BIOHAZARD (16 page)

“
Oh God,” Janie said.

That cloying stench of hot, seething honey was getting stronger in the room and it wasn’t from what I was wiping off my boot onto the area rug under the desk. Because that scratching came again, only there was more of it. They were coming from the clean air vent.

I saw two of them flying around, bumping into the ceiling. Another settled onto a lampshade and Carl swore, brought up his carbine, and fired. He split it into two sections that skittered about on the floor for a moment or two before going still.

“
No guns!” I said, looking over at the black, breathing mass covering the windows. “You break that window, we’re fucked.”

Texas and Janie were clinging tighter than ever. Texas had a throw pillow in one hand and was wildly swatting with it. It was probably the most ridiculous, effeminate defense I’d ever seen.

Carl was chasing the other bugs around. They flew in directionless spirals, bumping the walls, one of them knocking a vase off the desk that shattered on the floor. He knocked one down and smashed it with his boot and I cold-cocked the other with the wastebasket and it nose-dived to the floor. Its wing was damaged only it was too stupid to realize it and kept propelling itself in a buzzing circle on the floor. I killed it with the wastebasket.

But by then there were others.

One of them dove right at Janie and she punched it, knocking it aside and I stomped it. Texas beat another down with his pillow and crushed it under his boot. The sound of it smashing made him wince, say, “Oh Lord.”

One of them dove at my head and I swatted it away with the can. Two others went at Carl, one of them attached itself to his fist as he made to punch it and another latched onto the back of his arm. He smashed the one on his fist by punching the wall, but the other got a good grip and its proboscis suckered to his skin. He let out a wild cry and I took hold of him. I reached out and grabbed the bug in my fist. It was hot and greasy under my fingers, its body pulsating rapidly like the beat of a newborn’s heart. I squeezed it with everything I had. Its wings crackled like dry cellophane and its bony skeleton crunched like an egg shell, brown goo squirting between my fingers. With a swell of nausea in my belly, I yanked it free, the proboscis refusing to let go. As I pulled the mangled body free, the proboscis stretched like a rubber band, then the lips came free with popping, smacking sound and a ribbon of Carl’s blood sprayed against my cheek.

I tossed it to the floor.

Texas and Janie were on their feet, swatting the insects down.

“
Cover that fucking vent!” Texas shouted.

Which was exactly what I was going to do, but Carl was way ahead of me. No gun? He had a better idea. He grabbed a can of silicone spray from the shelf on the wall, the kind used to lubricate machine parts and make leather upholstery gleam. He got down on his knees before the clean air vent, pressed the button on the can and held his Bic lighter to the spray. A foot long mushrooming tongue of flame shot out. He held it to the vent. He fried one of the bloodsuckers coming through and it curled up, making a shrill
e-e-e-e-e-e-e
sort of sound as it died. Others tried to come up but he cooked them and drove still more down the vent. When the lattices of the vent were glowing hot, he yanked one of the filing cabinets over it, sealing it shut.

As he did that, the rest of us killed bugs.

There were about a dozen of them. We smashed and stomped and hit them. One got tangled in Janie’s hair and Texas almost cold-cocked her when he hit it, knocking it free. One got on the back of my neck and I screamed. I tried to pull it off but I couldn’t get a grip on it. I felt those rubbery pulsing lips attach to my flesh. They were warm. There was a sudden piercing like an ice-cold pin.

Then Carl knocked me to the floor and tore the beasty free.

I saw it laying there, smashed, a long needle-like protrusion hanging from the lips. It was wire-thin and probably used to puncture veins and arteries.

The war we fought was horrendous and by the end we had bug guts smeared on our hands and bug blood on our faces and down our arms. But we won. And when we had, we stood there breathing hard, dozens of mangled insects and parts thereof at our feet.

Carl lit a cigarette. “Fuck of a way to fight a war,” he said.

Janie burst out laughing, only this laughter was high-pitched and near hysterical. I understood it: I had the mad desire to do the same. I clutched her to me, that honeyed bug stench so ripe on her my stomach rolled over. Texas kicked bugs into the corner and the rest of us just let the tension run from us.

About the time Carl finished his cigarette, we heard a creaking.

Then a snapping.

And that’s when the window exploded inward.

4

The eruption of glass had not even made it more than a few inches, I bet, before we were in motion. I suppose we were all pumped hard with adrenaline and just ready to jump. Later, I was impressed at how we reacted, how we moved as a single unit: fast, cohesively, and without question.

The window blew in and we moved.

Texas threw open the door to the closet and we piled in…along with four or five bugs which, considering that
hundreds
had just blown into the room, was not so bad. I was the last one in, shoving Janie before me, and as I slammed the door shut I saw the room fill with insects.

And I do mean
fill.

They came in through the shattered window in a droning storm like autumn leaves blown by the wind, an absolute tempest of bloodsuckers that erupted in a single boiling mass of wings and thoraxes and bulbous red eyes, fanning out and inundating the room in their numbers. That’s what I saw in the second or two before I slammed the door shut, smashing three or four between the door and jamb that were trying to follow us in.

