by Jack Hamlyn
The slughead straddling him was a woman with a face like bleeding suet, loose and dangling from the bone. He fought against her, but it wasn’t so easy in his cumbersome biosuit. She was frenzied, absolutely demented, and viciously determined.
She gripped his helmet and banged it off the floor again and again, grinding her hips against him. Ribbons of pus dripped from holes in her face onto the glass. Then she brought her mouth down against the bubble and began licking it, leaving a trail of pink juice over it.
Kurta reached down and found his knife, fumbling it from its sheath as the woman licked and sucked at his bubble. He nearly dropped it, then got it in his fist, and brought it to bear, stabbing her in the throat again and again until she pulled away, shrieking. She gripped her head with both hands as if she was afraid it might come apart if she didn’t.
With a cry, he jabbed the blade into her left eye socket, the orb splashing free from its housing in a slime of optic tissue. Howling with lunacy, she grabbed his hand and only succeeded in drawing the blade downward, splitting her face in half. Gouts of gore splashed against his bubble.
Then her head exploded.
Spengler and Mooney were in the room, driving the remaining slugheads back and down with sustained fire. The Pole had West and he was dragging him up the stairs. Something which was not easy because West was fighting against him, completely out of his head by that point.
Kurta pulled back, and Mooney hosed the room down with his flamethrower until everything was burning.
By the time they made it out onto the lawn, the entire house was blazing.
“Good thing is,” The Pole said, “weren’t no sluggos upstairs. Nothing but a dog. A big old mangy retriever.”
“You shoulda seen it, boss,” Mooney said. “Fucking dog was infested. He had three slugs on him. Most pathetic thing I ever saw.”
“What did you do with it?” Kurta asked.
“I wasted it,” Spengler said. “Couldn’t leave it like that. What if it was your dog?”
4
Back at the APC, they hosed each other down with wormicide from the sprayer that killed any nasty parasites or dangerous microorganisms on contact. It stank like bleach (which was its active ingredient), but it did the job. After a few moments, they took their helmets off. It was nice to feel the fresh air, though in that neighborhood there was a certain smell of decay that was ever-present.
Pulling off a cigarette, Kurta said, “You okay, kid?”
West was sitting on the curb, a blank look in his eyes. “I really fucked up, didn’t I?”
“Nah,” Mooney told him. “It happens to everyone.”
“There were so many of ‘em…I just, I don’t know, I guess I kinda froze at the end there.”
“You did fine,” Kurta said.
“Really?” West brightened.
“Sure.”
The Pole lit a cigarette off the butt of his last. “Next time I try to save your ass, cherry, don’t fight me or I’ll leave you. I got better things to do than nipple-feed you.”
“Go easy,” Mooney said.
“Fuck that. Did you see how this little prick fought me? He pulls that girly shit on me again and he ain’t gonna like how it turns out.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Kurta told him.
The Pole didn’t like being talked to like that.
His eyes were full of acid as he stared at Kurta. Kurta met his gaze, held it, dared him to take it farther. The Pole didn’t. As team leader, Kurta owned his ass and he knew it. It all came down to necessity. If The Pole wanted to stay on the team, then he had to keep on Kurta’s good side. That way he ate good back at the bunker, had access to good liquor and weed, a roof over his head, protection, and sometimes even girls. He pissed Kurta off, he’d be demoted, end up on one of the scavenging crews or waste disposal, picking up corpses in the streets or work animal control putting down the roving packs of wild dogs. There were other jobs like medical and food service, but a guy like The Pole wouldn’t rate them without training. And schools were real hard to come by these days.
“Sure, boss,” he finally said, grinning with his bad teeth.
Kurta didn’t even bother commenting on that.
Time was going to come, he knew, when he and The Pole were going to go head to head. Had to happen. The Pole was always going out of his way to question Kurta’s authority. Kurta put up with it for team unity. He always wanted his boys to chip in if they had a better plan than the one he came up with. Problem was, The Pole took it too far. He always had to keep pushing, see how far he could get.
