by Tim Curran
As I ate, picking at corned beef hash and powdered eggs, he watched me. Watched me very closely. He pulled a Winston out of a crumpled red pack, snapped off the filter and lit up, blowing smoke out of his nostrils. And never once did he take his eyes off of me.
“Well, go ahead, Bill,” I said. “You got something to say, so say it.”
He chuckled. “I’m thinking it’s time you pack up your old kit bag and move on. Nothing here for you now. City’s getting worse by the day. Get out. Get out into the country where a man has a chance.”
“We lived here. This was our neighborhood.”
“That’s all past now, son. Nothing but memories. Get out for chrissake. Get out now.”
“You coming?”
“For what? Ain’t nothing out there for me. I’m too damn old to start again.”
I set my fork down. “Nothing here but memories for you, too, Bill.”
“When you get my age,” he said, blowing out a cloud of smoke, “there ain’t much else.”
He turned away and looked out the curtains to the streets below. Just shook his head. “Goddamn cesspool, Rick. That’s what. Been wanting to get out for a long time. Would’ve, too, if Ellen hadn’t loved it here so much. She grew up two streets away. Even after she passed…I don’t know…something held me.”
“Something’s holding me, too.”
“Bullshit.” Bill coughed into his hand and for maybe the first time, I noticed how blotchy his face looked. A funny yellow sheen to it. “Bullshit, I say. You need to go before it gets worse. Right goddamn now, Rick. I’m too old to go with you. You pull an old tree up by the roots, its dies. But a young one…you can replant it and it’ll bear leaf. You following me?”
I was. “I’ll think it over.”
Bill looked like he was about to read me the riot act, but then the wind went out of him and he broke into a coughing fit. The cigarette fell from his fingers and he held himself up by the countertop.
I was on my feet. “Bill…”
He waved me away. “I’m all right. Just old. Just smoking too much for too long. That’s all.”
But I wasn’t believing that. The coughing. The weakness. The blotchy face. No, this was something else entirely. And he had it good.
“Rick, get the hell out,” he said, pulling himself up, standing erect with great exertion that left him gasping. “Ellen and I…oh, Jesus in heaven…we loved you and Shelly to death. Never had kids of our own. Always thought if we did, they might be like you two. So do an old man a favor and get out of the city.”
“Bill, I…”
“Please, Rick.”
There was no doubt about it at all then: Bill Hermes had radiation sickness.
A week later he was dead.
6
Bill Hermes was a good man. A wise man seasoned by time and experience. Did I listen to his advice? Of course not. I stayed. God help me, but I did.
Food and water were the biggest problems. For so long I had been mainly concerned with nursing Shelly back to health and in doing so, I had let everything else go to shit. Mother Hubbard’s cupboard was bare as Miss July’s thigh so I took to the streets with the rest of the gutter rats, scavenging anything I could find.
When Shelly’s deterioration began, the city had been running a series of aid stations with fresh water, food, and medical supplies. But in the many weeks since these had all been closed up and boarded down. Other than the Army out patrolling there was little order, state and local government having collapsed on just about every conceivable level.
So gun in hand, I hunted.
And was hunted.
I had a 9mm Browning Hi-Power I’d taken from Bill Hermes’ apartment. I’d never killed a man in my life and never truly wanted to, but I knew the time was coming. I’d jacked a few rounds over the heads of some bad boys that had been coming after me, but never anything more.
Then, about three or four days after Bill died, some old guy came up to me in the street, wanted a cigarette. Poor bastard was shot through with acute radiation sickness: teeth all gone, hair fallen out, face covered with ulcers.
But I wasn’t taking any chances.
I put the gun on him, told him to stay back. With so many dying of infectious disease in the city, I had a real horror of all the nasty germs floating around out there and what they could do. The radiation did something to those germs, made bigger, badder, more virulent bugs out of them. Some were the same old bugs, but others were much deadlier than they once were. And I’d already been exposed to cholera by then and God knew what else. My number was going to come up sooner or later.
