by Tim Curran
The windows, all the windows, of the Cadillac were covered in something dark. I didn’t get it. I pulled off some tepid water I had in a bottle, tried to clear my head.
“What’s all over the windows?” Specs asked me and I could already hear the paranoia creeping into his voice. Poor guy. Specs was a good person in most ways, but he was paranoid as hell. He saw the boogeyman around every corner and who could really blame him?
“I don’t know,” I said.
The Caddy had old-style crank windows. A huge vehicle back when they’d rolled them off the assembly lines in Detroit with plenty of leg room. I tried the windows and so did Specs, but they were jammed up. So I did what I didn’t really want to do: I opened my door.
The world was red.
The streets, the buildings, even the trees and stoplight were fucking red like they’d been dipped in red ink. It was insane. Specs and I got out and walked around. Everything was covered in that crusty red film. I had never seen anything like it. It looked like the sky had rained blood during the night. I walked over to a spreading oak tree and, sure enough, a few drops of red were still dripping from the branches.
“It’s blood, Nash. Jesus Christ, it’s blood,” Specs said, clinging so close to me I thought he was going to kiss me.
I shoved him away. “It ain’t blood. It was some weird rain. Like an acid rain or something.”
But I wasn’t even sure that I believed it. Something inside me clenched tight as we walked those blood red streets. There was no life or movement anywhere. Just that hazy sky above and the graveyard stillness and all that red. It was like some kind of expressionistic painting or something and it made me go cold inside.
“You know what this is, don’t you?” Specs said.
“No, I don’t. But you’re gonna tell me, I’m sure.”
“It’s an omen,” Specs said. “It’s a bad omen, Nash. Real bad.”
And on that point, I believed him.
3
We walked for a good hour. After a time the red was just gone. Either the sun dried it up or it had only rained like that in particular parts of the city. I didn’t know and I really didn’t want to know. So we walked and Specs jabbered on non-stop as was his way. We didn’t see anyone on Cedar Avenue, just desertion and devastation. Why I thought Cleveland would be any better than Youngstown, I did not know.
“Too bad we couldn’t have kept the Caddy,” Specs said. “That was one sweet ride.”
“Sure,” I said, scoping out the streets ahead of us, “one sweet ride with two flat tires and a dead engine.”
“Well, it was sweet. You know it was. Would have been cool to tool around the city in that.”
“Sure, we could’ve picked up some chicks,” I said.
The city was dead. At least what we’d seen of it. Another graveyard. The rusted hulks of abandoned cars were everywhere: at the curbs, pulled up onto sidewalks, flipped over in the roads, smashed-up. I figured someone was around-or had been-because a lot of tires had been scavenged. Most likely for fires. Nothing burned like a tire.
What I saw of Cleveland was intact. I saw some neighborhoods that had burned or were fire-scarred, but not like in Youngstown. Entire sections of the city had been fire bombed to wipe out the infections and those that carried them. This did not look so systematic. Just ordinary fires, I thought.
Still, there was destruction. Buildings had collapsed into heaps of rubble that blocked thoroughfares. Houses had been burned flat. There were open cellars everywhere flooded with water and leaves, the homes and buildings that had once sat upon them nowhere to be seen. Weeds were growing up in the sidewalks. Telephone poles had fallen, some only standing because their wires held them up. Storefronts were fire damaged, plate glass windows shattered, brick facades riddled with bullet holes.
There were skeletons everywhere. Sprawled in yards, tossed in gutters, some still sitting behind the wheels of cars fully articulated. But all of them bird-pecked and gleaming white. Not just human skeletons either, but those of dogs and cats and rats and more than a few that were so unnatural looking I couldn’t be sure what they were from. Bones were the only true raw material of the brave new world and they were in abundance.
After awhile, Specs and I took a break.
We pushed a heap of remains from a peeling bench and took a break. I had an olive drab Army knapsack that I used for scavenging. We each had a can of cold Dinty Moore Beef Stew and washed it down with warm Mountain Dew Code Red. That was our lunch.
I pulled off my Dew. “We gotta get us some wheels, Specs,” I told him, because The Shape had whispered in my head that we had to keep moving west. And I wasn’t about to walk.
“Yeah, too bad about that Caddy.”
“We don’t need a pimpmobile,” I told him. “We need something rugged. A four-wheel drive or something. Roads are going to be bad now.”
We’d driven motorcycles into Cleveland from Youngstown. Then we’d abandoned them in Garfield Heights after some big birds swooped down on us and stole Specs’ hat. I don’t know what they were. Looked like ravens. But huge, mutated. We decided after that we needed something with a roof over our heads.
“You ever wonder where we’re going to be in a year from now, Nash?”
“No, I don’t. I got enough problems here and now.”
“I think about it sometimes. I wonder if maybe out there somewhere there’s still cities with real people in ‘em.”
