The Infection

by Craig DiLouie

  Something like candles, on the other hand, would be perfect.

  “So what are you supposed to be?”

  He turns and blinks in surprise as he realizes the girl is talking to him. Time slows as their eyes connect. His heart takes a sudden flying leap. She is a petite fiery thing, her skin white as a sheet, with long, curly red hair that rages about her head like a lion’s mane. She looks about fifteen or sixteen, which is his own age. She has a sly mouth and a button nose and laughs easily, her blue eyes sparkling, betraying an appealing brand of feminine insanity.

  “I’m Todd,” he says instantly.

  “I’m Erin,” she says. “I asked you what you’re doing.”

  “I’m going to be a merchant,” he tells her. “I have some stuff I’d like to sell.”

  “Really? You should definitely hire me, then.”

  Todd laughs. “And why should I do that?”

  “You’re new. I can show you how things work around here so you don’t get conned.”

  He stops laughing. “How do you know I’m new here?”

  Erin flashes him a glance that tells him she thinks it is obvious. “Do you know about the gangs? They will try to collect a tax from you.”

  “How much should I give them?”

  “Nothing, you dodo bird,” she says. “It’s just a con. If the sellers paid every gang, there would be no market. They can’t really do anything to you. The sellers look out for each other, and everybody here is armed to the teeth. Now aren’t you glad I told you that?”

  “Yeah,” he admits.

  “You need somebody,” she points out. “Every day you have to collect water and firewood and cook your food. Once a week you pick up your rations and they let you take a shower. That doesn’t leave much time to be a seller. All these sellers have somebody helping them out.”

  He has to agree she makes a good argument.

  “You could do all that for me?” he asks her.

  She shrugs. “I’m doing it anyway for me. Might as well try to get paid.”

  “And what do you want in return?”

  Erin smiles as she leans in close, making his heart pound.

  “I want in on the action,” she whispers close to his ear.

  ♦

  The school gym is hot and crowded and noisy. The tired volunteers and professional bureaucrats manning the tables feverishly write and type information that nobody will read and hand out poorly mimeographed information that few will actually use. The main thing people seem to come here for is decisions, but they appear to be in short supply. After days of working the system to try to find his family, Ethan is beginning to see the processing center as a flea market for dying government. One big going-out-of-business sale. Waiting for his number to be called again by the records people, he wanders among the tables, finally pausing in front of a clean-cut young man under a U.S. flag and a sign that says ask me about resettlement.

  “Would you like to hear about Resettlement?” the man suddenly asks him.

  Ethan shrinks back, shaking his head.

  “It’s all part of the President’s policy for a Fresh Start,” the man says. He is clean shaven and wears a business suit with a neatly ironed white shirt and blue tie. “When the pandemic is over, we’re going to have to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. This means people who still have assets out there, somewhere, will recover them. Those who have lost everything will be given the means to start a new life. This is Resettlement in a nutshell.”

  “You’re going to do what, then? Tell me where to live?”

  “Only if you sign up,” the man says with a smile. “If you enroll in the Resettlement Program, we will match you with a good community and give you a job as close to your old profession as possible, respecting of course your preferences, special needs such as any health problems, and surviving social networks. But of course the final decision is yours.”

  Ethan laughs. “And the incentive is you’re going to give everybody a house and a car?”

  “Whatever you need to start a new life.”

  “How can the country afford this?”

  “The nation is filled with dispossessed property, sir, previously owned by individuals and corporations. Property owned by individuals who die intestate will be passed on to the nearest surviving heirs in accordance with state and local laws. But in cases where there are no identifiable heirs, the property will escheat to the Federal government for redistribution.”

  “My God,” Ethan says.

  The man behind the table is talking about a massive seizure of property on an unprecedented scale, to be distributed to the survivors.

  “Not God,” the man says. “The Wade Act.”

  This Wade Act will conflict with numerous state and local laws. With the amount of power and assets on the table, it might even be enough to trigger a civil war.

  Ethan does not care about any of this, however.

  “I’m here trying to find my missing family,” he tells the man.

  “Resettlement is about looking to the future, but there will be a full accounting. Every person, every dollar, every asset. If your family is alive, you will find them and you will be able to live together again under Resettlement.”

  “Good,” Ethan says.

  “Just fill out these forms,” the man says brightly, holding out a clipboard.

  “Let me ask you a question first.”

  “Of course.”

  “You mentioned a full accounting. How full will that accounting be?”

  “The fullest.”

  “I’m speaking of the dead. We all have blood on our hands.”

  “Don’t ask, don’t tell, sir,” the man smiles, still holding out the clipboard.

  Ethan stares at it longingly.

  “Perhaps later,” he says.

  The man frowns, dropping the clipboard back on the table.

  Ethan adds, “Sorry.”

  “You know, we will survive this,” the man tells him. “It’s okay to hope.”

  Ethan says, “Not yet it isn’t.”

