by Tim Curran
Joe had positioned himself at the window, was studying the night between a part in the curtains.
“Any activity?” Johnny asked him.
“Nada.”
“Not yet, anyway.”
They were in the rectory of St. Thomas’ Catholic Church. In the priest’s living room. It was large but cozy with a fireplace, shelves lined with old books, overstuffed furniture, and impressionist paintings on the walls. It smelled like leather and pipe tobacco.
Of course, Lisa and Lou were heavy smokers and there was a haze gathering in the air now. There was only one light on and it was turned down dim. Nancy thought that was for the best; she didn’t think she could handle bright lights just yet.
“Hi,” Lisa said to her. “How you feeling?”
Nancy looked at her, thought that though she was a pretty girl and everything that Nancy was not—petite, thin, fine-boned—she didn’t look well. Sick? Yes, like maybe she’d come off a lengthy illness. Not good at all. Dark hollows under her eyes, her bones lying tight just under her skin. Rock star? Yes, looked like one of those stick figures with all the hair, on the verge of death.
She thought: Looks like I feel.
She sipped from a glass of water Ben brought her. It tasted good. On her lips, on her throat, but when it hit her stomach she felt nauseous. “What band are you with?” she asked the girl.
“Electric Witch,” Lisa said, as if she didn’t believe it somehow. “It seems so far away now.”
“You guys are good.”
Lisa seemed surprised. “You know us?”
“Yeah. My son has your CD. Loves it.”
“Sweet.”
“What brought you here of all things?”
“My mom and dad. I’m from here. I don’t know where they are.”
Lisa explained to her that they’d come to the church because it’s where Johnny had decided to ride out the storm, watch the city go to shit.
“You could’ve done something,” Nancy found herself saying, her head pounding so badly now she thought she might pass out.
He shook his head, had a look on his stern face like he wanted to hurt somebody. “Nobody could stop this. It was inevitable.” Everyone was looking at him, but he paid them no mind. “This town’s fucked. Maybe the country.”
“I think it’s localized,” Lou said.
“You sure about that?”
“Could be spreading,” Ruby Sue said. “You know? I mean, shit, maybe town by town like some kind of plague. Think I saw a movie like that once. Anybody see that?”
Ben chimed in, “Listen, everything was fine before we got here. I’m sure it still is.”
Johnny shrugged. “Could be.”
“C’mon, Johnny,” Lou said. “When we were in the cruiser you could hear traffic on the radio. Cops calling in plate numbers, responding to calls. It sounded perfectly normal out there.”
“Did you call for help?” Nancy asked.
“Yeah. I tried. I hope I got through. I told ‘em to get their fucking dead asses to this shithole on the double.”
Nancy thought that was good. If he got through help would arrive. Sooner or later, the cops would investigate. She was certain of that.
Ben was sitting by her on the couch, his face cradled in his hands. “Johnny? You live…or lived here, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. Just outside town.”
“Well, what the hell happened?”
“About five days ago—I was out of townwe got this rain. It went on all day and night. No big deal, right? Except that in the afternoon, guy told me, it looked like ink.” He had their attention now if he hadn’t before. “After that, well, everyone started getting sick. Started staying inside, calling into school and work. People were saying we had a flu outbreak. No big deal. Half of the country was going through it, too. Nobody gave it a second thought. By Saturday, there wasn’t anyone around. Like a fucking ghost town. But Saturday night—”
“They started coming out of their holes?” Ben said.
“Yeah, you got it. Not a lot, but some. Sunday night, it was half the town…and tonight, well, you know what it’s like now.”
“I can’t believe somebody didn’t notice something,” Nancy said.
Johnny looked at her. “What’s to notice? The flu? Shit, it’s everywhere. Schools closing, businesses not opening. Think anybody’s gonna freak out about just another town coming down with it? You know how it is in the fall, winter, and spring…there’s always a lot of it around. They even talk about it on TV. No biggie. By the time somebody might have noticed, the phone lines were down and we were cut off. Who knows, maybe nobody wanted help. Maybe they didn’t want to admit that there was a problem in the first place. So they crawled under the covers, went to sleep. Except when they woke up that night…they didn’t see things the same way anymore.”
