a mundane cop ritual that was still novel to her, fussing over getting rid of every speck of lint. Then she stood in front of the mirror and worked on her game face.

At the station, after orientation, she was told that she would be partnered with a senior officer named Kendrick, a grizzled, overweight cop with a permanent scowl. She held out her hand to shake and he gave her a long, incredulous once-over, which he concluded by shaking his head.

“I hope that fucking Dave Carver isn’t the only thing you’re good at,” he said.

Wendy put on her game face and said, “I’m not fucking Dave Carver.”

“If you say so, rook.”

“But you’re right, I was good at it.”

Kendrick snorted with laughter.

“All right, Cleopatra. Let’s get going. But one more thing before we go out today. We’re going to be in some rough neighborhoods, but remember there are a lot of good people who call those neighborhoods home, so show some fucking respect out there.”

Wendy nodded, appreciating the perspective. They reported to the dispatcher and entered the garage, where they found their cruiser.

“I’ll drive, rook,” he growled. “You don’t do anything unless I say so—what?”

“I said, ‘Okay, Officer Kendrick.’”

“If you think I’m being hard on you because you’re a woman, fuck you.”

The squad car left the garage. They drove around their territory for a while and then stopped at a Dunkin Donuts for breakfast. Wendy went in and minutes later returned to the car with a box of donuts and two tall Styrofoam cups full of coffee. Kendrick wolfed down the donuts and drank his coffee, then sighed contentedly and settled into his seat. He watched the street with the dull gaze of a basilisk. Wendy guiltily prayed that something terrible would happen and that she could do some real police work on her first day. She pictured the dispatcher calling out, car crash with injuries, or robbery in progress and shots fired. Maybe she and Kendrick would catch a drug deal in progress. Maybe there would be a man on one of the city’s many bridges, threatening to jump, and she would have to talk him down. She began to fidget in her seat.

“This is the job, rook,” he growled, slurping his coffee. “You hurry up and wait. And wait.”

The radio suddenly blared.

“CD to all units.”

There had been a break-in and stabbing. The dispatcher gave the location and advised that the suspect was still in the house. He had broken in through a window, punched the occupant to the floor, robbed her, and cut her up. By the time the dispatcher finished, Kendrick had already started the car, turned on the lights and siren, and was now replying that they were en route.

The car lurched into traffic and roared toward the scene on squealing tires.

“Hold on to your ass,” Kendrick said.

“Every unit in the zone must be on its way,” Wendy shouted over the siren.

“We’ll get there first. Excited, cherry?”

Wendy tried not to smile through her game face.

He whistled. “First day on the job and you might get a collar. Lucky kid.”

The dispatcher was firing updates over the radio when Kendrick yanked the steering wheel and brought the squad car to a screeching halt in front of the house.

They got out of the car, Kendrick pausing to retrieve his shotgun. Wendy unholstered her Glock, fighting to control her breathing, and ran to the front of the house at a crouch.

They knocked loudly and took a step back.

“Police!”

The door opened and an old woman, leaning on a cane, waved them in.

“He left when he heard you coming,” she said.

“Where’d he go?” Wendy demanded.

“Up there,” the woman answered.

“Hold it a second, rook,” Kendrick said tersely. “Ma’am, are you hurt? Did he cut you?”

“He stabbed me right here. See?”

Kendrick’s face turned purple.

“It’s all better now. I refused to stay hurt. I am quite resilient.”

“Which way did he go, Ma’am?” Wendy said.

“I already told you he went up through the ceiling to his helicopter.”

Behind them, other cars rocketed to a halt in front of the house, spilling cops.

“What a waste of time,” Kendrick muttered.

“Can I get you a glass of milk, officer?” the woman said to him.

Sergeant McElroy showed up, talked to the woman for several minutes with clenched fists, and called the dispatcher to report the call as unfounded.

“Congratulations, Sherlock,” he said, jabbing Wendy in the chest with his finger. “You caught your first big case.”

She spent the rest of her first day as a police officer filling out reports on the incident in triplicate.

Clean and pink and dressed in plain green hospital scrubs, the survivors wolf down heated cans of ravioli and spaghetti and meatballs in the lounge, washing it down with bottles of red wine that before the world ended would have been considered expensive. The showers washed off the days’ old stink of fear and they are beginning to feel human again.

As the time approaches six o’clock, they chant a countdown. When they get to zero, nothing happens. The survivors stare at the ceiling, their hopeful expressions wilting in disappointment.

“Bummer,” Todd says.

