BIOHAZARD (50 page)

Faceless as the others, she walked off with them.

That was the last I saw of Mickey.

There was no doubt what was going on by that point. There could be no doubt. I could hear Price’s voice in the back of my head:
You see, Nash, when a hot virus infects its host, what it’s trying to do, essentially, is to convert that host into virus.
But he had said complete, successful conversion was impossible. But he’d been wrong because that’s what was happening here…beneath those orange and blue spacesuits there were no people, no healthy organisms of ordinary flesh and blood, but walking, functioning,
thinking
masses of hot virus, viral imitations of human beings and nothing more.

They had nothing to do with Janie or I.

They were in league with The Medusa and they were waiting for it to come, their savior, their prophet, a new god for a seriously warped new world.

Janie and I had not been assimilated yet. That made us dangerous. That’s why those figures in the spacesuits had backed away from us when we entered the complex: it had been revulsion and fear. Fear of infection. Fear of contamination. For they feared healthy, normal bodies with their active compliments of antibodies as much as we feared Ebola.

Janie and I were nothing but disease masses now, infections to be eradicated. We were the abnormal ones.

After a time, two forms in orange suits returned. One of them carried the black box.

“It’s time,” the one with the box said.

“Don’t do that to us,” I said. “Please. Just kill us. Destroy us. Don’t shoot us with that virus.”

“We’re not going to do anything to you,” the man said. “When you are converted, it will be
she
who touches,
she
who welcomes you into the fold.”

He was talking about The Medusa.

“Please,” Janie, said, tears running down her face. “Don’t hurt us. Don’t hurt us.” She put her hands to her belly. “You can’t. I’m pregnant.”

14

Three hours later, I was still reeling from that one.

But it all made sense when I finally calmed down and was able to look at it with some kind of perspective. Janie had been strange and moody for some time now, even worse than usual, and that had less to do with me being with Mickey than with something much larger than all that. She told me knew since Gary. When we were in that pharmacy after the Hatchet Clan attack and after those birds fed on the Clans, she had slipped off and gotten a pregnancy test. One of those home jobs where you just read the strip. I remember her disappearing that day. Then coming back with that funny look in her eyes.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I said.

“What would the point have been, Rick? What would it have changed?”

“I had the right to know.”

“Maybe you did. Maybe you didn’t.”

The men in the space suits took us out of the complex by gun point and led us off into the fields and brought us to a hilltop. You could see for miles from our vantage point. And what I saw was a little valley spread beneath us and it was filled with people. The same sort of people we had run into in Bitter Creek: the diseased, the dying, the suffering. That crazy old man had said they had been congregating in the town for some time and for a particular reason.

It’s coming for all of us! Coming out of the east, yes sir! And there’s those here that want it to come! You see all them sick ones? They been pouring in for weeks! For weeks! Some have died, but others is hanging in just so they can see it! Look it in the face when it comes home to roost!

That’s what he had said and now I was seeing them, thousands upon thousands of them crowded together beneath us, a hot wind of pestilence blowing off them as they waited in the seepage of their wastes and drainage. They were moaning and chanting, holding leprous fingers up to the sky, watching for the coming of their god with ulcerated faces and eyes filled with blood.

Dozens of men in spacesuits with submachine guns ringed the bottom of the hill in all directions. Dozens more waited at the fringe of the crowd below. There would be no escape for Janie and I. None whatsoever. At least, that’s what they thought. But I had already decided that a swift charge at them would make them open up on us, cut us down out of sheer terror. Because they
were
afraid of us.

Dying beneath a hail of bullets was better than the alternative.

“
When will it happen, Rick?” Janie asked.

“
Soon,” I said.

And it would be soon because there was a spreading stain of gray rising up at the horizon and I knew it was The Medusa, darkening the land as it…or
she…
came.

I sat there, holding Janie’s hand like we were a couple lovers waiting for the fireworks to begin on the Fourth of July. I drew off a cigarette, wishing I had a cold beer to go with it. Wishing for a lot of things, I guess. What vexed me was that even though I understood much of what was going on now, I still did not understand my part in it or, more precisely,
The Shape’s
part in it. Why did it want us here? What was so fucking important about all this that it kept pushing us west?

What did it want here?

What did it need here?

I had to know, somehow I had to know. I closed my eyes to the mulling crowds below and shut my ears to their fevered cries. I concentrated on that sphere of darkness. This time I did not call it up. I communed with it.

15

Right away a wave of blackness rolled through my brain. My mind was uplinked with that of The Shape and The Shape was letting my mind reach out beyond until I could sense The Medusa out there. I could feel a horrible crawling in my head as if thousands of worms had infested my brain, tunneling, digging deeper, breeding and brooding, their hot, moist eggs bursting with millions of writhing larval young.

I screamed.

In my mind I screamed.

For this was The Medusa, what it was: an invasive life force of infestation and pestilence and charnel horror. Not worms, not really, but exploding particles of virus.

The Medusa’s voice was in my head, a dry and snakelike hissing.

I could smell millions of slimy corpses rotting, bursting with gas and worms, greening with putrescence. It was a crypt smell, a stench of fuming corpse ovens, of carrion boiling with maggots, of viral infestation. Of cities heaped with the dead and plucked white bones piled like ramparts up into the sky.

