by Tim Curran
I had my pump shotgun in a sling at my side, my AK slung over my back, and Barber’s Stoner LMG. I could do a lot of killing, but I knew that eventually they’d overrun me by sheer numbers and ferocity.
It was good to be out of the rain, but it stank in there—age, mildew, a wet rotting smell. I didn’t like any of it; I knew I was wading into the shit. But I had to see, had to find out, before I killed them and maybe myself, too.
The entrance was barely five feet in height. The first hundred feet or so you had to crawl on your hands and knees, but then it opened up. It was huge. A shadowy, gigantic mausoleum. Stank like death, like blood, like things much worse. I kept my mind on the task at hand; once you got the spooks, you were done.
There were pooled columns of volcanic rock, stalagmites and stalactites, shattered slabs of stone that had fallen from above. But what you really had to watch for were the sudden chasms in the floor that dropped down farther than my light would reach. But the cave itself wasn’t really too dark: there were crevices and cracks in the rock above and fingers of sunlight filtered in, sickly beams clotted with dust. I found a natural archway at the far end and slipped through.
The smell of death was stronger now.
I was in another passage, maybe six, seven feet in height, twice that in width. It was dank and smelling. Water was dripping somewhere. I could hear things from time to time—skitterings in the darkness, clawing sounds, squeakings. Rats and bats, I figured. Such a place was perfect for them. I came upon a colony of greasy black mushrooms growing from a rent in the rock. A pool of gray slime was leaking from them. They were huge things, like footballs. I’d never seen anything like them before. I stepped over them and one brushed the back of my leg. It was oddly warm like a newborn, pulsing with life. It made my fucking skin crawl. I started wondering what else Laughing Man was mutating.
The walls were narrowing, the ceiling drooping. The air was so thick with damp it was hard to breath. There was moss growing everywhere. Although I saw no bats, there were puddles of guano I sloshed through, alive with roaches, black beetles. In places the stuff was four, five inches deep, a livid, crawling carpet of insects. But there were bones in there, too: human, animal, covered in fungi where they poked from the filth.
I came into another chamber that was huge and vaulted. The floor began to slope downward, black stinking water coming up to my knees. The surface was scummy with clots of graying mold and bat shit. Above, bats were roosting in the darkness. I could hear rats go splashing away at my approach. I played my light around and saw more bones bobbing in the water. Jawless skulls, shattered ribcages, femurs punctured with teeth marks.
I could hear a continual buzzing sound and soon saw why. Flies. Hundreds and hundreds of them lighting about the twisted forms in the water. I saw limbs, heads, gutted torsos. The remains of last night’s raid, no doubt. But bodies didn’t bother me; I’d been wading through them for nearly two years by that point.
What bothered me was that I was in a hive.
I panned my light around and I saw, yes, I saw them. I saw dozens of yellow eyes shining in the darkness, all glaring out at me with hatred. They were everywhere, the villagers. Two of them came splashing and hopping in my direction, screeching like birds of prey, their rabid jaws snapping open and close. I sprayed them down with the Stoner and they dropped into the water. But the thunder of gunfire had wakened the others. The sweating walls were honeycombed with passages, worm-holes. The rabids dragged themselves out, filthy and wild, black with dirt and dried blood. I started shooting and screaming, emptying the magazine of the Stoner quickly. There was no finesse in what I did; I popped off rounds like some cherry in his first firefight.
The water all around me (up to my hips by that point) began rippling and churning.
There were wet squealing sounds and growling noises erupting everywhere. Yes, they’d heard me coming and had been waiting for me in the water. They rose up all around me, those white faces swimming at me, fingers hooked and deadly, eyes livid with hunger. I started shooting with the AK and the shotgun, firing in a crazy arc. They would drop away, but not die. Nearly cut in half, they would not know death. I fought my way through their ranks and fell stumbling into that stinking water. I felt their white, clutching hands pulling at me.
I fought free and dragged myself out into the passage.