The fluorescent lights suddenly blink to life, impossibly bright.

The survivors gasp in amazement, then cheer.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I give you civilization,” Sarge says.

“Fantastic,” Ethan says. “It almost feels normal.”

“How much of the building is powered?” Anne asks.

“We isolated the power to a section on this floor that includes this lounge plus the pathology department, brain clinic, OBGYN, nursing administration and all of our rooms.”

“How long will we have it?”

“The generator runs on diesel like the Bradley. After topping up the rig, we’ve got enough fuel to have power for forty days if we use it an hour a day.”

“I’m going to try to power up my cell phone,” Ethan says.

“There’s probably still no service, though,” Paul says.

Ethan shrugs with a sad smile.

“Sorry,” Paul adds. “That was a stupid thing to say. Anything is possible.”

“It’s all right. I just want to have the phone ready, just in case. I have to be ready.”

“I hear you.”

Todd says, “I’m going to juice up my iPod. Shazam!”

“Are there any windows we need to black out?” Anne asks Sarge.

“I think we’re good, Anne,” Sarge tells her. “We turned off the lights in all the rooms with windows.”

“Somebody should go out and check to make sure no light is leaking out of the building.”

Sarge blinks. “If you think that’s wise.”

“If somebody sees the light, we will not be safe.”

“True,” he admits.

“We’re acting like we’re safe here but we’re not. We’ve only explored a small part of the building. Today, we found a room infested with worm eggs. There could be more of those things, not to mention more Infected, right under our feet on the second floor, or right over our heads on the floors above. They could be crawling through the air ducts. We can’t worry about both them and other people coming in from the outside wanting to take what we have.”

“All right, Anne,” Sarge says, feeling sour, as if a fine party has been spoiled. “Who do you want to go out and check? The power will only be on for an hour and it’s starting to get dark, so whoever is going had better get moving.”

“I’ll do it.”

“Not alone. If nobody else wants to go with you, I will.”

“Thanks, but I’d rather go alone,” she says. “I’ll be fine.”

“I’m not at all sure that you are,” Sarge says.

“So it’s decided.”

Anne cleans her hands on her pants, gets onto her feet, and walks out the door. The survivors stare at the empty doorway in a stunned silence for a few moments.

“Are you really going to let her leave like that by herself?” Wendy asks Sarge.

The big soldier shrugs. “She don’t belong to me.”

“She wanted to go,” Paul says, shaking his head. “She practically ran out of here.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Ethan says, pouring himself another tall cup of wine.

The television set’s large screen flickers to life, filled with snow. The soldiers wheeled it in on a cart and plugged it into one of the power outlets. Sarge fiddles with the antenna. An image begins to resolve: a military officer standing in front of a blue curtain and giant map of the United States mounted on an easel board. The image lurches for a moment, stretching like a funhouse mirror, then snaps back, snowy, as if perpetually on the verge of disintegration.

“Whoa,” Todd says, eating a chocolate bar. “This isn’t the usual emergency broadcast crap.”

The speakers roar white noise, under which they can hear the officer murmuring like a ghost behind the walls. Sarge gives up and finally turns the sound off, backs away from the TV gingerly, and sits in one of the lounge chairs.

“Who is that guy?” Wendy asks. “Do you know him, Sarge?”

Steve snorts. “He’s the chairman of the joint chiefs.”

“The who?”

Sarge explains, “The chairman is the highest ranking military official in the country, besides the President. That’s General Donald McGregor. Ran the show for a few years in Afghanistan. He’s a tough sumbitch.”

“Any idea what he’s saying?”

“It looks to me like he’s giving some type of press conference.”

The survivors stare at the unstable image raptly, their brains tickled by the sensation of watching television again. Drunk on the feeling that they are no longer alone.

Ethan finally gets up and stands next to the TV, pointing at the map. “It’s shaded. Like a weather map. See? Pretty much all of Pennsylvania is red.”

“I guess we’re in for some hot weather.”

“That’s not a good color,” Ethan agrees, squinting closely at the grainy image. “Philly and New York are shaded a really dark red. That can’t be good either. But eastern Ohio, outside the major cities, is yellow. Yellow’s better than red, right?”

The survivors shrug, but nobody objects either.

He adds, “If the chairman would move his ass out of the way, we could see what’s going on out west.”

“The chairman looks profoundly unhappy about the current state of affairs,” Todd says, his mouth full of candy.

“Washington, DC is shaded dark red,” Wendy says. “I wonder where the President is.”

