BIOHAZARD (21 page)

I looked up at her, my face warm and waxy, my eyes bloodshot and tearing. I swallowed. Swallowed again. I could not speak. We went inside and I drank some water, smoked a cigarette, and all the while she was staring at me, wanting answers. “Nash? Nash? God, Nash, speak to me…” Oh, but I couldn’t. Because if I opened my mouth and powered up the old voice box what was going to come out in a gushing flood of pure unbridled terror was the scream to end all screams. I was afraid I would start and never, ever stop.

So I said nothing. Absolutely nothing.

I could see it in her eyes, the concern, yes, but also the fear as she wondered if I was shot through with the Fevers. But what I couldn’t say, what I dared not frame into worms, was that I was not sickened with Fevers but had been embraced by
the Mother of Fevers.

And it was coming.

Getting closer day by awful day.

An unnamable horror that had come to exterminate what remained of the human race.

6

Texas Slim and Carl found a vehicle for us and it was really something. They came back with it about an hour before the sandstorm hit, noticing with some discomfort the uneasy silence that lay between Janie and I. They did not ask about it. They took us out to show us what they had found.

I started laughing when I saw it.

So did Janie.

Of all the dinosaurs in the automotive jungle they had somehow come across a VW microbus that had been new when the Vietnam War had still been raging. The bus was worn and dented, painted up with ancient flowers, peace signs, and other psychedelic hieroglyphics that had faded with age. It was an ugly vehicle for an ugly world.

“Where in the hell did you find this?”

“Some guy’s garage,” Carl said, scratching his thick black beard. “We were checking out this neighborhood, just looking in garages for anything we could get. We found this. Looks like shit, sure, but it moves and it can get us out of here. Maybe Michigan City or Gary, wherever.”

“It’s been serviced some, Nash,” Texas Slim added. “We found the fellow what owned it. He was on the floor, still had an oily rag in his hand.”

“Fever?” I asked, almost breathlessly, remembering my dream.

Texas Slim shook his head. “No…looked like radiation. His hair had fallen out and that sort of thing.”

“Yeah, but we almost didn’t get it because of the dog in the yard,” Carl said.

“Oh, you’re going to go into that, are you?” Texas Slim said.

“Dog?”

“Sure,” Carl said. “Big black mutha. Probably chained out there for days, crazy and foaming at the mouth. Texas here, he tries to make friends with it. Tries to pet it.”

“I didn’t try to pet it.”

“Sure you did.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did, you idiot. You were talking all sweet and sassy to it like you wanted to bone that fucker. Not that I’d be surprised.”

Texas just laughed. “Now see, Nash, that’s sheer invention on the part of my friend here with the small penis. Carl gets confused sometimes. His head isn’t right. But, you know, what with his mother mixing it up out in the barnyard with anything willing, it’s no wonder he turned out this way.”

Carl took a step towards him. “What I tell you about my mother?”

“Nothing I hadn’t already read on the bathroom wall.”

“Keep it up, you peckerwood sonofabitch. One of these days you’re going to dip that wee little pee pee into something and it’s going to get bit off.”

“So I’ll keep it out of your mouth.”

I had to break them apart at this point because the last thing I needed were these assholes swinging on each other and busting out each other’s teeth. Like we didn’t have enough to worry about. And it was about that time that the sandstorm started kicking up. I told Carl to find a garage somewhere to store the bus and by the time he got back the sand was already blowing.

So we hid out in the Army/Navy store and just waited.

There was nothing else to do.

We spent another four days in South Bend because we could not leave.

Visibility was down to a few feet. We listened to the sand blow and blow. It was driven by high winds that howled through the town, burying the streets in drifts and swirling eddies, churning sand-devils whipping and lashing against the building. For days it was like that, the moaning wind and the sound of sand grating against the windows and walls in a fine granulated grit. It found hairline cracks and seams and blew into the store, dusting the floor and covering the displays and shelves in a powdery down.

We waited downstairs in the storeroom, listening to it rage.

Even down there we could feel the sand on our skin, clogging our pores, getting in our hair and dusting our faces. It went on and on.

We huddled together and paged through old magazines and nobody said much. We all wanted to be on the road. We wanted to ditch this desolate burg.

But Mother Nature had other ideas.

As we waited, Carl and Texas Slim tried to stare each other down almost constantly and Janie was pretty much ignoring them and giving me the cold shoulder. It was a long goddamn wait. I spent my time consulting the dog-eared map in my pocket, wondering what we might run into out on the interstate, the whole time my belly filled with needles because we were trapped there.
Waiting.
I couldn’t shake the dream. Maybe I was paranoid—
definitely—
but I was feeling that hideous something coming from the east as maybe I’d been feeling it for a long time. I did not doubt its reality. The bottom line was we had to keep moving west. That’s the way it had to be and nobody asked why.

They knew.

They knew, all right.

Just like they knew that the next full moon was less than a week away and it would soon be time for me to make a selection.

