BIOHAZARD (48 page)

I caught her eyes once and quickly looked away. Something in them made me wither. I had slept with both girls now, Janie repeatedly.

Trust me, it was no notch on my belt. Because it was always there in the back of my mind, that dread question of what I would have to do if either of them became pregnant. Because if the stories were true, babies
always
became like the Children and usually right away. Monsters. They came right out of the womb like that, literally burning their way out and killing their mothers in the process.

Could I let Janie or Mickey suffer like that?

And better, would I have the balls to put them down if and when it happened?

9

The Hatchet Clans came not thirty minutes later.

Just when you think things can’t much worse, they usually do.

I decided to let the old man and the girl go. We didn’t need them and I was pretty sure they didn’t need us. I didn’t know what to do with the old man. I did my best splinting his leg. He looked like he wanted to tear my throat out the entire time.

Carl cut them loose and the girl ran off. The old man looked at us one last time, spit at my feet, and out the door he went, hobbling off with a broken broomstick for a crutch. He looked almost casually at the corpses of his posse and then went on his way. He didn’t make it half a block before he screamed.

Carl and I were just dragging Morse’s corpse out the door…and I saw three Clansmen hacking on the old guy. Scouts. That meant the main body was coming. I got back inside and told the others to hide. And just in time. For rolling down the streets like a storm, the main body was coming. Screaming, breaking windows, they had arrived.

I watched them storm past the front of the diner in their filthy, ragged olive drab overcoats and gas masks, scalp locks greased, axes and pikes, chains and clubs in their hands. Several carried decapitated human heads. They swung them by the hair. They found the bodies of Morse and the teenagers and set on them in a pack, more pressing in all the time like swarms of insects. They scalped the teenagers. They eviscerated them, dismembered them. They took Morse’s head with them.

We were in unbelievable danger.

If it came to it, we could kill quite a few, but I knew that in the end they’d overwhelm us with sheer numbers. They mulled about for about an hour, marching around and hissing to one another through their masks. None of them came into the diner. I figured that was a real spot of luck.

I thought we were going to make it.

Then twenty of them charged. They weren’t as stupid as I thought. They knew where we were and they played us, let us relax, let our guard go down slightly—because with the Clans in the street it never went down completely—then they attacked.

We killed at least ten of them, ducked into the back room and went out the rear door into the alley. Right into a nest of those assholes. We started shooting and dropped quite a few, but it was close-quarters combat and they came from every direction.

I saw Carl go down beneath a tangle of five or six of them.

And Texas Slim shouted:
“Nash! On your left!”

I turned and shot another that was bearing down on me with an axe. And then Texas knocked me to the pavement and took a spear in the belly for it. He’d saved my life but sacrificed his own. They kicked my rifle away and beat me down with clubs. They had Texas down. He was screaming as he was jabbed repeatedly with five or six spears.

I fought to my feet and something collided with the back of my head. The last thing I saw was them hacking on Texas and Janie being dragged away down the alley.

10

I remember coming awake to the sound of my own voice:
“Janie? Janie? Janie…where are you, Janie?”

I blinked and blinked again. Finally my eyes opened, focused, and I saw the Hatchet Clans. We had been taken to some kind of encampment outside town. In the distance I saw those crucified mummies up on the crosses. There were fires burning, canvas tents pitched. I was tied to a post driven in the ground. Mickey was to one side of me and Janie was to the other. Both of them were unconscious. They were still dressed, so I supposed they hadn’t been raped or tortured yet.

But that was coming.

Because that’s what the Clans did with women. With men, they generally killed them outright. But maybe they had a special purpose for me. Maybe they would make a grand spectacle of my death.

For the time being, we were of no interest to them.

I watched them sharpen axes and spears, fashion weapons from slats of wood and lengths of iron. If they had voices, real voices, I never heard them, just that indecipherable hissing. Now and again they’d make ratlike squealing sounds as a fight broke out between individuals. And when they fought, trust me, they fought to the death.

I watched a couple of them—women, I thought—threading things onto a length of metal bailing wire. Human heads. Five or six of them. They jabbed the wire into the ear and pushed it right through and out the other ear. Then they tied off the wire between two green tree limbs jabbed into the ground.

One of the heads belonged to Carl.

11

I must have went out cold again because when I awoke, two of the Clansmen were standing right before me and I could smell the hot stink of raw meat, filth, and urine coming from them. One had a knife and he cut me free. Numb, I pitched straight forward like a tree into the grass. Blinking in the hazy sunlight, I looked up at those gas masks on their faces. I knew the subhuman things that were beneath them.

They hissed something at me.

And when I didn’t understand, one of them kicked me.

I wanted them to kill me. It was the best I could hope for. I didn’t want to see what they did to the girls. Texas and Carl were dead. I was having trouble wrapping my brain around that. Because with their deaths, in a way, everything had died. The core of my posse was gone. My connections were severed. Because Texas and Carl connected me to Sean who connected me to Specs who connected me to Youngstown and Shelly and my life. And now it was gone. I had no center.

