BIOHAZARD (26 page)

The world was shit.

To survive you had to be an animal.

The end had brought things into being that had no right to exist and it had changed others to absolute nightmares. That was the world these days. Like something Roger Corman had envisioned back in the fifties…mutants and roving gangs, religious crazies and nature run wild. Like in one of those old movies that I used to watch on the late show when I worked three to eleven at the shoe factory in Youngstown,
The Day the World Ended
or
Panic in the Year Zero
or
World Without End.
Just laying there on the couch, chewing takeout pizza and drinking beer, never once thinking I would be living through some kind of fucked-up horror movie.

But I was.

We all were.

Things had changed. The fallout had killed hundreds and hundreds of millions. There were resulting mutations and degeneration and savagery on the part of those that
did
survive. I had seen my share, but I knew there were worse things out there. Things I could not or would not want to imagine and one of them had come to me in a dream. Regardless, I knew very little about radiation or nuclear physics or genetics or any of it. Yes, I had a solar-powered Geiger Counter. But I didn’t really know how it worked or how radiation affected things like atoms or biology.

Back in Youngstown, after it happened and everyone was just kind of wandering around in shock, the germs started sweeping the cities. There was a guy in my building named Mike Pallenberg. He taught physical sciences at East Palestine High. A real smart guy. He was an assistant football coach for the Bulldogs and when I was in high school I was a running back for the Lisbon Blue Devils. So we had a little rivalry going. A friendly one. When he was dying from radiation sickness, on his deathbed, he said,
You just wait, my friend, you just fucking wait. There’s things gonna happen now I’m glad I won’t be around to see. All that nuclear energy released at once…it’ll affect the weather, living things, everything. You wait. See, it’s the molecules. They’ve changed just as cells have mutated and physics as we understand it has been bent on its ear. This world is mutating, organically and physically, microscopically, matter and energy and subatomics going haywire. Nothing will ever be the same. Not for a hundred-thousand years.

If ever.

Mike was absolutely right.

I had seen mutations. They were real. The radiation wrought evolutionary changes that would never have to come to be in a sane, sunlit world beneath the eye of a loving god. And it wasn’t always the changes you could see. Much of it was, as Mike hinted, microscopic. Diseases that men had beaten off years ago mutated and spread like wildfire after the bombings. And that’s what worried me now. The germs. What they were becoming. Because I had seen cities where plagues, super-plagues, the
Fevers,
had turned them into leper colonies.

And those germs were still out there.

Mutating, waiting to burn through what was left of the human race.

Like David Bowie said, this ain’t rock and roll, this is genocide.

9

If you’re reading this, then no doubt you know how the world ended. Feel free to skip this part. I’m putting this down just to clarify things in my mind and maybe leave some kind of record.

Okay.

It started with an exchange of nuclear weapons in the Middle East. Iran launched one against the Israelis and the Israelis responded in part. Maybe it could have stopped there, but the fuse had been burning a long time and by then it was just too late. Nukes were used in Africa, Asia and Europe. About thirty such weapons were used worldwide. Mutual assured destruction, just like they’d always said. Four of them were detonated in the continental United States—one in New York, one in Chicago, another in Atlanta, and the last in LA. The initial strikes killed fifty million people, the news said…when the stations were still broadcasting, that is. Resultant contamination killed another three million and fallout tripled that within six months. All of the weapons used against the U.S. came from North Korea. The U.S. responded by turning North—and much of South—Korea into a radioactive dead zone. We hit it with some eight nukes. The Russians hit it three times, the Chinese twice.

Just goes to show, we should have taken out that crazy little dictator when we had the chance.

Nukes were being fired by just about everybody in the wake of mass nuclear destruction. Africa and the Middle East were particularly hard hit by a variety of tactical nukes that killed millions as armies attempted to destroy armies and succeeded mainly in thinning the already teetering civilian populations. By the time it all came to an end, there was no more civilization as such. Just billions of people dying from fallout and rampant infectious disease. Firestorms raged and cities cooked hot with fallout and nuclear winter descended.

And that is how the world ended.

The Doomsday scenario.

Not with a bang, but with big motherfucking
BOOM!

10

I dozed for an hour or so and when I woke, Gremlin and Texas Slim were giggling. I had been dreaming of my wife. What a waste to open my eyes to this fucking nightmare. I drank some water and smoked a cigarette, watched Janie’s long legs cross over one another and wished we were alone so I could screw the hell out of her. Typical male thoughts. Even Doomsday couldn’t change the male animal.

Carl was cleaning weapons. Texas Slim was humming some old John Cougar song and laughing as he did so. Gremlin was staring at me. He had a funny look in his eyes.

“
What is it?” I asked him, already suspecting it would be trouble.

Gremlin smiled. “Just wondering when it’s gonna be and
who
it’s gonna be. That’s all.”

“
Hell are you talking about?”

“
You know.”

“
No, maybe you ought to elaborate.”

