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.
The thing shudders again, releasing another cloud of musk. This is how it eats.
Ray roars and crushes the creature’s head with the chunk of concrete, the antlers stinging his hands as his skin brushes against them. The dark green skin splits easily, spurting pus and wriggling things that splash wetly onto the road. Its head destroyed and sagging like the ruins of a burst balloon, the creature continues to skitter back and forth on its leash, spilling squeaking parasites and fluids rich with alien bacteria and viruses.
Heaving the concrete over his head, Ray smashes the body into a puddle of green flesh.
Tyler laughs. “What do you think that’s going to do? Shit, you can’t kill Life, boy.”
Ray says nothing. He no longer understands language. He no longer has a mouth. The heat is incredible—the heat of his own blood pumping through his body. Tiny monsters swim in the soup, spreading fresh diseases his body receives and catalogs with joy. He peers out from rubbery green skin with millions of microscopic eyes, sensing Tyler’s presence. His hooves, chapped and raw and bleeding, clomp on the road.
He has become Infection.
Red mist veils his vision as he dreams the dreams of the Brood, the dreams of home. He floats over an endless plain under a copper sky filled with red dust and countless screaming winged things. As far as the eye can see, the land below swarms with monsters—naked things of all shapes and sizes constantly fighting and eating each other in teeming mountains of flesh. An entire ecology based on meat and waste in a circular food chain where everything eats everything else. Life filling every bit of space, eating and breeding and fighting for scarce nutrients and air and sunlight. This ecology is harsh and brutal but also rich, diverse, changing. Soaring through the humid, oily air, Ray watches as species rapidly evolve in endless competition. He wonders which of them is the Brood.
Then he understands. They are all the Brood.
As the myriad species fight and fuck and die, the Brood sighs content, flush with cheerful health. Oh, the joy of life. The wonder of endless creation. The brilliance of evolution. The Brood infected their world, and turned it into a laboratory for distilling perfection.
A dark shape veers shrieking from the left, and the dream ends.
Ray awakens and feels the constant hunger. He scuttles toward Tyler on his four legs and shudders, flushing powerful enzymes into the air.
“That’s right,” Tyler says, his eyes swelling shut, his face red and shiny with fever. “You eat. You grow up big and strong. It is time for you to become, Ray. Become perfection.”
Dr. Price
Travis sees the woman head into a side tunnel terminating at a three-story office building buried under the west portal, part of the underground world where he now lives.
Don’t go, Travis wants to call after her. He mouths the words but cannot say them.
Every morning, she appears somewhere on the way to his job, but he has never had the courage to approach her. The truth is he is afraid of her, just like he is afraid of everything down here. His job may sound heroic—searching for a cure to the plague—but mostly he spends his time competing for scarce resources against the rest of the bureaucracy and staring at the ceiling in a state of mild, blank terror. Wondering if all those thousands of tons of earth, just over his head, will one day come crashing down.
Pale faces flash in the gloom of the crowded tunnel, people heading to their jobs or wandering around with nothing better to do. There are thousands more people than there are jobs. The stale air smells like minerals and concrete and sweat.
If the ceiling collapses he will be crushed like a bug, with as much awareness of his fate. The world will tremble violently; then darkness.
A man shoulders him, muttering an irritated apology. Travis catches a glimpse of blond hair in the crowd ahead and changes course, following her into another tunnel.
His stomach trembles with an odd falling sensation, reminding him of descriptions of love he has read. He wonders why he is doing this. He has no idea what he is going to say when he catches up to her.
Where are you going? he wants to ask her. I don’t even know your name. How did you survive?
Nearly three weeks ago, Travis gazed down at Washington from a thundering Army transport. Riding high in the sky, the city looked normal, as long as you ignored the columns of smoke and the omnipresent distant boom of gunfire.
Heading west, the helicopter left the city and flew over green fields that gradually turned into the treed slopes of a mountain. At its base sprawled a complex of bland, utilitarian buildings and roads girdled by miles of fencing. Beyond, the Shenandoah Valley looked lush, green, untouched by the violence. The helicopter circled the facility and landed on a broad concrete pad occupied by several aircraft, their rotors still turning. Crowds of refugees were being herded by Marines toward the yawning mouth of a large building built from corrugated steel against the base of the mountain.
My God, Travis thought, pausing to look at the buildings. This is the Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center. The Alamo of the U.S. government.
A man in a business suit holding an M16 grabbed his arm and pushed him toward the tunnel. Follow the others, he said. Obey all instructions.
Travis glanced up at the sky and that was the last time he saw the sun.
Inside, the refugees streamed into what appeared to be a massive bank vault carved into the rock and waited their turn to plunge deep into the earth, emerging into the sunless world they were told was Area B.
The chase leads him to the mass transit station.
He hurries after, pushing through the crowd, trying not to lose sight of the young woman. She wears coveralls, common among the rank and file refugees who fled Washington with just the clothes on their backs. He grits his teeth and works to control his breathing, fighting his constant claustrophobia.
We’re just rats in a cage, Travis thinks. The Mount Weather facility was designed to support two thousand people. He guesses at least three times that live here now. The top officials and the Congress and their rich friends have lots of space, he heard. They have their own private apartments and tennis courts and movie theaters. Everyone else lives and works in overcrowded dormitories, locker rooms, office buildings and cafeterias that are spartan, gray and washed out by fluorescent light that never seems bright enough.