Zombies: More Recent Dead

The Afflicted Matthew Johnson

In the end I managed a bit of sleep, wedged between the trunk and branches of the oak, before dawn came. My knees and elbows ached as I lowered myself to the ground and I could feel a blister forming on my shoulder where the strap of my .30-06 Winchester had rubbed against my oilskin all night. I went over the previous day’s events in my mind, walking myself carefully through every mundane moment from when I woke up to when I climbed into the tree to sleep; then I looked down at my watch, waited for the minute to turn over and started to rattle off words that started with L: life, leopard, lizard, loneliness . . . Twenty words and thirty seconds later I took a breath and started down the train tracks.

It was about an hour’s walk to the camp, my last stop on this circuit. The clearing was packed with tents, their walls so faded by years of sun I could hardly make out the FEMA logo on the side; here and there ripped flaps of nylon fluttered in the breeze. The camps, cramped to begin with, were made even tighter by the lean-tos that had been built to expand the tents or shore them up, so that in places I had to turn sideways to squeeze my way toward the center of the camp.

As I got deeper into the camp, pale figures began to emerge from the tents, most of them dressed in filthy pajamas and bathrobes and nearly all bearing scars or fresh wounds on whatever flesh was exposed. I kept my .30-06 at my side and quickened my pace as they began to shuffle after me on slippered feet.

A single tent stood in the middle of the camp, as worn as the rest but bearing a faded Red Cross logo. When I reached it, I turned around and shrugged out of my backpack one arm at a time. All the narrow paths that led here were now blocked by the shambling forms that had come out of the tents: they paused as they reached the clearing, watching me carefully as I cradled my rifle.

After a few moments, one of them stepped forward. He was bald, save for a fringe of white hair, and he had a bloody gash down the side of his face. Unlike most of the others he was still in reasonably good shape, his skin the color of a walnut. I leveled my rifle at him; he took another shambling step and then stopped.

“Hey, Horace,” I said. I gestured at the cut on his face. “That looks bad.”

He shrugged. “There’s worse off than me.”

“I know,” I said, lowering my rifle, “but we’ll start with you. Then you tell me who’s worst off.”

He looked back at the others. “There’s a lot that are bad off, Kate,” he said. “How long do you have today?”

I leaned the rifle in a spot where I could reach it in a hurry if I needed to. “You’re my only stop.”

He nodded, though he knew as well as I did that even in a full day I only had time to see the very worst off. Their affliction aside, my patients’ age and the conditions they lived in meant that each of them had a host of issues for me to deal with. I counted on Horace to keep an eye on who was seriously injured, who had developed anything infectious, and who was showing signs of going end-stage. Everything else—minor illnesses and injuries, the frequent combination of scurvy and obesity caused by their diet of packaged food—I couldn’t even hope to treat.

I glanced up at the sky, saw just a few white clouds. “Let’s set up outside today,” I said. “Sunshine and fresh air ought to do everyone some good.”

“Sure. At least we’ve got plenty of those.” Horace gestured to two of the waiting patients and they came up to the tent, giving me a wide berth, and hauled out the exam bed. He turned to the others. “You might as well get on with your day. I’ll come get you when she’s ready for you.”

A few of the waiting patients wandered off when he said this, but most stayed where they were. The line was mostly silent, with little chatter: the camp residents were used to isolation, many of them only coming out of their tents when I visited or to take care of bodily necessities.

I patted the exam table and Horace sat down on it stiffly. I unzipped one of the pockets on my backpack, drawing out my checkup kit, then held his wrist in my hand to take his pulse and slipped the cuff around his arm and inflated it. “Any cough?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Little bit now and then,” he said. “I used to smoke. Guess I’m better off now, huh?”

I nodded. A lot of my patients were former smokers: when they were kids everyone had been, and they had grown up watching cigarette ads on TV. I got the TB kit and a pair of gloves out of my pack, pulled on the gloves, and tapped a syringe of PPD into his forearm. “Let’s hope it’s just that,” I said.

He scowled. “Does it matter?” he asked.

I shook my head. “TB’s a bad way to go. You remember how this works?”

He nodded.

“Tell me anyway.”

“Watch where you pricked me for three days. If there’s a spot, stay out of camp until you get back.”

“Good. Hey, do you remember what we were talking about last time I was here? You never finished that story.”

“You wanted to know how Adele and I met. Right?” I nodded. “Well, she used to work in the corner store. I would go in every day to buy something, just to see her. Of course all I could afford was a Coke, so she started to wonder—”

I reached out to tap him on the lips, right under his nose, and nodded with relief when he didn’t react. “Horace, that thing you pull to open a parachute—what’s that called?”

“It’s a—damn it, that’s, I know it . . . ” He closed his eyes, frowning. “I don’t remember.”

“Never mind,” I said. “How’d you get the cut?”

He was silent for a moment. “You know how it is.”

I opened a steri-wipe and washed his wound; he flinched as I ran my fingers along the edges of the cut. “Does it hurt?”

