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Description
(A Left 4 Dead sketch)

People have always mistaken me for what I'm not. I don't know. Perhaps I don't look like anything particular, a blank slate, and people see what they want in me, what they need. But it means I'm always explaining, and then explaining my explanations. And usually making a complete mess of it.

And sometimes not. Take my stay in hospital a few weeks ago. I've been in and out of the place for years. I'd managed to stab myself with a stray needle in the course of my work for the bus company, and by sheer dumb luck it had enough of the AIDS virus on it to get the disease started in me. I can't say I was surprised when I heard the news. Things like that tend to happen to me. I was annoyed when people I met began to assume I was gay, though. I hated having to explain that I wasn't. It's so difficult to do without making it sound as if there would be something wrong if I were. People ask too many questions.

I was very interested in staying alive, though, which is what brought me to the hospital that day a few weeks ago. My AIDS drugs weren't working any more, and the disease was beginning to make rapid progress. I was in for an unpleasant end fairly quickly, unless....

That's what I get for going to a teaching hospital, I suppose. The chance to become part of medical history. Or a cadaver. Or both. They had this new drug mixture, they said. Not tested on humans yet. All known drugs, but never used in combination. It was a trick they hadn't tried before, a mix of antivirals formulated so that it would stay in my bloodstream for as long as possible – for months, years. Maybe for my whole life. It gets into your bones, I think. The idea was that it would have so many chances to destroy the virus in all that time that finally my body would be cleared of it. Or I might take badly to the mixture and die on the spot. Or anything between these two extremes.

Since it was my only chance, I agreed. They gave me forms to sign. Quite a bundle of them. It was amusing reading through their careful, legalistic phraseology. Really, they could have put things in a much simpler fashion.

"So, doctor, these say you're not to be held liable even if your mixture turns me into a zombie," I said to the expectant white-coated figure hovering beside the table at which I sat and signed. Not in a hostile tone, mind you. I have to admit, they'd never pretended this was anything but an experiment.

"Oh, that's not likely," the doctor said. He was young and full of an innocently inhuman curiosity about how I would turn out. Dead, alive, didn't make much difference to him, so long as it was novel and interesting. In his eyes, I was his next journal article. "But there's no way to get it out once it's in. This particular mix hasn't been tested in humans before, and the nature of the drugs in combination means that any side-effects will be exceptionally long-lasting. Just so you know that."

"Death's longer," I said. "I'll go for your little adventure." And signed the forms, every one of them. At the end, I noticed that I had picked up the wrong pen. I had been signing in red ink. As if it were blood. But the doctor didn't seem to mind. He scuttled off with his stack of exculpatory papers, and they shot me up that very afternoon. Before I changed my mind, I suppose. Mind you, they were very busy at the time as well. Some sort of new bug going around. I wasn't paying attention to the details. Too much on my own plate already.

They arranged to keep me in the hospital overnight, free of charge, so that they would get first dibs on the cadaver if I just up and dropped dead, I suppose. Class accommodation, a private room. As it was, there were some side effects. Quite a few, actually. I became very dizzy that evening, and the next day or so were a haze. Then I was unconscious, lying on a bed in my room, until finally I woke up again.

I sat up with a start. The window was curtained and it seemed dark outside, but none of the lights had been turned on. The corridor outside, seen through the glass window of the door, was just as lightless. I knew they had been busy, but this was a bit much. Had everyone just moved on and forgotten me?

The call button didn't work. I noticed it wasn't illuminated either, didn't seem to have power. The telephone was dead, as was the staff intercom. This was getting odder by the minute. I got out of bed and put on my clothes. There was a low moaning in the hallway now, something not exactly human, and it was coming closer. Had the Martians invaded, or what? My chief reaction at that time was not fear but annoyance. Couldn't someone have left me a note? I always get forgotten. That was what preoccupied me. It's amazing sometimes how self-pity can help you get by.

Hospital wards are devoid of objects with lethal possibilities, I suppose by design, but I wasn't going to greet whatever was making that ungodly noise with no more than a smile and a cheery Hello! I looked around quickly. The telephone had no heft to it, and the IV stand was too cumbersome, though it might do in a pinch. The chair? I wasn't a lion tamer. Ah.... the fire extinguisher. There was a powdered chemical unit there, a small one, for electrical fires. For when the machinery turned on them.

I took it out and loosened the safety pin. It was heavy enough to leave a mark, but small enough to wield easily. As a last resort, I could fire it right into something's face. If all this turned out to be some big mistake, I could always say that with the lights out I had smelt burnt insulation and was looking for the fire. I've always been that way. Public-spirited. Though people used to think I was just paranoid and snoopy. That was another thing I always had to deny. Though not any more.

The moaning got closer. I drew my window blinds for what little light there was – it seemed to be very early morning – and then opened the door to my room.

There were more than one of them out there. The noisy one had been a doctor, I suppose. He had the white coat, anyway. Perhaps a pharmacist. When I opened up the door, he was a few feet away, leaning over, hands on his knees, throwing up on the floor. There were others staggering back and forth further down the hall, some in patient gowns and others in normal clothing or nurse uniforms. It stank.

