“I might be able to take you to Steubenville,” Sarge says.
“What’s in Steubenville?”
“Bridges.”
“The Infected of Pittsburgh,” Ethan says, nodding.
“What are you guys talking about?” Todd says.
“That big fire that chased us out? It also chased out all the Infected,” Ethan explains. “They’re walking west, straight to the bridges. Straight to us. Right, Sarge?”
Sarge nods. “I’m leading a mission out there to blow the bridges. Specifically, the Veterans Memorial Bridge. Six lanes across the Ohio River.”
“You can’t help but hear them,” Paul adds. “They’ve been attacking the camp ever since we got here. The gunfire has become almost constant, day and night. After a while, it gets to be background noise. If they get inside, we’re done.”
“We’re the last refugees that made it to the camp from Pittsburgh,” Sarge says.
“Can the Infected swim?” Ray says.
“Our intelligence says they can’t,” Sarge tells him. “If we blow the bridges, they’ll be stopped cold at the river.”
“What they’ll do is go north and south.”
“That’s not our problem.”
Ray shrugs. “You’re right. It’s not.”
“The migration will be deflected and that’s all that counts as far as we’re concerned.”
“I want in,” Todd says. “Let me come, Sarge. Please.”
“I might as well join in, too,” Paul says, eyeing him hopefully. “I could be useful.”
Sarge shakes his head in mild disbelief. The truth is he would be happy to bring them on the mission. The boys he commands are good but they do not know what the survivors know. Frankly, he is surprised that they would want to leave the safety of the camp to go back into the jaws of the beast. And after just a few days, no less. Was it not the point of their journey together, after all—to find this sanctuary, and try to live a normal life?
“It’s going to be incredibly dangerous,” he tells them.
He remembers driving through Steubenville, the town eerily quiet. No sign of life, not even a dog barking. The Infected are there, all right. And with many of the Infected of Pittsburgh migrating west, the place is going to be swarming.
“I’m coming, too,” Wendy says from her cot.
“Wendy!” Todd says happily.
The men launch themselves to their feet as she stands painfully, visibly trembling, touching the back of her head and wincing. She shrugs off their hands and walks to where they were sitting, taking a place next to Sarge and accepting a drink of water in a plastic cup.
“Well, then I’m going, too,” Ray says.
“The hell you are,” Sarge growls. “You’re not one of us.”
“But she’s one of us. If she goes, I’m going. It’s that simple. I made a promise.”
“Yeah?” Sarge glares at him. “To who?”
“To a lot of fucking dead people,” Ray snaps back.
“Ray is coming with us,” Wendy rasps.
Sarge scowls but says nothing.
“Are you all sure about this?” he says.
“Yes,” the survivors murmur, looking down at their bowls.
“What about you, Wendy?”
“You were right,” Wendy says. “It’s not safe here for us.”
“Can you do it?”
“You’re not going without me.”
“All right,” he says.
The room falls silent as they consider their reasons for wanting to go.
“I hate it here,” Todd says finally.
Ethan says, “I actually love it. But I have to get to Harrisburg.”
“We’ll get you as far as we can, Ethan,” Sarge tells him.
“It will be good to get out of here for a few days,” Paul says. “Maybe I’ll go all the way to Harrisburg with you. This place is unclean. God doesn’t live here.”
“Where exactly does he live, Preacher?” Ray asks quietly.
“Where? Out there, friend. With them. They are his agents.”
“Get your sleep tonight,” Sarge tells them. “We’re training tomorrow. The morning after that, we’re going to drive out there and blow a hole in that bridge.”
He adds, “I hope this is what you want.”
FLASHBACK: Reverend Paul Melvin
He remembers seeing the half-eaten remains of the children defiling the altar of his church, blood running down its sides like the afterbirth of some grisly sacrifice to a pagan god. He remembers his shoes squishing on the wet carpet, stepping over the bodies of his congregation surrounded by clouds of buzzing flies. He remembers the mob marching out of the haze singing and waving their Bibles and banners and weapons. He remembers how they hung the Infected on a traffic light at the intersection of Merrimac and Steel, how they demanded that he bless them, how he told them their war was just. He remembers the screams, the popping guns, the newly Infected lying twitching on the ground, the final shouting as the last of the mob made a stand and were overrun in the smoke. He remembers telling them not to be afraid as they died.
He remembers walking home through the smoke while the screams rose up from the city all around him. He remembers walking home intent on letting Sara infect him so that they could be rejoined. He remembers finding his house on fire.
Like Job, Paul lost everything he loved.
As with Job, God allowed it.
THE BRIDGE
When the survivors left Pennsylvania, they crossed a sliver of West Virginia, a piece of ground stabbing north like a spike, before finally entering Ohio. The Veterans Memorial Bridge connects Steubenville, Ohio and Weirton, West Virginia—six lanes of modern superhighway carrying U.S. Route 22 across the Ohio River. Nearly twenty football fields in length, the cable-stayed bridge consists of steel girders and beams supporting a composite concrete road deck, the entire structure suspended by cables fanning out from the two support towers, a common design for long bridges.
