BIOHAZARD (42 page)

An angry, betrayed sort of revenge fantasy, that’s all it was. I wouldn’t do that to Janie. But on the other hand, if it came down to it, who
would
I select? Looking at the faces crowded into the Jeep, I knew it wouldn’t be easy if it came to it.

Every corner we turned, every street we prowled down, I expected trouble. But there was nothing. Nothing at all. My guts in my throat, Carl drove us out of Des Moines. And even then I think I really knew where we were going. Because I’d heard it in my sleep last night.

Nebraska.

11

We left Des Moines and drove for a few hours until we spotted a little roadside park with a historical marker. A river ran through it and there was a waterfall back along the trail. We were dirty and we needed to clean up. So we took turns bathing and it felt wonderful. Janie and Mickey went first. Then Price and Texas and Carl. I made Morse go alone. I figured nobody wanted him clicking shots of them in the raw even if there was no film in the camera.

I went last. The water was chilly, but refreshing and I could have stayed in there all day.

I needed to think.

We were right on the outer edge of something and I knew it. Some great abyss was opening before us and it had everything to do with Nebraska, where The Shape wanted us to go. The endgame was coming soon. Destiny was just over the state line and I knew it. I felt it right down into my marrow.

As I stood under the cascading water, I thought about all that I had lost. I thought about Specs. I thought about Sean. But mostly I thought about my wife. I thought about Shelly and it seemed she’d been dead a hundred years. Her image was still in my mind. But it was no longer clear, no longer fresh, almost like an old photograph that was slowly fading.

And that scared me. It really did.

I remembered Shelly dying and I started to cry. I was happy that she had not died alone and unloved like so many others. I was glad that I held her hand as she passed. She was out of it by then and probably didn’t even know I was there, but I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that at all. I think she was aware. I think she died knowing I loved her.

You would have been such a good mother, I thought. Remember how we talked about kids, Shelly? Remember that? Oh, our children would have been so lucky to have you as a mother. You would have been so perfect. You were an angel in every way and I’m glad I told you so and I only wish that we’d have had kids so I could be telling them now how wonderful of a woman their mother was.

These were the things I was thinking.

I couldn’t seem to think much else. I stood there in a daze and somewhere during the process, I realized I was not alone. Mickey was standing there at the edge of the river, up to her ankles in the water.

“Mind if I join you?” she asked.

Well, I wanted to tell her to go away and leave me brood, but I didn’t and I honestly didn’t want to. “Sure. Come on in.”

Mickey stepped out of her shorts and her T-shirt and she was amazingly beautiful. Just long-legged, high breasted, her skin bronzed by the sun, long dark hair sweeping down one shoulder. I don’t think I’d ever wanted anyone as badly as I’d wanted her at that moment and she damn well knew it. She’d been orchestrating this since she joined us and I hated her for it. Almost as much as I hated myself for giving into it.

“Come here,” I told her and it was not a request.

I swept her into my arms and her flesh was cool from the water, but I could feel the heat blazing between her legs. I took hold of her roughly and she did not fight. Her tongue was hot in my mouth. We fondled and kissed like that for a moment and then I grabbed her by the hair and pulled her down, slid my cock in her mouth. I forced her head up and down on it and made her gag. When I was hard, I grabbed her by the hips, digging my fingers into the cheeks of her ass and she wrapped her legs around me.

There was nothing tender about it.

I brought her over to a waist-high shelf of rock and put her down. I spread her legs apart and slid into her. She was a fantasy fuck, there was no doubt about it. I took her like I hated her. I slammed into her and made her cry out. And when I came, I shoved her away from me. There was no love involved. It was brutal, violent.

And that’s exactly what she wanted.

By the time I was done and I stepped out of the water with her trailing behind, I knew one thing for sure: Janie had been watching us.

12

And she had been. I knew it. I could see the recrimination in her eyes, the way she looked at me like some squirming thing that had slid out from under a rock. Maybe it was my imagination. I don’t know. She’d been giving me the evil eye for so long it was hard to be sure.

That night I dreamed of The Medusa moving east to west like some immense malefic vacuum cleaner sucking up the last of the human race from decaying cities like dust from a carpet and leaving nothing but polished white bones behind.

It was getting closer and closer and I could not get away from it. I saw its face. And worse, it saw me. It called me by name.

And then hands were shaking me awake.

“Nash,” Janie said. “It’s just a dream. That’s all it is. Just a dream. You have to be quiet. I finally got Morse to sleep.” She told me this like he was some little kid she had to tuck in. Maybe he was.

I laid there, looking up at her, sweat running down my temples. “I saw it,” I told her. “It’s coming for us. It’s getting closer.”

She just nodded. “It’s been coming for a long time.”

“You’ve…you’ve seen it?”

“In my dreams. We probably all have.”

“Janie…”

“Go to sleep, Rick.”

“Stay with me,” I said. “Don’t leave me alone.”

She shook her head. “It can’t be that way anymore and I think you know why, don’t you? Go to sleep. When you wake up you can tell yourself it was only a dream.”

I never felt so alone before.

13

As we drove to Nebraska, Price and I spent a lot of time talking. He was a very intelligent man and there seemed to be little he did not know about. One night, sitting by a fire in a sheltered field off the highway, I told him about The Shape. He was part of it and I figured he needed to know.