He shrugged, gritting his teeth and hissing as I pressed a chitosan sponge into the wound and then covered it with plaskin, running my fingers along the edge to make the seal. He jerked his head suddenly and I pulled my hand back. “What is it?” I asked. “Did I hurt you?”

“Rip cord!” He broke into a broad grin. “Rip cord. Right?”

“That’s good, Horace,” I said. “No progression since last time. Anybody else I should know about?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your cut,” I said. “Those are bite marks. Who was it?”

“Jerry,” he said after a moment. “He didn’t—I didn’t know he’d gone end-stage.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. One of the things that makes the affliction so terrifying is how rapidly and unpredictably it can progress, smoldering like an ember in some and burning like a brush fire in others. That’s why it has to be dealt with when the first symptoms surface, when they’re still the parents and grandparents we had known in spirit as well as in body. “I don’t suppose he’s in the dog cage?”

Horace shook his head. “Ran off. Guess he’s out in the woods somewhere.” He was quiet for a moment. “Am I going to . . . will I . . . ?”

For a moment I said nothing, trying not to look him in the eyes. The fact is that nobody knows for sure what causes the affliction, or even how it spreads: it could be that it’s lurking in all of us, waiting for us to grow old. It seemed to me that the ones who had friends or spouses in the camps stayed well longer—but when one went, the others almost always followed soon.

“I can tell that’s paining you,” I said. “Say no to a little morphine?”

“I guess not.”

“Arms up, then,” I said, and fished out a syringe. He held his arms up in front of him so that the sleeves of his bathrobe fell to reveal his bare forearms. I drew a finger over his papery skin, tapped the syringe on a good vein. “How does that feel? Better?”

“One of those and I don’t feel much of anything,” he said. He took a breath, then smiled weakly. “What do you suppose two would do for me? Or three?”

“I don’t aim to find out,” I said.

“Damn it, Kate—if I’d gone end-stage, you wouldn’t hold a moment’s thought before you dropped me.”

I shook my head. “I’ll put down an animal in pain, but you’re still a man.”

“You won’t feel that way when you’re my age.”

Even just the worst cases took most of the day, and after that I still had the public health work—checking that the rain barrels storing the water supply weren’t contaminated, and that the honey buckets were being emptied far enough from the camp—so it was already dark when I finished up, and too late to head to my cabin. I crashed in the Red Cross tent, sleeping on the exam table.

The next morning I rose a bit after dawn and started back to the tracks. My joints were stiff from being on my feet the day before, my skin itched sympathetically from all the scabies cases I had seen, and my stomach was still leaden with the camp ice cream—sugar, wild berries, and Crisco whipped together—one patient had insisted on giving me. (Crisco is a big part of camp cooking, which goes a long way toward explaining the chronic obesity in the camps; the other factor is that, for the most part, the residents have absolutely nothing to do, no motivation even to get out of their tents. The end-stagers, of course, don’t have access to the camp food and usually become malnourished soon after they turn.)

Once I had finished my self-check I headed off again, along the train tracks. When I was about halfway to the station I saw that someone else had broken a trail out from the tracks, into the woods: there were a lot of confused footprints in the mud there, and what looked like blood on some thorns. I followed the trail for a little while, keeping a careful pace, then sped up when I heard the shrieks.

The trail led me into a small clearing in the shade of a tall willow. A man and two women, all clearly end-stage, were standing at the foot of the tree. There was a tension among the three of them, like cats facing off over a fallen baby bird, and when I got a bit nearer I could see the cause: a young girl, maybe ten years old, was up in the tree.

I fished my glasses out of my coat pocket, put them on, and then raised the .30-06 to my shoulder. The broad trunk of the tree made it hard for me to line up my shots, and I was worried that dropping the first one would break the tension between them and send the other two up the tree after the girl.

“Are you all right?” I called to her. The end-stagers turned at the sound but stayed where they were, still eyeing each other carefully.

“Who’s there?”

“My name is Kate. I’m here to help you. What’s your name, honey?”

“I’m Sophie,” the girl said after a moment.

The end-stagers were starting to fidget, my presence disrupting the tension that had been holding them back. Whatever I was going to do, I had to do it soon. “How old are you, Sophie?”

“I’m, I’m eleven years old,” she said. “Can you get me down?”

“I will, honey, but first I need you to climb higher up. Can you do that? I need you to climb as high as you can.”

“I’m—I don’t like going high.”

I lowered my rifle slowly, aiming just short of the end-stager nearest to me. “Go as high as you can, Sophie. It’s really important.”

She started to squirm upward, hugging the thick branches tightly. “Is this high enough?”

“High as you can.” I kept a close eye on the three end-stagers as she rose, watching to see if any of them would make a break for her or for me. When one of them took a step I fired, sending a shot into the ground next to the male. The crack of the rifle made him jump and destroyed the last of his self-restraint: he started to climb up after the girl, now heedless of the other two. They followed him, more intent now on denying him the prize than on getting it for themselves, and I forced myself to breathe slowly as all three of them went up the trunk. “I can’t go any higher!” Sophie shouted.

