BIOHAZARD (41 page)

“A small mind with surging hormones,” she said. “A walking idiot penis.”

I started laughing. Yeah, she had that asshole pegged, all right.

“I study people, Nash,” she told me. “I always have. People and their relationships interest me.”

“And what do you think of the relationships in my little posse?”

“I think they’re tight, solid. You have a good group,” she admitted. “Carl’s okay. He’s like your obedient watchdog. He’d never betray you. Texas Slim? Oh boy, how do you categorize him. He’s weird, but loyal. He sure likes to talk about mortuaries and embalming bodies. I have to think his interest in corpses is not purely professional. Then again, he’s about ninety percent bullshit. Underneath he’s okay.”

Mickey admitted that Janie intimidated her a bit. Probably because Janie didn’t like her and felt threatened by her presence. But there was no reason for that, Mickey said, because Janie herself was pretty, features finely-sculpted and perfectly Nordic from her blue eyes to her high cheekbones and the blonde hair that was not so much yellow as silver.

“She’s really got it going on, Nash. But if you don’t mind me saying so, she’s a little cool. Not just to me, but to you, to everybody. She’s caring and compassionate, though. She gives you that feeling that she cares a lot more than she’s willing to admit, but it’s sort of a, I care, honey, but from the end of a stick.”

Mickey said that she’d felt the bond between me and Janie right away. Like she was plugged into me or I was plugged into her and together we completed some sort of arcane circuit.

“Sure,” I said. “But I’m beginning to think that circuit is dead.”

“If it is, I’m sure she’ll blame me for it,” Mickey told me. She stared at me for some time. “You have the power and I knew it right away. Just looking at you made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. But I wondered what it was at first. Everybody walked light around you, except for Janie with her mood swings. I knew you had something going because whatever it was, the others were terrified of it.”

I could feel myself warming to her already. She was honest. Honest like Janie was honest, but more straightforward, no games, no subtlety, no esoteric feminine mystery. With Mickey, everything was on the table in plain sight. There was something very refreshing about that.

“And what do you think now that you know about The Shape?” I asked her. “Do you think I’m some kind of horrible monster? Some psycho who gets his kicks hurting other people? No mercy, just a fucking animal. That’s what Janie thinks.”

Mickey put the full force of her hungry eyes on me and it was considerable. “No, Nash. That’s not what I think at all. You do it for the good of all even though it scares you and you hate it. But I don’t hate it,” she said, moving in a little closer. “I respect the power you have. In fact, it turns me on.”

I could have laughed, but I didn’t. It was true. I could see it in her eyes. Power got her off and she wasn’t too proud to admit it.

“How’s you intuition working?”

“Just fine.”

“You feeling anything?” I said. “About what might be coming our way?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

She licked her lips and looked away. “We’re in terrible danger.”

9

We were driving.

It was decided that the simplest route out of the city would be the one we took in. Follow I-80 out and head west. I didn’t have the slightest idea where in the west we were going, I only knew that we had to keep heading in that direction. For it was out there somewhere. What I was looking for or what The Shape wanted me to find. In just about every way entering Des Moines seemed like an awful waste of time, yet I knew it had been important. Somehow. Was it Price? Was that it? I couldn’t say for sure, but it seemed likely. The idea of it scared me. For the only real use Price seemed to have was that he was an expert on infectious diseases.

Time would tell.

Carl was driving, complaining about all the wreckage. Mickey was sitting up front with him. I sat in the back with Price and Texas. Janie was in the way back seat with Morse. I turned to say something to her, but she held a finger to her lips. Morse was sleeping and that was a good thing. I started plying Price with questions. Maybe I just wanted to hear somebody talk who knew something about what was going on.

So Price talked. “Even in the old days nobody wanted anything to do with Ebola,” he told us. “Even your veteran biohazard experts were scared of it. It gave virologists the cold sweats. The way a lot of us were thinking was that Ebola was the doomsday machine of germs, the only life form we had encountered thus far that could truly put a serious dent in the human population. Maybe more than a dent, maybe a big ugly hole. The Ebola organism was the most frightening thing we could imagine. We knew too little about it. It popped up along the Ebola River in Africa, wiped out some villages, continued a pattern of sporadic, though minor, outbreaks in the next few decades, but never really broke out. Maybe if it had, we could have nailed the bastard. But it was all sketchy. We couldn’t be sure of the vector. Was it airborne? Waterborne? Both? Neither? Were the corpses of its victims vectors? We tracked it to central Africa and there the trail went cold. We knew it was there somewhere, proliferating, but we never could find the headwater, the reservoir. Yet we knew it existed. And that scared us. We were all envisioning a massive breakthrough into the human race, the virus crashing from one individual to the next. Millions dead within weeks. So it was no wonder that biohazard people wet themselves at the idea of working with this deadly little bug. One little tear in your protective suit…well, that’s it, isn’t it? The virus will flood into your system through any tiny cut or abrasion.”

Price went on to tell us that Ebola was the perfect microbial firestorm. Once it gets inside you the war is over before the first battle is fought. So it was all bad enough on the old Ebola front, he informed us, then Ebola-X showed.

It was even worse, if such a thing is imaginable.

Basically the same bug, just pumped up and with a very bad attitude. It spread faster, it killed quicker. Ebola-X attacks every part of the human body, sparing nothing: nervous tissue, marrow, organs, lymphatics. It goes after everything, absolutely laying waste to the immune system. It begins with massive blood clotting which restricts blood supply to the various systems of the body. Starved of nutrients and oxygen, tissues go necrotic. Connective tissue become mush, the skin is covered with bright red lesions which seem to expand as you watch. The flesh goes to pulp and internal bleeding begins. Your gums go to putty and your teeth fall out. Your eyes fill with blood and blood runs from every available orifice. Black infected vomit comes out in great quantities, tearing the skin off the tongue and bringing up sloughed, dead tissue from the windpipe and stomach while blood flows from your ass thick with macerated chunks of your intestines. The organs bloat as they fill with clotted blood and begin to decay. The testicles swell up like hard blue balls, nipples bleed, and vaginas eject infected tissue and copious amounts of black-red drainage. If the unlucky victim is a woman and she is pregnant, she spontaneously aborts the child who emerges infected with Ebola-X, blood running from it, eyes brilliantly red. The child, like the mother, is toxic biological waste.

