The Infection by Craig DiLouie Page A

said. “But he’s still bleeding—”
    She’s one of us—
    The cop raised her gun and fired, the sound of the discharge filling the house. The man’s head exploded and splashed up the wall.
    The woman wailed like an animal caught in a steel trap, rushing forward to hug the man’s broken face against her chest.
    “You killed Roy!”
    Upstairs, a teenage boy was snarling and banging on a bedroom door.
    Wendy holstered her gun and walked out the door into the night.
    “ Why did you do that? Why? Why?”
    The woman’s screaming followed her down the street until it became just one of many voices rising up from the city in pain like a demonic choir.

MEMORIES
     
    Todd wakes up in a bed in a warm, windowless hospital room after a long, dreamless sleep. He is still exhausted but his body is telling him he has already overslept. You’re still here, Todd old man, he tells himself. Still truckin’. Wrapping his blanket around his bare shoulders, he shuffles blearily to a bucket in the corner and empties his bladder. His stomach growls. Outside, he finds Paul in the hallway, whistling as he mops the floor with a strong bleach solution. He finds the sight reassuring. He is not used to being alone.
    “Hey, Rev,” he says.
    “Morning, Kid.”
    “Wow, we just got here and they got you mopping floors already. Too bad there isn’t more need for preachers in the post-apocalyptic world.”
    Paul pauses in his work, smiling. “On the contrary, son, a true minister is no stranger to working with his hands. It’s a form of prayer. Good for the soul. You ought to try it sometime.”
    “Are you trying to turn me into an atheist?”
    “Ha,” says Paul.
    “Anyhow, my soul needs some coffee or it’s not doing anything today.”
    “Go around the corner and look for the lounge. We got it set up as a common room. I’m sure Anne saved you something.”
    “Thanks, Rev,” Todd says, his blanket forming a train on the floor behind him.
    “Good to have you back, Kid.”
    Todd turns and grins. “The Kid abides, Rev. The Kid abides.”
     
    ♦
     
    Ethan plods slowly through the pathology department, marveling at the expensive equipment now gathering dust in the gloomy light of his lantern. Everywhere they go, he sees signs of a world that has fallen down. He is looking for things that they can use but has not found anything. A large centrifuge sits on a laboratory table, its lid open showing test tubes filled with cells, once living and now dead, from an unfinished experiment. People had been working here when the Infected got out of their beds. They left in a hurry. Ethan sees an overturned chair with a crisp white labcoat still clinging to the back. A crushed test tube on the floor.
    He pauses in front of a cabinet filled with delicate glassware, test tubes and beakers. They are clean but he feels a primitive fear of touching them. Germs are the greatest threat to his survival right now, and his instincts are not very discriminating. In the corner, an emergency liquid nitrogen tank catches his eye. He stares at it for a long time. The nitrogen is stored under pressure, so they might be able to siphon some of it off into a container to make a crude explosive. If they don’t blow their own hands off first. They might dump it on the Infected and flash freeze them. As long as they don’t freeze their own arm solid in the bargain.
    Liquid nitrogen is a dangerous laboratory material, he reminds himself. Probably best to leave it alone. He considered it worth thinking about, however. In this world, everything must be evaluated as a potential weapon. Out of the five basic survival needs, security now ranks first.
    Ethan fiddles with a fluorescence microscope but it sits dark, inert, lifeless without electricity. The room is filled with hundreds of thousands of dollars in deteriorating lab equipment. He recognizes an incubator, decides not to open it. It strikes him again that scientists studied disease here. Not scary diseases like