I saw Roshland and Barber now. Their pallid, bloodless faces were split by jagged grins. They called my name and pushed forward with the others. My skin went hot, then cold, then hot again at the sight of them. My head was thundering with noise. I pulled a pair of white phosphorus grenades from my belt, popped the pins, and threw them behind me, into the chamber. I ran maybe ten, twelve feet and then there was a heaving explosion, followed by another and the acrid stink of phosphorus. The cave was brighter than midday, fire belching in every direction, engulfing the rabids in blankets of flame. I heard them howling and mewling and it drove me nearly insane. But I only heard it for a second or two and then there was a huge, rending explosion and a wave of heat lifted me up and tossed me ten feet through the air. I crashed into the cave wall and went out cold.
I came to sometime later and all was quiet.
My head was bleeding and I was singed, much of my hair burned off…still hasn’t come back as you can plainly see.
The air was pungent with the sickening stench of cremated flesh. I figured the chamber must have been full of gases from the putrefying flesh and guano. Enough to trigger one hell of an explosion when the white phosphorus ignited. The chamber had caved-in, burying those things which men and women should never lay eyes upon. I got out of the cave, finally falling drunkenly into the morning air. The rain was still coming down and it felt so good.
I don’t remember much after that. Just running and running, night and day, sure they were behind me, whispering my name.
Somehow, they told me later, I bumped into a Lurp patrol and they got me out. The next four months I spent in a naval hospital in Hawaii.
Specifically, in the psych ward.
Nobody believed me.
Or so they said…but somehow that didn’t jibe with all the visits I got from the brass, the debriefings. And it sure as hell didn’t jibe with the visits I got from a team of doctors who I knew for a fact worked for the Agency or all the comprehensive medical exams they gave me. If I was in a psych ward being treated for battle fatigue, why all the goddamn tests? Did they really think I was fool enough to believe you treated such a problem with constant blood, skin, and bone marrow samples? What about all the antipsychotics—lithium, thorazine, phenobarbitol, other names I couldn’t even pronounce—why those specific drugs? And how about that team of Agency doctors (who, by the way, went by the sterile names of Smith, Jones, and Johnson) who pumped me full of drugs at one in the morning and dragged me away to some place that looked like Dr. Frankenstein’s wet dream and gave me brain scans for three days?
No, I’ve since talked with other vets who suffered battle fatigue and they never got the attention I got. They considered themselves lucky if a doctor stopped by every few days. Me? I had my own team of specialists.
There was this one grunt in the ward. Ramirez was his name. He knew what Laughing Man was. He said he’d heard through the grapevine that they’d quit spraying it because a handful of slopes that had been exposed went psycho and wiped out an Air Cav platoon up along the DMZ. A correspondent for the New York Times had been along on the patrol. They never did find his head.
I received an honorable discharge, the Navy Cross for reasons never made clear, and was sent home. Thirty years ago now. And that’s it, people, all I can tell you about what I saw, what haunts me to this day. Crazy? Maybe. But that don’t mean I’m wrong. Just look around you. Thirty years and half a world away.
Now it’s come home.
God bless America.
-TOXIC SHADOWS-
19
It was quite a tale.
Such a tale that for sometime nobody said a thing. They
didn’t even look at each other. Had it been yesterday or even this afternoon, all concerned would have immediately dismissed it as pure nonsense. But after what they’d all seen, all witnessed…well, they took it in, mulled it over.
It was Lou Frawley who finally broke the silence. “That was in Vietnam, though. How…how could something like that happen here? I mean, shit, I’ll be the first one to admit I don’t know a thing about biological warfare or any of that crap, but why the hell would that stuff get sprayed here?”
Johnny stroked his mustache. “I’ve thought about that a lot.”
“And what did you decide?” Ben said.
“Let’s just look at the facts. Since the war I’ve done some research into this. Not much—there isn’t much you can find out—but some. What I know comes from other vets. A guy at the VA in Iron Mountain told me that the planes doing the spraying were from an Air Force unit called the 57th Tactical Bombadier Group.” He looked around at the worn faces surrounding him. “That probably doesn’t mean jack to any of you. But if I were to say that that particular unit still exists and is based out of Pierce Noolan AFB, it might start making sense.”
Lou shrugged. “Sorry. Still not getting it.”
Ben’s eyes widened, though. “Pierce Noolan Air Force Base is about twenty minutes from here.”
“That’s right,” Lisa said.
Johnny nodded. “What do you folks know about that place?”