The time of The Shape was nearing…

GARY, INDIANA

1

We came into the city on a day that was still, ominous, and hazy. Our VW hippie microbus was on its last legs. Like the wild free-loving days of Haight-Ashbury, the bus was past its prime. She seized up twice out on I-80 coming into Gary and Carl said her bearings were shot and her carb was gummed up. As it was, we pretty much coasted into the city, the love machine wheezing like an asthmatic old man. We needed new wheels because hoofing it across country just wasn’t an option.

We skirted Tolleston and cut through Ambridge until we reached downtown. Coughing out clouds of blue smoke, our VW microbus rolled to a stop before a row of tenements and died with a backfire.

Inside, Carl swore. And then swore again.

I stepped out, fanning my sweaty face with a Cleveland Indians baseball cap. I lit a stale cigarette with a cupped match and then looked around at the devastation…the overturned cars, the rubble, the garbage blowing in the gutters. Drifts of sand were pushed up against the buildings. A crow sat atop the traffic light ahead, cawing. The day was hot and hazy, picked dry as desert bones,

Other than that, there was nothing.

Just the deathly silence that was uniform to most cities since the bombs had come down. A pick-up truck was pulled up to the curb, a crusty yellow skeleton behind the wheel. Birds had built nests in the slats of the ribcage.

I was trying to get a feel for things. Where we should go and what we should do when we got there.

From inside the bus, Texas Slim called: “Nothing here, Nash. Let’s pack it in.”

I ignored him, stepping away from the bus and studying the ruined buildings around me. I saw no life, no movement, but I knew it was out there somewhere. Hidden eyes were watching me, gauging me. The days had long since vanished when you welcomed strangers with open arms.

That’s not how it worked now.

There were people here, I knew, and not all of them were thick with radiation and Fevers. I had to find one of them. Somehow. Some way. The full moon was coming fast now.

If I couldn’t find someone, it meant selecting one of my own and I didn’t like that idea.

There were five of us now―Janie and I, Carl and Texas Slim, and the new guy, Gremlin. We called him
Gremlin
because we’d picked him up in Michigan City, found him trapped in the trunk of an old AMC Gremlin. Scabs were out the night before, he said, looking for recruits and he jammed himself in the trunk and then couldn’t get out. He was so wedged in there it took all of us to yank his sorry ass free.

I hadn’t made my mind up about him yet. There were things I didn’t like about him―his perpetual bitching―and things I
did
like: he did what he was told without question. Janie was neutral on him. Carl and Texas Slim liked to pick on him a lot, which was their way of feeling him out and finding out what he was made of.

I scanned the streets, looking for a decent vehicle but all of them were wrecks. I turned my back on the VW and then I heard something. At first, I wasn’t sure what it was, only that it seemed to be coming from the alley across the way. I called out for the others to stay in the bus in case it was a trap and walked over there. Plugging my cigarette into the corner of my mouth, I pulled the Beretta out of my waistband. I worked the slide and jacked a round into the breech, got ready for what might come.

In the alley, shrouded in shadow from the buildings on either side, there was a man.

Barely a man, in fact. Just some emaciated stick figure pulling itself along like a worm. He had three riders on him―rats. They were huge, the size of cats, their bodies swollen and tumorous beneath pelts of greasy gray fur. They looked up with shining rabid eyes and then got back to work eating the man. This is what I had been hearing…the chewing sounds of rats feeding, moist and slobbering like dogs working juicy bones.

There wasn’t much meat on the man, but the rats were taking what they could get. One of them had its snout buried in his throat and was tugging at something in there. The other two were digging in his belly, yanking out his entrails and gnawing on them.

Bold bastards…and in the daytime yet.

The rat that was digging in the man’s throat pulled its gore-smeared snout free and made a low hissing sound. It was ready to defend against all and any poachers. It rose up on its haunches, ready to fight. Droplets of blood glistened on its whiskers. There were wriggling worm-like growths suspended from its belly that looked like teats…except that they moved, pulsed. I aimed, fired, knocking the rat free of the man and pulverizing its head into splashing meat. It rolled over once, legs kicking, and died.

The other two abandoned the man’s belly, leering at me with flat red eyes. They both opened their mouths, blood-stained teeth bared. Strips of tissue hung from their jaws. I shot first one and then the other. The first took a head-shot and died quick enough, the other, a hole punched through its belly, tried to crawl away, squealing and bleeding, dragging its viscera behind it over the dirty pavement. I shot it again and it did not move.

The dying man looked up, his face contorted in utter agony. He had crawled out from behind a dumpster, the rats eating him the entire time, no doubt. He left a smear of blood in his wake. I watched him, wishing there was something I could do. Times were hard, savage, yes, but I still felt compassion at times like these and I wanted nothing more than to help the poor guy.

But it was too late and I was no surgeon.

The rats had done irreparable damage, the trauma gruesome and unpleasant. The guy’s belly was open, his throat was open, his bowels had been pulled out and bitten. Bad enough, but he was obviously dying long before they attacked. Radiation poisoning. I had seen it plenty of times by then and I knew it when I saw it. Most of the guy’s hair had fallen out, his scalp and skin split open in jagged ruts. There were sores everywhere. Most of his teeth were gone and those that remained were rotting brown in the gums. He was bleeding from his ears, his nose, his mouth, even his eyes.