BIOHAZARD (15 page)

Janie looked at me, but I wasn’t saying. Carl, cigarette clenched in his teeth, sighted in on the pick-up truck. He started squeezing off rounds, working the bolt of the Ruger and squeezing the trigger in rapid succession. He put one through the windshield. Another through the front driver’s side tire. He kept them pinned down. Two more shots into the cab. And then the killshot. Leaning out the window, he scoped out the gas tank and pulled the trigger. Dead on target, too. Right away, gasoline started flooding out from under the truck.

The bad boys started shouting.

Carl fired into the tank again and it went up with a resounding explosion, the puddle of gas going up in flames. The three survivors—one of them beating his burning clothes with his hands—appeared from behind the truck. They were firing at the building, trying to make the safety of the Bronco about twenty feet away. I aimed and fired on the guy I’d already pegged in the leg, catching him in the side and pitching him to the pavement. He screamed like he was being roasted alive.

The smoke from the burning truck was thick in the air and it screened the others from us as it screened us from them. The two survivors were going to get the Bronco. I put two or three rounds where I thought they were, but I knew one of them would make it. And they would have.

But something else happened first.

3

Carl stopped shooting and backed away from the window. “Listen,” he said. “You hear it? They’re coming…”

“That smell,” Janie said.

I didn’t know what the hell either of them were talking about. I was smelling burning gasoline and scorched metal, melted rubber and plastic, the stink of burnt cordite in the room. My ears were ringing from the shooting. So I truly didn’t hear or smell anything for a moment. But then I did: a rising steady drone that seemed to be coming from every direction and a smell: sweet, almost gagging, like sugar liquefied in a pan. The droning got louder until it became a high, whining buzz and that stink…nauseating, like thrusting your head into the innards of a hive dripping with honey. Absolutely overwhelming.

“Close those fucking windows!” I cried out.

But Carl and Janie were already doing so and I joined in. None of us seemed to give a shit about the fact that we had exposed ourselves to gunfire from below. We knew what was coming and we knew very well what would happen if we didn’t get those damn windows closed up fast.

“They’re down in the lobby!” Texas Slim called out, rushing into the room and slamming the door behind him.

We got the windows closed and just in time—for something landed on the glass outside. An insect. It was about six-inches long, segmented, a pale cream in color like a larval termite with tiny spines rising up from the thorax. Looking like some weird mutant hybrid of a wasp, a fly, and a mosquito, it fluttered wide, transparent purple-hued wings, two sets of them that were intricately veined with a dark tracery. It had bulbous red-orange eyes the size of marbles and I swear it was looking at us, hungering for us. Carl thumped the window and three more landed followed by a fifth, sixth, and seventh. They knew we were in there and they wanted us. They crawled over the glass, buzzing their wings, each extending a fleshy proboscis to the window, investigating it. The most obscene thing about them was that proboscis. It was rubbery, pulsing, the tip flaring out like a set of moist pink lips, suckering on the glass, inflating and deflating like it was kissing.

The dread of insects, especially large ones, is instinctual and that instinct becomes manic when the insects arrive in numbers, swarm like these things did. I don’t know what they were. Nobody really did. Just horrors that rose from the ashes of nuclear saturation, the radiation mutating their genes, adapting them perfectly to the hunting grounds of the new lopsided world. We called them
bloodsuckers
and that was as good of a name as any because they
were
bloodsuckers. They flew in dense, buzzing clouds, descending on anything with red blood in them and draining them dry.

I’d seen it happen and it was a horrible thing.

Carl thumped the glass again and something shrank inside me as I feared it might break, but it didn’t break. The insects flew off. Out in the parking lot below there were hundreds of them gathered in a huge buzzing swarm like mayflies, rising and falling, darting in and out of the mass, dancing about each other.

But even with that shrill buzzing in my ears I could hear the bad boys below screaming.

It’s not a sound I think I’ll ever forget. They were covered in bloodsuckers, literally enveloped in them. They were on the ground, writhing, squishing bug bodies beneath them and more poured in to feed all the time. Those blubbery lips—I don’t know what else to call them—on the end of the proboscises were attached to the men, suctioning the blood from them and I could hear that, too. It sounded like a kid sucking pudding through a straw.

Janie backed away from the window, shaking violently, hugging herself, then covering her ears. She was crying, her mouth was open like it wanted to scream but all that came out was an airless whine.

Texas was shaking, too. They shared an absolute terror of insects and these things only multiplied that tenfold. He wrapped his arms around her and she held on tight and maybe I would have tried to pacify them with a calm reassuring word if my skin hadn’t been crawling.

Even Carl wasn’t doing too well and nothing scared him. Beads of sweat were rolling down his face and I bet they were ice-cold. Just like the sweat beading my forehead.

Down in the parking lot, the feeding continued. The swarm found the bodies of the two dead men and were feeding on them. The gasoline had long since burned off and the truck sat there smoldering, but not putting out enough smoke to drive the bugs away.

As I said, the bloodsuckers were a dull, pale cream in color, but as they fed, juicing their veins and capillaries with stolen blood, they bloated up and their flesh went a bright, vibrant red like the ass end of female mosquito after she has just drank her fill on your forearm. Some of them were so distended with blood they could barely get off the ground, they looked almost absurd with their bulging, brilliant red thoraxes. Like glistening scarlet softballs with wings. Several were scrambling along sluggishly on the ground, too fat to fly, dragging their wings behind them. Their fellows chipped in by landing on them and suctioning off the excess with their proboscises.