It was a chilling hypothesis, but it made a certain amount of sense.
It could’ve worked that way. People thought they had the flu. Even if they went to a doctor or the emergency room of a hospital with flu symptoms, they would’ve been sent home, told to drink lots of fluids and get some sleep.
Nancy closed her eyes for a moment.
The darkness felt good.
Her limbs were aching now, a tight ball of nausea jumping in her belly. She kept her hands hidden beneath the blanket though she was too warm, her scalp tight and itchy, sweat at her temples.
Flu? She wanted to laugh at that. But her body hurt too much.
Lou sat there, nodding. “All right. Say there was something in that rain. It couldn’t have gotten everyone. Am I right?”
“Maybe it spread person to person after that.”
“Could be,” Johnny said. “By the time I realized something was really fucked-up, it was too late.”
But they’d all gotten a taste of his nihilism by that point and they didn’t exactly believe him. They pretty much figured he liked all this.
Lou lit another cigarette. “Your husband tell you we’re not alone? There’s some people in the basement. Got themselves locked in. Johnny found ‘em before. They won’t come out.”
“They think we’re…what do you call ‘em, Johnny?”
“Rabids.”
“Yeah, rabids.”
Lou shook his head. “Bunch of Jesus freaks by the sound of ‘em,” he said, like the idea disgusted him. “They got it into their heads that it’s the fucking Rapture or some crap. Rapture, my white ass.”
“They’re singing hymns, man,” Ruby Sue said. “And they sound like shit. Why don’t you go give ‘em some pointers, Lisa?”
“I’ll pass.” She got up and left the room, taking her purse with her.
“Say the word, people, and I go clean ‘em out,” Johnny suggested to them.
Joe laughed at that. “Few less pests knocking at people’s doors.”
“They’re scared,” Lou said. “You can’t blame ‘em.”
No, Nancy thought, you can’t blame them.
There was a strange tingling where Sam had bitten her. It throbbed dully. She felt very…restless. Sore, tired. But she’d been through a lot and that had to be normal…right? Because she couldn’t quite put a finger on it, but something felt wrong. And it wasn’t just the pain or nausea or numbness in her hands. There was no one word she could put to it, just a sense that something in her wasn’t exactly right.
Lisa came back in about five minutes later.
Nancy thought she looked much better.
“What time is it?” Nancy asked Ben.
“Almost midnight.”
Midnight. Christ in Heaven. Is that all? Another six, seven hours to dawn? That much time…might as well have been a week. What time had Sam bitten her? Ten? Ten-thirty? Yes, no more than that. And already she could feel it creeping through her, that malignancy.
She jerked stiffly under the blankets as a convulsion ripped through her.
“You okay?” Ben asked.
“Cramp,” she lied. “Ow.”
; “All we gotta do here, people, is wait for dawn,” Johnny told them in a low voice. “When the sun comes up, they’ll crawl back in their holes. At least until the sun goes down again.”
Lou sat there staring at him, cigarette hanging from his lips. “What are you saying? We got vampires here?”
“No, not exactly.”
Joe turned away from the window. “If you know something, buddy, maybe you should spill it.”
Lou stood up now. It was pretty plain he’d had his fill. “Yeah, c’mon. If you know what this is about, for chrissake tell us.”
They were all watching him.
Johnny looked at them each in turn. A dark species of dread crossed his face. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll tell you a story. I’ll tell you something I’ve never told anyone. You see, I’ve seen this before. But it was a long time ago and a world away…”
-THE WALKING PESTILENCE-
18
I spent two tours in Vietnam with the SEAL teams. You know who they are, what they do. I won’t go into that. Why did I join a unit like that? Late ’69 and ’70 they were beefing up the Teams because a lot of the conventional Army and Marine units were pulling out. Not just the SEALs, but other groups like Marine Force Recon and Army Special Forces. End of ‘68 I was a swabby doing basic at Great Lakes in Chicago. I was eighteen. I joined the Navy because I didn’t want to fight, didn’t want to die in some foreign shithole. I thought I could avoid the draft and spend my time on a battleship, getting drunk and catching the clap in port. Towards the end of boot, the chief gave us a little chat, said they needed volunteers for the riverboat Navy, the River Rats. You’ve probably seen those guys on the Discovery Channel or something—they cruised the rivers in patrol boats, exchanging fire with the NVA and VC. Had a high casualty rate. Grunts in the bush had nothing on these guys.