Keep it up, Kurta thought, just keep it up. Won’t be a fucking demotion for you, dipshit. You’ll get left behind with the slugs.
He pushed that from his mind because he didn’t need any more negativity blowing through his head than he already had. He sat there, pulling off his smoke, watching the house burn. If it was up to him, he would burn them all flat, town after town after town. That way, you could be sure the slug infestation would be eradicated.
But command didn’t want that.
They wanted the houses cleared one by one because some day (they claimed with rosy, self-deluding optimism), people would be moving back into those neighborhoods which would be the anchors of productive, self-sustaining communities.
Kurta laughed dryly and butted out his cigarette.
Spengler had a pint of Jim Beam and he was passing it around. Kurta was okay with that. A good snort now and again steeled a man and ironed out his nerves so they weren’t bent like pins.
“The crazy, crazy shit you see,” Spengler said as the bottle made the rounds, spirits buoyed. “I was in this house, Northside Cleveland. We had it cleared out except for the attic. I go up there and this sluggo comes crawling out of the dark. Old lady, had to been pushing eighty. I open up, peel the top of her head off and…Jesus…I can see right inside her skull and it looks like a Cup o’ Noodles in there with all slugs squirming in her brain.”
The Pole laughed, then grimaced at the very idea of it.
“Those weren’t slugs,” Mooney pointed out. “They were flukes, parasitic flatworms. The slugs carry them like cattle carry liver flukes. Once a slug parasitizes a host, it releases larval flukes which migrate immediately to the brain.”
Sometimes they forgot that Mooney had taught high school biology once. Regardless, it led to a lively discussion of the life cycle of the slugs (which still wasn’t completely understood), from the larval stage (“wigglers”) to the adult slugs to the final molting which produced leggy horrors known as “creepers.” Mooney pointed out that it was the flukes that hijacked human beings, making them slaves of the slugs.
It was a weird symbiosis.
Somehow, the flukes were servitors of the slugs. When they entered their host, they released an endorphin cocktail which overloaded the human nervous system, creating an overdosing pleasure response which pretty much turned humans into addicted zombies.
Scientifically, it was very similar to heroin addiction.
In the central part of the human brain known as the basal forebrain, there was a cluster of nerve cells known as the nucleus accumbens, which was an integral part of the reward circuit which was activated by massive doses of dopamine during sex, eating rich food, or taking drugs. The flukes mimicked this, flooding the nervous system with neurotransmitters, creating a “high” of the sort associated with heroin. This surge literally exhausted the nerve cells from constant stimulation, so the brain dampened the dopamine response as it did with opiate addicts. The end result was that the hosts needed more and more of a hit from the flukes to trigger the same dopamine response. So, essentially, the slugheads were addicts. They would do anything to please the flukes which in turn existed to please the slug itself. And anything meant eating and eating, stuffing themselves with meat which provided the slugs with the proteins they craved.
Any meat.
Which turned them into cannibalistic monsters whose brains were turned to sludge from fluke infestations. The life of the host w
as a matter of months at best.
“That’s what I don’t get,” The Pole said. “Why the fuck are we doing this? Why don’t we just let the sluggos die off and be done with it?”
“Because the slugs are aggressive. They are not going to simply stop…not until the last potential hosts are exhausted and the life cycle ceases,” Mooney pointed out.
“Sure,” Spengler said, “which means the extinction of the human race.”
“All mammals for that matter,” Mooney added.
The addiction thing fascinated Kurta.
As a guy who’d spent two years spiking junk before he was arrested and detoxed, he understood addiction. With the slugs, the addiction cycle began when they spat those globs at people which juiced them with endorphins, triggering opiate receptors in the brain and creating a joyous analgesic effect. The perfect little high which lasted only seconds. The only way to get more was to pick up the slug and place it against your belly…and your brain instinctively understood that.
Once you did that, there was no going back because the flukes entered your system upon contact.