I suppose I should have panicked, slammed the door again, called for help. But the telephone didn't work, I knew that already. And I'm different that way. Level-headed. I always concentrate on what to do, how to help, in a disaster. Practical. Through people mistook it for coldheartedness. Stupid people. What good does emotion do? You can cry when it's all over. Cry when it's happening and you'll just have more to cry about in the end.

So, when the figure in white straightened up, snarled, and made a rush at me, I was ready for him. He got the fire extinguisher right over the head, and crumpled up. His skin was gray, dead-looking, and he seemed weak. But maybe that was just the adrenaline in my system, pumped up. As soon as he went down, the others were on me. They were fast, that much I grant them. But stupid. They got in each others' way. I was bitten or scratched a few times, nothing very serious, but they were all dead or unconscious by the time the brief scuffle was over.

Before I came down from my rush, I visited each prone form and used the extinguisher to bash its brains out. I did mention I like to be thorough, didn't I?

Then I began wondering what the hell had happened.

There was a light still on at the nurses' station at the end of the hall. I walked down there, stepping over bodies, those I had just dealt with, and others further down. Lots of bodies. There were the corpses of two nurses at the station. Not gray and sick-looking like the things that had attacked me, but a healthier color, even when dead. There were reddish-brown splashes of dried blood all over.

The staff washroom behind the nurses' station had its door broken down. That would have taken some doing. Hospital doors aren't flimsy. A third nurse was in there. She must have tried to hide. They'd gotten in and ripped her throat out all the same. She was cold, dead for hours or days, like the others.

There was a clipboard by her side with a few scribbled notes. Her blood made them hard to read, but they were a call for help. Maybe she was planning to throw it out a window or something. They said something about people beginning to turn in a wave of infection, across the whole city, like a wind blowing across a field of wheat, bowing the heads of grain. Must have been a country girl, I thought. I checked my watch. The date and time on the clipboard told me the whole thing had happened less than a day ago. That was lucky. At least she hadn't begun to decompose. The stink was bad enough already.

Her name had been Mary Eastwood. Her friends outside had been Jill Knighton and Lori Enderby. There were addresses, phone numbers, a message to her parents. That was personal, and I'm not going to repeat it here. Maybe I'll get to deliver it one day, though I'll have to recopy it. Or lie and say that the blood on the note is mine and not hers.

Finally, there was a note at the bottom of the page, hastily scrawled, "I'm not turning. I was bitten but I'm not turning. Antivirals?" I remembered. Working on this floor, in constant contact with viral infections, the nursing staff had been receiving much milder doses of some of the drugs I had been stuffed to the brim with. They'd resisted turning, and the newly infected had turned on them instead.

Awkward, I thought. If the infected attacked the unaffected on sight, I'd be needing something with more kick than a fire extinguisher if I wanted, say, to cross the street. Or even move around in the building. And I was getting hungry. There was a vending machine at the nurse station, so I raided the bodies of the staff for change and filled my pockets with candy bars. Robbing the dead. But that would do for the time being.

What next? I still had no idea what was going on. A plague of some kind. Something that infected nearly everyone, almost instantly, and drove them to attack the few who had been spared infection. That much was obvious. But I needed details. Was the government trying to deal with the situation? Would anyone come to the rescue?

I searched the other rooms on the ward. Only half of them had been occupied: it was a single-bed ward, a luxury, at least to those who weren't getting it as a perk for other services. Most of the other patients had been killed in their beds. Interesting. The patients tended not to turn. I suppose it must have been antivirals again. Everyone there was under some sort of treatment. Though it hadn't done them much good in the end.

I sat down and put my feet up in a room free of cadavers. I had smashed the window so that the air could get in, and locked the door. Time to think about my next step. But I suddenly remembered something stupid that had happened to me a few years back, and began to laugh helplessly. My accident had been in the news, a minor item, to warn people to be more careful with their sharps, I suppose. Some nut had read the story, somehow discovered my home phone number and called me up late one night. He told me he knew that I was a faggot and this was God's punishment for sodomites. That AIDS was God's punishment for fags. The gay plague. Sodom and Gomorrah. And so on and so forth. I hung up on him. Wasn't going to let him assume I thought there was something wrong with gays by denying that I was gay. He wouldn't have believed me anyway. He called several nights in a row, and finally I had to set the telephone company on to him. He lost his account, I think.

And why was that funny? Antivirals. I was alive and uninfected because I had been shot up with a huge dose of antivirals, and I'd been shot up because I had AIDS. I wasn't gay, but a lot of those taking my drugs would have been. And intravenous drug users, and those with unusually expansive sex lives. And they were going to be just about the only ones left standing, bar a few exceptions like those nurses, if they had been luckier, and me. Take that, Mr. Evangelical. If AIDS had been the Gay Plague, this was the Straight Plague, God's special fuck-you gift to his most fanatical followers. After the Straight Plague, the fags and druggies and hookers were going to inherit the earth. The holy ones should have been more careful about what they wished on other people. Karma's a bitch.

Then I thought about my situation again.

There was no point going back to my home. There wasn't much there, and I had lived alone anyway. I could try to make my way to some important building like City Hall and hope that rescuers would find me before I starved or lost a bashing contest with one of the infected. Or the airport. If anything were to come in and out at this point, it would probably be by air. The problem was that the airport was a bit out of town. There was a light rail line between it and the main city bus terminal, though. If worst came to worst, I could just walk there, following the tracks.