Anyway, I’d heard enough about the River Rats to know that I didn’t want no part of it. The chief inferred that those that didn’t volunteer might end up with the Rats anyway. Then he gave us the pitch about the SEAL Teams. As usual, I didn’t pay too much attention. All I heard him say was “frogman.” Frogman? I thought. I got this dicked in a hard way. What could a frogman possibly do in a jungle war? I’d get out of it that way. Shows you what a naïve dipfuck I was. SEAL training lasted about a year, which was exactly what I wanted. You see, they were saying on TV and on the radio that the war would be over in a year. I had her made.
So, I volunteered.
And when I did, the chief looked at me like I had a hammer hanging out of my ass.
“You sure, Davis?”
“Sir, yes, sir!” I called out like some gung ho dumbass.
“You stupid prick, you deserve it,” was all he would say.
So, after a series of tests and what not, I made the cut. And for the next year they beat my ass bloody. Only ten percent of our class made it through. Frogman? Sure, that was part of it. The basis of everything we were, but only the basis—I was jumping out of airplanes, learning to live off the land, sniping, demolitions, counterinsurgency, reconnaissance, guerrilla warfare. Shit, I learned how to handle all kinds of weapons, how to kill people with knives and crossbows, with poisons, booby traps, even my bare hands. I learned how to speak some French and Vietnamese. They brainwashed the hell out of you, too. By the end of that year you were a gung ho, life-taking motherfucker who just wanted to kill for his country and got physically sick at the thought of communism. Kick ass and take names.
Beginning of ‘70, they mobilized us and sent us to Southeast Asia. No point in going into my first tour. I did what you think guys like us do—I killed the enemy in number. I personally greased seventy that I knew about within the first four months. After that, I gave up counting. I re-upped for a second tour and this time I was attached to a team of second-and third tour vets who were handling special operations and intelligence missions for the spooks, part of the Phoenix program.
In July ‘72, Naval Intelligence sent us on a search and destroy mission in the Mekong Delta. The Delta was our main area of operations, our AO. At least that’s what the buzz was. Truth being, we went everywhere and anywhere—North Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, even China itself. This time, though, it was the Delta, just like our orders read. We were heading northeast, deep into the Rung Sat. The area had been heavily infiltrated by Uncle Ho’s pukes and was serious Indian Country. The Rung Sat, or “Forest of Assassins” as it was also known, was a traditional hideout for Asian bandits and smugglers and it was also home to communist insurgents. Some four-hundred square miles of mangrove swamp and thick rain forest.
Lieutenant-commander Barber was our C.O. He was an okay guy as long as you did what he told you, which you always did because after three tours, he knew exactly how to keep you alive in the boonies.
I liked Barber. He was professional and honest and had no problems tipping beers with us swabbies in Saigon or Da Nang. Our former C.O., an Annapolis squirt name of Wentz, got greased up north after we parachuted in one night to abduct an NVA colonel. We got our subject, but we left that uppity fuck behind. Wasn’t much left to him after he tripped that Russian mine, anyway.
We were to be inserted by riverboat. As we sped down river to the insertion point, everyone was quiet. Even the riverboat swabbies, the River Rats, were silent. And that was strange: they were always talking about being fucked—by each other, by the slopes, by their whores, the climate, the Navy, you name it. It made me feel uneasy. This whole thing did and I wasn’t sure why.
