Craig Dilouie - The Killing Floor

Todd smiles as he shakes it and thinks, I always wanted to belong somewhere.

Marcus

He was a good mechanic and this got him steady work at auto repair shops. Mufflers, brakes and shock absorbers, mostly, plus body repair and painting. After his wife died, leaving him with two growing boys, he quit Sears Auto Center and got a job closer to home as a service technician at a Toyota dealership. He was welding when the Screaming swept through town.

After hours of starting and stopping, swearing and leaning on his horn, Marcus pulled into the high school parking lot and lunged sweating from his truck. Inside, he pushed through the roar of red-faced parents and teachers and into the gym, where the survivors had laid the bodies of the fallen, students and teachers alike, in rows on the floor. Both Jack and Michael lay on their backs, their bodies still jerking in tiny spasms. He swept them up, one boy over each shoulder, and carried them to his truck. A teacher approached to challenge him but dodged aside after seeing the terrible expression on his face and his hands clenched into fists.

On the way home, he listened to the radio. They were calling it a syndrome because nobody knew what the hell it was. There was a lot of talk about exploding head syndrome, frontal lobe epilepsy, nanotech terrorism . None of it made any sense. A doctor said some of the victims exhibited echolalia , the automatic repetition of sounds. His ears perked up at that. After arriving home and getting his boys into their beds, he told them he loved them, hoping to hear it said back to him.

His cousin Kirsten, who worked as a nurse at the hospital, dropped by first thing in the morning to set up bedpans and intravenous tubes. After she left, Marcus could not cope with the empty, funereal silence and went to the liquor store, where he stood for hours in a line that went out the door and around the corner. Returning home, he found his boys lying in the exact same position he’d left them. He changed their bedpans and IV bags, exercised their limbs a little, gave them a quick sponge bath. When he moved Michael’s arm, he noticed his younger son had waxy flexibility , which he’d heard was another occasional symptom of the syndrome. Wherever he put the boy’s limbs, they stayed frozen in whatever position they were last left.

This done, fighting tears, Marcus went back downstairs, poured a few fingers of Wild Turkey bourbon, topped it up with Coke and ice, and turned the TV on. A blowhard on the cable news was saying things like brain drain and national inventory and precipice.

None of it made any sense to him. The world began to blur.

Two days later, he heard shouting on the TV. The screamers were waking up, and they were attacking people. Nobody knew why. Apparently, if a screamer bit you, you caught the disease. Marcus watched Cleveland fall apart for an hour before realizing his kids had woken up as well. He could hear them stomping around upstairs.

Still reeling with hangover, Marcus staggered to the foot of the stairs. He considered calling Kirsten, or maybe the cops, and felt ashamed. Why was he afraid? What was there to be afraid of? The boys were his own flesh and blood.

He climbed the stairs slowly, one step at a time.

“Jack,” he said when he reached the bedroom door. He felt out of breath; he could hardly speak. “Michael?”

He heard snarling on the other side, fingernails scratching at the wood.

“Are you guys okay?” Marcus whispered, suddenly scared of his own voice.

Something large thudded against the wall on his left, making a picture jump off its hook and clatter to the floor. Moments later, something crashed against the door, making it shiver on its hinges, followed by more growling and pacing.

Shit , Marcus thought, afraid to say anything. Terrified to even move. Even breathe. His body would not stop shaking. After a minute, he held up his trembling hand and stared at it as if it belonged to someone else.

I’m afraid of my own sons, he realized. My sons. My own flesh and blood.

It was like being afraid of yourself. They were a part of him.

Even worse, he was afraid he would open the door and they would have hate in their eyes. That they would look at him as if they didn’t know him.

In the end, he had no choice. He opened the door.

“Boys? It’s your dad. I’m coming in now. Take it easy, okay?”

Jack came at him first, hands splayed into claws. Marcus pushed him onto the nearest bed as Michael lunged at his legs. He kneed his younger son in the face, hard enough to make him yelp, and would have apologized if Jack weren’t flying at him again. He shoved Jack to the floor, trying to buy time some to figure out what he was going to do. He was stronger than them, but he knew how much energy they had; they could keep this up for hours, while he was already breathing hard and sweating.

Retreating into the hallway, he slammed the door as the boys launched themselves against it, and moved a massive dresser from his own bedroom to block it. He listened to them howl and scrabble at the wood with their nails.

“You can bang on that door all you want,” he said. “I’m not letting you out.” The father in him felt the urge to add, “until,” but until what?

Until never.

His body tingled with shock. His own children were trying to kill him. They had turned into the monsters he saw eating the dead on the cable news. He stumbled downstairs feeling fuzzy, as if he were floating. A part of him had been amputated, leaving nothing behind. The TV was still on, showing another talking head saying things like we’ve lost contact with John and apocalypse. Marcus poured another tall bourbon and Coke and wondered how long the door and dresser would hold his kids before they broke out and came for him.

The world blurred again. A tank rolled past the house on shrieking treads. People swarmed on top of it, clawing at the armor, trying to get in. Inside, dishes rattled in the cupboards. Pictures fell off the walls and crashed to the floor.

So this is the way the world ends , he thought.

The blowhard on the TV was saying, God help us all , when the power failed and plunged the world into darkness. Marcus sat on the couch sipping his bourbon in long stretches of silence periodically shattered by distant screams. The air smelled like smoke.

No son of mine is going to be a monster , he decided. His boys needed mercy only a loving father could give.

He drank until he had the courage to do what needed doing.

As dawn paled the sky, he lurched to his feet and searched until he found Michael’s baseball bat. He hefted it, feeling the weight in his large hand.

Then he went upstairs to say goodbye to his sons.

Cool Rod

Back in Kandahar, the Fifth Dragoons played death metal battle anthems like “Bodies” and “Die Motherfucker Die” as they rode into battle in their Stryker vehicles, pumping up their courage and scaring the shit out of the Afghans. Now, roaring along the service road adjacent to Ronald Reagan National Airport near Washington, DC, the boys of Comanche Company are listening to the plaintive sound of “Paranoid Android” and still searching for the right note.

Sergeant Hector Rodriguez—Nimrod in elementary school, Hot Rod in high school, Cool Rod in the Army, and just plain Rod to his friends—doesn’t mind. To him, this is a Radiohead war. Surreal music to go with the surreal scenery: a desolate, post-apocalyptic America. He feels like a sailor on a submarine, returning home after fighting a nuclear war, only to find his country destroyed.

In any case, at least it’s not Enya. Some smartass cranked up “Only Time” as they stormed the airport a week ago, and nobody challenged it. It actually fit their mood.