More bugs landed on the window and when Carl went to thump them, I stopped him. If that glass broke we were dead. It was safety glass and safety glass does not break easily like in the movies, but all we needed was for one of those windows to have an imperfection. If it broke, we’d be drained dry before we even made the door.

And at that point, running from the room was no longer an option: I could hear them on the door, thumping and scratching about, their suckers attached to the wood.

I looked out the window. The bloodsuckers had abandoned the bad boys. They were bled white, every drop of blood vacuumed from them. They were curled up on the pavement like dead, dehydrated spiders. They were contorted, limbs drawn up, faces corded and withered, looking like mummies that had dried out for 2,000 years in a tomb beneath the sands.

“Why don’t they leave?” Janie said. “What the hell do they want?”

“They want us,” Carl said under his breath.

It wasn’t the right thing to say, of course. It was like telling somebody who was terrified of snakes that the snake in the backyard won’t leave until it crawls up your pantleg and bites you. But Carl was never known for his sensitivity.

The noise outside the door was growing. The buzzing was getting very loud, the thumping, scraping and sucking sounds going right up my spine.

I looked outside.

The bugs were still out there, flying around, covering the pick-up and the Bronco, so thick on the ground you couldn’t see the pavement. More of them were settling onto the windows all the time. Drunken and distended with blood, the fat ones flew around in crazy circles, crashing into the others and hitting the ground. And then one, just intoxicated, flew right at the window at full speed. I jumped just as it hit the glass with enough force to make the glass rattle in its frame. The bug was so swollen with blood it literally exploded on impact like a water balloon. Blood and bits of tissue, a few assorted limbs, ran down the window in a vivid crimson smear.

Janie screamed.

I think I did, too.

The spilled blood drove the swarm wild and they pressed into the glass to lick it up, dozens and dozens of them. The buzzing outside the windows was then louder than that outside the door. More of them flew in, covering the glass and each other, more all the time, until the light was shut out and the room went dark.

Carl fumbled in his pack and lit a couple candles. Texas Slim pulled out his Coleman lantern and lit it. We didn’t need to be waiting in the darkness, listening to those things buzzing and sucking, wondering if one might land on our necks. That would have been too much. It would have been living on the edge of panic and we were already there.

“
Just wait it out people,” Carl said, sounding somewhat calm. “When they realize the pickings are all picked, they’ll move on. They always do.”

That was sensible. And as the little leader of our little group, I probably should have said it but my mouth was so dry I think anything I might have said would have come out in a broken squeak.

Carl walked over to the door and studied it with the beam of his flashlight. He lit a cigarette. “Too bad we couldn’t pump some smoke out there, Nash, it would drive them off.”

“
Just…get away from the door,” Janie told him.

“
Had to make sure it was secure,” Carl said.

Texas Slim chuckled. “And is it secure?”

“
Seems to be.”

“
That’s good news, Carl,” Texas said. “You make me feel all warm and cozy like I was in my mother’s arms.”

“
Kiss my ass, peckerwood.”

“
All right,” I said. “Let’s shitcan the fighting, okay?”

Texas was still holding Janie to him—and liking it, I’m sure—over on the couch against the wall. “Well, you know it ain’t me, Nash. It’s Carl. He just likes to pick and the more picking you do the better chance you have of making the blood run.”

“
Shut up about blood,” Janie said.

“
Yes, darling,” he said. “Whatever you want, my dove. I’m here to comfort you.”

“
And watch your hands. My tits don’t need comforting and neither does my ass.”

We all shared a brief laugh at that.

But it didn’t last. This time, I heard it: a scratching sound. In that room of shadows, it was hard to say where it was coming from, only that it was there and it was growing more insistent by the moment. I looked around. The couch. The desk. A few leather chairs. The radiator. A potted plant long since wilted. File cabinets. A walk-in closet, door closed. A few stray chairs pushed up to the desk.

“
I’m not liking that,” Texas Slim said.

Carl and I started looking around with our flashlights. At first we thought it was coming from the walls. But that wasn’t it. I walked around the desk, shining my light around. My beam fell on the clean air vent in the floor. It gleamed off two bulging red eyes.

I shrieked and stumbled back.

A bloodsucker came up out of the vent and circled the room lazily like a moth around a streetlight. It was in no hurry. Texas and Janie ducked, crying out. Carl made ready to put a round in it with his carbine. I grabbed up the wastebasket and tried to swat it. The glow of the candles and flickering lantern light cast a mammoth, leggy shadow of the thing against the wall. It flew like a wasp you see in slow mo on one of those nature documentaries on the Discovery Channel: back hunched, legs dangling beneath, just drifting around.

Carl jumped at it, swung his carbine like a bat and struck it. It bounced off the wall, slid across the desk and landed on the floor about three inches from my boot. I instinctively stomped on it and then almost wished I hadn’t: the sound of its exoskeleton crunching beneath my boot made me shiver. It made a pained trilling sound right before my weight smashed it to paste.