But how was I to get to the bus station? Batter my way down the street with my fire extinguisher? It was full light outside now, and when I leaned out the window I could see infected wandering the streets here and there. I'd be like catnip to them. Even stealing a vehicle wouldn't be much help. The streets were clogged with stalled or parked cars.

If you can't beat them, join them. I would have to blend in to have any chance of success. In the past, people always mistook me for what I was not. Why not now?

The infected shambled and slumped. Their hair seemed gray, and their skin was grayish as well. They threw up periodically. Well, maybe I'd have to skip the last touch. But with some talcum powder and zinc oxide ointment, I could get close enough to the look. The walk and actions could be imitated. And if I rubbed some dead zombie over my outer clothes, I'd probably stink well enough to satisfy them. They didn't seem to attack each other.

I decided to test my idea out inside the hospital. No doubt the other floors had been infested by the infected as well. It wouldn't be too dangerous to just slip down one floor and see how the residents received me.

Dressing up was the work of only a few minutes. I switched outer clothing with one of the infected to create a rumpled look – and to borrow his stink, which had dulled to the endurable level for me by this time. I grayed my skin and hair with ointments and talcum powder. They won't be too picky, I thought. It won't occur to them that anyone would do this. I just have to remember not to stand too straight. To moan every now and then. Nothing much.

With this as my magic cloak, and a length of steel pipe up one sleeve as an easier weapon to conceal than the fire extinguisher, I began to slip down the fire stairs one level at a time. On the second floor there was a lounge, I knew. Perhaps there would be something there that would tell me what was going on. A radio, or a TV. If I could get to them without the other infected noticing.

Floor by floor. I had never been so grateful to be misconstrued and misunderstood before. The infected accepted me as one of them with an unsettling ease. But the grey pukers weren't the only ones in the mix now. Passing the fourth floor, I heard crying mingled with the groans, and out of the corner of my eye, noticed a strange slender figure with bloody hands, wandering and weeping loudly. I gave her a wide berth. Time enough to be curious when I was better armed.

The lounge was nearly empty. The television was on, but showing nothing but white noise. The remote control was on a table at the side. I shambled over and snatched it with a lurch, concealing it in my hand and flipping through the channels. The few infected within range didn't seem to notice. Nothing... nothing... test signal... and again nothing. Another test signal. But this one was looping an announcement of some kind, through heavy static. I stumbled around near the TV, grateful that there was no need to look at it directly, and listened.

Something about an assembly point for survivors. A warning not to get too close to troops if you saw them. The phrase authorized to use deadly force broke through the static at several places. The bus station. A deadline, now several hours past. Damn.

Still, since there was nowhere else to go, off to the bus station I went. It wasn't more than two or three hours away, even at the shambling stagger my disguise mandated. As I left, a couple of infected began slugging it out near the nurses' station. So they did fight. I'd have to avoid that. Too hard to keep my disguise intact.

I left the hospital at as fast a stumble as I dared. Cars were abandoned in the streets, but there was usually a way to walk around them. Climbing seemed too coordinated for the infected, so I tried to avoid it. Sometimes I had company; sometimes I was the only moving figure in sight. There were a few bodies of uninfected, but not many. A few bodies of children, too. I realized I hadn't seen an infected child. Maybe they all just died. Lucky kids.

The bus depot. I could see the main building burning from a long way off. Not good.

There seemed to be quite a crowd of infected around the depot, and at least one more of the strange weeping women I had first noticed in the hospital. There were other noises too, snarls and from one dark room, a disgusting liquid burbling. I decided I didn't need to know where any of these came from, and gave them all a wide berth. The constant stumbling and moaning was getting tedious. I needed to find some place where I could be alone and rest.

There was some sort of a rough holding area outside the burning terminal. Barriers and yellow tape, police lines. Quarantine signs. Gates, open now. I didn't dare look at them too closely. Lots of infected were wandering about there. I would just as soon have avoided it, but I had to pass that way to get to the airport rail station.

Many corpses on the ground there, not infected. Ordinary people. Some had clearly died from bullet wounds, great gaping holes. None seemed mauled or bitten. The ordinary infected seemed to cluster round them. Relatives perhaps? Or looking for a quick lunch? No way to tell.

Working my way around the bus station. Fewer infected here. I saw several military vehicles, abandoned it seemed. One of the trucks, a 4x4 with a canvas canopy, had a field radio in the back. Hm, I thought. Worth the risk?

It was that or shamble all the way to the airport. And my back was killing me. There weren't many infected near the trucks. I stumbled around and waited my chance, and then "fell" strategically into the back of the truck. No one seemed to notice. A few more lurches, and I was out of sight of anything not standing directly behind the truck.

The radio had earphones. Thank goodness. Wouldn't do to attract the attention of the neighbors. Not in this neighborhood.

I put on the earphones, crouched behind a crate, and turned on the radio. There were lights on its front, red and green, bright. I masked them with a clipboard. And pressed the Transmit key, hoping that the unit was set to a usable frequency. Shortwave radio. Another skill I didn't have. Should have been more careful in the old days, more prudent. No good having regrets now.

Softly, but not too softly. Was anyone listening? Outside the truck? On another radio?

Hello, hello, I began. Loud enough? Morristown Bus Depot. Is anyone there?