The male had almost reached her when I was finally able to line the three of them up: I hit him high in the back, just below his neck, and he toppled backward, knocking into one of the others as he fell. By the time I had recovered from the recoil I had the next round chambered and was trying to get a bead on the second one. She was clinging to the tree trunk, frozen between rising higher and heading after me, and I forced myself to slow down and take aim.

I usually prefer body shots—a head shot is better if you make it, but there’s too much risk of missing entirely—but she was a difficult target, rail-thin and wearing a ratty brown housecoat that faded into the tree bark, so I had to aim for her white hair. I peered down the rifle sight, took a slow breath in, and then let it out as I squeezed the trigger: a burst of red covered the old woman’s head and she slumped, sliding down the tree trunk.

The third one, the heavy woman, had been chewing on the male that had fallen on her, but the sound of my gunshot made her look my way: a few moments later she was up and heading toward me in a stumbling run. She was faster than I had expected and blurred as she neared me. I peered over my glasses to get her back in focus and then fired; the shot took her in the stomach, a fair bit left of center, and turned her to the side but didn’t stop her. I chambered another round, squinted, and fired again. My aim was better this time and she fell, first to her knees and then onto her face.

I began to cough, fighting to keep a bead on the fallen end-stager as I gagged and finally spat up a mouthful of greasy vomit. I wiped my mouth with my sleeve and then looked around, hoping the noise hadn’t drawn any other company.

“Are you okay?” Sophie called from up in the tree. “Can I come down now?”

“Just take a look around first. Can you see anyone else?”

“No,” she said after a few seconds. “There’s just you.”

“Okay, come on down.”

“Okay.” She didn’t move for a minute or so, then started to inch slowly down the trunk. “Are they—are they all dead?”

I took off my glasses and moved toward the tree. The woman I had hit in the head was gone, but the man was still breathing: I slung my rifle over my shoulder, drew my knife, and rolled him over with my foot. He was better dressed than many of them, in heavy green cotton pants and a blue checked shirt instead of a gown or pajamas: I remembered him telling me that before coming to the camp he had lived on his own, rather than in a home. His skin was thin like an onion’s, and white where it wasn’t covered with scratches and bruises. My knees protested as I crouched down and slit his throat.

The girl dropped the last few feet and landed next to me. After a moment she threw her arms around my waist; I reached around her and drew her close, feeling her shake as she sobbed silently. “It’s all right,” I said quietly, and after a few minutes she stepped back, leaving a trail of snot and tears on my oilskin.

She looked from side to side, over her shoulder and then back at me. “Thank you,” she said.

“It’s all right,” I said again. She was dressed in dark blue jeans that showed little wear, a T-shirt, bright red fleece, a yellow plastic windbreaker over that and red sneakers covered in little stickers and doodads. There was some bark and leaf litter stuck to her, but her shoes were mostly clean: she hadn’t been in the woods for long. “How did you get here, honey?”

“I was on the train,” she said. “I was going to live with my uncle and his wife and his kids.” She looked straight at me for a moment, then glanced away. “I was by myself. My grandma . . . ”

“So what happened?”

“I was . . . we were going around a bend and something bumped the train. I got knocked into a door and it just opened. I tried to wave at the train but it was too far away by the time I got up and my phone doesn’t work here.”

“We’re a ways from the tracks.”

“I got lost. I guess I should have stayed by the tracks, but I didn’t know how long it was going to be until the next train came, and I thought if I got higher up I could maybe get a signal on my phone. Then those—those people found me and when I knew what they were I went up the tallest tree I could find.” She paused for a breath. “I’d been up there since yesterday.”

“Are you okay to walk?” I asked. “We need to get you someplace safe.”

She nodded. “Where are we going?”

“I’m going to take you to the Ranger station. They have a radio—they can let the next train know to stop for you.”

“How far is it?”

I shrugged. “A bit more than a day.”

I handed her a handful of dry breakfast biscuits. She took a bite of one, chewed it slowly, swallowed, and said “Thanks.”

“No problem,” I said. “I can stock back up when we get to the station.”

“No, I mean—thanks. For what you’re doing. I didn’t—I didn’t think there was anyone, I mean anyone not—you know, anyone not sick out here.” She was silent for a moment. “What—why are you out here? Are you—”

“No,” I said. I ran my hand through my hair, held it out so she could see the gray starting to speckle the black. “Not yet, anyway.”

“So do you—do you, like, hunt them or something?”

I shook my head. “That was—I try not to do that. Unless I have to.”

“Then why are you here?”

I slung my rifle over my shoulder. “I’m a nurse.”

At first they thought the homes were the vector. The affliction had spread all through them by the time anybody noticed it; the upticks in violence and dementia were noted but unremarked upon, hardly unusual in the overcrowded facilities, the larger pattern only visible if you saw what was happening with your own eyes. By that point nearly all the work was automated, done either by social robots or remote workers; few homes had more than the one Nurse of Record the law demanded.