I didn’t even bother speculating on that. I finished my stew and threw the can in the street. We survivors were terrible litterbugs. I smoked and sipped off my Dew. We’d looted the Dew from a deli in Garfield Heights. Everything was long rotten in there, but the canned stuff and soda was still good. Civilization may fall, but the Dew goes on forever.
“Why do you figure west, Nash? Why not south?”
He’d been thinking about asking me that for a long time. So I told him about The Shape. I didn’t want to because he was too wrapped up in all that occult shit and I knew he’d make it into something supernatural. And he did, of course. But I had to tell him and I did.
After that, all he thought about was The Shape.
4
It was getting on dark and we still hadn’t found a ride and I was getting sick to death of Specs speculating about The Shape-he was convinced it was an old pagan god that had resurfaced now that Christianity had bottomed out-and asking me fifty questions about it.
“Listen,” I finally said. “What I told you was a secret and we’re not going to talk about it, okay? Just let it lay.”
We had other things to worry about.
I knew well enough from Youngtown that you didn’t want to be caught out in the open after dark. We had to find a place to lay low. We were down along the Cuyahoga River. There wasn’t much but a lot of industrial sites, many of which looked long abandoned, and the usual assortment of neighborhoods and storefronts that spring up around places like that. Lots of bars and lunch counters and not much else. We needed the right place. Something defensible.
As I looked around, Specs tugged on my elbow. “Nash,” he said. “Oh boy, Nash. Look.”
Shit. Scabs. About five or six of them just up the street sitting atop a pile of rubble, half-naked and moon-fleshed and filthy, like birds of prey on their high perches looking for tasty rodents. I wasn’t entirely convinced that they’d even seen us. One of them, a woman in a black motorcycle jacket and nothing else, was staring intently in the direction we’d just come from. The others were staring dumbly at their own feet.
I carefully slipped the. 38 from my jacket pocket.
Specs and I moved very slowly towards a run of ruined buildings about twenty feet away. I was very aware of how debris crunched under our boots. I think I held my breath the entire way. It was the longest twenty feet of my life. We ducked through a massive hole in the brick facade of a bar. It looked like it had been hit by an anti-tank round and it probably had been.
We made it.
“Hey, not bad-” S
pecs started to say.
“Shut up,” I told him. “They’re not fucking deaf.”
I peaked around the corner. They hadn’t moved. Holding my finger to my lips, I led Specs farther into the bar room. Whatever had blasted through that wall had kept going and blew out a good portion of the rear wall, taking out most of the bathroom. We climbed free of the building into a little alley paved in bricks. The shadows were starting to get long. The alley was a cul-de-sac whose entry was blocked by more rubble. We climbed through a missing window into another building and we soon saw that it was gutted inside. The upper floors were nearly gone. You could see the sky through a jagged chasm in the roof.
“What the hell happened here?” Specs asked.
“Must’ve been some kind of battle. Looks like this place took an airstrike or an artillery barrage.”
A great section of the floor was missing, having fallen into the cellar below. We moved around this carefully, found a door, and on the other side, it was even worse. What we were looking at was like London after the blitz: heaps of rubble, buildings that were entirely gutted and reduced to debris. Roofs were gone, windows blasted out, entire walls missing. And floors? There were no floors. Just huge pits that looked down into the cellars below that were dark and ominous, choked with debris and flooded with black water. There was only a skeletal framework of joists to walk on. It would be risky.
“Oh, I don’t know about this, Nash,” Specs said. “I don’t like this at all.”
But we really didn’t have a choice. Behind us, I could hear a lot of shouting and screaming. More Scabs had shown up. Going back that way wasn’t an option.
“You can do it,” I told him. “The joists are an easy foot across. Just don’t look down.”
We moved over to the edge of the pit, kicking up clouds of brick dust. I started out on one of the joists and it wasn’t so bad. Plenty of room to walk. The trick was not to look down. It wasn’t that it was a deep drop…probably eight feet or so, but eight feet into rubble and twisted metal, that rank-smelling water and who knew what kind of things lay right beneath the surface that would impale you?
“Come on,” I told him. “Don’t look down.”
Hesitantly, he started across. He moved like a turtle at first, but once he got his feet under him it was no problem. We crossed the joists, ducked through a jagged archway and found ourselves in another building lacking a floor. I noticed that a cobwebbed rocking chair hung from the floor above by a section of electrical wiring. It swayed back and forth. The water below us was caked with leaves. A few plastic bottles bobbed.
I was about two-thirds of the way across on the center joist when I heard a muted splashing. Maybe not a splashing exactly, but sort of a slopping sound. I looked back and Specs was still coming, offering me a goofy smile. He hadn’t heard it.
“This ain’t so bad,” he said. “Like walking curbs when you’re a kid.”
I nodded, smiling thinly. I heard that slopping again and looked back. This time I saw something. Something that froze me up and made my heart start hammering. Cool sweat ran down my face. Near to where Specs was I saw…thought I saw…a puckered white face pull down beneath the leaves and water.