For a long moment, nothing but static. Then an excited response that made me cringe a bit, glad of the earphones. If it had been through speakers, that fool would have killed me.

Hello, hello! We read you. Who are you? What is your condition?

I replied, as softly as possible.

One survivor. I'm all right. I seem to be immune. I was in hospital. Under antiviral treatment when the infection hit.

The response was again delivered at what seemed to be a near-shout, and I jumped.

You lucky bastard! Can you reach the airport by yourself? We're pulling out soon, but we'll be able to send a helicopter back to get you if you're there.

So I was chasing a retreat. Comforting thought. No one ever waits for me.

How can I contact you when I arrive? It'll take me a while to get there.

There was a pause. The reply was in another voice, an older one. Probably the commander.

Get up into the control tower. We'll leave it unlocked. There will be a radio there, and probably not too many infected in the airport. Call us from there.

It was a plan. Nothing better to do, anyway.

Right. Leave some food there too. It's dangerous for me to talk long. Over and out.

Then I switched the radio off. I could already hear a soft growling from outside. Not pleasant. I curled up behind the box to wait it out, and it passed on. Eventually, I fell asleep, hoping that I wouldn't snore.

Dawn, the next day. I set out for the airport. Didn't dare to take too direct a route. Too conspicuous. But there weren't many infected there. They seem to prefer built-up areas.

The road to the airport led first through cookie-cutter suburbia. Then fields where uncomfortable dairy cows, unmilked for several days, mooed in distress. I wondered if they would die. Nothing to be done about it anyway.

The farmhouses, the one or two I passed, were all empty except for one or two dead kids. I took advantage of their cover to rest a bit and straighten my back. Couldn't do that where any infected might see. Like finding a place to take a piss in the great outdoors, in olden times, a week ago. The damn crick in my back will become permanent if I'm not careful. I'm not that young any more.

I took food too, and a pistol that someone had left lying on a table with its ammo. Strange. Only a few days, but it didn't feel like stealing any more.

Finally the airport. In through the front gate, blocked with stalled cars. All the cars were empty. Did the people inside get rescued? Or were they part of the gray-skinned horde now? Damn. A lot of infected in the terminal building. Had to be careful. There was that horrible gurgling noise as well, again, from the darkness. I forgot about going inside.

I saw a door at the base of the control tower and did my dance toward it. Someone had chalked a big X over it. Must be the door they spoke of, the one they unlocked. Clever. If all the doors were closed, tough security doors, it's not likely any infected would have bashed their way in. No reason for them to.

The door was open. I shambled in, closed it, and locked it behind me. Then I stood straight again. Good-bye and a very hearty fuck you, dear infected. I couldn't wait to get out of my sticky mess of ointment and stinking infected sheath.

For once, mistaken identity had been of use to me. Everything had gone my way. My AIDS treatment had saved my life. Now, if it just got rid of the AIDS as well, I would be sitting pretty. I had a sudden absurd desire to buy lottery tickets.

I danced up the staircase to the door at the top. Heart in mouth: was it locked? But it was open too. Bless the military. The control tower windows looked out over the runways. The instrument panels were unpowered and dark, but there was another of those portable radios set up on a folding table, its green and red lights blinking merrily. On it a scribbled note, Give us a call! Behind it a pile of everything. Clothing and a camp bed. Food, water, an automatic rifle, ammunition, even a half-dozen grenades. My lucky day, for sure. It felt like Christmas.

A lovely home, with a view to die for. At least in normal times. The scenery at the horizon was as beautiful as ever, but the nearer prospect was problematic. At least two aircraft had crashed on the runways, near the terminal, probably trying to land. Civilian cars and military vehicles, jeeps and trucks, were scattered across the paved apron. They'd need a helicopter to take me out. But that was what they had said they would be using, wasn't it?

The radio was a bit more elaborate than the one in the truck. It had a dial to adjust to different frequencies, instead of just buttons. I smiled. Cadillac treatment. Time to sign back into the world.

I sat down and put on the headphones. Pressed the transmit button and said Hello. And Hello again. And again.

No answer, only a whisper of static.

No answer on any of the transmission bands. Just static.

I hunted the full spectrum, longwave and shortwave, for any signal, any at all. Then, and many times in the days since then. Some loud buzzing. Once, a person transmitting, speaking, but too faint to make out clearly. It sounded like a call for help. By the following day, he had fallen silent. He's never been back. Two or three places transmitting in Morse code. I don't know Morse.

But I have food for months, and plenty of batteries. I wonder if the people who left them are still alive somewhere. Or whether they died just beyond the end of the runway in one of the crashed planes I can see through the binoculars.

I won't be leaving any time soon. My career as an infected impersonator is over. I don't have the smell any more. I burned the clothing. They should be starving, but there seem no fewer of them. And today, I saw a new type down near the terminal building. Big mean mother, a real King Kong. He got pissed at one of the ordinary infected, ripped out a lump of the pavement, and threw it. Smeared the poor bastard on the receiving end.

Something that strong could rip off the doors to this place as if they were made of paper. I'll have to be very, very quiet. And dark. Need to save the batteries anyway.

Here comes another burst of Morse. I don't know if it's automatic or whether someone is transmitting a message. It could be a crash beacon, that sort of thing.

As I said, I don't know Morse.

But it looks as if I'm going to have plenty of time to learn.