So they emptied the homes, setting up the tent cities in National Park campgrounds across the country. None of us who had worked in the homes had shown any symptoms, but that didn’t matter. Whether or not we were infected, or infectious, we were seen as tainted—and few of us could find many reasons to disagree with that judgment. So we were each given a choice: a comfortable quarantine, or life in the camps with our former patients. I never found out what any of the other nurses chose, but I can’t imagine many of those quarantine apartments were ever occupied.

It wasn’t long after I had moved into my cabin that cases began showing up outside of the homes, and everyone over sixty became a presumed latent and carrier. There was never any word about bringing us back, though, just the intermittent shipments of food and medicine and the trains carrying more and more of the afflicted.

It was maybe an hour before she started talking again: just small talk at first, like what my last name was and where I had come from, and telling me a little bit about her life. When she talked about herself I let her lead: I didn’t know yet whether her past had made her resilient or if she was just riding on shock and adrenaline, and I couldn’t afford to let her crash.

We reached the tracks in good time and followed them east, toward the Ranger station; after an hour or so I stopped.

“What is it?” she asked.

I held a finger to my lips, turned around slowly. “Someone’s tracking us,” I said quietly.

“Oh,” she said after a second. “Do you—is it one of the, the end-stagers, do you think?”

I raised my rifle and began to turn slowly from left to right, watching for movement in the trees. “I don’t think so,” I said. “Whoever it is has been following us since you came down from the tree. End-stagers don’t have that kind of attention span.”

Sophie put a hand on my arm: when I glanced at her I saw that she wasn’t looking at me, or in the direction my rifle was pointed, but just to the right. Her grip tightened as I turned.

“Sophie,” I said, “did anyone else fall off that train?”

For a long moment nobody said anything; then there was a rustling in the bushes, right where I was pointing my rifle. I kept my finger near the trigger but waited as I heard Sophie’s breathing get faster and faster. After a few seconds a woman stepped out from behind a tree, dressed in black pants and a jean jacket. Her black hair had hints of white in it, like mine, only hers was white at the roots.

“Don’t,” Sophie said in a tiny voice.

I took a breath, kept her in my sights. “Are you with her?” I asked.

“Yes,” the woman said.

“She’s my grandma,” Sophie said. “You’re right. She was on the train with me.” She pulled harder at my arm. “Please don’t shoot her.”

“I won’t,” I said, though I didn’t lower my rifle. “What’s your name?”

“Peggy. Perkins.” She raised her hands. “I just—I just wanted to make sure Sophie was all right.”

“You shouldn’t have been on that train,” I said. I glanced at Sophie, then back at Peggy. “They found out, didn’t they?”

Peggy nodded. “I couldn’t stop her,” she said. “They were holding me, and then she just jumped off the train. I didn’t want . . . ”

There was silence for a moment as she trailed off. I turned to Sophie. “That was a very, very foolish thing to do,” I said. “Your grandma is . . . she can’t come with us.”

“No,” Sophie said. “I couldn’t. I can’t just leave her alone.”

“Your grandma is sick, Sophie,” I said. “She can’t get on the train with you, and they won’t let her into the Ranger station.”

Sophie crossed her arms. “Then I don’t want to go,” she said. She scowled, her jaw quivering, and tears were appearing in the corners of her eyes.

Peggy crouched down to look Sophie in the eyes. “Honey, you have to,” she said, then turned her head to look up at me. “But I’m not sick yet. I can come with you—as far as the Ranger station. To help keep her safe.”

I took a breath. “What’s the last meal you ate on the train?”

Peggy frowned. “I don’t—”

“I need to know how far along you are. Do you remember what the last thing you ate on the train was?”

She stood up and closed her eyes for a moment. “Ham and cheese sandwich,” she said. I watched Sophie’s expression, to see if she remembered the same thing. “Little crackers, but I didn’t eat them; Sophie had mine.”

“All right,” I said. “Give me five words that start with R, fast as you can.”

“Rainbow. Rutabaga. Rooster. Red . . . Red light.”

I nodded, then reached out to tap her on the lips. She drew back but made no other response. “Okay,” I said. “You’re not showing any definite symptoms yet. But this thing can go very, very quickly.”

Peggy’s whole body relaxed as she let out a breath. “I promise, I—if you ever think I’m a danger to her, I’ll just . . . go away, I’ll go into the woods and never come back.”

“If you turn,” I said, “I’ll put you down myself.”

We walked for the rest of the day, mostly in silence. Sophie stayed close to Peggy; I felt an absurd jealousy as she held her grandmother’s hand and cast occasional glances up at her. We got back to the train tracks after another hour or so, and followed them westward until it began to get dark. I found a suitable tree to sleep in, and after a meager supper of jerky and biscuits, we made our way into its branches.

When I woke up I was alone: Sophie wasn’t on her branch, though the bungee cord that had held her there lay on the ground. I loosened my own cord and carefully lowered myself to the ground. My knee locked as I touched: I took a half-dozen deep breaths, straightened my leg and looked around. There was no sign of either of them, nor any sound but the usual noise of the forest in the morning.

