The Infection

by Craig DiLouie

  ♦

  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 i
nside.

  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 th
ere, 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.”