Description
(A Left 4 Dead sketch)

People have always mistaken me for what I'm not. I don't know. Perhaps I don't look like anything particular, a blank slate, and people see what they want in me, what they need. But it means I'm always explaining, and then explaining my explanations. And usually making a complete mess of it.

And sometimes not. Take my stay in hospital a few weeks ago. I've been in and out of the place for years. I'd managed to stab myself with a stray needle in the course of my work for the bus company, and by sheer dumb luck it had enough of the AIDS virus on it to get the disease started in me. I can't say I was surprised when I heard the news. Things like that tend to happen to me. I was annoyed when people I met began to assume I was gay, though. I hated having to explain that I wasn't. It's so difficult to do without making it sound as if there would be something wrong if I were. People ask too many questions.

I was very interested in staying alive, though, which is what brought me to the hospital that day a few weeks ago. My AIDS drugs weren't working any more, and the disease was beginning to make rapid progress. I was in for an unpleasant end fairly quickly, unless....

That's what I get for going to a teaching hospital, I suppose. The chance to become part of medical history. Or a cadaver. Or both. They had this new drug mixture, they said. Not tested on humans yet. All known drugs, but never used in combination. It was a trick they hadn't tried before, a mix of antivirals formulated so that it would stay in my bloodstream for as long as possible – for months, years. Maybe for my whole life. It gets into your bones, I think. The idea was that it would have so many chances to destroy the virus in all that time that finally my body would be cleared of it. Or I might take badly to the mixture and die on the spot. Or anything between these two extremes.

Since it was my only chance, I agreed. They gave me forms to sign. Quite a bundle of them. It was amusing reading through their careful, legalistic phraseology. Really, they could have put things in a much simpler fashion.

"So, doctor, these say you're not to be held liable even if your mixture turns me into a zombie," I said to the expectant white-coated figure hovering beside the table at which I sat and signed. Not in a hostile tone, mind you. I have to admit, they'd never pretended this was anything but an experiment.

"Oh, that's not likely," the doctor said. He was young and full of an innocently inhuman curiosity about how I would turn out. Dead, alive, didn't make much difference to him, so long as it was novel and interesting. In his eyes, I was his next journal article. "But there's no way to get it out once it's in. This particular mix hasn't been tested in humans before, and the nature of the drugs in combination means that any side-effects will be exceptionally long-lasting. Just so you know that."

"Death's longer," I said. "I'll go for your little adventure." And signed the forms, every one of them. At the end, I noticed that I had picked up the wrong pen. I had been signing in red ink. As if it were blood. But the doctor didn't seem to mind. He scuttled off with his stack of exculpatory papers, and they shot me up that very afternoon. Before I changed my mind, I suppose. Mind you, they were very busy at the time as well. Some sort of new bug going around. I wasn't paying attention to the details. Too much on my own plate already.

They arranged to keep me in the hospital overnight, free of charge, so that they would get first dibs on the cadaver if I just up and dropped dead, I suppose. Class accommodation, a private room. As it was, there were some side effects. Quite a few, actually. I became very dizzy that evening, and the next day or so were a haze. Then I was unconscious, lying on a bed in my room, until finally I woke up again.

I sat up with a start. The window was curtained and it seemed dark outside, but none of the lights had been turned on. The corridor outside, seen through the glass window of the door, was just as lightless. I knew they had been busy, but this was a bit much. Had everyone just moved on and forgotten me?

The call button didn't work. I noticed it wasn't illuminated either, didn't seem to have power. The telephone was dead, as was the staff intercom. This was getting odder by the minute. I got out of bed and put on my clothes. There was a low moaning in the hallway now, something not exactly human, and it was coming closer. Had the Martians invaded, or what? My chief reaction at that time was not fear but annoyance. Couldn't someone have left me a note? I always get forgotten. That was what preoccupied me. It's amazing sometimes how self-pity can help you get by.

Hospital wards are devoid of objects with lethal possibilities, I suppose by design, but I wasn't going to greet whatever was making that ungodly noise with no more than a smile and a cheery Hello! I looked around quickly. The telephone had no heft to it, and the IV stand was too cumbersome, though it might do in a pinch. The chair? I wasn't a lion tamer. Ah.... the fire extinguisher. There was a powdered chemical unit there, a small one, for electrical fires. For when the machinery turned on them.

I took it out and loosened the safety pin. It was heavy enough to leave a mark, but small enough to wield easily. As a last resort, I could fire it right into something's face. If all this turned out to be some big mistake, I could always say that with the lights out I had smelt burnt insulation and was looking for the fire. I've always been that way. Public-spirited. Though people used to think I was just paranoid and snoopy. That was another thing I always had to deny. Though not any more.

The moaning got closer. I drew my window blinds for what little light there was – it seemed to be very early morning – and then opened the door to my room.

There were more than one of them out there. The noisy one had been a doctor, I suppose. He had the white coat, anyway. Perhaps a pharmacist. When I opened up the door, he was a few feet away, leaning over, hands on his knees, throwing up on the floor. There were others staggering back and forth further down the hall, some in patient gowns and others in normal clothing or nurse uniforms. It stank.