“The end result…well it’s horrible, like something thrown together by Hollywood special effects people. The body literally liquefies into fleshy soup hot with virus.” Price stared out the window at the ruin of civilization. “Ebola was bad enough, but we knew with Ebola-X we were looking at the perfect killing machine. The hand of a very angry god. A species threatening event.”

After that little discourse, nobody said a damn thing. Not for quite while. The gruesome details had done their job on us.

“Well, you certainly are a cheerful fellow,” Texas Slim told Price after a time and there was absolutely no humor behind his words.

I was still thinking about The Medusa. I wanted to relay my fears to Price somehow without sounding like some kind of paranoid whacko who couldn’t tell the difference between nightmare and reality. Later I knew, if the chance came and I could get him away from the others, I would tell him. I would make him listen. And if he thought I was raving, so be it.

We drove on and I saw Mickey watching me in the rearview. When I caught her eyes, she smiled. I was glad she was with us and at the same time I saw her as a possibly destructive element. I believed for the most part everything she’d told me that morning, but I wasn’t naïve. I knew women like her with all the right stuff in all the right places made a career of manipulating men. I knew I had to be careful.

“If I might ask,” Price said, “what exactly fuels this desire to travel west? You seem to have no clear idea of where you’re going or even why you want to go there. I find that a bit confusing.”

Texas looked over at me and I didn’t dare meet his eyes. I could feel Janie’s eyes on me, too, probably bitter with hate and recrimination. I had to tell him; he was part of this, he deserved to know. But I was hoping for a more intimate chat. I don’t know what I would have said and I never had the chance because there was a sudden impact and the Jeep fishtailed in the street, glanced off a parked car and smashed into a pile of rubble.

10

Of course, Morse came out of his peaceful sleep screaming and immediately reaching for his Nikon. Everyone was yelling and shouting and wondering what in the Christ had happened. Me among them. Something had hit us and hit us damn hard. This was no accidental run into a parked car or a slab of building. Something had hit us. Something really damn big. Through the windshield I could see nothing but a swirling cloud of dust.

“Is everyone all right?” I said, once things calmed down.

“We’re okay, I think,” Carl said. “Have to check the Jeep, though.”

“What was it?” Janie wanted to know.

“Perhaps our friend Carl drove us into something,” Texas Slim suggested.

“Fuck I did. Something hit us. Something big.”

But what? That’s what I kept asking myself. We had come around a blind corner created by a shattered building and its attendant rubble and then…I don’t know…I saw a flash of silver. Then…
boom.

“I think it was a bus,” Mickey said. “It came out of nowhere…but it looked kind of like a big bus.”

“That’s what I saw, too,” Carl said.

I looked from one to the other. “A school bus? A Greyhound? Hell kind of bus?”

“Nothing like that,” Mickey told me. “It was bright silver. Like a train.”

We piled out. The front passenger side quarter panel of the Jeep had a good dent in it, a very big dent, but it wasn’t pushed in enough to rub against the front tire. Carl checked the engine, the undercarriage. Everything was okay. For once, vehicle-wise, we’d caught a break.

“I’m still wandering what it was,” Texas said.

“Look,” Mickey said, examining the dent. She scraped something out of it with her fingernail: a strip of silver paint. “See? I told you. It was a big fucking silver bus.”

Morse got a shot of the paint.

I was picturing one of those chartered coaches that used to take elderly people down to Bransom, Missouri for foot-stomping country music. One of those out on a wild joy ride. It was ridiculous, but the image in my mind persisted.

“It didn’t have windows,” Janie said.

We all looked at her.

“That’s what I saw. I wasn’t really looking. I think I was nodding off,” she explained. “But then I opened my eyes and I saw this metal, silvery thing. It was huge. But it had no windows. No windows at all.”

I thought maybe some kind of military vehicle. But
silver bus…silver bus…
those words kept running through my mind. Where had I heard something about a big silver bus?

Mickey was tapping a long index finger to her lips. “That guy…do you remember? That weirdo in the bathrobe? He was saying something about a silver bus.”

Carl laughed. “That fucking Gomer? Shit, he had painted purple toenails and he was carrying a fucking phonebook. He said he ate his dog.”

But I was remembering now, too. The bathrobe guy, crazy, deluded, shellshocked…but not necessarily wrong. What had he said exactly?

They came in silver buses. I saw ‘em. They had orange suits on. They took Reverend Bob and threw him in the bus.

“Might I ask what you people are talking about?” Price said.

I told him. I told him about the guy and what he had said which had struck me as being very odd at the time. Now I was wondering if it wasn’t so odd after all and I think Price was wondering the same thing.

“Hmm. A silver bus. Men in orange suits, did he say? Interesting.”

There was no time for speculation then. We were wide open in the streets. We got back in and Carl got behind the wheel and got us rolling. As we drove out, I tried several times to engage Janie in conversation but she wasn’t having it. Every time I spoke to her, she’d ask Texas or Price a question or pose for one of Morse’s photos.

She’s gone over the line, hasn’t she?
I kept telling myself.
Bitch is alive because you’ve taken care of her and now she’s turning on you. You gonna put up with that, Rick? Maybe you ought to introduce her to big brother Shape next month…