“Sophie?” I called quietly. I started back to the tracks, just a few yards away, then stopped when I heard a noise coming from behind me.

“It’s us,” Sophie called. She emerged from the brush with Peggy trailing behind. Sophie was holding her windbreaker in her hands. “We went to get berries. For breakfast.”

“I suppose it wasn’t a very good idea,” Peggy said, “but I made sure she stayed close.”

“No, it’s all right,” I said. “I was just . . . ” I reached up to rub my eyes. “Did you find any?”

Sophie held the hood of her windbreaker up to me: it was about half full of tiny wild raspberries and blackberries. “Look,” she said.

“We had a cottage when she was little,” Peggy said. She shrugged. “Back before . . . ”

We divided the berries between us, and then the remaining breakfast biscuits; Sophie tucked her last one in the pocket of her windbreaker and then looked at her grandmother, who put on a smile.

“Is there any way I can take some of that?” Peggy asked when I lifted my pack.

I shook my head. “It’s all right.”

“We might go faster.”

“I don’t remember you having to wait for me yesterday,” I said.

“No, I know. I just meant I’d like to, well, carry my weight.”

I looked over at Sophie: she was watching us carefully, an expression of concern on her face. “Sure,” I said. I separated the zipsack from my backpack, reached inside to take out the box of cartridges, and then handed the sack to her. She swung it over one shoulder as we headed off, first going back to the train tracks and then following them to the Ranger station. I kept my hand on my rifle and watched the woods.

“Hey, I see smoke,” Sophie said, pointing ahead of us. “Is that the station?”

I could just see the station’s fence and gate, and beyond that a wisp of smoke rising up into the air. “We’re almost there,” I said. “They wouldn’t usually have a fire this time of year, though.”

“Do you think something’s wrong?” Peggy asked.

I held up my hand, then reached into my jacket pocket for my glasses. Once I had them on I could see that the gate across the tracks was open.

“Get off the tracks,” I said, looking back at them. “Come on, now.”

“Is there a train coming?” Peggy asked as she stepped carefully over the rail. “Don’t they blow a, you know, make a noise? So you know they’re coming?”

“Yeah, they do,” I said. “But maybe . . . ” I waited for a minute, glancing back and forth between the station and the woods. Suddenly my pack felt very, very heavy.

“What are we going to do?” Sophie asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t understand—they wouldn’t open the gate except to let a train through, but that’s not long enough for . . . ” I turned to look at Peggy and Sophie. “You said your train stopped when they threw you off. How long?”

“I don’t know,” Peggy said, frowning. “Maybe ten, fifteen minutes.”

“Which way was it going?”

“To San Diego,” she said. “Why does it matter?”

“I think somebody else got on that train when you got off,” I said. I lifted my glasses and rubbed my eyes. “Not on the train, but hanging onto the outside. They must have seen that the trains could get through the fence.”

“So what happened to the Rangers?” Sophie asked. “Do you think they’re all . . . ?”

“I don’t know. I guess they might not bother closing the gate if the station was already compromised . . . ” I took a breath, folded my glasses and put them back in my jacket pocket. “We have to get to their radio so that we can tell someone about Sophie, get her out of here.”

“Couldn’t we just stay here, wait for the next train?” Peggy asked. “I’m sure if you explained . . . ”

I shook my head. “The trains that stop here don’t let people on,” I said. “You’re right about one thing, though. You’re staying here, but she has to come with me.”

“No,” Sophie said. She squeezed Peggy’s hand in hers. “I, I’ll come. I’m not scared, but Grandma has to come too.”

“I’m fine,” Peggy said. “That’s just, my mind is fine. A whistle, the word I was looking for is whistle. There, you see? You just forget things sometimes, at my age. Doesn’t that ever happen to you?”

“What did we have for breakfast, Peggy?” I asked.

“Berries,” she said.

“What kind of berries?”

She rolled her eyes. “It was . . . well, summer berries. What you pick in the summer, in brambles with, with prickers.” She looked away and then back at me: her face was red, her eyes glistening.

“There’s a camp just a few hours that way,” I said, pointing the way we had come and off to the left. “You’ll be all right there, and I’ll check on you when I can.”

“No,” Peggy said. “I’m not going. Not until she’s safe.”

For a moment I looked at the two of them standing together, then shrugged. “Fine,” I said. I slid open the bolt of my rifle, making sure there was a cartridge in the chamber. “Let’s go, then, while we’ve still got some light.”

“Should we wait till morning?” Peggy asked.

I shook my head. I had seen too many shapes moving in the bushes, heard too many footsteps and rustling branches. I chewed my lip for a moment, guessing at the distance between the gate and the station—a hundred yards, maybe? “Let’s get through that gate as fast as we can—I don’t want to get caught in a choke point.”

“I haven’t seen any—”

“They’re there,” I said, trying to keep my voice too low for Sophie to hear. “Maybe a lot of them.”

