The Killing Floor (9 page)

“Sorry,” Ray whispered, keeping his eyes on the road.

Something big was happening, something horrible, even worse than the Screaming. He turned on the radio, set to his favorite station. At this time of morning, Kaptain Kyle and Betty Boo did their morning zoo program. A muffled voice was shouting.

I swear to Jesus I saw this. The school bus was shaking. People were shoving at each other to get inside. Swarming. The bus was packed with people. They could barely move in there, there were so many. There was blood all over the windows. The windows were streaked with it. Those people were doing something awful to those kids—

Kaptain Kyle: And you’re done. Another caller bites the dust. Look guys, it’s a funny joke, but enough’s enough already. I’m not falling for it. From now on, I’m cutting you off immediately. Even think the word “zombie” and you’re gone, okay?

Betty Boo: It sounded real though, didn’t it? Jeez, it gave me the willies. A school bus.

Kaptain Kyle: Some kind of
War of the Worlds
thing going on today.

Betty Boo: Is today the anniversary?

Kaptain Kyle: You’d think after the Screaming, people would show a little class. Should we take another caller? Dare we risk it?

Betty Boo: What’s she doing?

Kaptain Kyle: Ladies and gentlemen, our producer, Sharon, is waving her arms at us. That is how cutting-edge modern producers tell their on-air talent to go to commercial, instead of using their microphone. They wave their hands in the air like they just don’t care.

Betty Boo: Must be important. She’s kind of freaking out. Is she crying?

Kaptain Kyle: Curioser and curioser. Ladies and gentlemen, we will return after the break.

Ray’s truck rocketed down the street until coming to a skidding halt on the sidewalk in front of his house. He killed the engine, cutting off an ad for a better mattress, and jumped out. The air felt warm here and he smelled smoke. He had a rough plan sketched in his head. He knew a place where he could hole up for a while, but he needed supplies.

Inside the house, food, beer, liquor, cigarettes and dip, jugs of water, flashlight, packets of Kool-Aid, burritos and TV dinners all went into a plastic cooler until it was full. He had no idea how long it would last him, but it was all he had.

He ran back outside, the cooler perched on his shoulder, and nearly dropped it as someone fired a gun in the house next door. Old Wexler lived in that house with his poodles. The guy was pushing eighty. Ray wondered if he should go help him out.

In the distance, a woman screamed as if being tortured. The sound froze the blood in his veins. Wexler fired his gun again, BANG BANG. Ray saw the flashes of light in the living room window.

“Oh, God,” he sobbed, heaving the cooler onto the back of the truck and jumping into the driver’s seat. “Holy shit.”

The radio was still playing commercials. He worked the dial until he found the local AM news station, which blasted the angry klaxon honk of the Emergency Alert System. He turned the radio off. He didn’t need it. He had plenty of information. Everything he needed to know was happening right outside his windshield.

Squinting against the orange glare of the morning sun, he threw the rig into drive and turned onto Oakland, swerving to dodge cars and crazies. He drove blind through a billowing hot cloud of pitch black smoke, screaming
hail Mary
, and emerged in time to narrowly miss ramming a wailing ambulance in the process of swerving off the road. Another car, its windows streaked red, crashed through a phone booth and into a wall. Galveston looked clear and he floored it, pushing aside the worry a cop was going to pull him over. Figures ran in the distance. Bodies lay on the sidewalk. As he passed, they sat up and stared at him.

Minutes later, his truck idled in front of the self-storage facility’s chain link fence while Ray panted as if he’d run, not driven, the entire trip. Sweat stung his eyes and he wiped it away with the back of the sleeve of his uniform. He had to talk himself into leaving the truck. Opening the door, he walked to the gate on trembling legs and unlocked it. He drove into the compound and parked in front of one of the storage cubicles.

As he jumped down from the vehicle, a deep thud reverberated through the ground, making him stumble. Car alarms shrieked across town. A massive fireball rose over distant houses. He paused, feeling curious.
What’s over that way? Gas station?

The gate rattled. Someone was trying to get in.

Breathing hard, Ray cut the lock on one of the storage cubicles with a pair of bolt cutters. He opened the door and squinted into the darkness, wondering. A strong musty smell poured out of the room. It was half filled with dusty boxes, some old furniture, a few floor lamps, an area rug rolled up and bound with masking tape. Good enough. He tossed in the cooler and a few blankets and clothes he’d scooped up back at the house and pulled the door shut. The darkness enveloped him. He felt safe in it.

Footsteps pounded outside, receding.

♦

For five days, he lived like a rat in a hole. At least, he thought it was five days; after a while, he lost track of time. At first, it was like a party. If this was the end of the world, he might as well drink up. His mother was dead, everyone had gone crazy outside, and he wanted to forget it all. Two days later, he woke up in the darkness to the smell of his own vomit, barely able to remember where he was and how he had gotten here.

Boredom set in. He spent hours rummaging through the boxes with his flashlight and found nothing useful. Just the detritus of some other loser’s life: photo albums, knickknacks, children’s toys, women’s magazines, portable heater, computer mouse, mystery novels, videotapes, dishes and cutlery, blankets, dead cell phone, bras and clothes and a broken wristwatch. Nothing he could eat or drink or fight with. He used one of the boxes of clothes as his toilet. Filled with self pity, he had his first crying jag.

The batteries in his flashlight failed on what he thought was the third day. He started to panic. He pressed his ear against the big metal door but heard nothing outside, wondering what that meant. Maybe the entire town was on the other side of the door, waiting for him to come out so they could yell,
Surprise!
and laugh at him. Then he imagined Stewie and Brian standing on the other side of the door listening for
him
, drool leaking from grinning, chomping, red-stained mouths. The lockup had filled with stale cigarette smoke and the nauseating odors of his own vomit, shit and piss, but he didn’t dare open the door even a crack to let in some fresh air. This made him wonder if the lockup had any ventilation at all. He imagined suffocating in his sleep, and spent the next hour taking deep breaths until his mind moved on to something else.