  ♦

  Mobs of people, angry, shell-shocked, dressed in filthy clothes, wander among the densely packed tents and shanties built on grass long trampled into dust.

  Ray says this place is going to blow.

  “It’s fucked up, but it works— barely,” he says. “And for now. You know the old saying about America being three days away from a revolution? Here, it’s a matter of hours.”

  Wendy nods. “What are the biggest community problems?”

  Ray laughs. “Everything. Wendy, we got people packed in here like sardines. The place is an open sewer that serves gruel for breakfast, lunch and dinner. We have to truck in clean water for half the camp. Outside resupply is obviously touch and go. Then there’s the constant threat of fire, disease and of course Infection. Everybody’s carrying a gun. We got gangs, prostitution, drugs, con games, rapes, murders, suicides, you name it. All right?”

  Just two weeks ago, this place did not exist. There was a sleepy small town here in the middle of eastern Ohio. Outlying farms. Open fields and woods. All of it now absorbed into a camp with the same population as Independence, Missouri and the poverty of Calcutta.

  “I get the picture,” she says.

  “Don’t worry about them. Worry about you. The main thing you got to realize is there are a lot of unhappy people in this place who had everything and now they have nothing. They are mad as hell and looking for somebody to blame. Every once in a while some asshole gets an itch to take a shot at a cop. So you keep a sharp eye out there.”

  “I will, Sergeant.”

  “My name is Ray. Use it. Dammit, Wendy, you should be calling the shots, not me.”

  “I’m just fine with the way things are, Ray,” she says. “So when does my training start?”

  The man snorts. “This is your training. You got a question?”

  “Okay. How are arrests processed for trial? Where is the courthouse?”

  “Stop right there
,” Ray says, taking off his grimy steelers cap and wiping sweat from his forehead. “I guess I need to explain a few things. Wendy, I know you were a cop back in the real world but this is the far side of the Moon. We just don’t have what you want here. It’s frontier justice. We’re holding this ground by force.”

  They approach long lines of people waiting for their turn to fill their jugs at a bright yellow water tanker guarded by a squad of kid soldiers with M16 rifles. A cloud of dust hangs over the scene. Ray changes the subject, pointing out landmarks on what will become her night beat—shower facilities, health tent, food distribution center, and a feeding center where new mothers can breastfeed and collect extra rations. The latrine area, a large battery of portable toilets, is especially dangerous at night. Women who come here after dark are often raped. Men, too, sometimes. As a result, many people drop their waste into the nearest canal, and sometimes fall in.

  “So what am I supposed to do if I see a crime?” she interrupts. “Just rough them up?”

  “If you want,” Ray says, placing a pinch of chew into his cheek. “Or you could take them to the Judge, who will probably give them hard labor such as shit disposal. They get an electronic bracelet that tags them. It’s pretty much the same punishment for any offense, so only bring in the hard cases you really want punished. The worst offenders get put outside the wall.”

  “What about proof? Is it just my word?”

  “Yup,” Ray says. “That’s how it is here. You got to understand, though, that our main role is not to solve and punish crimes. The locals mostly do that for us. The people here all watch out for each other. They usually know if somebody commits a crime, and sort it out themselves without our involvement. We’re not really in the justice business. Our job is to keep the peace.”

  “We’re not cops,” Wendy says, disgusted. “We’re armed thugs.”

  “Yup. You want out?”

  She does not even have to think about it.

  “No,” she says.

  “Our unit’s shift starts around sundown. Then we get to patrol a Third World shantytown in the dark for twelve hours. Memorize your beat, don’t get lost, don’t fall in the canals, don’t get killed. Especially don’t get killed. We need people like you, Wendy.”

  “I’m nothing special, believe me. Especially for this work.”

  Ray stops and spits a gob of tobacco juice into the dust. “You don’t understand. We need people like you to survive. Listen: One day this thing is going to end and things are going to get back to normal. To do that, we’re going to need people who can remember what normal was and can make things right again. There are not many cops walking the earth right now. Every time one dies, all those memories of how things used to be dies with them.”

  “I’ll live, Ray. I survived out there for weeks. I’ll make it in here. This is nothing.”

  “Just know the original cops in this town were good men and they died trying to hold this place when it was first being built. Not all of them died by the hands of the Infected.”

  Wendy smiles at him, touched by his concern.

  “I promise I’ll be careful,” she tells him.

  “You do that, Wendy,” Ray says, eyeing her sadly. “You do that.”

  Speakers mounted on poles in the area squawk, we are winning; ask what you can do to help, before screeching loudly and resuming a tinny rendition of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin.”

  ♦

  Paul leaves the FoodFair supermarket, dog tired and enjoying the night air after hours of handing out food packages, shifting boxes and mopping floors. The food distribution center has no air conditioning and keeping the camp supplied is hot, sweaty work. His tattered clerical uniform, recently cleaned and patched, is already getting ripe again. He could use a shave and a haircut. But he did good today. He digs into his pocket for his wilted pack of Winstons and lights one up, sighing. The cool air feels good and he is happy for the opportunity to finally rest. After his smoke, he will brush his teeth and hit the sack with the other workers, lying on his old bedroll with bags of rice as a mattress.