Before Infection, thirty thousand people crossed this bridge every day. Now it is a funnel for more than a hundred thousand Infected moving west away from the still-burning ruins of Pittsburgh.
♦
The Bradley roars east on Route 22, leading a convoy of vehicles including several flatbed trucks stacked with explosives, armored cars and four school buses packed with soldiers and fitted with V-shaped snowplows on their grilles.
The rig slams into an abandoned minivan and sends it spinning onto the shoulder of the highway without breaking its stride. The crash makes Wendy flinch.
“We’re going to practice a rapid scan,” Sarge says.
Wendy blows air out of her cheeks and nods. She moves her left hand to wipe sweat from her forehead and bangs her elbow again.
“Mother,” she hisses. Sitting in the commander’s seat directly adjacent to Sarge in the gunner’s station, her body is almost surrounded by hard metal edges. Not much room to do anything except work the joystick that controls the turret and weapons systems.
She peers into the integrated sight unit, which provides a relay of what Sarge sees, overlaid with a reticle to help aim the Bradley’s guns. The highway slices through the rolling hills to the horizon, flanked with green. Smoke is still pouring out of Pittsburgh, darkening the eastern sky. The horizon shimmers and pulses with heat waves.
“Hey,” Sarge says. “You’re sightseeing.”
“It’s hard to take my eyes off the road.”
Sarge smiles. “You have to get used to the fact that somebody else is driving. While Steve will obey our commands to stop and go and so on, we are a self-contained world up here, just you and me. You help scan and identify targets, and I’ll track and kill them.”
“Yes, sir,” Wendy says.
“I’m not a sir. I work for a living, Ma’am. Now let’s do a rapid scan with overlapped sectors.”
“With who, what?”
“That means I’ll be scanning roughly the same ground ahead as you. First, scan center out,
near to far, then left and right to center, near to far. I’ll be scanning far to near.”
Her gum cracking, Wendy scans the highway ahead and identifies two abandoned vehicles in the grassy median. They are passing a billboard on the right that tells her to tune in to Channel Seven News at Eleven with Janet Rodriguez, Janet grinning confidently down at her in a power suit with her arms crossed. Beyond, power lines and trees.
The opposite lanes of the highway are occupied by a long column of Infected that stare grimly at the rig as it rolls by on its grating treads.
“Identified,” she says.
“Confirmed. Range?”
“Fifty meters?”
“I’m asking for the range to the nearest target.”
“I thought that’s what I was giving you.”
“See that billboard up there on the other side of the highway? That’s about a hundred.”
“Oh, then twenty, twenty-five?”
“Bingo,” he grins. “You’re learning fast. You should be proud, babe.”
“That’s Private Babe to you,” she answers, turning and flashing a smile.
“What can I say, girl. You do look good in cammies.”
“Settle down, Sergeant,” she laughs. “This Army uniform is like two sizes too big for me.”
“You wear it like a dress.”
“A tent, maybe.”
Wendy laughs lightly, feeling good for the first time since she kissed him at the hospital. Sarge is a good man. He gives her precious moments in which she can forget about Infection and everything else. She believes she could easily fall in love with him if they live long enough.
The Bradley trembles slightly with the stresses generated by dozens of moving parts. She can feel the beating heart of the engine, turning the force of controlled explosions into the raw horsepower needed to turn the treads and propel the vehicle’s twenty-five tons. The vibrations flow through her body, reminding her that she is riding a metal bull with the strength of five hundred horses and a mind of its own. And yet she feels powerful sitting here in its brain. More in control than she has ever felt, in fact. She is in an armored box with wheels, somebody else is driving, and she’s got the big guns. She laughs again as she considers there are few better places one could be in the middle of a zombie apocalypse.
The exhilaration she feels, however, is tempered by a growing weight on her chest. Running the rig is a lot of responsibility. The soldiers, the other survivors, and all the people back at the camp will be counting on her to make good decisions when they hit the bridge in ninety minutes, and she simply does not have enough training or experience to do it right.
She is scared.
“You ready for more?” Sarge says.
I’m ready for a hot bath with real soap, scented candles, some Alanis on the CD player and a tall glass of red wine, she thinks.
“What else you got?” she says.
She is still wondering why she wanted to come on this mission, but another glance at the man beside her in the gunner’s station reminds her. They are a tribe.
♦
Todd smiles at the almost surreal sense of déjà vu he is feeling at being back inside the hot, noisy, dim interior of the Bradley. He has butterflies in his gut, the humid air is dense with the smells of nervous sweat and diesel combustion, and he has to pee. Just like old times. It feels oddly right. The big difference is Anne is gone, Wendy is up in the front with Sarge, and there are two new faces in their unit—Ray Young, the rent-a-cop with the hard eyes and handlebar mustache, and Lieutenant Patterson, the combat engineer with the buzz cut and earnest, clean-shaven face.
“Once more into the breach, huh, Rev?” Todd says with a laugh, hoping to show off his easy familiarity with the group to the newcomers, but the two men either did not hear him over the Bradley’s engine or are simply lost in their own thoughts. As usual, nobody cares.