The voice hissed and the worms dug deeper and I felt my mind implode like thunder, as The Medusa enveloped it in a black, pestile cloud of corruption, invading my mind as its children must invade cells: sliding tendrils through membranes, draining them dry, bloating them with a hideous viral pregnancy like millions of eggs hot and juicy that would erupt with seeking death—

16

Janie shook me out of it and I was thankful for that because I don’t know if I would ever have come out of it on my own. My eyes opened and I saw that creeping shadow closing in on the valley. I saw the faithful cheer and heard them scream with delight or terror and perhaps both. The Medusa spread across the earth like a fire storm destroying everything in its path.

I had felt it in my mind and I had seen it in my dreams and now I saw its physical reality as everyone in the valley did.

A spreading gray shadow that was blank and formless, as far as the eye could see: lifeless, hollow, a vapor of dead alien plains.
Then…fragmenting, swelling and bursting, slitting open like some immense birth canal in an undulant mass of white and worming tendrils that reached for miles, reached right up to stars themselves as the world became carrion threaded by a million-billion hungry corpse worms. The tendrils split apart into more webbing tendrils and filaments and snaking ropes of slime that were viscidly alive.

And beyond it, rising like the cold marble graveyard face of the moon was The Medusa itself: an elongated, mutating, ever-changing firmament of gaseous malevolence. An elongated face like a dead-white moldering corpuscle, flaking and fragmenting in the hot cemetery wind of plague breath and swirling bone dust. A living pestilence of viral matter with a mind of gnawing starvation and immense black tunnels for eyes that reflected the tenebrous glare of shadowy sterile worlds and the dripping voids between the stars.

The faithful began to scream.

They had waited for her, dreamed of her in their bacterial delirium and she had come. Now they sat at her table not as guests but as food and she looked down upon her gathered offerings with a sawtoothed, contorted, cadaverous grin of plague pits, her eyes pulsating with evil color, verminous yellow wastes kissed by cold flames of fever.

Shrouds kissed by stillborn winds, rustling like graveyard rats in subterranean tombs, she unraveled herself, taking what was offered, taking her sacrificial lambs.

I watched them scream as she settled over them, one by one popping like overripe pumpkins and rotten gourds, their blood and tissue and disease meat vaporized and sucked up into the chaotic maelstrom that was The Medusa. She left nothing but smoldering bones in her wake as she moved across the valley taking what was hers and hers alone.

Janie screamed as we felt that hot wind blow up at us like a breath from a crematory oven. She screamed. She fought in my grip. She went absolutely hysterical as I held onto her feeling numb and emptied by the sight of this haunter of the dark.

She grabbed my face. She kissed it again and again. “If you love me,” she cried. “Don’t let her take me! For the love of our unborn child and the love I have for you, don’t let it end this way! Call it!
Nash…call The Shape…”

Revelation.

This is what made it push us here, prod us ever westward. Yes, it wanted to keep me and mine out of the path of The Medusa. But that was only part of it. The Shape did not love us. It was not some caring, compassionate father figure protecting its children. It did not know love. It did not understand loyalty or devotion or even the need to protect life itself: it knew only hunger and here was the ultimate feast that it had known was coming all the time. This table had been set a long time ago and now it was filled with food just as The Medusa herself was a banquet of life force.

I kissed Janie as that wind grew hotter and held her beautiful face in my hands one last time, then I called up The Shape. I peered into that sphere of darkness, that zone of blackness which was a conduit to it and maybe its own black little beating heart.

I summoned it.

And it came.

Something shifted around us, the air was filled with a thrumming energetic vitality. It went heavy, crackled with static electricity. There was a sudden thrumming sound and an overpowering stink of ozone.

The Shape rose up out of the ether, a whirlwind of shrieking matter, black and buzzing, angry and spinning. A writhing, energized cloud of radioactive dust and debris and force. An elemental field of sentient electrons, wrath and destruction and appetite and I could feel the raw force coming off of it. A stink blew off of it like fused wiring and melting steel, cordite and the breath from foundry ovens.

The Medusa was a relentless, unstoppable machine of death, but The Shape was a sentient, living thermonuclear furnace.

It rose up high as two story building.

It paused there, sparkling with flecks of luminosity and arcs of electricity. Two leering red eyes looked out from that storm of atomic refuse. The noise it created…like screeching metal and hurricane winds and bubbling cauldrons…was so loud you had to shout over the top of it.

“
Take them! Take them all! Take everything that’s yours!”
I screamed at it.

When it moved, that buzzing sound rose and its body envelope began to spin faster. It was doing that now as it came in my direction. At the last moment, I could feel the blazing, cremating heat of the thing and it was like standing too near a smelter full of molten steel. The Shape was still thirty feet from me at the bottom of the hill, but close enough to bake my skin and singe my eyebrows. I collapsed at that very moment. But at least I knew something…I knew what it had been like for those others, I knew the horror they must have felt as they were scalded and incinerated, kissed to ash and embers by that abomination.

The Shape did not want me, of course. It went right for the men in orange suits. They were vacuumed into that living kiln, that living nuclear reactor.