I suppose I should have panicked, slammed the door again, called for help. But the telephone didn't work, I knew that already. And I'm different that way. Level-headed. I always concentrate on what to do, how to help, in a disaster. Practical. Through people mistook it for coldheartedness. Stupid people. What good does emotion do? You can cry when it's all over. Cry when it's happening and you'll just have more to cry about in the end.

So, when the figure in white straightened up, snarled, and made a rush at me, I was ready for him. He got the fire extinguisher right over the head, and crumpled up. His skin was gray, dead-looking, and he seemed weak. But maybe that was just the adrenaline in my system, pumped up. As soon as he went down, the others were on me. They were fast, that much I grant them. But stupid. They got in each others' way. I was bitten or scratched a few times, nothing very serious, but they were all dead or unconscious by the time the brief scuffle was over.

Before I came down from my rush, I visited each prone form and used the extinguisher to bash its brains out. I did mention I like to be thorough, didn't I?

Then I began wondering what the hell had happened.

There was a light still on at the nurses' station at the end of the hall. I walked down there, stepping over bodies, those I had just dealt with, and others further down. Lots of bodies. There were the corpses of two nurses at the station. Not gray and sick-looking like the things that had attacked me, but a healthier color, even when dead. There were reddish-brown splashes of dried blood all over.

The staff washroom behind the nurses' station had its door broken down. That would have taken some doing. Hospital doors aren't flimsy. A third nurse was in there. She must have tried to hide. They'd gotten in and ripped her throat out all the same. She was cold, dead for hours or days, like the others.

There was a clipboard by her side with a few scribbled notes. Her blood made them hard to read, but they were a call for help. Maybe she was planning to throw it out a window or something. They said something about people beginning to turn in a wave of infection, across the whole city, like a wind blowing across a field of wheat, bowing the heads of grain. Must have been a country girl, I thought. I checked my watch. The date and time on the clipboard told me the whole thing had happened less than a day ago. That was lucky. At least she hadn't begun to decompose. The stink was bad enough already.

Her name had been Mary Eastwood. Her friends outside had been Jill Knighton and Lori Enderby. There were addresses, phone numbers, a message to her parents. That was personal, and I'm not going to repeat it here. Maybe I'll get to deliver it one day, though I'll have to recopy it. Or lie and say that the blood on the note is mine and not hers.

Finally, there was a note at the bottom of the page, hastily scrawled, "I'm not turning. I was bitten but I'm not turning. Antivirals?" I remembered. Working on this floor, in constant contact with viral infections, the nursing staff had been receiving much milder doses of some of the drugs I had been stuffed to the brim with. They'd resisted turning, and the newly infected had turned on them instead.

Awkward, I thought. If the infected attacked the unaffected on sight, I'd be needing something with more kick than a fire extinguisher if I wanted, say, to cross the street. Or even move around in the building. And I was getting hungry. There was a vending machine at the nurse station, so I raided the bodies of the staff for change and filled my pockets with candy bars. Robbing the dead. But that would do for the time being.

What next? I still had no idea what was going on. A plague of some kind. Something that infected nearly everyone, almost instantly, and drove them to attack the few who had been spared infection. That much was obvious. But I needed details. Was the government trying to deal with the situation? Would anyone come to the rescue?

I searched the other rooms on the ward. Only half of them had been occupied: it was a single-bed ward, a luxury, at least to those who weren't getting it as a perk for other services. Most of the other patients had been killed in their beds. Interesting. The patients tended not to turn. I suppose it must have been antivirals again. Everyone there was under some sort of treatment. Though it hadn't done them much good in the end.

I sat down and put my feet up in a room free of cadavers. I had smashed the window so that the air could get in, and locked the door. Time to think about my next step. But I suddenly remembered something stupid that had happened to me a few years back, and began to laugh helplessly. My accident had been in the news, a minor item, to warn people to be more careful with their sharps, I suppose. Some nut had read the story, somehow discovered my home phone number and called me up late one night. He told me he knew that I was a faggot and this was God's punishment for sodomites. That AIDS was God's punishment for fags. The gay plague. Sodom and Gomorrah. And so on and so forth. I hung up on him. Wasn't going to let him assume I thought there was something wrong with gays by denying that I was gay. He wouldn't have believed me anyway. He called several nights in a row, and finally I had to set the telephone company on to him. He lost his account, I think.

And why was that funny? Antivirals. I was alive and uninfected because I had been shot up with a huge dose of antivirals, and I'd been shot up because I had AIDS. I wasn't gay, but a lot of those taking my drugs would have been. And intravenous drug users, and those with unusually expansive sex lives. And they were going to be just about the only ones left standing, bar a few exceptions like those nurses, if they had been luckier, and me. Take that, Mr. Evangelical. If AIDS had been the Gay Plague, this was the Straight Plague, God's special fuck-you gift to his most fanatical followers. After the Straight Plague, the fags and druggies and hookers were going to inherit the earth. The holy ones should have been more careful about what they wished on other people. Karma's a bitch.

Then I thought about my situation again.

There was no point going back to my home. There wasn't much there, and I had lived alone anyway. I could try to make my way to some important building like City Hall and hope that rescuers would find me before I starved or lost a bashing contest with one of the infected. Or the airport. If anything were to come in and out at this point, it would probably be by air. The problem was that the airport was a bit out of town. There was a light rail line between it and the main city bus terminal, though. If worst came to worst, I could just walk there, following the tracks.