I was checking over my gear and the other SEALs were doing the same. I looked over at Roshland, the only guy I outranked. He was carrying his ruck, Starlight scope, and the usual shit like the rest of us. But he also had the M-60 machine gun, the kind we used with the barrels sawed-off real short. He was a big black mother, his body crisscrossed with bandoleers of ammo. Roshland was okay. He was a drummer back in the world. Claimed his band had opened for Jimi once. He was probably the only guy on the team I would have associated with outside the SEALs. The rest of ‘em—maybe myself included—were all fucked-up and not in a good way. They were scary. Maybe it was just that I knew how good they were at killing people. Maybe I’d seen them peel the skin off one too many Viets with their diving knives and grin while they did it, keeping the screaming little pricks alive for hours.
So, there I was on the riverboat, the PBR, smoking and worrying, propped up against several stacked cases of C-rats, the mechanical cacophony of the twin diesels thrumming through my bones. Within an hour or so, the boat slowed to a stop before a small clearing. We slipped into the water, silent as hunting crocs, and made our way to the bank, running through waist-deep elephant grass towards the jungle.
The PBR didn’t hang around long: soon as we deployed, it swung around back up river.
And we were alone.
After we’d entered the fringe of the jungle and secured perimeter, Barber called us together.
“Okay, listen up,” he whispered. “About five clicks east there’s a suspected supply route for Charlie. We’ll just check it out, maintain surveillance and ambush any small groups we come across. Anything larger, forget it. Intel just wants numbers, weapons, organization, the usual.”
It wasn’t unusual for us to get our briefing in the jungle. Lot of the shit we did was so highly-classified we were rarely told in advance…unless it was a special op like an abduction or an assassination or something tricky like that. Then they told you beforehand and put you in quarantine until you deployed. Security.
“That’s just our first stop,” Barber said. “After that comes the vil. In the morning.”
The village.
As far as intel knew it wasn’t much more than a little hamlet. So tiny and remote it didn’t even have a name, just a couple map coordinates. It was our ultimate destination, the reason for this little trip. We were to hit it with extreme prejudice, meaning we were to kill every living thing we came across—men, women, and, yes, children, too.
Idea of that leaves you cold?
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br /> It shouldn’t. We exterminated plenty of villages in ‘Nam. That’s what the Phoenix program was. Fucking government will never admit to it, of course, but then they still won’t tell the truth about Roswell and who greased JFK. Anyway, Phoenix was in full force and lots of villages were being erased because of communist ties.You probably heard of My Lai, but that was only one instance. You see all that shit on TV about the Nazis exterminating villages in Poland and Russia and that, but we did the same thing. See, Mao Tse Tung said that the guerrilla is the fish that swims in the sea of the population. Something like that. So how do you catch that fish? You net the whole lot, that’s how. If the population shields those cowardly bastards, then they go, too. Don’t get pissed off at me, it wasn’t my idea to do these things. It was your government’s, good old Uncle Sham. But having troops go in and waste some shit-nothing hamlet was messy. Too many guys traumatized, too many witnesses who might spill the beans. So the strategists in Washington got some better ideas. And you’re gonna hear all about that in a minute.
Anyway, there we were in the bush.
“What’s the situation?” Thurman asked.
Barber coughed quietly into his hand. “They were a little vague on that. Just that no one comes out of there.”
Thurman shrugged. “Just gooks. Grease ‘em and get on out. Fuck ‘em.”
I didn’t like it, didn’t like any of it, but I was in too deep and had too much blood on my hands by then to pull out.
I remember Barber looking at me and I swear something passed between us. He didn’t like any of this either and I could see that. There was something weird going on. He had a camouflage bandana pulled tight over his head, his face painted black and green. It was hard to say where cloth ended and flesh began.
Thurman was chuckling; he was always chuckling. “Find ‘em, fix ‘em, and fuck ‘em,” he said, fingering the blade of his K-Bar knife.
He was this tall, blonde psychopath with a shrapnel-pitted face and a scarf of napalm burns at his neck, arms sleeved with tattoos of serpents and scorpions. Six foot four, two-hundred fifty pounds of death. I think maybe that ghoulish little laugh of his reinforced this…and the necklace of sun-dried ears. Thurman was scary. No one really liked him, but he was a badass boonierat and he was good to have around. A natural born killer.