Craig DiLouie - The Infection

Ray sighs loudly, feeling strangely blessed. He has been ambushed and rushed and he is standing next to a bunch of morons fooling around with more than four thousand pounds of high-grade explosives, but he is still alive. When Patterson tells him to grab some sandbags and start distributing them along the two lines in the road he drew with chalk, he is almost grateful. Mindless labor he understands. He is perfectly fine with that. A little work won’t kill him.

“Yo, Ray. Ray. Ray Young .”

He turns and sees the Bradley commander gesturing from the open hatch of the vehicle.

“You need something, Sarge?”

“I’ve lost contact with Sergeant Horton. He’s in the right bus. I need a runner to get up there and report back on what’s happening.”

“Christ, Sarge, you can hear the firing from here. They’re still there.”

Sarge glowers and Ray glares back, setting his jaw, feeling mean. He is afraid of death, yes, but not of fighting. He never backs down when it comes to a fight.

Anytime, Sergeant Wilson, he thinks. Anytime you want, you let me know.

“Ray, there’s blood on the windows,” Sarge says. “I need to know if he’s got casualties. I need to know what he’s got in front of him. I need to know if he needs ammunition.”

Ray understands bullying very well. Sarge is not being a bully. It’s a reasonable request.

“All right, all right,” he grumbles.

“You sure it’s okay? Sure you don’t mind?”

“I said all right, I’ll go.”

“Then move your ass, shit for brains!”

Ray grins, checks the magazine on his M16, and starts jogging. After fifty feet, he is already flagging and wheezing a little, his lungs starting to ache.

Christ, Ray, he thinks. You need to get back into shape.

He feels a hand on his shoulder and almost screams.

“What’s up, dude?”

“What are you doing here, kid?”

“Thought you might want some company.”

“Why don’t you just do it and I’ll go back?”

Alarm crosses Todd’s face.

“Sarge wouldn’t like that. Come on, it’ll be cool.”

It’ll be cool. Crazy, stupid kid.

They slow as they approach the bus. Several of the windows are sprayed with blood on the inside. Two of them are open and gun smoke drifts lazily out of them. Dark shapes are moving inside. The constant pop of gunfire is so hot and loud here that it almost feels like a physical barrier.

Ray and Todd glance at each other.

“What do you think?” Todd shouts at him.

“I think we should get this over with.”

Ray pushes open the bus doors and climbs aboard, looking down the aisle and coughing on the smoke. The aisle and seats on the right are filled with soldiers, firing and reloading and roaring obscenities. Dead men occupy several of the seats on the left, their eyes staring at nothing. Empty shell casings clatter onto the floor, already covered in brass and links. There is an atmosphere of madness here. The soldiers wear wild expressions, like they’ve completely lost it.

But they are holding.

He is about to grab one of them when he sees Sergeant Alexander Horton sitting in one of the seats, his eyes bulging with fear and his chest torn out and dripping onto the floor, dead as a doorknob. Mission accomplished, now let’s get the hell out of here.

Todd taps him on the shoulder and points.

Ray looks past the nearest soldiers and sees the horde.

It surges towards him in a vast shrieking swarm, an endless freak show of monsters and zombies converging on the bridge. He spots packs of Hoppers with their absurd walk, occasionally leaping to sting one of the Infected. Giant leering faces swaying on bony stilted legs. Titans waving their tentacles, bellowing. And flowing among them, mindlessly marching and occasionally serving as food for the monsters, thousands of Infected waiters and students and housewives and cashiers and typists and investment bankers.

He wakes up outside the bus, running, gasping for air, trailed by Todd.

Paul rushes to meet them halfway. They fall to their knees together.

“Talk to me,” he says.

“He freaked out,” Todd says. “Paul, there are like a million of them over there.”

“Ray?”

“Tell your boss that Horton is dead,” Ray gasps. “In fact, one out of four soldiers on that bus is dead. And every Infected bastard from Pittsburgh is beating at their door.”

Sarge sits on the Bradley’s turret, aiming his binoculars at the school buses at the end of the bridge and chewing his lip. They have been on the bridge for over an hour, anxiously watching the engineers do their job. Patterson bangs on the armor to get his attention and tells him that he is almost done setting up the charges. The TNT is arranged in two lines in front of the Bradley. All that remains before the show, the engineer explains, is finishing the tamping and pulling back the wires for each series of explosives to where they will be detonated.

Twenty minutes, he says.

Roger that, LT.

The distance between the Bradley and the end of the bridge is about three hundred meters. Sarge has the Bradley’s battlecarry—pre-selected range and ammunition—set up, establishing a kill zone around the buses. He looks at his watch nervously, sweating in the afternoon sun.

He sees Todd, working with the other survivors and Guard to pass sandbags along a human chain, and waves.

Yeah, Sarge?

Sarge smiles. For a moment, he forgot he has radio communication with the survivors.

He keys his handset and says, “Todd, I want you to go up to the buses and tell those boys we need twenty more minutes from them, over.”

Cool! Todd, out!

Todd snatches his carbine and takes off at a sprint.

He hears a colossal crash of thunder and looks south. The center of the Market Street Bridge, shrouded by a drifting cloud of black smoke, is collapsing into the Ohio River.

The soldiers let up a ragged cheer. Sarge grunts with satisfaction. Half the mission is over. But it will not be successful until they finish the job and destroy this bridge.

He returns his binoculars to the buses. He sees fresh streaks of blood on the windows, the dead propped up in the seats, as if waiting for their next stop.

Just hang on a little longer, he thinks. He marvels at the bravery and endurance of the men inside those vehicles. He cannot even imagine what they must be going through in there.

The engineers are shouting in alarm. Sarge shifts his gaze and sees one of the Towering Things leering down at the bus, ropes of drool leaking between its massive teeth.

The monster’s tongue lashes out. After several moments, it pulls the broken body of a National Guardsmen into its chomping mouth. The monster bites down, chewing greedily with a blissful expression, its eyes closed and leaking tears. The creature is so happy it is crying.

Another Towering Thing appears on the right, chortling. Its tongue lashes out and a man screams.

The bus is moving .

“Todd, get back here now,” Sarge says.

But I’m almost there, over.

“Get back here now,” Sarge roars. “The line is breaking.”

The gunfire sputters and stops. Soldiers emerge from the buses and race towards the safety of the machine guns at the center of the bridge. One of the monsters lashes out over the roof of the bus and grips a fleeing soldier by the ankle, yanking him up and into the mouth, the man screaming and firing his weapon until the teeth crush his body into paste.

The bus is moving, swinging open like a door. Something big is pushing it. Tentacles wave in the air behind the vehicle. One of the Giants. A limb as thick as a tree trunk, knotted with thick, pale muscle, emerges. Moments later, the behemoth pushes its way past and lumbers onto the bridge, bellowing like a foghorn.