“Nothing to know,” Ben said. “It’s high security, I know that much. It’s not open to the public. Cousin of mine’s a plumbing contractor. His firm won a bid to modernize the boilers there. He said you had to go through three gates to get in. There were guys with machine guns at each checkpoint. My cousin and his crew were escorted in and out of the place, were never allowed to wander off by themselves. Said you had to show your ID card just to take a piss.”
Johnny was starting to look satisfied. “It’s right on the fence there, some shit about it being a U.S. Government facility and use of deadly force authorized etc. All that bull. It’d be easier to get into Miss America’s pants than that place.”
“All right, sure,” Lou said. “But that’s the military. They get like that. Hell, you were a SEAL and all. I bet you guys had top level clearances.”
“I could’ve walked right into the Pentagon.”
Lou slapped his hands on his knees. “Well, there you go. That’s how they do shit. But that don’t mean we got some sort of conspiracy here.”
Ruby Sue laughed. “You people just astound me.” She pulled a joint out of her coat, fired it up. Everyone, of course, just stared. “Hey, you smoke yours, I’ll smoke mine.”
“Why not?” Lou said, firing up another cigarette.
“What astounds you about us?” Ben wanted to know.
She coughed, blowing out smoke. “Oh shit, man. This country ain’t nothing but one big conspiracy. Haven’t you heard of Area 51? The JFK thing? Roswell? Shit, man, it’s everywhere. This whole country ain’t nothing but a nest of lies. Right, Nanc?”
Nancy was staring off into space through glazed, fixed eyes. Her lips trembled. She shifted from one position to the next. She hugged herself. She trembled.
“She’s been through a lot,” Ben said, stroking her cheek. It was damp and cool like the underside of a mushroom. But he told no one that.
Nancy squinted her eyes shut, then opened them.
She managed a thin smile which quickly became a frown.
There was something not right with her, but everyone pretended ignorance. Ben was right, they figured: she had been through a lot.
Ruby Sue looked away. “I say Johnny’s one-hundred percent correct. CIA, NSA, DIA…all those secret black budget ops groups, man, they have no respect for human life.” She sucked off her joint, coughed again. “Good shit. Anyone…no? More for me. But like I was saying, those groups, man, they’d spray a town down in an instant.”
Lou sighed. “Whatever. But let’s not digress, people.”
“What I’m saying,” Johnny pointed out, “is that from what I found out, the research on that stuff, on Laughing Man, was carried out many places. But the group that dispersed it is right next door to Cut River. Let me speculate here a minute. Yeah, I think there is a conspiracy here. A conspiracy of silence. Uncle Sam won’t admit he has stuff like this. But he does. And he stores it at certain facilities. My guess is that Pierce Noonan is one of them.”
“But you’re guessing,” Lou pointed out.
Johnny shrugged. “Sure, I am. Facts aren’t exactly plentiful, pal. I’m offering you people an explanation for this fucking nightmare. You think some goddamn virus or something just happened to mutate and cause this? Bullshit. Maybe I’m wrong here, but I don’t think so. I’m not saying for a moment that the Air Force did this on purpose. I’m thinking more like a mistake here. Colossal fuck-up comes to mind. How? I don’t know.”
Lou stared at him through a cloud of cigarette smoke. He decided he was getting pretty good at this Devil’s Advocate thing, so he kept at it. “All right. It’s feasible, I’ll say. And it explains things. I’ll give you that. But don’t you think stuff like this Laughing Man would be stored in a really secure place?”
“Who knows?” Lisa chimed in. “Maybe a container of it broke open, maybe some kind of animal infected with it got out. Maybe it vaporized and came down in that rain. I don’t see the point in arguing here. It happened…or something damn close to it.”
She was right.
They all knew that. The hows and whys really didn’t matter at present…or not too much.
“Yeah, maybe you’re right,” Lou said, stabbing out his cigarette. “We can sort it out later.”
Ruby Sue laughed. “Sort what out? You guys hear what you’re saying? Christ, I thought I was the one who was baked here! Sort it out? They’re not going to let you do that. On purpose or by accident, people, they’ll never admit to it. They’ll blame this shit on the Libyans or Osama Bin Laden or something. But be sure of one thing, we won’t get answers. Shit, if they find out we saw this and survived, they’ll probably kill us anyway.”