As we neared the gate I fought the urge to run: I could hear the end-stagers in the woods around us, feel their eyes on us as we passed through the narrow space. The fence around the Ranger compound was solid steel, with razor wire along the top to keep end-stagers from climbing over it. The open gate, just wide enough for a train to pass through, let us see glimpses of the other side but concealed much more. I slowed my pace as we reached the gate, letting my finger curl around the trigger of my rifle.

Sophie reached the gate and broke into a trot as she passed through, moving out of view. I caught up with her just as she ran into a man in dark clothes who had been moving in front of the gate on the other side. For a moment I thought he might be a Ranger, until I saw his white hair; he turned toward me and opened his mouth to reveal two rows of teeth, like a shark’s, perfectly white and gleaming.

I raised the barrel of my rifle, getting ready to shoot and run—the sound of the shot would surely bring all the other end-stagers from the woods—but before I could fire Sophie reached into the pocket of her windbreaker, pulled out the biscuit she had saved from that morning, and held it out to the man.

For a moment he just looked at her, his double teeth grinning obscenely; then he took the biscuit and began to chew it carefully, barely able to get it in his mouth. I stood there, watching as he chewed contentedly on the biscuit, and I saw that he was wearing dentures over his own teeth, which were sliding in and out of his mouth each time he moved his jaw.

After a few moments, Peggy tugged on my sleeve and led me away. The cabin was about fifty yards off the tracks, the firewatch tower a short distance beyond that. Once we had passed the chewing end-stager we broke into a run, crossing the distance between the tracks and the cabin as quickly as we could.

The outside of the cabin was not much different than it had been before it was repurposed—there was not much you could do to make a wall of stacked logs more defensible—but the windows and doors had been replaced with shatterproof Plexiglas and steel, the wood-shingle roof long gone in favor of aluminum. I used my momentum to launch myself up onto the cement platform that stood before the door, the only reminder of the screened porch that had once covered the whole front of the building. Peggy hesitated as she neared it and stumbled; Sophie slowed to help her, the two of them awkwardly levering themselves up onto the platform with their hands.

“Stay close,” I said. “We’re just going to find the radio and get out.”

“Don’t you know where it is?” Sophie asked.

“I’ve never been inside,” I said. I took a step back, raised my rifle and waved Peggy forward. “Push it open, then step away.”

“What if it’s locked?” Peggy said.

“Then we knock very politely and ask the Rangers to let us in,” I said, glancing back at the gate.

Sophie grabbed my arm as her grandmother stepped past us, putting a hand on the door handle and turning it tentatively. Peggy leaned into the heavy door, pushing it with her shoulder, and as she did I moved my sights off her and onto the opening doorway. Once she had it fully open I stepped in and then waved the others in after me. When they were both inside, Peggy released the door and it swung back, slamming shut with a heavy thud that made me wince.

The door led into a small foyer that opened into a larger room to the left. I stepped into the room and swung my rifle at the other three corners. Fading light from the window showed a brown leather couch, much-patched with silver duct tape, facing a fireplace on the far wall that held some smoldering logs: in front of it was a wagon-wheel coffee table, its glass top lying in shards on the floor all around, and an eyeless moose head hung on the wall above.

Peggy held her hand to her mouth. “That smell . . . ” she said.

“They’ve been here,” I said. An open doorway in the wall to our right led to a hallway, but it was too dark within to see anything. “Let’s hope they ran out of toys to play with.”

We crossed the room, stepping carefully to avoid the shards of glass, until we stood at the doorway. I took my flashlight from my jacket pocket and handed it to Sophie. “Stay right in front of me,” I said quietly.

“I should go first,” Peggy said.

I shook my head. “You’re too tall. I need to be able to shoot over her.”

She opened her mouth, shut it, and nodded. Sophie and I counted a silent one, two, three together and then stepped into the doorway, swinging the flashlight and rifle together to the left and then the right. There was a door, half-open, almost directly across from us, and another to the left of it; beyond that the left-hand hallway opened into a room that looked like it spanned the breadth of the cabin. To the right I could see three doors, all on the facing wall, before the corridor faded into darkness.

Peggy pressed against the back of my jacket, trying to squeeze into the doorway with us. “Which way?” she asked.

I nodded at the door across the hall and Sophie and I moved forward together. The wooden door swung inward as she kicked it. The room lit up as she pointed the flashlight inside, with mirror, tile, and porcelain bouncing the light back at us.

“Let’s try to the left,” I said. “It’s not as far from the front door in that direction—maybe we’ll get lucky.”

The smell we had noticed earlier grew stronger as we opened the next door on the left. It was a smell I had known before I ever came here: every home I ever worked in had it, no matter how hard it had been scrubbed.

The flashlight’s beam picked up a carpet, dresser, and two single beds, on each of which lay an unmoving body. I started to cover Sophie’s eyes with my hand, but the smell had already reached her: she spat up water and half-digested berries and dropped the flashlight onto the floor. It rolled into the room, and Sophie reached down to pick it up; as her hand closed on it, something seized her and pulled her forward. I took a step, trying to get a bead on the end-stager who had grabbed her, but Peggy rushed past me, knocking me to my knees. In the dim light I saw her grabbing Sophie’s other arm, pulling hard, and I heard Sophie scream.

