Craig DiLouie - The Infection

He says nothing, flustered and afraid he might blurt out something stupid and irrecoverable.

Wendy motions for him to stop. “You ready to shoot that gun, Todd?”

He nods.

“Then let’s clear this hallway.” The cop calls out, “Hey! Hello? Anybody home?”

A woman bursts out of one of the recovery rooms, dressed in hospital scrubs stained with dried blood down the front, and begins jogging towards them with a bark. The survivors flinch, their hearts racing. Immediately, the ammonia smell of piss assaults their nostrils, making their eyes water.

“Who?” says the Kid.

“You,” says the cop.

The Kid wishes he could have set his rifle to full auto and let it rip like in the movies, but Sarge said not to do that. Sarge said you do not need suppression. You just need to stop somebody, running right at you, with as few rounds and as little energy as possible.

The Kid does not aim at the woman’s head, which offers only a small, lurching target. Instead, he aims at her center torso and squeezes the trigger, firing a single burst of three bullets.

The center of the woman’s chest explodes and she stumbles, wincing and smoking, before bouncing off a wall and toppling to the floor.

The man turns the corner and lunges at them from behind. Wendy wheels and fires her Glock. The bullet enters his left eye socket, scrambles his brain and shoots the mess out the back of his head. He collapses instantly without a sound, dead before he hits the floor.

“Nicely done,” the Kid says weakly, feeling drained.

“I swallowed my gum,” Wendy says.

The corridor suddenly echoes with howls and the tramp of sneakers, dress shoes, high heels, bare feet. Wendy and the Kid freeze, breathing hard, standing back to back with guns ready.

A lot of people are coming.

Sunlight cannot reach this part of the building where it is now perpetual night. The corridor connects the emergency room with the guts of the hospital. Paul and Anne explore its length, searching for supplies, anxiously aware of the sound of their breathing and footsteps. Paul lights the way with a highway flare, revealing bloody handprints on the wall in glaring detail. Beyond several feet, the light is quickly swallowed in the gloom. Bodies lie on the floor surrounded by small clouds of flies. The air reeks of bleach and rot. Water drips loudly somewhere close. A door slams, far away. Paul’s shoes crunch on the scattered remains of a smashed jar of tongue depressors. Rats scamper along the walls before disappearing into the dark.

“I made a mistake, Reverend,” Anne says, shattering the silence.

“What kind of mistake?”

“The kind you regret.”

Paul grunts. He does not know what to say. This is survival. He does not think it is possible for somebody to be alive today without having regrets. He is trying hard to keep his moral compass aimed in the right direction but the harsh truth is morality is a luxury at a time like this. There is plenty of guilt to go around. He wishes there were just a little forgiveness. But even guilt is a luxury reserved for those still alive and feeling safe enough to experience it.

He pauses in front of a door and holds up his flare.

“‘Custodial,’” Paul reads. “I think this is it. It’s unlocked.”

Too late, he realizes that Anne was not talking to him as a fellow survivor. She was speaking to him as a man of the cloth. Sorry, lady, he wants to say, that well has run dry at the moment. He realizes that he knows so little about the people on whom his life depends on a daily basis. He glances at this petite woman holding her powerful scoped rifle and the satchel filled with ammo and thinks, take the gun away and she could be a housewife. A dentist. An actress doing local theater. President of the PTA. The only part of her he has really cared about, however, is her natural talent with the rifle that has helped keep him alive for so long while other men, better men, have died.

“Reverend, did you have to kill somebody you love?”

Paul remembers Sara getting older and how on some level he saw her as a mirror reminding him that he was getting older. He did not like it. Death? Beats getting old, Sara used to say. She had a great attitude about it. He frequently wondered about the strength of his faith if he was afraid of getting old and dying. But even then his mortality was still just a frightening abstraction, not like the past nine days, during which he has been continually, painfully aware of the thin ice separating life and death. You walk along and suddenly you fall through and then either there is a heaven or there is only oblivion. Sara used to joke, if you want to be remembered for a really long time after you’re gone, die young.

He remembers lighting a cigarette in the alley behind his house several nights after the Screaming. So late at night it was practically morning. He had tossed and turned and barely slept. The neighborhood twenty-four hour convenience store was open and he bought a pack of cigarettes to satisfy an incredible, sustained craving he felt immediately upon waking up. Now here he was smoking for the first time in years. Beating an addiction takes belief in a higher power, and while his faith in God helped, the strength of his marriage got him to finally kick the habit. Now Sara was lying on a bed inside his house, connected to an intravenous bag, and here he was standing in the alley lighting up and blinking at the immediate head rush. He coughed but by the third drag he was hooked again. Like riding a bike. He enjoyed the quiet. A dog barked and then stopped. For the first time in the past few raw days, he felt something like an inner peace. At least one itch had finally been scratched.

A figure appeared under the streetlight at the end of the alley, a small silhouette. Paul squinted at it for a few moments, unsure it was even a person until he realized it was growing larger. Moving towards him. It passed a light fixture mounted on a neighbor’s garage and Paul caught a glimpse of its terrible face. It was breathing hard and running at Paul as fast as the average human being can run. It was doing the hundred yard dash and Paul was the finish line. For several critical moments, Paul was outside his body, watching himself do nothing. He was not sure he could move; his legs had turned to water.

He started to feebly ask, can I help you , barely finishing the sentence before turning and sprinting back into his backyard and locking the gate behind him, his heart hammering in his chest. He sensed the man pacing outside the gate, hissing like an animal.

He walked carefully back to his house on wobbly legs, still filled with dread.

Inside, Sara was sitting on the edge of her bed. Waiting for him.

“No,” Paul says. “I haven’t killed somebody I love. Have you?”

“Yes,” Anne says.

The doors at the end of the corridor burst open and a snarling man races through. The Kid fires a burst that obliterates his face and then falls back, continuously firing and dropping bodies as a swarm of Infected pours into the corridor, filling it with their horrible, sour stench.

Wendy keeps pace at his side, the beam of her flashlight glittering across red eyes, covering him with her pistol. The Kid’s gun jams and he stares at his weapon in numb surprise. The cop empties the Glock into the snarling faces, drops the mag, loads another. The Kid wrestles with the bolt until a howling woman claws at his eyes. Holding the carbine sideways in front of his body for protection, he slams it into her gray face on impulse, breaking her nose. She falls back howling and a giant of a man in a paper hospital gown stomps towards him with clenched fists like sledgehammers, roaring. The top of his head erupts in a geyser of blood and he disappears. Wendy is still shooting, burning quickly through the next magazine. The first woman comes back and wrestles with the Kid for the carbine, her jaws chomping in a blind rage. He hears a scuffle and the crack of the cop’s police baton striking bone. The Kid shoves the woman against the wall and smashes the carbine into her face repeatedly until she slides down the wall leaving a smear of blood. Panting, he turns and sees Wendy fighting two men twice her size and kicking the shit out of both of them with her side-handle baton. He clears the jam out of his carbine and signals to her, murder in his eyes. She backs away just in time for him to gun them down with several bursts from the hip.