“The gates of hell opened. If we hadn’t dropped smoke, I don’t think we would have made it. That thing was kicking the shit out of my rig. Come on.”
Ethan shakes his head in amazement. That thing, Sarge said. This was not the average Infected and probably not a worm either. The commander obviously had no idea what he had been fighting in the dark. As Ethan suspected, there are other children of Infection, probably an entire family of monstrosities. If there is something out there that can take on an American armored fighting vehicle, Ethan believes, the human race might have to give up its claim on the planet.
He has often speculated about what could have caused the pandemic. As an educated man, he refuses to believe the cause is supernatural. Infection is spread by a virus, but a virus does not explain these bizarre mutations. In the days following the Screaming, scientists were speculating about a nanotech weapon that escaped the lab. Could nanotechnology create such monsters?
Ethan once again finds himself entertaining an alien colonization theory. Consider an alien race on a distant world that wants to propagate itself across the galaxy. Instead of spaceships, it sends seedlings out across the cosmos, which eventually rain down on Earth to colonize the resident species’ DNA, mutating the natives into adaptations of the alien species and its ecology. The creatures are at first sickly because they are still adapting to Earth’s environment. They eat the dead but are starving because their alien digestive systems cannot extract nutrition from it. While they turn the dominant species against itself through Infection, they burrow into the darkest spaces in abandoned buildings and adapt and multiply. Over time, they grow stronger until they eliminate the dominant species and complete the conquest of their adopted world. It makes sense, he reasons. Why else would they target our children for immediate extermination?
Or perhaps the aliens are indeed coming in spaceships, but they are terraforming the planet before the ships arrive, eliminating the resident species in the process. Which means humanity is not fighting aliens, but the wildlife of the aliens’ home world. These things are repulsive but they are not evil in the sense that they want to hurt humans purely out of malice. They are hunting people for food. In one sense, they might as well be millions of hungry lions roaming the streets, hunting and eating people simply to survive.
The worst part is the human race will probably never truly understand what killed it.
His family needs him more than ever. He will keep looking for them. He wonders if this is why he is so calm, that he has surrendered what is left of his sanity to the delusion they are alive.
I’ll keep searching for you, Mary. I’ll never stop looking.
They approach a figure sitting on the ground propped against a gas pump. The man is pale, underweight, his cheeks sunken, his eyes dark and bruised. His arms rest withered and useless at his sides. Ethan suddenly recognizes him as the driver—what is left of him, anyway. The gunner kneels next to him, trying to give him water.
Sarge is saying, “You’re smart, Ethan. I’m betting you can figure out a way to fix him.”
Ducky Jones lost thirty pounds since Ethan saw him the night before. The man is almost visibly wilting in front of him, coughing feebly, his breath rapid and shallow. His dark, intelligent eyes flicker at Ethan with a mixture of fear and hope. There is still a man in there.
Ethan holds his gaze respectfully for several seconds, then looks down at the revolting thing that protrudes from his hip like something out of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not.
Todd enters the truck stop cautiously, violating Anne’s standing rule of never going anywhere alone. Something could attack him and he would be vulnerable. Anne’s rules suddenly mean a whole lot less to him today, however. The monster changed the game last night. How can they hope to survive with horrors like that out there hunting them? Like most victims of bullies, Todd is highly sensitive to what other people are feeling, and the best word he can think of to describe the mood right now in the group as a whole is deranged. Deranged and black, raw, angry. In other words, morale is shit. They are becoming people who do not care, people who are losing hope and otherwise have nothing left to lose. Damaged goods.
They are close to giving up.
Inside the lobby, he has a choice of restaurant, convenience store or public restrooms. As much as he would like to take a private dump on a real toilet, there is no way he is going into a public restroom by himself. The store looks interesting. The shelves have been rifled but whoever did it left most of the stuff behind. He might find some good loot in here. He remembers that Wendy wants a pair of toenail clippers.
His nerves are crawling with the oppressive feeling that the group is falling apart. Anne and Wendy wandered off to who knows where, Paul is emptying the Bradley’s guts into the ash under the pretense of organizing their supplies, and the driver is dying at the fuel island. Anne was ready to blow Ethan’s head all over the pavement. What about Todd? Nobody wants to listen to him. They obviously think of him as just a kid. But he will not abandon the group. He feels a very strong loyalty to it. Groucho Marx once quipped that he would never want to be a member of a club that would have him as a member. Todd wants to be a member of the club almost entirely because they offered him membership. America feels like a distant dream. This tiny tribe is his nation now. These people are not mere tools used to help collect food and stand guard while he sleeps. They are much more than that. They are something like family to him.
It is true that as individuals, while he trusts the other survivors and feels comfortable with them, he does not know them well, even after days of fighting together against terrible odds. All anybody talks about is how they plan to survive the next ten minutes. It is not like people are going to open up during the apocalypse about their hobbies or where they went for vacation last summer or their favorite flavor of ice cream. They have intense flashbacks, but never talk about their separate pasts from the Time Before. The past right now seems less real than the demon that attacked them last night. The past is also too painful to recall willingly, bringing to mind too many lost things. Todd likes the other survivors, but his interactions with them, while intimate, have been largely superficial. He feels his deepest connection with the group itself—feels safest, in fact, interacting with the others through the medium of the group.
But if there is no group anymore, to what or whom is there to be loyal?
A bell tinkles as he enters the store, sending his heart galloping in his chest. The place smells musty. The air feels flat, dead. He accidentally kicks a two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew spinning across the floor. He flinches at the noise, raising his rifle and sweeping the store for targets as he backs against the nearest wall.
Maybe coming in here by myself was not such a good idea, he thinks, gasping for breath. Another scare like that and I’ll drop dead from a stroke.
Having a closer look at the shelves brings further disappointment. Most of the merchandise is still sitting on the shelves or hanging on hooks, but there is no food, water, medicine. Instead, almost all of the stuff left in the store are products specifically marketed to truckers who have to live on the road for as long as a month at a time. Movies and audio books, CB radio equipment, hazmat placards, truck stop exit guides, road atlases, electric frying pans, toasters, DC adapters, coffee makers and TV/VCR systems.
Todd wonders what a trucker would do with a coffee maker and then realizes, looking at the packaging, that all of these devices are DC powered. And the DC adapters allow AC devices to run off of DC. He suddenly has an epiphany. Most appliances do not work anymore because they need AC power, and the only way he knows to make AC power when the grid is down is with an emergency generator that runs on diesel or propane or natural gas. But DC comes from batteries.