He kept smiling and I wanted to slap that grin off his face. “When you gonna do it, Nash? When you gonna call The Shape? When you gonna call it up?”

That snapped my eyes open.

Yes, it
was
time to make a selection, to offer someone up, but I didn’t need this sonofabitch to remind me of the fact, to rub my nose in it. Now and then I liked to forget. Pretend my soul wasn’t dirty. The wind out there was still blowing, dust and grit scraping against the building. I listened to it, felt a different sort of wind blowing through my heart. A wind that was hot and ugly and searing.

Janie saw it coming, said something, but I wasn’t hearing her.

Gremlin saw then that he’d crossed the line. “Listen, I just mean―”

I don’t know what came over me. I balled my hand into a fist and punched him in the mouth. Gremlin’s head jerked back and his lips mashed against his teeth and then the blood was flowing. I hadn’t really even thought about it; it was a reflexive kind of thing.

“
You stupid motherfucker!” I shouted at Gremlin’s cringing, bleeding face. “We don’t talk about that! We never fucking talk about that!”

Gremlin babbled out some silly excuse, his lips and teeth all stained red, and he was so pathetic, so ridiculous that the anger rose in me like lava up the cone of a volcano. It burned bright and hot. I lost all reason and just started swinging. Gremlin warded off a few with his upraised arms, but most of them landed and I had the satisfaction of hearing him beg and bleed and hurt. Gremlin’s left eye was blackened, his nose bloodied, lip split. There were some nice eggs on his head. I would have kept going, lost in the idiotic violent splendor of the thing, but then Carl pulled me off and Janie shouted at me with such utter disappointment and hopeless resignation that I just curdled inside.

Carl finally let go and by then there was no fight left. “It’s cool, Nash,” he said and you could tell by the sound of his voice that he didn’t think it was cool at all. “You got him good. Taught him a lesson and all. Got it out of your system. Chill now. Step away.”

“
Well, you certainly whomped his cookies, Nash,” Texas Slim said. “You worked him like three miles of dirty road.”

They were all staring at me and I didn’t like it one bit.

But I guess I would have stared, too. Irrational, violent outbursts have a way of attracting attention just like they have a way of shaking your trust in people. I felt foolish, guilty, angry with myself. I’d always prided myself on my cool head. Patient, understanding. This
wasn’t
me. I didn’t hit people. Not unless they were a threat. And what threat had Gremlin been? He was just an annoying little windbag that never knew when to shut up.

“
Nice job,” Janie said. “Jesus Christ,
Rick.”

The others just kind of turned away. All of them except for Gremlin. He kept eyeballing me with an accusatory stare. There was blood all over his face, purple welts. His lower lip was swollen like a sausage and his right eye was nearly closed. It hurt just looking at him.

“
Feel better now, Nash?” Gremlin, said spitting blood onto the floor. He chuckled. “I’ve been beat worse. A lot worse. That’s okay. I got out of hand and you showed me my place. I know better now. I know how I rank.”

I reached out to him, to put a hand on his shoulder, and Gremlin slapped it away, almost putting me on my ass in the process. “Don’t you fucking touch me, you goddamn asshole.”

Nobody disagreed with what he said.

I went and sat by myself, smoked, brooded, listened to the storm. Pouted. I was angry and at the same time I was beside myself with guilt. I kept thinking:
You could kick them all to the curb right now. Get rid of ‘em and in a week you’d have a new posse. Who are they to fucking judge you? Who the hell do they think they are?

Crazy thinking, I know. I couldn’t kick Janie to the curb without kicking a big part of myself there, too.

Shit.

Ultimately, I had just shaken their confidence in me and I knew it. I didn’t really know why it happened, only it had been coming for a long time. It just happened as such things will. Partly it was the damn depression that ate me open most days, made it feel like there was a black hole south of my belly that wanted to suck me into the darkness alive and kicking. And another part was probably general frustration, unhappiness, and the very real fact that Gremlin was really, really getting on my nerves. Add to that that the waiting was killing me. We had to move. We had to get west before…well before something caught up with us.

Nobody spoke and I kept my mouth shut.

Gremlin hadn’t bothered washing the blood off his face. He wore it like warpaint. He sat on the floor, legs drawn up, arms wrapped around them, head cradled between his knees. His eyes were crazy and wild and full of pain and they were on me. Only on me.

Staring.

Hating.

I had the most ugly feeling that as soon as my eyes were closed Gremlin would slit my throat. So I watched him. Watched him close. And as I did so, feeling that my little posse was fragmenting, I felt more alone and vulnerable than ever. I started thinking about Shelly. I started thinking about Youngstown.

I remembered standing on the roof of our building the night the bombs came down. Lots of people were up there. New York City had taken a direct hit. Though it was a long way from Youngstown, if you looked to the east you could see where it was…or had been…because the horizon was glowing blue.

11

Beneath the bleached eye of the moon, the rats came out.