Craig DiLouie: The Infection

Special thanks to Randy Heller for all his editing support over the years and to Chris Arnone for his superior knowledge of all things mechanical.

Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, ©1996, 2004, 2007. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.

Ethan was at the end of his patience trying to explain using factoring to solve equations to his high school algebra class when everybody started falling down.

Hacking at the blackboard with a piece of chalk to guide his students through a third example, he heard the first distant scream. The chalk broke in his hand and he accidentally scratched the board with his fingernails, sending a shiver of revulsion through his body.

“Let’s try that again,” he said, peering at his class over his rims of his glasses.

Some of the kids smiled back, suddenly engaged by his personal tone, while the rest slouched at their desks and continued to stare out the window—some longingly, some vacantly—at the green lawn washed in spring sunshine.

Finishing the example, he slapped chalk dust from his hands and said, “Okay, who wants to take a crack at this one? Where would you begin to solve for x ?”

“Wow,” several of the students shouted at once, sitting up straight in their desks. Two of the boys stood up, looking out the window.

“Come on, guys,” Ethan frowned. “Butts in seats. We’ve only got fifteen minutes left.”

“But there was an accident,” one of the kids told him, his eyes gleaming with excitement. “A bunch of people are lying on the ground.”

A second scream rang out in a classroom down the hall. Ethan wondered what was going on and took a few steps towards the window. Following his cue, all of the kids got out of their desks and stood to get a better look outside.

Another scream. Shouting in the distance. Footsteps pounded the hallway outside. Ethan turned just in time to see two teachers jog by his classroom. A door slammed.

He took several steps towards the hallway, wondering if there was some type of emergency, if he should be doing something special to protect his kids.

“What is that sound, Mr. Bell?” one of them kept saying.

“I don’t know,” Ethan murmured.

“It’s horrible!”

Another shiver ran through his body. He knew the sound. Why did he deny it? It was screaming. Screaming that would not stop. Screaming that just kept going on and on and on. Whoever was screaming was in extreme, unending pain—strong enough to make them howl at the top of their lungs for minutes. And there seemed to be a lot of people doing the screaming—some outside and some inside the school, in the classrooms down the hall.

He suddenly wondered if he should be here at all. His wife was at work. Their toddler, Mary, at daycare. He took another step towards the door. Would he get fired if he left the school?

Trevor Jackson’s face contorted and he fell down screaming, cracking his nose on the floor, blood spurting. The other students jumped back with yelps of surprise, transfixed by the real drama unfolding in front of them. Ethan took several steps back into the classroom and watched helplessly. Trevor was lying on his side, his back arched, his arms outstretched with his hands splayed into claws. His eyes were bulging, leaking tears, while his mouth screamed at a volume Ethan had not thought possible. The sound assaulted him with an almost physical force, pushing him away. He felt the urge to run as fast as his legs would take him. The other students felt it, too, wavering, suddenly aware of the choice of fight or flight.

“Do something!” Lucy Gall shouted at him.

“I’m going to call 911—”

Lucy fell to the ground, her body jerking in little spasms and the crotch of her jeans flooding with piss. Moments later she started to scream loud and shrill enough to damage eardrums. The students shouted at each other to do something. One of the boys got down on his knees and tried to shake her, but then he fell over as well, his eyes rolling back into his skull.

It’s in the ventilation system, Ethan thought. Something is in the air all around us.

Five more kids fell down within seconds of each other, spilling desks and scattering their notebooks.

They began to scream.

Ethan was suddenly outside of his body, watching himself push his way along with the remaining students in a blind stampede to get out of the school. In the hallway, they raced over the trembling, screaming bodies of teachers and students as if they were parts of an intricate obstacle course, and then bolted out of the school’s steel doors and into sunshine and relative quiet.

He froze in his tracks, amazed. The street beyond the lawn was a tangled mess of crashed vehicles. Plumes of smoke rose above the city in the distance. Now new waves of sound assaulted his ears: car alarms, horns, sirens and, rising up above it all, the distant sound of thousands upon thousands of mouths screaming in unison like an auditory glimpse of hell.

This is everywhere, he realized.

He ran as fast as his legs would go, oblivious to the students toppling around him as if cut down by an invisible scythe. The screaming filled him with blind panic now, an irrational fear of the supernatural, as if actual demons were at his heels. A motorcycle roared by, its rider spilling and cartwheeling through the air. In the distance, planes were falling out of the sky. These things barely registered in his consciousness. All he could think about was Mary’s safety. He had to get to her. Please God, spare her, he thought. Take these kids. Take Carol. Take me. If anything happens to my little girl, I will have nothing.

He got into his car and started the engine. The radio began sobbing hysterically at him. He turned it off and that was when he noticed the screaming had stopped. Looking out his window, he saw the lawn covered with bodies, jerking and quivering, while those who escaped Infection walked among them mindlessly, trembling and hugging their ribs and moaning in shock.

So rapid was the transmission of the mysterious virus that swept the world over a period of just forty-eight hours, so sudden the onset of disease, that scientists would later claim that it must somehow be linked to human-engineered nanotechnology. Some kind of weapon that escaped the lab. The government traced the origin of the pandemic to a village near secret facilities in China, but they would never find out the truth. And Ethan would never teach again.

After three days, the screamers woke up.

They are refugees forced from everything they consider home, searching for a safe place. They have become nomads, living on whatever they can find. But mostly they are survivors. They are good at surviving because they are on the road and they are still alive. They have done the things one had to do to survive. They have all killed people or they would not be here.

They have not lost anybody since Wednesday, when they lost Philip in Wilkinsburg. There are five of them now sitting ramrod straight in the loud, hot, dim passenger compartment of the armored personnel carrier, passing around a bottle of water, their rifles between their knees. They sit in a tense silence, their mouths slack, sweating in air that is twenty degrees hotter than the unseasonably warm May weather outside, air that stinks of sweat and grime and diesel combustion. Between the engine, the squeal of the treads and a steady drumming sound, they have to shout to make themselves heard, and nobody has the energy to do that. The drumming grows louder, punctuated by sharp metallic taps, until it drowns out the Bradley’s five-hundred-horsepower engine. The survivors are perpetually one second away from screaming.