“At Mount Weather in Virginia, most likely,” Sarge guesses. “The emergency bunker. Anybody in government who made it out of Washington when the screamers woke up, that’s where they’ll be now.”

“At least there’s still a government,” she tells him. “We’re still resisting. That’s something.”

Sarge nods. “Yeah, that’s something. We’re still in the game. I hope we’re winning it.”

The survivors pour fresh drinks, lean back on the couches, and watch until they grow bored.

“Is there anything else to watch?”

“When does Jon Stewart come on?”

They laugh.

“Thank you for coming to my important press conference,” Todd says in a nasal voice, watching the general talking on the TV screen and imagining aloud what the man is saying. “My strategic assessment is we’re all fucked. Any questions?”

Before the end of the world, Todd wouldn’t be caught dead watching television, which he considered an opiate for the masses and a big waste of time besides. He grew up on the Internet. He would spend hours staring at his PC, flitting from one site to the next, engaging total strangers in obnoxious debates in message boards and chat rooms about weapons and tactics and rules in World of Warcraft and Warhammer 40,000, his favorite games. He called this nightly ritual “doing the time warp.” He would sit down at his computer screen after dinner and, after several hours that flew by as if only a few minutes, his mother would be nagging him to go to bed.

One night, seven months earlier, as he sat hunched over his keyboard dying to piss, his mother yelled his name from downstairs, which he dutifully ignored, as it was his policy to never answer his parents’ first call, only the second. Less than a minute later, she yelled again.

“WHAT?” he roared in a blind rage.

“Come down!”

“I’ll never finish this post,” Todd complained, sighing loudly.

He trudged downstairs and froze in his tracks. Sitting on his living room couch was April Preston, wearing jeans and a sweater and glasses.

April was a senior. April was popular. April was beautiful, even with her glasses on.

“Hey,” he said, recovering.

“Hi,” she said, smiling awkwardly.

“I thought you might want to say hello,” Todd’s mom said. “You go to the same school.”

“Different grades,” Todd said.

“Right,” April said.

“April’s car broke down,” his dad said. “We just called AAA.”

“Excellent,” Todd said, nodding.

“Do you want a Pepsi or something, April? Something to eat?”

“I’m all right. Thanks, Mrs. Paulsen.”

“Do you need to call your parents?”

“I already did, thanks. My dad’s coming to get me.”

Todd studied April while they talked, feeling nervous. While she personally had never done any harm to him, he considered her an enabler to those who had. She certainly hung out with them. Apparently, she found total jerks irresistibly attractive, because she also dated them. You’re abusive to people who are younger and weaker than you, and you play football? Wow, you’re so hot! Now she was in his house. Should he consider this an invasion? Even his home was violable, apparently. They could just walk right in. He pictured her telling everybody at school what a dorky house he had, what dorky parents. She would imitate them: I just called AAA. Want a Pepsi?

She did not look particularly threatening, however. In fact, she looked even more nervous than he was. He suddenly felt an overwhelming need to do something chivalrous. Maybe he could impress her and she would tell everybody how cool he actually was.

He realized his parents had left the room and April was staring at her hands in her lap.

“Must be great to be a senior,” he said.

She smiled again and nodded.

“Um. Are you going to college?”

“I’d like to go to college,” April said. “I’ll probably end up at Penn State. You?”

Todd blinked. “Me? I’m not sure yet. I mean, I’d like to go, I definitely will go, but I haven’t chosen a school yet. Graduation seems like an eternity to me.”

“Well, you’re smart. You’ll probably get your pick of schools.”

Todd did not know what to say. April had violated the first law of the jungle, which is you never praised above-average intelligence. You could be a great athlete, a great musician, a great consumer of twelve-ounce beers, but never a great student. He began to see her as outside the game, operating by different rules. In her last year of high school, she already seemed like an adult. His ears were ringing and his entire being felt warm and flushed at the compliment. He was used to being complimented, but only by authority figures—his parents and teachers, mostly—never by other students. Never by his peers. He began to see himself as outside the game as well, entering a world where a reputation for smarts would be an asset instead of a source of embarrassment and fear. For the first time in a long time, Todd actually felt hopeful about the future.

He suddenly wanted to talk to her all night.

Just then, his dad returned to tell April that her father was outside waiting for her.

Todd looked at her hopefully, looking for more, but the spell was already broken. Tomorrow, they would both return to the same building that defined their lives, and they would have no relationship. He felt like he had been given an unexpected gift, while at the same time cheated.

“Well, I’ll see you around, I guess,” April said.