It was just the two of us.

I was expecting him to laugh at the very idea. He was a scientist. An educated man. But he did not laugh…he looked very grim as I told him about The Shape. Afterwards, he went silent for a long time, lost in thought.

Being Price, he had a few theories on my friend.

He said that The Shape was the ultimate cosmic chaos, something born of nuclear fission and plutonium saturation from the very blast furnace of creation…something that was nothing until the radiation brought it into being, gave it body and mind and attitude, if you can dig that. A wraith essentially, a spook birthed from a thermonuclear womb, a supercharged flux of sentient radiation.

A brand new devil for a brand new world.

“
The destruction of our old world, Nash, has given birth to a new one that is very frightening in all respects,” he said. “The biological mutations we’ve all seen are really minor in comparison to things like this Shape of yours and other things that may be coming to pass out there now. There’s nothing supernatural about any of it…but at the same time, it’s all so beyond our science and our meager simian powers of reasoning, that it seems almost godlike.”

“
You haven’t seen The Shape,” I told him. “But when you do…well, let’s just say it’s enough to put you to your knees.”

“
I believe it would be.”

The Devil of the new world, as it were, Price believed to be a random series of particles that became organized and cohesive and organic, for lack of a better word, as a result of massive fallout. And let’s face it, as crazy as that sounds, this particular bogeyman had been waiting to be born a long time. All the raw materials were there in barrels of radioactive waste, the cores of atomic reactors, and stores of unstable isotopes. Just laying there waiting, waiting to be born. Much like the inorganic chemicals of Azoic earth had waited to become life.

I had always wondered why The Shape only showed on nights of the full moon. Sometimes I could talk to him in my head on other nights, but only on the nights of the full moon would he show for his latest meal. I figured it was all impossibly esoteric and mystical, something supernatural that my poor little brain could never hope to understand.

But Price had a theory on that, too.

In fact, wasn’t much that guy didn’t have a theory on. From female orgasms to the mating cycles of katydids, Price had a very definitive opinion. He was one of those guys that were just too smart for their own good. I tried to argue with him about a few topics, but that was a mistake. He made me feel like a striped ape wallowing in my own shit. He was a professional debater and he took me off right at the knees, leaving me feeling stupid and annoyed and goddamn uneducated. Annoyed mainly, because he never seemed to see me as an equal, but as an object of amusement like a cute little puppy that had learned not to piss on the furniture, but hardly an intellectual equal.

And you would think that I would have been offended by that, but I wasn’t. I admired people like him. I really did. Often in blue collar people like me you get a sort of reverse snobbery where anyone with money or higher education becomes an object of ridicule. And, yes, sometimes it was warranted, but very often not. In Price’s case, it was not. He was highly intelligent and intuitive and if I were to have dismissed him out of some Neanderthal bias, then the only fool would have been me.

So I did not dismiss him.

I listened; I learned.

Price had a theory on the full moon bit, too, as I said.

And he gave it to me in the form of a lecture as always. He said that if you looked through the body of folklore and tradition concerning the moon—he had, of course—then you would see certain underlying principles that were intriguing. The moon, he said, had a history of inciting the human species. It drove men mad. It regulated the menstrual cycles of women. It was forever an object of religious importance. To many primitive societies, the moon was considered a goddess, the creator of time and space, the repository of human souls…those unborn and those awaiting reincarnation. This Moon-Goddess ruled the cycles of creation and fertility and death and this was why ancient calendars were very often based on lunar phases
and
the menstrual cycles of women which were very often identical in duration. The moon ruled not only the tides, but human and animal life, rebirth and procreation. That’s why Scottish girls at one time would only wed on a full moon and why certain crops could only be planted beneath its glowering eye. Witches were said to draw down the moon, to call up demons and familiars only on this blessed night.

But much of that was superstition and yet, he told me, there was a germ of underlying truth to it all. For the geomagnetic pull of the moon had a decided impact on all living things and their individual electromagnetic fields and maybe it was at these times of greatest influence—the full moon phase—that certain doors were open that might be closed on other nights. Maybe witches really did call down demons and nameless monstrosities and maybe those things were much like The Shape in origin and composition. The same geomagnetic force that made crops and women fertile, might also create an ideal environment for something like The Shape to physically manifest itself, exploiting cosmic and lunar energies to give itself substance.

Just a theory again, but I liked it.

Price was a smart guy, like I said.

I think he was dead right about not only the moon’s influence, but about the nature of The Shape itself. And I told him as much. Not that being right came as much of a surprise to him; he was usually right.

“
It wants us to go west,” I told him. “It’s been pushing me in that direction ever since Cleveland. I don’t know why. But there must be something out there. Something…”

Price put his analytical mind on it and right away said, “Maybe it’s not pushing you
towards
something, but
away
from something.”

God, the guy was good.

There were other things I wanted to say to him. Things about my dreams, about The Medusa, but I wasn’t ready just yet. It was coming, though. I knew that much. Because The Medusa was out there, chewing its way through the ruined cities of men, picking the last meat off the last bones of humanity. And it was coming for us.

Knowing this, feeling death and plague gathering behind us, I said, “You worked in a lab back east, right? Tell me what that was like. Tell me what happened at the end.”