Fascinating, all right.
As the others chatted away, Kurta sat there with West.
You were in the Guards before this, weren’t you, kid?”
West nodded. “Three years. Then everything went to shit and there were no more Guards. I had a girl. We were saving up to buy a house…then, well, you know.”
Kurta sighed. “Yeah, I know.”
“How long you been doing this?”
“Over a year now.”
“God, that’s a long time.”
“Sure.”
“Why do you keep at it?”
Kurta shrugged. “I ask myself that every day. Still don’t have an answer. Guess I do it because it has to be done. You know your dad?”
West was taken aback by that. “Um…sure. He was great. Died of a heart attack before the slugs came. That’s a blessing.”
“What did he do?”
“Dad? He worked in a foundry. An awful place, hot and stinking. He’d come home every night exhausted, dirty. He’d barely finish his supper before he fell asleep. But he took good care of us. He always took good care of us. Lots of food. Clothes on our backs. Toys. Bikes. Summer camps. You name it. He made sure we had it.”
Kurta smiled. “You know why he did that, kid? Because it was the right thing to do. My old man worked in a foundry, too. I know what that’s about. It’s a fucking shit job. Your old man hated it, I bet, like my old man did, but he did it because he didn’t have choices in life like some people. He did it because he loved you. He did it because it was the right thing to do and he wanted you to have a better life than he had.”
“I guess you’re right, Kurt.”
“Course I’m right. Remember that: I’m always right. You do that and we’ll get along fine, you and me.”
A chopper buzzed high overhead, then circled back around once, then twice.
“Uh-oh,” Mooney said.
“What?” West asked.
“It’s the fucking major,” Spengler said.
A call came in on the radio and Kurta, sighing, climbed into the APC to take it. “This is Ex-Three, over.”
“OVER, MY ASS!” a voice screamed over the band.
“GODDAMMIT, KURTA! WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU STUPID JACKASSED MOTHERFUCKING MORONS DOING DOWN THERE? HAVING A FUCKING WEENIE ROAST? WHY IS THAT STRUCTURE BURNING? YOU KNOW THE GODDAMN RULES! NO HOUSES ARE BURNT DOWN, YOU FUCKING MONKEYSKULL!”
“Yes, sir,” Kurta said. “I know the rules, sir.”
“THEN WHY THE FUCK IS THAT STRUCTURE BURNING?”
“Collateral damage, sir. Collateral damage.”
5
The bunker.
Three stories of reinforced concrete and steel, one level above ground and two below. It was guarded by tire traps and cement berms and a twelve-foot chain-link fence that encircled the compound. Shooters with night-vision scopes watched the outer perimeter. They had .30 cal sniper rifles and .50 cal machine guns at their disposal. The bunker sat dead-center, or nearly, of Lorrain Air National Guard Base. It was designed during the Cold War to house those who were not expendable in the case of a nuclear war—politicians, dignitaries, high-ranking Air Force staff and assorted technicians. It was made to accommodate a hundred people and to accommodate them in comfort with private sleeping quarters, gyms, recreation rooms, meeting rooms and war rooms, medical and laboratory facilities, plus enough food and water to last five years after the fresh stuff ran out.
There were currently some fifty-odd people in the bunker. It had been in operation just over a year and each month, two or three others came in. The place was operated by Dr. Dewarvis, a former CDC parasitologist, but actually run by Major Trucks who was in charge of security.
To the south, there had been three other doom bunkers (as they were called) at Wright-Patterson AFB. But only one was currently in operation; the other two had been shut down because of slug outbreaks. Which was a dread that everyone lived with on a daily basis. They were trying to survive against an adversary that nature had designed to inherit the earth. They told themselves that they would win in the end, but nobody really believed that. Oh, they told the children that there was no real danger but when the kids weren’t around, the forecast was exceedingly grim.
As the country had discovered more than once, there were some wars you simply couldn’t win.