Between the fear and the isolation, he was starting to go crazy.

On the last day, still wearing his rumpled brown security guard uniform, he pulled open the cubicle door and emerged blinking into the light. The darkness had driven him out. His terrors lived in that darkness. His memories. More than food or water, Ray craved light.

In his fevered delirium, he recalls what happened next. Instead of a wasteland overrun by crazy people, which is what he half expected, he saw the watchtowers of a thriving refugee camp. He saw people unloading the storage lockers and staring back at him just as curiously. He figures on some level a bad guy like him was supposed to join a roving post-apocalyptic biker gang raping and pillaging and making things worse, just like in the movies. If he’d left the storage lockup and found such a gang, he supposes he would have signed up if he thought they could keep him alive. But he didn’t find that. Instead, he found a struggling community making a stand, people working together to maintain something like normal. This was fine with him. He wanted nothing more than to help fight for that normalcy, even to the point of becoming a cop. The truth is the apocalypse scared the hell out of him. Sure, he was bad to the bone, as the song went, but he would rather be a bad guy among good, honest folk than a bad guy among homicidal maniacs. The apocalypse changed him—made him want to do better before it all fell apart. That’s why when he met Wendy, the rookie cop from Pittsburgh, he pledged to watch over her. Even after every other cop was dead or run off and her city burned to the ground, this poor, innocent girl still fought the good fight, and it broke his heart. She deserved a guardian angel. He followed her to the bridge at Steubenville—perhaps the one selfless thing he ever did—and entered the nightmare of Infection.

In his delirium, however, he opens the door and does not see watchtowers or people looting the storage lockers. He does not hear dogs barking or men hammering boards or five-ton trucks churning up clouds of dust. This twilight world is barren, as quiet as the Moon. Infection is not showing him what has happened, but what might have been, or what might yet be.

He tries to start his truck, which clicks in response. The battery is dead. Outside the storage facility, he walks past an abandoned Laundromat, car dealership, appliance store, fast food restaurant, daycare. The pawn shop has been burned out. His boots crunch on broken glass. His footsteps are loud in his ears. The town looks like it has been bombed. The street is torn up and strewn with rubble. Trash rustles across the ground. Someone spray painted giant letters across the front of the police station: WE HAD IT COMING.

For hours, he explores his old town as little bits of ash flutter to the earth. His own house has been burned to the ground. None of the cars will start. The houses have no power. He sees no bodies, no animals. He finds a battery-powered radio but it hisses across the entire band.

It is a dead world.

Then he sees the distant walking figure.

Ray calls to him. The man turns and grins and waves as Ray grunts with recognition.

Tyler Jones, still wearing his CASHTOWN FIRE DEPARTMENT cap and dark gray work shirt with a pack of Marlboros in the breast pocket, waits for Ray to catch up. Tyler is half friend, half mentor and, in semiretirement, something of a professional bum. Like so many people who lived in Cashtown, he did a little of this, a little of that, to make his beer money. Unlike other people, he wore his lack well. He always seemed completely comfortable with what he had, right down to his skin.

Tyler squints at him, chewing on a toothpick. “Where you been, boy?”

“
What happened here, Tyler?” Ray yells breathlessly as he jogs close. “What happened to the camp?”

This question appears to irritate the man. “Hell, there ain’t no camp, Ray.”

“
The camp, Tyler. The camp! Camp Defiance.”

“
Check this out, bud. Look what I found. It’s going to blow your mind.”

Ray gasps in revulsion as Tyler steps aside, revealing two creatures bound to him with leather leashes. They’re four legged, the size of deer, and covered in hairless green skin. The barrel-chested one on the left totters on tapering stalactite legs, its skull covered in long, straight horns. The other has bloated legs with wrinkled knees and a head covered in
a briar patch of fleshy antlers throbbing like veins.

Ray glances down at the ground and sees a chunk of concrete on the rubble-strewn road. He picks it up, feeling its weight.

“
What the hell are they?”

Tyler laughs wetly, wiping yellowish mucus from his mouth onto the back of his hand. “This,” he announces proudly, “is Life.”

Ray stares at them in horror. They are starving, weak, disgusting. They have no mouths, no teeth, no claws. They appear harmless, and yet he has never been so afraid of anything.

Tyler adds, “Come on over here, Ray, and meet the family. They ain’t gonna bite.”

He whistles and the creatures stir and totter forward. Ray is too terrified to move. Close up, they appear to be blind, without eyes, and yet he knows they can sense his presence—knows that they’ve been looking for him, that they’re happy to finally have found him. They smell like pus.

As the creature with the antlers nears, its head shifts as if to nuzzle and its body shudders, releasing a cloud of musk. Ray cringes in disgust, fighting the urge to vomit. Make your pecker fall off, his mind blurts out irrationally. His instincts are howling with fear. He realizes he is not looking at another hideous spawn of Infection. He is looking at Infection itself.

Specifically, he is looking at his own infection. The sickness that right now is turning him into something else. It is like having cancer and being forced to say hello to your tumor.

The antlered thing scuttles toward him in a surprising burst of speed, straining at the leash and releasing another cloud of musk. Ray can feel its raging fever heat.

“
Oh, we got a live one,” says Tyler, laughing.

Ray reels from a massive wave of nausea. He looks at his hand and sobs in horror. It is bright red and swollen and covered in warts and blisters, one ruptured and leaking bloody fluid. His index finger has been bitten off. He is afraid that if he screams he’ll start vomiting and won’t be able to stop.