“Good talking to you,” Todd said formally, meaning every word.

Months later, the game of high school ended with the Screaming. April was one of the majority that did not fall down. Todd still wonders sometimes what happened to her. He hopes she made out okay. She was one of the good ones.

The survivors drift away one by one. Wendy goes back to her room to clean her Glock and refill her magazines with bullets. Sarge wants to work up a sweat with some exercise. Ethan, drunk and slurring his words, scoops up two unopened bottles of wine and announces that he is going to his room to recharge his cell phone. Todd shows Steve and Ducky his crudely stitched forearm and asks them if they ever heard the story of how he got wounded. He asks them if they had to choose between a pistol with thirty rounds and a katana, which would they want to fight a zombie horde with?

The crew shake their heads in irritation and excuse themselves to check on the emergency generator, which they are supposed to shut down in fifteen minutes.

After they leave, Todd grows even more bored. He begins listing all of the things he misses the most. A big, fat, juicy steak, for starters. French fries. Buffalo wings. Anything cold to drink. His PC and his X-box game console. Friday nights at the hobby store. World of Warcraft. Warhammer 40,000.

“I wonder how much time we spend each day doing things and not actually knowing we’re alive,” Paul contemplates, draining the last of his wine.

“So what do you miss the most, Reverend?”

Paul grimaces, shaking his head, and leaves Todd to watch the crumbling, snowy image of the tired general by himself.

Sarge mentally counts his pushups—twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two—his shirt off and his thickly muscled torso slick with sweat. A medallion engraved with the image of Saint George, the patron saint of soldiers and Boy Scouts—and the victims of plague—dangles from his neck. He has been sitting reclined in the Bradley for over a week, which is like being forced to sit on a tiny couch playing a violent video game, one in which people actually die, for ten days straight. His brain is exhausted while his body has been going soft. Exercise will reboot both. Rest means refit.

His mind wanders to mountains looming over a sprawling base built of sandbag bunkers and huts and tents surrounded by timber walls and concertina wire. Chinook helicopters pound over the valley with their Apache escort. A patrol toils over distant hills. Soldiers laugh and clean their gear and piss into PVC tubes stuck into the ground. This is Afghanistan.

“Forget it,” he thinks aloud. “Just forget it.”

The first Chinook falls out of the sky and crashes into the mountain, breaking into pieces and spilling bodies as it rolls down into the valley.

He quickens the pace of his pushups. His heart is racing.

A knock on the door.

The soldiers at the base begin falling down onto the crushed stones.

“Not yet,” he says, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine—

The bodies are screaming.

The person knocks again.

He stops, panting. So close. He had come so close to forgetting.

“Come in,” he says.

The door opens and Wendy enters. She watches him wipe the sweat from his body with a towel. She seems particularly interested in the bear paw print tattoo on the left side of his chest. He looks away, suddenly feeling naked.

“Has Anne come back?” he says.

Wendy smiles and nods.

“Good,” he says.

She reaches into her mouth, extracts a chewed ball of Bazooka gum, and sticks it to the doorframe.

“Good,” she says, staring at him.

“So,” he adds, feeling awkward.

“So,” she says.

The cop takes a step towards him, holds his face in her hands, and kisses him gently on the mouth.

He forgets everything.

Ethan sits on his bed in the fluorescent light, watching his phone lying inert on the floor and drinking red wine out of a Dixie cup. The phone is connected to a power outlet. The power from the emergency generator will shut off in fifteen minutes and he wants to make sure he has his phone charged. It is starting to hit him that they are safe and that they will be living here for a while. Ever since he fled his home with nothing but a backpack, his every waking thought focused on staying away from the Infected when he could and killing them when he could not. After that: water, food, shelter. Now that all of his basic needs are being satisfied, his mind is already beginning to wander to other needs. New clothes and toiletries. Some DVDs to kill the time. Exercise equipment. Some art on the walls. And, perhaps most important, a project that will give him a sense of purpose, that will allow him to start living again instead of simply surviving. Rescuing other survivors, maybe. Starting a greenhouse. Anything to keep out the other emotions that continually threaten to invade his mind. For ten days, he has felt little other than fear, anxiety and panic. Now he is beginning to feel guilt, depression and boredom. A crushing sense of isolation and homesickness. He misses his wife. He misses his little girl. He misses his old life.

We were lucky, Carol, he thinks, his brain soggy with alcohol. We were stupid.

He takes another long sip of wine. It is a ridiculously expensive vintage but he has put down so much already that his taste buds right now could not tell the difference between a fine Bordeaux and Mad Dog.