I didn’t bother to stand but instead rose to one knee and tried to sight the end-stager. All I could see, though, was Peggy: she had knocked Sophie aside and leapt onto the one who had grabbed her, clawing at him with a savagery that was, I was sure, entirely foreign to her nature.

“Grandma?” Sophie asked.

Peggy turned back to us; her face was chalk-white, her eyes wild. I kept my rifle where it was, watching her carefully.

“Sophie, go,” I said. “The way we were going.”

Peggy looked from me to Sophie and then back again. She opened her mouth but remained silent, a perplexed look on her face. She took a step toward Sophie and my finger curled inward, touching the cold metal of the trigger.

“No,” Sophie said. “Don’t . . . ”

Peggy froze. I rose to my feet, keeping her in my sights. “We have to go now,” I said. I backed up toward the door, putting myself between Sophie and Peggy. Sophie reached from behind me and grabbed my arm, pulling it down until the .30-06 was pointed at the floor.

I took a step back out into the hall, still watching Peggy, and glanced to my left. Two end-stagers had emerged from the large room at the end of the corridor. One was a bald male in faded blue pajamas, his bare feet trailing blood; the other was a female dressed in just a dirty, pilly gray bra who had a halo of frizzy gray hair and little round bumps all over her body, like someone had slipped a sheet of bubble wrap under her skin.

“Go.”

Sophie looked at her grandmother for a moment before heading down the long corridor, the flashlight’s beam jumping around the walls as she ran. I took a step backward, trying to keep both Peggy and the two end-stagers within my arc of fire, then turned and ran after her. I could hear the male and female pick up their pace behind me and swore under my breath, cursing myself for triggering their instincts by running.

Sophie looked back at me, slowing her pace to let me catch up. We were already past the doorway to the room we had come in, so we ran until we could see the end of the hallway. There was a door on the left, just before the furthest wall; beyond it the hallway turned left, with a hint of light visible at its end. The exposed logs on our right showed that we were following the outer wall, and ahead of us we could see light coming through a transom over a wooden door. When we got closer, though, we saw that the door handle had been removed and nails driven through the door into the frame.

I took my jackknife from my pocket and tried to work the blade into the empty socket where the handle had been, thinking that if I could get the latch free I might be able to force the door open.

“Can you use your gun?” Sophie asked.

I took a step back and raised my rifle, aiming at where the handle had been. “I don’t know,” I said.

“No, the other end—bang it on the hinges.”

I nodded, then handed her my knife. “You keep working on the handle.” I slid open the bolt and let the cartridge fall to the ground, then turned the rifle around and slammed the butt into the upper hinge. I could see the screws pulling out of the frame, but just barely.

Sophie was kneeling in front of the door handle, trying to disengage the latch with the knife. She glanced behind us, saw the two end-stagers rounding the corner, and screamed.

“Just keep trying,” I said. “We can get out of this—”

When I moved to hit the hinges again, though, something was pulling the other way: I turned to see the bubble-wrap woman’s hands on the barrel. My finger went to the trigger, but by the time it had gotten there I remembered I had taken out the cartridge.

The bubble-wrap woman had both hands on the barrel now and was trying to pull the rifle away from me. The bald man crouched down, trying to creep past the woman and me to get at Sophie, who screamed again.

Suddenly the bald man’s head flew forward, slamming into the door. I glanced away from the woman to see Peggy stumbling back from where she had collided with him. The bubble-wrap woman looked at her, too, and that gave me enough of a chance to pull the barrel out of her grasp; I swung the stock forward and it hit her head with a crunch, knocking her back into the wall. Sophie was curled up into a ball, covering her face with her hands, but the bald man had forgotten about her and was struggling with Peggy, scratching her face with long, dirty fingernails.

I turned back to the hinge and hit it again, saw the ends of the screws come loose from the doorframe. “The doorknob,” I said to Sophie.

She moved her hands from her face, then froze as she saw her grandmother struggling with the bald man.

“Sophie, the doorknob,” I said again. “If you can get that, I think I can open it.”

She nodded and turned back to the door, sticking the point of the knife between the door and the frame. A few moments later the whole door moved slightly within the frame and I lowered the rifle, took a half-step back and slammed my shoulder into the door. The top half of the door pulled free of the nails holding it to the frame and with another slam the whole door came loose and fell onto the ground.

I stepped outside but Sophie didn’t follow. “Come on,” I said, but she was frozen. Peggy was still wrestling with the bald man, his teeth sunk into her shoulder as she punched him in the stomach. I took the box of cartridges from my pocket, loaded one into the rifle, and drew a bead on the man’s bald head. “Don’t look, Sophie,” I said, then pulled the trigger. The shot drove the man into Peggy, knocking them both over.

“Come on.” I grabbed Sophie’s wrist and pulled her after me. “There should be another radio up in the firewatch tower.”

“No,” Sophie said. “My grandma’s hurt.”

“Oh, honey,” I said. “She’s not your grandma anymore.”

