The Infected stumble and hold their heads, wailing in a constant state of metaphysical pain. They glower and bare their teeth at Sarge as he drives by in the armored vehicle.
The survivors find the tall, muscular man on his front porch wearing a bathrobe and boxer shorts, shouting and waving a pistol in his right hand and a battered, folded-up umbrella in his left. All of the neighboring houses have a large black X painted on their front doors; the Screaming apparently wiped out this community and left this man as its sole survivor.
“This is my neighborhood,” he says, firing off a round with his pistol and killing a running Infected, who falls sprawling on the sidewalk, joining another draped over a fire hydrant and a third crumpled in a fetal position on the hood of an ancient Cadillac. “You ain’t welcome here!”
The Bradley’s gunner, sitting next to Sarge inside the vehicle, sizes up the man through the periscope and says, “I think we found somebody who might be big enough to take you, Sergeant.”
Sarge snorts and says, “I like his spunk. He’s a fighter.”
“Spunk as in crazy,” says the gunner. He has the square jaw of an action movie hero and wears a Dora the Explorer Band-Aid on the left cheek of his stubbled face. “Crazy as in a threat to all of us.”
“If crazy disqualified membership, there’d be no club in this rig. Ha.”
“I thought the plan was we want ‘survivors, not fighters.’ That’s what you said.”
“Fighters are useful, too,” Sarge says cryptically. “We can’t do job interviews, Steve. Let’s invite him on. If he blends, he blends.”
“You’re the boss, Sergeant,” the gunner says, shrugging.
The man roars: “Kids used to play on this street!”
crack crack
Sarge says, “Something about him reminds me of Randy Devereaux. Remember Devereaux?”
“Not really, Sergeant. I hardly knew him.”
“Right,” Sarge says. “You’re right. That’s my bad.” Steve and Ducky, the driver, are new to the Bradley, replacements for the previous crew, who fell down during the Screaming nearly two weeks ago. Two weeks and an eternity. The replacements barely had any contact with the Bradley’s infantry squad, the boys who survived the Taliban and the Screaming and then flew all the way back from Afghanistan to die in a Wal-Mart parking lot in Pittsburgh.
“This is a nice place to live!”
Sarge calls out to him, but the man ignores him. If he does not trust the military, maybe one of the civilians can coax him. Anne volunteers to get out and do the inviting. While the Bradley stands idling, she approaches with her hands up, palms out.
“What’s your name?” she asks.
The man glares at her sideways, frowning, then waves her off. “Aw, you don’t live here neither.”
“My name is Anne. There are five of us plus the crew—”
The pistol cracks in the man’s hand twice, dropping two distant running figures.
“I am making my stand!” he announces to the sky.
“Come on, get in,” Anne says. “You can come with us.”
“I said, step off, bitch!”
Sarge laughs, shaking his head, while the gunner grins.
“But we want you to come with us,” Anne says.
“Too dangerous out there,” the man tells her, waving his umbrella. “It’s raining zombies!”
crack crack
He fires again several times at distant figures running down the street. At long range, barely looking, and does not miss. One of the kills, Sarge saw it clear, was a headshot. The Infected’s head snapped back and he was dead in the blink of an eye.
Steve says, “Is he actually hitting anything with that pea shooter?”
“Yeah, he is. In fact, every shot hit a separate moving target and brought it down at between twenty-five and thirty meters.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not a kidder, Steve.”
“With a handgun, though? Wow, this guy is amazing.”
“No, you’re right,” Sarge says. “He’s crazy. Radioactive.”
He calls out to Anne, who jogs back to the vehicle.
“This is my home! My land!”
crack crack crack
Sarge lowers the telescopic seat and closes the single-piece hatch.
“How long do you give him, Sergeant?”
“I don’t know, Steve. Longer than most. Not long enough.”
Paul runs his hand over his salt-and-pepper stubble and takes in the massive hospital looming against the graying sky. The air is cooling and he can feel the tickle of tiny drizzling raindrops on his face. Dull thunder grinds in the distant ether, as if God is moving his furniture across the floor. Now this is good weather for an apocalypse, he tells himself. A gray sky against which black birds swarm. He found the past two weeks of May sunshine jarringly discordant with the end of the world. The diseased walking blindly past flowers in bloom. (Earth abides.) The dead rotting away on lush green grass and overgrown gardens, slowly eaten by bacteria and insects and birds and animals. By the very soil. (Yes, the earth abides.) Paul wonders if God, who also abides, is as impervious as the weather to all of mankind’s horrible sufferings or if, like the grass and the animals and the insects, his creator is getting something out of it.
The wind picks up and the drizzle turns into a spring shower. The survivors set out buckets to catch the water and decide to wait out the downpour inside the hospital instead of the Bradley. They navigate a cluster of abandoned ambulances and dead bodies and enter what is supposed to be the emergency room but what instead looks like a burned-out slaughterhouse. Signs of extreme violence are everywhere on this place. The floor is littered with charred bodies under a thick layer of ash and dust. The walls are painted with dried blood.
“When the first Infected woke up and spread out into the city, the first responders brought the victims of the violence here, to the hospital,” says Ethan. “Gift-wrapped for the rest.”
“It looks like some concerned citizens then showed up and firebombed the place,” Wendy says, kicking at the ash and raising a small cloud of black dust.
The place gives them the creeps. The hospital seems eerily deserted except for the charred dead. It is not hard to imagine doctors and nurses hurrying across this noisy room to greet hardworking first responders bringing in broken and dying people for life-saving treatment. But this is where Infection started. After the Screaming, the people who fell down were brought here and to the ad hoc clinics. Three days later, they woke up and slaughtered and infected the people who had been working around the clock to keep them alive. They slaughtered and infected their own families coming to visit. Then they went out into the city in the early morning hours, driven by the virus’ simple programming: Attack, overpower, infect.
Now it is a killing floor. A dead place. Sarge regards a wheelchair crumpled in a corner, the walls above it riddled with bullet holes. Wall-mounted electronic medical devices hang uselessly. Disturbed by movement, black ash swarms in drifts in the air, acrid to the nose and bitter on the tongue.