“Christ, you watch too much TV,” Lou said.
“Maybe I do. But they’ll come for us. Black ops troops. Assassins. I saw a movie like that once.” She roached her joint, put the unsmoked end in her pocket. “This plane or train or something full of some chemical warfare crap crashes and infects this whole town. People there go nuts or something. Then the government comes in. Bang! Martial law. Even if you’re not infected, man, you ain’t getting out.”
Lou looked to Joe who just shrugged. “Well, let’s not worry about that. What we gotta think about here, friends and neighbors, is how this stuff spreads. Granted it’s infectious, contagious, whatever you want to call it. But how does that happen?”
“Could be just about any way,” Ben said. “Water, personal contact, animals.”
“Even through the air,” Lisa said. “We might be full of it and not know it. Not yet.”
Lou smiled grimly at that. “Any thoughts, Johnny?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. All I can say is that I was exposed in ‘Nam and never got it.”
“If this is that Laughing Man junk, then wouldn’t the military want a germ that was controllable? Something they could stop easy enough but the enemy couldn’t?” Lou asked them.
Johnny shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. One thing I don’t want to do is to get into the minds of the crazy, sadistic pricks who could dream up something like this.”
“And use it,” Lisa said.
“We might all be infected,” Ben said, looking down with desperation at Nancy. Feverish heat was rolling off her clammy skin in waves. As if to show the others that she was just fatigued, he leaned over and kissed her forehead. In a whisper, he said: “If you got it, baby, then I want it, too.”
Joe looked out the window, closed the drapes. “How long, you figure, before those creatures out there, them crazy shits, sniff us out and make an assault?”
<
br /> Johnny looked grim. “I’d say it could happen anytime. Anytime at all.”
20
Just after midnight, everyone seemed to break up into little groups. Johnny and Lisa hung together, lounging in wing-backed chairs over by the fireplace. The mysterious bikers, Joe and Ruby Sue, stayed together by the window. Lou joined Ben in a little ell off the study. No lights burned that weren’t absolutely necessary.
Nancy was sleeping, but not peacefully.
She tossed and turned and sweated. She didn’t look good at all.
“How you holding up?” Lou asked him.
“Peachy,” Ben said dismally. He was sitting on a little window seat, studying the dark, empty courtyard beyond the glass. “How about you?”
“Nervous. Agitated. So scared, I think I might have kittens pretty soon. Other than that, hey, I’m just fine.” He sat down, pulled a cigarette out, thought better of it and put it away. “I better save what’s left of my throat.”
Ben stroked his closely-trimmed beard apprehensively. “My wife…Nancy…she’s not doing so good. I think she’s on the point of a nervous breakdown. I think she might be in shock or something.”
Lou licked his lips. They felt very dry. “Like you said, she’s been through the mill.”
“So have you. So have I. So have the others.”
“People handle it different ways, Ben. It’s human nature.” Lou thought that sounded pretty good, even if he wasn’t sure he believed it himself. “I knew this guy in Newark, right? Back in the old days when I used to drive truck. This guy—his name was Al DeAmato—owned a string of dry cleaning outfits. Big, tough Italian guy. Honest, hard-working, doing pretty good for himself. But you know what it’s like in Jersey, right? Well, maybe you don’t. Let’s just say that it’s corrupt in spots, lot of mob action there. Had my truck hijacked two, three times in Bayonne by those fucking wops, excuse my French.
“Anyway, my friend had one of his stores in the Down Neck area of Newark. Tough area. Mob-controlled or mostly. One day these hoods show up and tell Al real sweet-like that they want a piece of his operation, that it would be in his best interest to go along with them. Al tells them to go fuck their dogs or mothers or something. Of course, these guys, they turn the heat up. But Al? He won’t bend to them. They turn the heat way up finally. They firebomb his car. The union guys who fixed his machines, they’d never show. One night a couple hardass toughs jumped him and beat him to a pulp with lead pipes. Al? He still won’t give in. Fuck you and the donkey you rode in on. He’s in the hospital almost a month. He gets out, they burn down one of his stores. But Al keeps on plugging. Finally, they let him alone, moved on to easier pickings. He still had trouble with the union guys. And every now and then a gang of street toughs would break some windows, but eventually, even that stopped.