Sophie said nothing as she moved to pull the dead end-stager off her grandmother. Peggy was in bad shape, but still moving; there were cuts and bruises all over her face, and bright red blood was oozing out of the tooth marks on her shoulder. I fumbled with another cartridge, loaded it into the chamber.

“Is she going to die?” Sophie asked.

I raised my rifle and tried to sight Peggy, who was rising stiffly to her feet. “Come on, Sophie,” I said. “Get away from her. We have to go.”

Sophie turned back to look at me, frowning deeply. “Is she going to die?”

“Yes,” I said. “Not right away, but yes, she probably is. Bite wounds are bad—they get infected, and the blood she’s lost is going to make it worse.”

“Tell me what to do. To help her.”

I took a step forward, nudging Sophie aside with the rifle barrel. Peggy looked up at me, silent, her face unreadable. “There’s nothing you can do to help her. Your grandma is gone.”

“No, she isn’t,” Sophie said. She turned to Peggy and looked her in the eyes. “You’re sick, I know that. But you aren’t going to hurt me, and I’m going to help you.”

Peggy’s ragged breathing slowed as Sophie held her, becoming more regular. After what felt like a long time I took a breath, looked right and left, and then dropped my rifle. I unshouldered my pack, took out some steri-wipes, two syringes of my moxifloxacin/clindamycin bite mix, and one of morphine. “Give me her arm,” I said.

Sophie took Peggy’s right hand in hers and straightened her arm. I found a good vein, wiped it clean and tapped the three syringes, one after the other. “That should help with infection,” I said. “Do you want to do the bandages?”

Sophie’s mouth quirked up into a tiny smile, and she nodded. “How do I do it?” she asked.

I handed her a steri-wipe, tore open a pack of chitosan sponges, and handed it to her. “Clean your hands first, then press these into each of the wounds.” I held my breath as she touched the first sponge to Peggy’s bite marks. “Careful, it might hurt her,” I said.

Peggy flinched as Sophie applied the sponges, but did not move. “Now what?” Sophie asked.

“Here,” I said, passing her the bandage. “Wrap this around the wounds five or six times, nice and tight.”

When she was done she looked back at me. “Is that it?”

“That’s everything we can do,” I said. I put a hand on her shoulder. “We have to go.”

She looked her grandmother in the eyes for another few moments, then stood and turned. “All right,” she said. “Let’s go.”

The firewatch tower stood a few hundred feet down a path past the cabin, silhouetted in the evening light. A narrow wooden staircase zigzagged inside the tower’s timber frame, up to the observation post and radio tower at the top.

I paused at the bottom of the staircase, letting Sophie go ahead of me as I watched to see if anyone was coming after us. Peggy was sitting where we had left her, watching us, more still than I had ever seen an end-stager. We climbed up carefully, the stairs creaking and groaning as we rose, and by the time we got to the top the sun had nearly set.

Sophie had said nothing since we started up the stairs. She stopped a few steps below the platform and looked down at me: the stairs reached the platform on the west side of the tower, so we could just see each other in the pale pink light of the setting sun. Down below I could see the whole Ranger compound and I understood why it had angered the end-stagers so much, looking so mockingly like a home.

“What do we do now?” she asked.

“Find the radio,” I said. “See if it still works.”

“And then?”

“We let people know you’re here.”

“Do you really think they’ll come and get me?”

I took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “We’ll tell them what happened. To the Rangers. They’ll have to do something about that, and . . . ”

After a few seconds she nodded and climbed up onto the platform. There was a small shed there, with a narrow walkway around it and a metal antenna on top. Sophie opened the unlocked door to the shed and we slipped inside.

The small room had an air of long disuse: the flashlight’s beam revealed a narrow cot, a folding wire-and-nylon chair, and a desk on which sat a pair of binoculars and a radio and microphone. The radio was old and bulky, a black box with a front panel covered with switches, and even before I reached the desk I knew it was broken. I flicked the on switch up and down a few times, but nothing happened.

Sophie sat down on the cot, saying nothing. I sat down next to her, and as I did the flashlight flickered and died. In the darkness I could hear her banging the butt-end of the flashlight; a few moments later I felt her shifting her weight and then a tiny blue square of light appeared in front of her, just enough for us to see each other’s faces.

“Hey, my phone works up here,” she said. “Two bars, that’s not bad. Should I . . . should I call somebody? Who should I call?”

“Nine one one, I guess,” I said. “That’s got to do something.”

We sat there a while longer, neither of us moving or speaking. “Are you going to come?” she asked finally.

“I can’t,” I said. “I’m here for good, like everyone else.”

“The Ranger that was . . . one of the ones in the room, she looked a lot like you. You could pretend you’re her. You could come with me.”

“No,” I said after a long moment. “I have too many people counting on me.” I took a breath. “More than I thought, maybe.”

Sophie nodded slowly. “I think I need to stay here too,” she said. “To take care of my grandma. And I think maybe you need someone to take care of you, too.”

“Maybe,” I said, and reached out to take her hand. She smiled, and then we both zipped our jackets and went to sleep sitting up.