6
While the others socialized and drank and smoked weed, Kurta stayed to himself. They were blowing off steam. He understood the need; he just couldn’t be part of it. His good times were long ago.
He laid there in his bed, staring at the battleship-gray walls and pulling off a cigarette, thinking, remembering, punishing himself with guilt because that’s what he was good at.
He thought about the Army.
He’d pulled six years before the trouble started, before he fell in with the wrong people in Thailand and hanged himself. The Army didn’t look kindly at him trafficking narcotics. The only thing that really saved him from a ten- to twenty-year stretch at Leavenworth was public perception. The Army was real sensitive about it. They liked to control it. Manipulate it. And what they didn’t want was their soldiers going on trial for heroin trafficking. When the people back home found out that there was a U.S. Army narcotics ring operating out of Asia, the shock waves would be heard in Washington and things would get ugly in the Far East Command. So, they cut Kurta and the others a deal—dishonorable discharge, six months in the brig, then out.
They all took what was offered.
This was the first of what Kurta liked to think of as his BIG FUCKUPS.
The second one was even worse. He bumped around for awhile, taking one job after another: driving truck, working in a bakery, crewing a fishing boat. He worked hard, went to school at night, got his welding certificate. Good jobs were easy to come by then. He met Pammy, fell in love, got married, and they had Lucy. Everything was right. He was pulling twelve-hour days, so Pammy took care of everything. She ran the house, she paid the bills, raised Lucy. She made great meals that didn’t come out of a box or a can. He was happy. But through it all, as good as things were, he felt the urge to run wild again. Before long, he was running with his old crew from high school, selling weed and then junk—because that’s where the money was. He kept telling himself that he’d get out, but by then he was snorting heroin and, soon enough, shooting it. Another junkie pushing drugs to support his habit. He lost his job, was put through detox twice. That’s when Pammy left him. She couldn’t take it anymore. She was tired of lying to her own daughter when Lucy asked why daddy was sick all the time.
Kurta lost everything.
That was the second—and biggest—of his BIG FUCKUPS.
By the time he straightened out, the slugs came. They got both of his girls and that was that. He’d been alone since.
As he butted his cigarette and pulled off a can of beer, he thought, the slugs, those fucking
slugs.
Nobody knew what their origin was. Not really. The infestation swept the globe and something like 80% of the human race was infected within two months. People said it was the result of Russian genetic engineering. They claimed it was a terrorist plot financed by radical Islam. They said the slugs were a synthetic organism that escaped from a U.S. transgenics lab. Others claimed that the slugs arose from nature—all the toxins we’d been dumping into the soil and water for decades had given birth to a new and deadly life form. Mother Nature was kicking our asses for polluting and poisoning the Eden that she’d given us. Still others were certain the slugs had come from outer space.
In the end, nobody really knew.
The experts said they were not the end result of biotechnology and Frankenscience run wild. Manufactured organisms were easily detectable in the lab. And the slugs had the same DNA as every other living thing on earth, so that ruled out the idea that they came from Mars or Altair 4. Chances were, the biogenetics and evolutionary biology people said, they were a very successful mutation, possibly created or enhanced via man-made pollutants.
Nobody knew for sure.
Save the slugs and they weren’t saying.
“And now the human race is spam in a fucking can,” Kurta said out loud. “Way past our freshness date. Next stop, extinction.”
It should have frightened him, but it didn’t.
Mankind had been asking for this for years and now here it was.
7
Back at it.
Kurta led Ex-3, as Extermination Team #3 was known, down into the moldering cellars of an apartment building on West 27th. They’d been at it all morning, cleaning out floor after floor after floor. They’d been issued new biosuits, white Tyvek full containment suits, because the old ones were starting to smell pretty bad and the seams were getting worn. It only took one little hole for a wiggler to breach a suit. The new Tyveks were lighter, cooler, but the choice of color was a really bad idea. By the time Kurta and the boys got down to the cellar, they were stained with gore, spattered with tissue and vomit, bile and blood, all manner of assorted drainage.