The old man attempted a smile. “Just want one of them cigarettes. That’s all.” He broke up into a coughing fit, spewing blood and bile to the sidewalk. “Gimme one, friend. Gimme one and I’ll tell you where there’s food. I ain’t got but a day or two left. It won’t do me no good.”
I threw him a pack and a book of matches. “Keep ‘em. I got more.”
He was nearly orgasmic as he smoked that cigarette. Such is the nature of addiction. Something I knew well. I had quit smoking three years before…but after the bombs came down, what with the stress I started again. After he got a few drags down, he told me where there was a deli. Canned food that had barely been touched. I was welcome to it.
I scouted down a few streets, found the back door to the deli like the old guy said. And like he said, the deli had a storeroom with boxes and boxes of canned and dried goods. Like a kid in a candy store, I filled my sack with canned pasta, vegetables, tinned milk, mac and cheese. I was pretty happy about it all. I was doing real good. Too good, I soon learned.
When I tried to leave, a woman came stumbling out of the front of the store. She was wearing an old fur coat with nothing on beneath. Her flesh was pitted with spreading sores and flaking scabs. There was some crusty fungal growth coming out of her nose and she was entirely bald. She looked at me with glassy, fixed eyes and grinned with a mouth of graying, broken teeth.
“Mine,” she said, holding out her filthy hands. “It’s all mine!”
I put the Browning on her. “Get the fuck away from me.”
“Mine!” she said, yellow foam running down her chin like she was rabid. “Give it to me, pretty boy! It’s all mine!”
She launched herself forward and I didn’t even get a shot off.
I brought the gun up, yes, but like most people that weren’t used to killing, I hesitated. And that split second of hesitation was all she needed. She threw herself at me, knocking me flat, knocking the gun right out of my hand. I hit the floor and then she was on top of me, pinning me down. Her stench was gagging, sickening: like warm rotting fruit, a fermenting and moist odor. She had her scabby hands around my throat, squeezing the life out of me. My guts heaved. I needed badly to vomit. And it wasn’t just her stink or the rot of her face or the foul slime that dripped from her mouth…it was what she was doing.
Gyrating.
Dry-humping me, rubbing her infested crotch against me with greasy violent gyrations.
“Pretty boy! Pretty boy! Pretty, pretty, pretty boy!” the hag kept saying, ribbons of slime hanging from her mouth. “I’m fucking the pretty boy!”
It was this more than anything that gave me the strength to fight back: pure, unreasoning physical revulsion. I hit her in the face three, four times, her head rocking back each time. And then I clawed at her eyes. Her ulcerated flesh was so soft with rot that my fingers slid right into her cheek and scraped against the skull beneath. And somewhere during the process, I hooked my knee under her and threw her off.
Then I dove for the gun and she scrambled after me on all fours like some obscene, fleshy spider. The Browning in my fist, I let out a savage screaming war cry and pulled the trigger.
The bullet caught her right in the belly and she went down to her knees, pressing scabby hands to the wound. Blood juiced out between her fingers.
“Ohhhhhhhh! Look what you did, pretty boy! Look what you did!”
W
hen she came at me again, I shot her in the head. Brain matter and blood sprayed against the wall in an oily pattern. She hit the floor, mouth still opening and closing like a fish gulping for air. She trembled and flopped around and then jerked into stillness. In death, there was a mucid hissing and something like a gray clotted slime flooded out from between her legs.
Rotting fish. It smelled like rotting fish.
I threw up. The vomit came out in a warm spray and kept coming until I was shuddering with dry heaves. And when it was over I wondered if I hadn’t just been purging my stomach contents, but maybe something more ethereal and necessary like my soul.
Anyway, I backed away from her corpse, into the store, made to run and there were two more: a man and a woman. Both bald. Both foaming at the mouth. Both with sores on their faces and those crazy eyes.
I shot both of them.
Kept shooting even when they were down.