Ethan takes out his backpack and carefully places a series of artifacts on the bed. A hairbrush with his wife’s hair still tangled in it, which no longer smells like her. A yellow rubber airplane, a promotion from an airline during a family vacation to Florida. Plastic piggy: Mary picked it up while playing in a park and would not part with it. Grimy little teddy bear that squeaks when squeezed; Mary used to make it talk back to her in a falsetto voice during pretend conversations. A hairclip. A card his wife gave him to express how glad she was that he had not been taken from her by the Screaming. Ethan knows the words, written in her fine handwriting, by heart. A wood spirit carving, the face of a bearded old man. A little blue Buddha on a keychain: Carol frequently toured spirituality but could not commit to religion. A photo of her from before Mary was born. Another of them smiling at their wedding, hastily ripped out of its frame before he fled the house. Several wallet photos of Mary when she turned one. The edges are worn from constant handling.

He has dozens of other photos but they are all on his computer at his house. He wants to think that he can go back there one day and get them. That someday the Infected are all going to drop dead or some scientist will invent a cure, and he can go home.

Sarge returns to consciousness with an intense sensation of butterflies in his heart. The beautiful cop is pulling away. He gazes after her sadly, wondering if he did something wrong.

But she says, “Will you hold me?”

“Yes,” he says, surprised at how relieved he feels that she is not leaving.

“Just hold me for a minute?”

“I would like that.”

Wendy guides him gently to the bed and pushes him down. She curls up next to him. They lie together on their sides, spooning, his large arm wrapped protectively around her stomach.

“This is nice,” she purrs. “Jesus, I feel really safe right here. Oh, fucking yes.”

Sarge feels the warmth of her body against his. He smells her hair. The sensations are intoxicating; he has not been with a woman since before his deployment to Afghanistan. A long time. He wonders if he can touch her in other places, but does not move. He is afraid of spoiling the moment.

“Do you mind if I sleep here tonight?”

“You can sleep here,” he tells her.

“Sarge?”

He frowns at her tone. The moment was spoiled after all. A part of him expected this all along. She is going to ask him why he prefers Anne as leader. He does not want to have to explain the deal he made.

Instead, she says, “Do you think we have a responsibility to other people anymore?”

He blinks in surprise.”What do you mean?”

“You’re a soldier. I’m a cop. We swore an oath. We have our duty.”

Sarge thinks of Ducky, willing to risk everything to find friendly forces.

“We do,” he agrees.

“What if this is really a safe place? Are we allowed to stay here and be happy? Or are we obligated to find others like us and see what we can do to help?”

“I don’t know, Wendy,” he says. “I honestly do not know.”

He wants to kiss her again, but she has already fallen asleep in his arms. She is a different person in sleep, so beautiful and innocent it makes his heart ache. His arm is already hurting from the weight of her body but he does not care.

She moans briefly in her sleep, wincing. Her cheeks are wet with tears.

“I’ll protect you,” he whispers.

Paul stands in the dark on the roof facing north, gazing into more darkness. The fluorescent lighting had begun to make him feel nervous and exposed. It, or the wine over which he had silently mouthed the Sacrament almost without thinking, was starting to give him a headache. He believes he understands why Anne left. He felt a similar yearning to go out into the night. The dark can be a safe place. In the dark, nobody can see you. Sanctuary is what we all wanted, he tells himself, and now we fear it. We fear its illusion of safety and choice.

He lights another cigarette, careful to conceal the flame of his lighter. He coughs on a cloud of smoke. His throat feels scratchy and raw. He is already planning his next cigarette. He has a fresh pack making a comfortable bulge in the pocket of his jacket. He finds renewing his old habit good for the nerves. A habit is reliable. Right now, lung cancer is the least of his worries.

He thinks about the first man he killed. A woman, actually, in the beverage aisle of Trader Joe’s market. The woman came running and the shotgun, held in his shaking hands, suddenly seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. He barely remembers firing it—by that point, his heart rate was skyrocketing and his vision had shrunk down to the size of a small circle. He couldn’t control his hands. The roar of the gun startled him and he flew back against the empty shelving; then he ran screaming for help. When he returned with the other survivors, he found the woman lying on the ground, her head splashed down the aisle, stone dead. His legs gave out and he cried. Over time, he has gotten better at killing, but he still regrets every one.