“Fuck you,” I said at the Clansmen which is what stupid, thick-headed idiots like me always say when we know
we’re
the ones who are fucked.

They said something in their garbled voices.

Then I heard thunder. Or what I thought was thunder. But it wasn’t thunder at all. Because it came again, a lot closer: a shrieking explosion that vaporized five or six Clansmen, scattering pieces of their anatomy in every direction. Another round hit. Another and another. I could smell fire and smoke and blood.

The encampment was under siege.

The Hatchet Clans were scurrying around madly. I heard the reports of automatic weapons. I saw Clansmen fall beneath volleys of bullets. Through clouds of twisting smoke and around blazing tents I saw the raiders step into view: forms in shiny plastic orange suits with helmets on. There were faces behind the darkened plastic helmet bubbles and air lines leading from the mouthpieces to tanks on their backs. They were completely enclosed. They carried stout, short-bodied submachine guns in their hands.

I remember thinking:
Those are Hazmat suits, biocontainment suits. The kind of suits people like Price wore when they worked with hot agents. Space suits. That’s what Price called them.

This was a fucking biocontainment team.

The Hatchet Clans were outnumbered, out gunned.

They died in numbers. I could hear Janie and Mickey shouting out. I scrambled over the ground, found a dying Clansman and took his machete. He grabbed my leg, snarling at me. I brought the machete down on him again and again. I didn’t stop until the blade was gored with blood and he stopped moving.

And when I turned back to race to the girls, two men were standing there in their orange space suits. I could not see their faces through the visors. I could only hear the sound of their respirators hissing in and hissing out. They had their guns aimed right at me—H & K machine pistols, I thought, the kind counterterrorist units used. They did not lower them.

Speaking through an external speaker with a modulated, artificial voice, a man said: “Drop your weapon please.”

I was overwrought, I suppose. My life had disintegrated in the last twenty-four hours. I wanted blood. I wanted payback. I wanted some sweet, clean revenge. I suppose I must have looked dangerous with a bloody machete upraised to attack. “But my friends…they fucking killed my friends…” I said.

“They’re dead now, the Clans are dead,” the voice told me. “They can’t hurt you anymore.”

I could hear an occasional report of a submachine gun as the Hatchet Clans were mopped up. Soon, I didn’t even hear that. There was only silence. The murmuring sound of voices coming through speakers.

I dropped the machete.

They did not lower their weapons. A couple others cut Janie and Mickey loose. They came over to me, eyes despairing and full of questions.

“Come with us,” the man said.

“What do you want? We haven’t done anything,” I told him. “Where are you taking us?”

“To the place you wanted to go,” he said. “And tonight…tonight you will meet that which you have been running from.”

I felt a chill run up my spine. We had been rescued, yes, but I had a nasty feeling we were about to be given to something far worse. After all the selecting I had done, I had the nastiest feeling that it was
I
who had just been selected.

“What the hell is this?” Mickey said to me.

But I didn’t have a fucking clue.

12

Of course, I did. In a way I did.

This is exactly what bathrobe guy had been talking about that day in Gary:
They came in silver buses. I saw ‘em. They had orange suits on. They took Reverend Bob and threw him in the bus.
I remembered how intrigued Price had been when we related the story to him after the silver bus hit us in Des Moines. He knew what it meant. Even then he knew exactly what it had meant.

Janie, Mickey, and I were taken in a sliver, windowless bus out to an Army base beyond Bitter Creek. This was
The Creek.
It sat behind a high chainlink fence, actually a series of them with dog runs between, a collection of low white fabricated buildings attached to a larger brick complex. Numerous outbuildings were scattered about. The signs were everywhere: U.S. GOVERNMENT PROPERTY ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE. And my favorite: DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED.

We were taken into one of the buildings at gunpoint. Inside, it was clean with electric lights. I even saw operating computers. It was like going back in time a couple years. For in this complex, the old world was still operating, smoothly, efficiently. We saw other forms in orange space suits mulling about. Many of them stopped what they were doing when they saw us. Several backed away like they were afraid of us.

“I demand to know what this is about,” Janie said. “We haven’t done a damn thing. What do you want with us?”

Her question went unanswered. This was a military operation, it seemed. We’d get answers if and when they decided to give them to us. We were ushered through a series of hissing airlocks that had to be opened with plastic ID cards. There were guards with guns behind every one. We went through two more airlocks, the signs announced BIOSAFETY LEVEL ZERO and then BIOSAFETY LEVEL 2. Each time the door slid open, I could feel the difference in air pressure. It was like you were being sucked into the room. It was what Price had been talking about: negative air pressure. At Level 2 we were bathed in blue ultraviolet light. Next, we climbed into an elevator and went down quite a ways. When we climbed out a sign said BIOSAFETY LEVEL 3: STAGING AREA. There were signs around that read: DECON. Which I think referred to the chemical showers you had to go through before going in and particularly when you came out.