But how was I to get to the bus station? Batter my way down the street with my fire extinguisher? It was full light outside now, and when I leaned out the window I could see infected wandering the streets here and there. I'd be like catnip to them. Even stealing a vehicle wouldn't be much help. The streets were clogged with stalled or parked cars.

If you can't beat them, join them. I would have to blend in to have any chance of success. In the past, people always mistook me for what I was not. Why not now?

The infected shambled and slumped. Their hair seemed gray, and their skin was grayish as well. They threw up periodically. Well, maybe I'd have to skip the last touch. But with some talcum powder and zinc oxide ointment, I could get close enough to the look. The walk and actions could be imitated. And if I rubbed some dead zombie over my outer clothes, I'd probably stink well enough to satisfy them. They didn't seem to attack each other.

I decided to test my idea out inside the hospital. No doubt the other floors had been infested by the infected as well. It wouldn't be too dangerous to just slip down one floor and see how the residents received me.

Dressing up was the work of only a few minutes. I switched outer clothing with one of the infected to create a rumpled look – and to borrow his stink, which had dulled to the endurable level for me by this time. I grayed my skin and hair with ointments and talcum powder. They won't be too picky, I thought. It won't occur to them that anyone would do this. I just have to remember not to stand too straight. To moan every now and then. Nothing much.

With this as my magic cloak, and a length of steel pipe up one sleeve as an easier weapon to conceal than the fire extinguisher, I began to slip down the fire stairs one level at a time. On the second floor there was a lounge, I knew. Perhaps there would be something there that would tell me what was going on. A radio, or a TV. If I could get to them without the other infected noticing.

Floor by floor. I had never been so grateful to be misconstrued and misunderstood before. The infected accepted me as one of them with an unsettling ease. But the grey pukers weren't the only ones in the mix now. Passing the fourth floor, I heard crying mingled with the groans, and out of the corner of my eye, noticed a strange slender figure with bloody hands, wandering and weeping loudly. I gave her a wide berth. Time enough to be curious when I was better armed.

The lounge was nearly empty. The television was on, but showing nothing but white noise. The remote control was on a table at the side. I shambled over and snatched it with a lurch, concealing it in my hand and flipping through the channels. The few infected within range didn't seem to notice. Nothing... nothing... test signal... and again nothing. Another test signal. But this one was looping an announcement of some kind, through heavy static. I stumbled around near the TV, grateful that there was no need to look at it directly, and listened.

Something about an assembly point for survivors. A warning not to get too close to troops if you saw them. The phrase authorized to use deadly force broke through the static at several places. The bus station. A deadline, now several hours past. Damn.

Still, since there was nowhere else to go, off to the bus station I went. It wasn't more than two or three hours away, even at the shambling stagger my disguise mandated. As I left, a couple of infected began slugging it out near the nurses' station. So they did fight. I'd have to avoid that. Too hard to keep my disguise intact.

I left the hospital at as fast a stumble as I dared. Cars were abandoned in the streets, but there was usually a way to walk around them. Climbing seemed too coordinated for the infected, so I tried to avoid it. Sometimes I had company; sometimes I was the only moving figure in sight. There were a few bodies of uninfected, but not many. A few bodies of children, too. I realized I hadn't seen an infected child. Maybe they all just died. Lucky kids.

The bus depot. I could see the main building burning from a long way off. Not good.

There seemed to be quite a crowd of infected around the depot, and at least one more of the strange weeping women I had first noticed in the hospital. There were other noises too, snarls and from one dark room, a disgusting liquid burbling. I decided I didn't need to know where any of these came from, and gave them all a wide berth. The constant stumbling and moaning was getting tedious. I needed to find some place where I could be alone and rest.

There was some sort of a rough holding area outside the burning terminal. Barriers and yellow tape, police lines. Quarantine signs. Gates, open now. I didn't dare look at them too closely. Lots of infected were wandering about there. I would just as soon have avoided it, but I had to pass that way to get to the airport rail station.

Many corpses on the ground there, not infected. Ordinary people. Some had clearly died from bullet wounds, great gaping holes. None seemed mauled or bitten. The ordinary infected seemed to cluster round them. Relatives perhaps? Or looking for a quick lunch? No way to tell.

Working my way around the bus station. Fewer infected here. I saw several military vehicles, abandoned it seemed. One of the trucks, a 4x4 with a canvas canopy, had a field radio in the back. Hm, I thought. Worth the risk?

It was that or shamble all the way to the airport. And my back was killing me. There weren't many infected near the trucks. I stumbled around and waited my chance, and then "fell" strategically into the back of the truck. No one seemed to notice. A few more lurches, and I was out of sight of anything not standing directly behind the truck.

The radio had earphones. Thank goodness. Wouldn't do to attract the attention of the neighbors. Not in this neighborhood.

I put on the earphones, crouched behind a crate, and turned on the radio. There were lights on its front, red and green, bright. I masked them with a clipboard. And pressed the Transmit key, hoping that the unit was set to a usable frequency. Shortwave radio. Another skill I didn't have. Should have been more careful in the old days, more prudent. No good having regrets now.

Softly, but not too softly. Was anyone listening? Outside the truck? On another radio?

Hello, hello, I began. Loud enough? Morristown Bus Depot. Is anyone there?