It was pretty hairy for a moment after we got in there and the room filled with that ominous cacophony of buzzing. First off, I wasn’t exactly accurate in calling the closet a
walk-in
closet. It was your basic coat closet with a rod to hang jackets and what not from. About three feet deep, maybe four wide. And all of us in there with rifles. It was like the proverbial sardine can. When you took into account that we were trapped in a confined space with four or five mutant bloodsucking insects, it was not a good thing.

It was pitch black in there, of course.

The only light coming in was from the lantern and candles outside and this filtered through a space at the bottom of the door that was maybe half an inch wide. There was a lot of screaming and shouting as we smashed the intruders. One of them latched itself to Janie’s throat and she went absolutely wild. Carl was the one that finally got it off her. When all was settled and done, dead insects at our feet, we were pretty banged up and bruised. My face was scratched from Janie’s nails. I think I had punched Texas…or maybe Carl. Janie had elbowed me in the belly and stomped on my toes. Carl had backhanded me or, more precisely, back-
elbowed
me. Texas was complaining that somebody had kneed him in the balls and Carl said his left shin had been laid raw.

I suppose if somebody had watched us in there with a hidden camera or something, they would have found it hilarious. Basically, four adults in a box beating the hell out of each other as they tried to kill the bugs. It reminded me of that Three Stooges episode where the boys get stuck in a phone booth together.

Anyway, it was your classic closet. No standing room, of course, with the coat rod there. It was hell being packed in like that and having to stoop over. Especially when we realized that it might be hours before the swarm got bored and moved on. They were buzzing loudly outside the door and being in the closet was like being tucked away in the cell of a bee honeycomb.

“
Whose hand is on my ass?” Janie said. “Kindly remove it.”

“
Where am I suppose to remove it
to?”
Texas Slim wanted to know. “I’m simply trying to make use of every available space for the comfort of the group, darling.”

“
Leave that space alone.”

“
This is bullshit,” Carl said. “We’re going to be fucking pretzels by the time we get out.”

Texas laughed. “Well, I’m betting you’ll make a really awful tasting pretzel, Carl.”

“
Yeah? Well, fuck you.”

Carl shoved into me, knocking me and Janie against the wall. Texas shoved him and soon they were grappling and we were getting the worst of it. Go figure. I shoved back and Janie elbowed me and I made to push Texas and I cracked Janie alongside the head and she kicked me and Carl said we were all a bunch of fucking morons and brought his head back and nearly broke my nose.

“
All right!” I finally shouted. “Knock this shit off!”

Everybody calmed a bit and we had three or four seconds of unbroken, cramped peace. Then Carl made a growling sound in his throat. “Texas? You’re jabbing me in the ass with your gun.”

“
That ain’t my gun,” he said.

“
You sonofabitch.”

More scuffling. I finally told them to knock it off and told Texas Slim to quit jabbing Carl with whatever he’d been jabbing him with—I didn’t want to know what—and we settled in and started waiting. The bloodsuckers were buzzing, bumping into the walls, crawling over the outside of the door and scratching at it, making those appalling sucking sounds that were terrible to hear. Carl switched on his flashlight and, sure enough, about a dozen of those proboscises had slipped through the aperture at the bottom of the door, the flared lips at the ends looking for something to attach to. We stomped them and the bloodsuckers made sharp trilling sounds, but after awhile they learned not to stick their beaks into the crack. That sweet scent they carried was so thick in the closet I thought we would asphyxiate.

We spent nearly three hours like that.

Three hours is a long time when you’re cramped and contorted. I defused a lot of fights between Carl and Texas Slim and prayed the insects would leave, but mostly I did a lot of thinking. And what I thought about most was not our predicament or the death that was held at bay by two inches of wood, but about Sean. Sean was dead. I had seen him get his brains blown out but I still couldn’t believe it. Sean who had pulled my ass out of the fryer again and again in places like Cleveland, Toledo, and Bowling Green. He was a good guy. Tough, loyal, smart, and very wise in his own way. A guy who had run guns, pushed meth and heroin, been a blood member and enforcer for the Warlocks motorcycle gang back east, and did time for armed robbery and aggravated assault…but when it was just he and I alone, I had gotten to know a side of the man no one would ever have suspected existed. A very wise and compassionate side.

“
Nash,” he said one night as we sat on the shores of Lake Eerie in this little town called Vermilion. “Nash…what we gotta start doing here in this big crazy fucked up world of ours is forgetting about what we were and concentrating on what we are. The cavalry’s not coming over the hill and the U.S. Marines are just another piss-stain. The only luck we got is the luck we make and the only hope we got is the hope we carry. You dig this shit?”

“
Yeah.”

“
It’s gonna be up to guys like me and you. Especially
you.”

“
Me?”

Sean nodded. “That’s right. You’re special. We all know it. We can all feel it when we’re with you. You’re leading us somewhere and into something. Something important.” Before I could disagree, he said, “And it ain’t because The Shape let’s you pick out sacrifices for it. It could have chosen anyone to do that. It picked you because you’re on the road to something big. Might not be a good thing, might be real fucking ugly when you get there, but that’s where you’re going. That’s why The Shape is pushing you along. Because it’s out there. Your destiny. And I just got this freaky feeling that whatever it is, it’s important to the race, to all of us.”