This was my first altercation with the Scabs, as they were known. After that, after what that hideous woman had done to me which I likened almost to rape, I shot those ugly, infected bastards on sight without hesitation.
That was my first taste of blood. I had popped my cherry. It got real easy after that.
There were crazies everywhere. But, oddly enough, good people, too. People that would warn you against dangerous neighborhoods, places where night-things lay in wait, areas where the National Guard would shoot you on sight. One day, being chased by a gang of Scabs, a guy with a long black hillbilly beard came to my aid with a shotgun. He seemed all right. Afterwards, we had soup in his barren basement apartment. He never spoke and would only grunt when I asked him things. There were two shrouded forms stretched out on the floor.
“Those are my daughters,” he finally said. “I killed ‘em. I killed both of ‘em. They was starting to change.”
“Change?”
The guy put black fierce eyes on me. “Into them others. The ones with the glowing eyes. They only come out at night. Better watch yourself.”
I got out of there, thinking the guy was as crazy as the rest. It wasn’t until two days later that I knew he wasn’t. You see, that’s when I saw one of them.
One of the Children.
7
It was getting dark and I was far from home. That alone was trouble. With everything I’d seen by that point, I should have known better. But I lived by scavenging and I had to go where the best pickings were. On the corner of Mahoning Avenue and South Glenellen there was a St. Vinnie’s depot where they stockpiled food for the needy. I had given a guy a. 38 pistol for the information. He was leaving the city, he didn’t care about the food.
So there I was.
I went into the depot by breaking a window in the alley. I slipped through, found the food with no problem. There were no crazies or mutants about so it was easy pickings. I loaded my bag with canned food, boxes of pasta, tins of deviled ham, the works. My sack was full and I was a happy little gutter rat. I had just bought myself a few more weeks of life.
When I came out the sun was going down.
And when the sun goes down, all the night things slink out, all the predators and meat-eaters, headhunters and bone-collectors and bloodsuckers. On the sidewalk was a dog. It was just sitting there. A mangy, dirty golden retriever that was missing half an ear. His coat was crusty with dried blood. He looked up at me, laid back his ears and growled.
I could have shot him.
Maybe if I had instead of playing good Samaritan, I would have been home before the trouble started. But I felt sorry for that dog. He wasn’t rabid. I could see that. Nor did he look infected with anything or mutated. I took a chance. I talked to him in very soothing tones. He calmed down right away. He wagged his tail and made a whining sound in his throat. And those eyes…Jesus…if you’ve ever had a retriever you know how they can look at you with the saddest eyes in creation, arching their eyebrows and looking so human you could cry.
That’s what this fella did.
“It’s okay, boy,” I told him. “I won’t hurt you. Maybe you can come live with me, eh? We can take care of each other.”
He wagged his tail, still watching me. He was a good dog. I was willing to bet he’d been a family pet. Retrievers are great dogs…gentle, easy with kids, incredibly patient and loyal. I knew this old warhound had been of that variety. I got down on my knees by him and made a peace offering: a Slim Jim. One of those processed beef sticks. You know the kind. The dog loved it. He gobbled it right down so I gave him a second and a third and I had a friend for life. I could have cried because I had finally found someone-or something-to care about that I knew would care for me, too. That’s the thing about a dog. You can love men and women, but the human breed is a selfish one and they’ll hurt you if they get the chance. But not a dog. You feed them and care for them and they’ll love you to death, follow you straight into hell without question, and tear the balls off anyone that threatens you. That’s loyalty. Try and find that in a human being. Good luck.
So I had myself a pal.
But it was getting dark. Time to boogie. I walked away down the sidewalk, knowing I had about four blocks to go, but the dog didn’t follow me. He just sat there on the sidewalk looking forlorn, destitute, and unhappy. “Well, come on!” I said, slapping my leg. He bolted after me, rubbing his snout against my leg, leaping around with the sort of pure joy only a dog knows.