Paul smiles weakly and nods, but says nothing. Todd looks at him and realizes how grounded he feels being here with the other survivors. The Bradley feels like home. And yet he still does not know these people very well. He suddenly wants to talk to the Reverend about something important, something philosophical, man to man at the edge of the abyss—the nature of faith during war or whatever—but he cannot think of where to start such a conversation. A little more grounded, but he is still floating, away from others as well as himself.
The survivors’ role in the mission is to help clear the bridge and then keep Patterson safe because the Lieutenant is going to blow the bridge using more than two tons of TNT and C4.
The engineer told them that cable-stayed bridges are a little harder to blow a hole in. The cables fanning out from the towers pull to the sides instead of up like a suspension bridge, requiring a stronger deck to compensate for the horizontal load. That means more force will be needed to blow a hole in it that the Infected cannot cross.
What’s more, they will not have time to attach the charges under the bridge for a bottom attack. Instead, they will have to lay the explosives directly on the road deck, tamp it with a hill of sandbags, and blow off the concrete to expose the steel reinforcements. A second round of charges will cut the steel rods and beams. It will be a lot of work and take a long time.
Here is what will happen: After the bridge is secured, the trucks will pull up and workers will unload the explosives in piles across the eighty-foot-wide, six-lane bridge. These piles will be laid out in two lines covered in sandbags used as tamping to direct the force of the blast down into the concrete. The engineers will apply shaped C4 charges to the exposed steel elements.
Then, boom. The unsupported piece between the two blast lines will fall into the Ohio River and the resulting forty-foot gap will stop the Infected from crossing.
They have to do all this while potentially holding off a horde of Infected at both ends of the bridge.
“Hey,” Todd says to the combat engineer.
The glazed eyes flicker and focus.
“Hey, what?”
“Why forty feet?”
Patterson grins. The transformation this brings is almost alchemical. A moment ago, he looked like a hardened killer on death row waiting for his lawyer. Now he looks like a frat boy about to explain how he spiked the professors’ punch at the party.
“Mike Powell,” he says, his accept deep Louisiana.
“Oh yeah,” Ray says.
“Who’s Mike Powell?”
“He set the world record in the long jump back in the nineties,” Ray says.
Patterson nods.
“Almost thirty feet,” he points out. “We’re going to do forty—just in case one of those little Hopper sumbitches can beat old Mike Powell’s record.”
Todd grins with the other men, nodding, suddenly filled with awareness that history is being made today. It’s the end of the world but a new one is beginning. He cannot help but feel excited. It’s epic, ninja, like living in a video game.
He has already forgotten the brief, crushing sense of death he felt back at the hospital when Wendy held her Glock against his head and Ethan counted down to zero. You made it this far, Todd old man, he tells himself. You’re lucky. You’re good. Hell, you’re practically immortal. You are earning your place in the new world. There will be historians in this new world, recording the heroic deeds of people during the dark time of Infection for future generations to understand and respect.
The bridge they are blowing is the Veterans Memorial Bridge. What buildings and bridges and monuments will they build to honor our sacrifices? What day will they set aside for our memory? They will look at us as the Greatest Generation, the people who fought Infection and rebuilt the world. Every war has a turning point. Ours is here, now. He thinks about John Wheeler and Emily Preston and the ghosts of his high school. Most of them are by now certainly Infected or dead. But not me, he reminds himself. I was chosen for a reason.
Maybe this time he will reap the rewards when he returns. Maybe he will get a little more respect. Erin was impressed b
y his tales of survival and the wound on his arm but ripped him off anyway. Inside the camp, he felt powerless, small, his life reduced to stories nobody could truly believe even in these times. Out here, he feels powerful, somehow more real, part of something again. He would never say such a thing out loud to the other survivors, but he is here because he wants to find himself.
♦
Paul signed up for this mission on impulse, but he is old enough to know that nothing happens purely that way. There is always a reason.
It is not loyalty to the others. He feels safer with them, but not really safe, and certainly not very safe out here, in the lion’s den. He loves them in his own way with whatever love he has left to give anyone, but they can make their own decisions and take care of themselves.
It is not disgust with Pastor Strickland and his ministry of bitterness and regret. He does not approve it, but he also has no interest in fighting it. Strickland still loves the Infected that he lost but hates people he does not understand. A kingdom divided will be ruined and a house divided cannot stand, as Jesus taught. There have always been lost sheep like Strickland and McLean, and there always will be.
It is not even a simple desire to find a better place to live. If he continues on with Ethan to Camp Immunity near Harrisburg, it will be as filthy, hungry and violent as Defiance. When they were leaving, the people were cheering and blowing whistles and shooting into the air. The rumors that the Army was coming had achieved a critical mass. But nobody cared about the convoy of vehicles leaving the camp, filled with troops ready to sacrifice everything to save them all.
If God can appear cruel and hypocritical and vindictive, well, we are all made in his image, he reminds himself. God should have told Job that he had no right to question him because as bad as God is, people are even worse. When the chips are down, the best and worse is on full display.
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