For a long moment, nothing but static. Then an excited response that made me cringe a bit, glad of the earphones. If it had been through speakers, that fool would have killed me.

Hello, hello! We read you. Who are you? What is your condition?

I replied, as softly as possible.

One survivor. I'm all right. I seem to be immune. I was in hospital. Under antiviral treatment when the infection hit.

The response was again delivered at what seemed to be a near-shout, and I jumped.

You lucky bastard! Can you reach the airport by yourself? We're pulling out soon, but we'll be able to send a helicopter back to get you if you're there.

So I was chasing a retreat. Comforting thought. No one ever waits for me.

How can I contact you when I arrive? It'll take me a while to get there.

There was a pause. The reply was in another voice, an older one. Probably the commander.

Get up into the control tower. We'll leave it unlocked. There will be a radio there, and probably not too many infected in the airport. Call us from there.

It was a plan. Nothing better to do, anyway.

Right. Leave some food there too. It's dangerous for me to talk long. Over and out.

Then I switched the radio off. I could already hear a soft growling from outside. Not pleasant. I curled up behind the box to wait it out, and it passed on. Eventually, I fell asleep, hoping that I wouldn't snore.

Dawn, the next day. I set out for the airport. Didn't dare to take too direct a route. Too conspicuous. But there weren't many infected there. They seem to prefer built-up areas.

The road to the airport led first through cookie-cutter suburbia. Then fields where uncomfortable dairy cows, unmilked for several days, mooed in distress. I wondered if they would die. Nothing to be done about it anyway.

The farmhouses, the one or two I passed, were all empty except for one or two dead kids. I took advantage of their cover to rest a bit and straighten my back. Couldn't do that where any infected might see. Like finding a place to take a piss in the great outdoors, in olden times, a week ago. The damn crick in my back will become permanent if I'm not careful. I'm not that young any more.

I took food too, and a pistol that someone had left lying on a table with its ammo. Strange. Only a few days, but it didn't feel like stealing any more.

Finally the airport. In through the front gate, blocked with stalled cars. All the cars were empty. Did the people inside get rescued? Or were they part of the gray-skinned horde now? Damn. A lot of infected in the terminal building. Had to be careful. There was that horrible gurgling noise as well, again, from the darkness. I forgot about going inside.

I saw a door at the base of the control tower and did my dance toward it. Someone had chalked a big X over it. Must be the door they spoke of, the one they unlocked. Clever. If all the doors were closed, tough security doors, it's not likely any infected would have bashed their way in. No reason for them to.

The door was open. I shambled in, closed it, and locked it behind me. Then I stood straight again. Good-bye and a very hearty fuck you, dear infected. I couldn't wait to get out of my sticky mess of ointment and stinking infected sheath.

For once, mistaken identity had been of use to me. Everything had gone my way. My AIDS treatment had saved my life. Now, if it just got rid of the AIDS as well, I would be sitting pretty. I had a sudden absurd desire to buy lottery tickets.

I danced up the staircase to the door at the top. Heart in mouth: was it locked? But it was open too. Bless the military. The control tower windows looked out over the runways. The instrument panels were unpowered and dark, but there was another of those portable radios set up on a folding table, its green and red lights blinking merrily. On it a scribbled note, Give us a call! Behind it a pile of everything. Clothing and a camp bed. Food, water, an automatic rifle, ammunition, even a half-dozen grenades. My lucky day, for sure. It felt like Christmas.

A lovely home, with a view to die for. At least in normal times. The scenery at the horizon was as beautiful as ever, but the nearer prospect was problematic. At least two aircraft had crashed on the runways, near the terminal, probably trying to land. Civilian cars and military vehicles, jeeps and trucks, were scattered across the paved apron. They'd need a helicopter to take me out. But that was what they had said they would be using, wasn't it?

The radio was a bit more elaborate than the one in the truck. It had a dial to adjust to different frequencies, instead of just buttons. I smiled. Cadillac treatment. Time to sign back into the world.

I sat down and put on the headphones. Pressed the transmit button and said Hello. And Hello again. And again.

No answer, only a whisper of static.

No answer on any of the transmission bands. Just static.

I hunted the full spectrum, longwave and shortwave, for any signal, any at all. Then, and many times in the days since then. Some loud buzzing. Once, a person transmitting, speaking, but too faint to make out clearly. It sounded like a call for help. By the following day, he had fallen silent. He's never been back. Two or three places transmitting in Morse code. I don't know Morse.

But I have food for months, and plenty of batteries. I wonder if the people who left them are still alive somewhere. Or whether they died just beyond the end of the runway in one of the crashed planes I can see through the binoculars.

I won't be leaving any time soon. My career as an infected impersonator is over. I don't have the smell any more. I burned the clothing. They should be starving, but there seem no fewer of them. And today, I saw a new type down near the terminal building. Big mean mother, a real King Kong. He got pissed at one of the ordinary infected, ripped out a lump of the pavement, and threw it. Smeared the poor bastard on the receiving end.

Something that strong could rip off the doors to this place as if they were made of paper. I'll have to be very, very quiet. And dark. Need to save the batteries anyway.

Here comes another burst of Morse. I don't know if it's automatic or whether someone is transmitting a message. It could be a crash beacon, that sort of thing.

As I said, I don't know Morse.

But it looks as if I'm going to have plenty of time to learn.