Read The Infection for Free Online

a glance at his tangled, curly red hair and stubble. “Get out in the sunshine a bit. It’s time, Ethan.”
    “All right, I probably will,” he lied. He had no intention of leaving the house. “Leave Mary here, then. Last night, when I was up watching some TV, there was some kind of rioting going on all over the west coast. I’d like to keep her close to home.”
    “We live in Pennsylvania. And Mary misses her friends at daycare. They’re holding a special candlelight vigil today for the SEELS.”
    “No talking!” said Mary, upset that her parents were talking to each other and not to her. “My talking!”
    Carol got down on one knee to talk things out with their two-year-old, asserting their adult right to have a conversation, but the fact was the conversation was over.
    Ethan made a cup of coffee, kissed them goodbye, and went back to bed.
    He woke up, feeling uneasy, to the sound of sirens in the distance. Sitting up, he yawned and pulled on a T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants. Sunlight shined into the second floor bedroom picture window, which offered a spectacular view of downtown that had cost them an extra twenty thousand dollars on the house list price. Ethan and Carol moved to the city from Philadelphia during the previous summer, and she insisted on having a view. It was early afternoon. He needed another cup of coffee. Then he glanced out the window and saw plumes of smoke rising up from downtown, over which helicopters swarmed. There were a lot of sirens.
    “Goddammit, I knew something bad was happening,” he said, searching frantically for the TV remote before finally finding it under the bed. He clicked the television on and pulled on his glasses, blinking.
    Riots spreading throughout the country, across the world in fact, focused on the hospitals and the clinics, following the same path as the screamer virus. Panicked mobs firebombing the clinics. Families of victims arming themselves and taking up positions outside the clinics. And the screamers, who had lain in a catatonic state for three days, were waking up and apparently committing acts of violence.
    “Holy crap,” Ethan said, his heart racing.
    He dialed his wife, but all circuits were busy. Should he drive to the daycare and get Mary? Then drive to the bank and get Carol? What if she were already driving here? What if she were trying to call him right now? He hung up the phone and paced, racked by indecision.
    He needed a moment to think. He tore off his sweatpants and put on a pair of jeans and socks. He went downstairs, turned on the TV in the living room and made himself coffee, which he drank scalding. Some anchor on the TV was sobbing through evacuation instructions.
    “Nobody knows anything!” he shouted at his empty house.
    He made another coffee and drank it in front of the TV, hitting redial on his phone repeatedly and continually getting an all-circuits-busy signal. Then the news cut to video recorded by a helicopter accompanied by the breathless monologue of a reporter describing the scene.
    A group of people surrounded a family of four in a tightening circle in the middle of a busy downtown intersection, blocking their escape. The man stepped in front of his wife and kids. The other people rushed in. The man punched one and then they beat him and his family to the ground and kicked them for a while and tore the children limb from limb, stunning the reporter into shocked silence. The screamers began to eat their remains while the man and the wife lay on the ground twitching.
    “Jesus Christ,” Ethan said, almost in tears.
    The reporter was screaming, The SEELS are changing . Oh God, oh God, they’re attacking people, they’re attacking everybody they see, they’re eating people.
    Ethan turned the TV off and went back upstairs to watch history unfold from his picture window. Towers of smoke dominated the downtown skyline. It was chaos down there. Across the street, he saw his neighbors’ houses standing in a neat row facing