The only man he actually wishes he had ever killed was that first Infected who came running at him out of the darkness in the alley behind his house. When he tries to sleep at night, that hateful face lunges out of the dark, flooding his system with adrenaline. He has killed a dozen Infected, wounded perhaps twice that, but that one man still terrifies him. That one man has become more than a memory; he is a symbol of Infection and the hate and fear it has imposed on his life. If Paul could only go back in time, he would fight and kill the man with his bare hands.

He sighs and wonders what Sara would think about the new Paul if she were still alive. He takes comfort in the understanding she loved him and would want him to survive no matter what the cost. She would tell him to kill the thing in the alley. She would say: You are my man and I love you more than myself. She would say: Survive, baby. She would say: Kill them all.

He cannot remember what happened to her. He remembers the grisly slaughter at the church, and the mob, and the battle with the Infected. The next thing he knew, he was huddled in a corner in a temporary shelter set up by the government. He cannot remember anything else but wants to know what happened. Sara is Infected: Knowing will not affect that outcome. But he would like to know. Or rather, he would like to remember.

The sky is covered with flying clouds that hide the moon. For a few minutes, it is so dark that it is easy to imagine he is in a spaceship hurtling lost through the void. Slowly, his vision adjusts to night until he can make out the details of the urban nightscape. He hears muffled gunfire and shouts carried on a fresh breeze. He sees the headlights of a small convoy of vehicles driving far to the west. A bright red line emerges from the darkness in the northeast, like a glowing cut.

He watches the line grow larger, curving, a glowing red scimitar. Fire. A big fire on the south side of the river. He can already smell the smoke. Around the spreading flames, gunshots and screams. People and Infected alike are in flight. Paul shudders. If the fire keeps going, there will be a bloodbath tonight as thousands are flushed out of hiding onto streets filled with Infected. Many of them will come this way. There are few other directions they can go.

Already, down at the edge of the parking lot behind the hospital, he can see gray shapes moving in the dark, writhing and pushing against each other like maggots.

Ethan’s head is reeling from the wine and he cannot think straight. He picks up the cell phone, his heart suddenly pounding loudly in his ears, and turns it on. The image tells him that there is no service available in his calling area, another reminder that the entire power grid is down. Cellular networks use radio base stations and networks enabling voice calls and text and connection to the wider telephone network. All of these systems use power, and there is no power because the people who run the power plants, provide fuel to the power plants, and maintain the power distribution system are all dead or Infected or hiding. He feels a crushing headache coming on.

During his family’s last vacation together, they joined a group helping baby turtles make it to the sea. The female turtles leave the sea to dig a hole, lay up to two hundred eggs in it, and refill it with sand, the same as they have been doing for millions of years. After the turtles hatch, instinct draws them to the sea. As they emerge from the sand, predators, lying in wait, devour them. Most die; few survive. Only one in a thousand survive the journey. It is a heart wrenching thing to watch but there is no morality here, no overarching narrative, not even a guarantee that just one would make it. There is only life and death and survival of the fittest. This is nature. As Paul would say, the earth abides. The earth is blind to suffering and justice and happy endings.

A part of him believes his family is alive. He pictures Mary, hiding alone in a closet, scared and crying for her mommy and daddy; the image almost physically rips the heart out of his chest. If she is alive, she is a needle in a burning stack of needles. He would not know where to look and he knows that he would not survive five minutes on the streets without the protection of the other survivors and their big fighting vehicle. One in a thousand survive: They are innocent but so few make it and the rest are culled and there is no reason for any of it. He cannot believe his family is dead even though the rational part of his mind knows that this must be true. Ethan understands that he will spend the rest of his life being broken, stuck in the past, unable to say goodbye.

The lights cut out; the soldiers have turned off the power for the night. He becomes aware that he is on his feet pacing, drinking straight out of the bottle in long, painful gulps, his vision blurry with tears. His organs feel like they are in free fall. Ethan coughs on a mouthful of wine, vaguely aware that his right hand is bleeding and alarmingly swollen and throbbing with pain. My family is dead. It suddenly feels good to scream. What did my little girl think when the Infected beat her to death? He becomes aware of other people in the room. An LED lantern being turned on. He throws the bottle.

Did she feel any pain?

Voices cursing.

Did she wonder where her daddy was?

Hands on him, pushing him down.

Was she still alive when they started eating her?

Voices pleading.

WHY, WHY, WHY—?

Ethan lies on the bed screaming, his eyes wide, arching his back against the hands holding him down. His consciousness swims through a haze of guilt and rage, briefly focusing on Anne’s face, hovering overhead, just before he feels a jab in his arm and his vision fades to black.