We had a few more Slim Jims. I scratched his ears. I chatted with him. Then, as the shadows grew long, we both got very quiet as we stalked through what was very much enemy territory. The dog was hearing things, smelling things, sensing things. I felt more invulnerable than ever with him by my side: nothing can sneak up on a retriever when they’re wide-eyed and bushy-tailed.
About two blocks from my building, the dog stopped.
He perked up his ears…well, one of them anyway…and cocked his head. He began sniffing the ground. He made a low growling sound of alarm in his throat. He had caught wind of something and he did not like it.
I urged him on and there, standing on the sidewalk in a pool of moonlight, was a little girl. She was just a little slip of a thing with pigtails and the filthy remains of a blue jumper. I figured she was maybe eight years old, something like that. The dog went wild, snapping and howling, just beside myself.
“Quiet,” I told him. I looked to the girl. “Honey, what are you doing out this late? It’s not safe…it’s…”
That’s about as far as I got. For right then I got a good look at her and something in my guts pulled up in fear. This was no little girl. Her eyes were bright and yellow, luminous, and her face was a seamed and corded fright mask, an awful grayish-blue in color. She held up hands to me, her mouth opening and revealing a set of tiny hooked teeth of the sort that were designed to seize prey and hold onto it. Steam was rising from her and there was a sound of crackling energy like static electricity in a blanket.
A shrill piping noise came from her mouth, growing in volume until it was nearly hypersonic, painful to hear. She drifted forward, a low pulsating glow enveloping her, sparking with nuclear waste. She did not walk, she drifted, hot radioactive steam boiling from her, leaving a flickering misty trail in her wake.
She would have had me.
I fell back and fired twice and missed with both rounds. But the dog wasn’t about to let her get me, God bless him. He howled and charged, leaping right at her with jaws wide for attack. She enfolded him in her arms and he let out a wild, shrieking whine of pain. The dog literally burned up in her arms. It blazed with a cool blue fire, smoking and blistering, shriveling down to a blackened, smoldering thing right before my eyes. There was a hot, violent stink of cremated dog…then he fell from her arms, burning bones and blowing gray ash.
By then I was running. She did not come after me and by the time I got home and into my building I was shaking so badly I couldn’t even hold the glass of whiskey I tried to pour down my throat. That poor dog. I would never forget him…what he did for me and what that ir
radiated wraith did to him.
After that, whenever I saw a dog that wasn’t rabid, infected, or mutated, I gave him food, water, anything I could. And also after that, I shot the Children on sight. For if there are ghouls haunting the graveyard of this world, then they are the Children.
8
One thing I got used to very quickly were the corpses.
Because they were literally everywhere. The city itself wasn’t much more than a blasted, broken corpse itself. There had been so much fighting between the National Guard and private militias that entire neighborhoods were burned out, buildings collapsed from heavy firepower. Avenues were congested with rubble and the blackened carapaces of vehicles. Telephone poles had been knocked over and lay tangled in the knotted mesh of their own wires.
And everywhere in the urban graveyard…bodies.
By April, the corpse wagon system had broken down entirely and the dead were left wherever they had fallen or were thrown.
They were the only raw materials the city had left and they were in abundance. In whole and in part. Some rotted down skeletons, others burned to blackened husks, and many more swollen up green in the sun, clouds of meatflies rising and descending, feeding and laying their eggs. It wasn’t unusual to see the dead moving, shivering, because they were so infested with maggots. Many corpses had been gnawed upon. Probably rats. But other things, too, that only came out when the sun went down.
The heavy snows that had buried Youngstown had melted almost overnight, leaving standing pools of water throughout the city in which waterlogged bodies floated. The heavy rains had washed them into yards and doorways, created rivers of them that lapped up against storefronts. And what amazed me the most?and maybe frightened me, too?was that I and the other survivors paid the heaped human remains very little attention. We scavenged amongst them and hopped over them and kicked them aside, and the only time they were avoided was because of the disease vectors they might be carrying.