  The camp is still noisy but is slowly settling down for the night. The parking lot of the FoodFair is covered in tents and campers and people huddled around their cook fires. He takes another drag and exhales, enjoying the relative peace. He remembers that the last time he had a cigarette like this, Pittsburgh was on fire. The Infected streamed through the cars. He threw a Molotov. He cut somebody in half with his Remington. The Bradley roars in his head.

  He stills his mind with a short prayer of thanks that he remains alive to do this good and useful work. Maybe God does not want to listen, but being omnipresent, he cannot help but hear it.

  “Is that you, Paul?”

  Paul sees a figure sitting on a bench and approaches. It is Pastor Strickland, sitting with one hand cupped around the flame of a candle and the other holding an old photo.

  “Do you think it’s impossible to still love somebody who is Infected, brother?” Strickland asks him.

  “No,” Paul says. “I think it’s not only possible, but unavoidable.”

  The man smiles, wiping his eyes.

  “But they hate us in return,” Paul tells him. “That is the hardest thing to bear.”

  Strickland rubs tears from his eyes with the palm of his hand. “The love is just as hard.” He adds, “You did good work today, Paul.”

  “Thank you.”

  “This means something to you, doesn’t it? The work, I mean.”

  “It’s the only way I know how to be me,” Paul answers, surprising himself with the sudden insight. He wants to think about it more, but his tired mind cannot hold onto the threads.

  “There will be a march within the next few days,” Strickland says. “A march of Christians trying to make things right around here. There’s more that can be done working together than by one man alone. You might want to give a listen to what they have to say. I’ll be there, too.”

  Paul slaps the back of his neck to kill a mosquito. “I’ll do that.”

  They pass the next few moments in silence. Paul finishes his smoke and grinds it out on the asphalt with his boot. Strickland blows out his candle. A dog howls in the distance.

  “Can I tell you something, brother?” the pastor says quietly in the dark. “Can I speak to you as a man of the cloth? Will you hear a short confession?”

  “Of course.”

  “I always wondered if you could be a Christian and cry at a funeral. I mean, if somebody is going to heaven, shouldn’t we be celebrating? It’s the same here. The world is dying. Why are we so sad? Why do we cling to this miserable life? Maybe this is it, Paul. Maybe the Lord is calling us all home. If so, why do we resist the call? Why are we fighting God’s will? And why does it feel so horrible? Why does it taste like ashes? Why does it fill us with sadness?”

  Paul has no answer, but he understands the essential question. He has asked himself the same question repeatedly in the past.

  “I don’t know,” he says.

  Sara would have an interesting answer, he is sure. His mind flashes to the battle between the Infected and the mob and what happened after the Infected overran the last knot of fighters: sketchy images of himself walking down the road, returning home to his wife. But he cannot remember what happened after that.

  He is beginning to worry that he may have killed her.

  ♦

  Ethan runs between the shanties, his finger itching and throbbing. He hears his pursuers shouting to each other. He believes he has lost them.

  It happened suddenly.

  The woman was telling him that the Marines had landed in New Jersey when her friends noticed what he was wearing.

  He still wore scrubs from the hospital—the pants, anyway.

  They thought he was a doctor.

  Ethan spent the last few days at the processing center trying to locate his family, sleeping on the floor and living on handouts. The arrangement was not so bad. The school still has electricity and plumbin
g, the government’s way of demonstrating its strength. In some ways, he has been living in luxury compared to many people in the camp.

  They sat on folding chairs, fanning themselves with their cardboard numbers. The woman told him she heard the Marines had landed in New Jersey.

  He had already heard the rumor several times while waiting in the processing center. The Marines established bases along the coasts and the Army was striking inland, reinforcing the refugee camps and using them as forward operations bases in the campaign to retake the country.

  It sounded a bit wishful, to say the least.

  If it’s true, then where are they, why aren’t they here? Ethan asked, and didn’t bother listening to the answer. Rumors about the Army held no interest for him. All that mattered was the search.

  While the woman continued talking, he began to notice how attractive she was. He realized that he could always move on. He could find somebody else and start a new family.

  He did not want to do that. What was it Paul said to him when they talked about the people who left behind photos of their loved ones? I wouldn’t even know how, he said when asked if he could ever let go of those he left behind. Right.

  Thinking about Paul triggered memories of hours sitting in the dim, hot belly of the Bradley fighting vehicle, rolling through a dying city on screaming treads.

  The memory made him feel oddly homesick.

  Ethan was wondering how the other survivors were coping when the woman’s friends approached. They noticed he was wearing scrubs and asked if he was a doctor. They had a sick friend and they were there to try to get him placed on the list for surgery—a service provided only to the most needy cases in this time of scarcity, as so many medical professionals were either killed or infected in the first days of Infection. The hospital sent them here, only to be told by the government to return to the hospital.