After a while, I got bored. The trailers all looked the same, the junked vehicles on blocks looked like a waste of good scrap metal, the chatter was repetitive. We passed Alvarado’s team, and though they were sweating in the heat and visibly tired, they moved quickly and remained focused on their mission. Farther down the road, Farrell’s squad was a study in contrasts.
They had found a trailer with a generator and several gallons of fuel, and had used it to fire up the air conditioner. We heard the sounds of motors shattering the silence from over a hundred yards away and moved in to investigate. After knocking on the door, Dad and I entered the trailer to find them lounging in a cool living room drinking whiskey from a hodge-podge of collected shot glasses. The roar of the AC in the window reminded me of the dinosaur cartoons I used to watch as a child. It amazed me the soldiers were able to carry on their ribald conversations over its incessant din. Upon closer inspection, I saw they had cranked it up to its highest setting.
“Taking a break?” my father asked, not bothering to hide the disdain in his voice. Sgt. Farrell grinned and took another shot from a bottle of Bushmills.
“Yes, we are, civilian. Now kindly fuck off until the professionals are ready to resume their work.” He held up a shot glass full of yellow liquor and tossed it back. My dad’s flat brown eyes looked on blankly, then after a few seconds, he shrugged. “Have it your way.” He motioned for me to leave with him. I cast a final contemptuous look around the room and followed.
Dad marched purposefully toward the Humvee, threw it into gear, and roared away to the other side of the trailer park. He stopped where Alvarado and his men were working and got out. I stepped out as well, curiosity piqued.
“You might want to check on your boy Farrell,” he said. “Last I checked, drinking on duty was a serious offense.”
Alvarado made a disgusted noise and tossed down a box he was holding, eyes squinting westward. He wiped a sleeve across his sweaty brow and said, “All right. I’ll take care of it. Sergeant Gomez, you’re in charge until I get back.”
“Got it,” Gomez replied.
A few minutes later, we made another pass through the neighborhood and saw Alvarado follow Farrell and his men out of the trailer. I couldn’t hear what he was saying to them, but it was, by all appearances, forceful, one-sided, and involved a lot of gesticulating.
Farrell’s squad ducked their heads and trundled down the steps. Alvarado stood them at attention and spent a few more minutes with his finger inches from each man’s face in turn, ending with Farrell. For Farrell’s part, the speech only deepened the condescending smirk on his face.
Finished, or at least with no further time to waste chewing asses, Alvarado got back in his Humvee and drove to the other side of the trailer park. Farrell motioned to his men, and they turned in the direction of another trailer, forming up for a room entry through the front door.
One of them hefted a sledgehammer, lifted it to shoulder height, and brought it down on the flimsy door handle. The handle shattered, and the men backed off, waiting to see if any infected would emerge. None did, so they poured in.
Before following his men, Farrell looked in our direction and glared for a long moment. Gone was the smirk, and the smugness, and the devil-may-care attitude. His gaze was flat and cold and utterly emotionless. I’ve seen hungry reptiles with more life in their eyes. I stared back, not daring to look away. Some instinct, some hairy-knuckled, slope-browed leftover in the deeper portions of my lizard brain warned me that to look away was to show weakness, and I was staring at a creature who would perceive any weakness as an invitation to attack.
The contest dragged on until one of his men shouted for him. Looking startled, Farrell ducked into the trailer, rifle at the low ready. Seconds later, the boom of a shotgun thundered from a room near the far end of the trailer followed by shouting and the staccato rattle of M-4s firing in a confined space.
“Shit,” Dad said, accelerating toward the trailer.
More gunfire sounded, and as we skidded to a halt near the front door, a high, agonized scream came from within the trailer. Someone shouted, “Get it off him! Get that fucking thing off him!”
I entered the house behind my father. Mike and Blake were behind us. We turned left and headed toward the shouting at the end of a far hallway. The trailer was laid out like many others I had seen: the front door opened into the living room, to the right was a bedroom, bathroom, and laundry room, the kitchen was separated from the living room by a low island counter, and to my left was a long hallway with more bedrooms and another bathroom. The commotion came from the far bedroom at the end of the hallway. The four of us took a few brief moments to clear the rooms on our right—the doors were closed and Farrell’s men had not used their orange spray paint to mark them as clear—then pushed on to see what the shouting was about.
On the way, we heard a guttural growling and snarling beneath the continuing high-pitched screams of one of Farrell’s men. I had never heard a scream like that in my life, and hoped I never would again.
Fate, sadly, did not conspire to grant that wish.
A soldier’s dead body lay in the entrance to the bedroom, no doubt the victim of the shotgun blast from a few moments earlier. The shot had taken him in the chest and splattered blood, flesh, and chunks of bone in a wide cone-like pattern halfway down the length of the hallway. Mike seized him by the handle on the back of his vest and dragged him into the kitchen, out of the way. Once there, he grabbed a blanket from one of the bedrooms and draped it over him.
The room the rest of us walked into was small, crowded with soldiers, and so thick with foul odor the smell nearly made me gag. A combination of body odor, rotting meat, spent cordite, and vomit hung suspended in the thick air. There was a final crack of a rifle, deafeningly loud in the confined space, and the shouting stopped. The men in front of us went still, eyes looking down at something we could not see past them.
“All right, clear the goddamn room,” my father shouted. So firm was his tone of command, no one questioned him. They simply turned and filed out, gathering in the hallway. “Go on,” Dad said, shooing them along. “Wait outside.”
They did as ordered, faces stunned, muttering among themselves. Farrell remained behind, squatting next to a bleeding soldier and trying to bandage a massive wound on the stricken man’s forearm. A few feet away, a naked woman, mid-forties by the look of her, lay on the ground with a gaping exit wound in the back of her head. Her hands were tied behind her back, a rope trailing behind her toward the wall. By her mottled skin and milky white eyes—not to mention the gore smeared around her mouth—it was obvious she was one of the infected.
My eyes tracked the rope across the room to where a portly, middle-aged man lay slumped against the wall. A shotgun lay at his feet, and he clutched a hunting knife in his left hand. A quick glance around the room told the story of what happened.
The infected woman’s bound hands were secured to an eyebolt driven into the floor. A short length of rope allowed her to move halfway toward the entrance, but no further. Flies buzzed on smears of blood and scraps of bones scattered across the bare plywood flooring.
There was a picture on the wall next to me of the two people when they were alive. It looked recent. They were standing on a pier, the bright sunny ocean behind them, holding cocktails and smiling at the camera, arms around each other’s shoulders.
“Let me guess,” Blake said behind me. “The wife got infected, and the husband was keeping her alive in here. Feeding her.”
“Feeding her what?” Dad asked.
I bent down and examined a few bones. I recognized the shoulder blade and leg bones of a wild pig. “Looks like he hunted for it.”