I made it across.
“Something wrong, Nash?” Specs asked me.
“No, it’s cool,” I told him, just waiting for a pair of white, mottled hands to reach up and pull him into the flooded stygian depths. But it didn’t happen. He made it across and we darted through a missing wall. Before us was a solid expanse of brick with no egress. Instead of going forward, I feared, we had somehow gotten turned sideways and were moving lengthwise through the buildings. We’d have been at it quite a while at that rate. I compensated, led us around some huge heaps of shattered brick, through a near-collapsed doorway, and into the utter darkness. In the distance I could see a patch of light.
We were in some kind of warehouse, I thought.
Boxes and barrels were stacked around us. It was very gloomy in there. There were roughly a million places for unfriendlies to hide and about the same amount of ways to die. The floor was concrete and unbroken.
I led Specs forward and he clung to me, pulling at the back of my jacket, bumping into me, grabbing me by the arm. It was like going through a carnival spookhouse with your badly frightened kid brother. The. 38 in hand, I moved us along, trying not to trip over anything. We were not alone in there. I heard a scratching once and a dragging sound another time.
When the patch of light-a missing door-was about fifteen feet away, Specs pulled me to a stop.
“Listen,” he said.
I heard it right away: a sort of low, coarse breathing in the darkness. Behind us, I could swear I saw grotesque forms threading through the shadows. Whatever was in there was closing in on us. I grabbed Specs and raced him to the door and out into the blinding light.
Nothing followed us.
The sky above looked odd, I thought. Kind of roiling with bloated pinkish clouds that started to look less and less pink and more brilliantly red by the moment. A drop of rain splatted at my foot. Another ran down the windshield of a wrecked pickup truck. Except it wasn’t rain…it wasn’t water. It was red. Like blood.
“Shit,” I heard Specs say.
I turned to find the nearest shelter and there was a big guy with a pump shotgun in his hands. He looked mean. “Where do you assholes want it?” he said. “In the belly or in the head?”
5
I had my. 38 out, but I honestly felt impotent with it next to that killing iron in the big man’s hands. He was about 6’3, had to go in at an easy 250 if not more. His hair was short and choppy, but his beard was long and tangled. It reached right down to his chest. He wore a tattered jean vest with lots of patches on it. He was a biker. This guy was a fucking biker.
“We’re not Scabs,” Specs told him. “We’re not infected.”
“I know that, little man. You were Scabs, you wouldn’t be alive right now. I was looking for some normal people and I suppose you two scrubs’ll do.” He was standing under the wide awning outside a shoe store, one eye cocked to the sky. A few more drops of blood fell. “You boys better get over here. You don’t wanna get caught in a red rain.”
We got under the awning with him. I lit a cigarette, explained who we were, where we had come from, how we were looking for some wheels to head west with. He nodded, didn’t seem like he gave a shit. His bare arms were massive, set with tattoos and I could see right away that those tattoos symbolized something, all those snakes and deathheads and names and places. He wasn’t just some wannabe punk or yuppy that thought some inking would make him into a real man. He was the genuine article: an outlaw biker.
“Name’s McKree, Sean McKree. Friends call me ‘Chang’,” he told us, watching the sky. He did not look happy. “Fucking weather.”
“Nice to meet you, Chang,” Specs said.
“You can call me, Sean, little man,” he said. “My friends are all dead.”
More drops of red fell out in the streets, plopping onto the hoods of cars. Then the downpour began, an absolute curtain of what looked like blood. But not just liquid, but unidentifiable chunks of matter that thudded and splattered everywhere. It lasted about ten minutes and the stink of it was acrid. It reamed your nose right out. But that, too, faded in time. Out in the streets the liquid was drying up, leaving that sticky red film I had seen that morning. I looked closer and there was no mistaking it: there were bones in the street. Not human bones, I didn’t think, but animal bones. Most of them quite small. They had not been there before.
“It is blood!” Specs said. “Bones, too!”
“Can’t be blood,” I told him. “That doesn’t make any sense. It’s acid rain or something.”
“You’re both right.”
We looked at Sean. “You heard me,” he said. “There’s acid in that shit and it’ll burn the soles off your boots and sting your skin if you get caught out in it. But it’s mostly blood and run-off. See, there was a slaughterhouse
on the Cuyahoga. Back in the day they used to release their by-products straight into the river and the river would turn red in the summer. But the EPA made ‘em clean up their act,” he explained to us. “So what they did is they built two gigantic steel rendering tanks that were like fifty feet deep and sixty feet across. They pumped all their by-products in there: blood, bones, fat, you name it. The tanks were full of acid…”
He told us that the tanks were open air so that evaporation would remove the liquid. Then the world puked out and those two full tanks of remains, acid, and run-off were just sitting there. He couldn’t be sure, but now and again something like a wind-spout brewed up off the big lake and traveled down river, sucking up just about anything that wasn’t tied down. For some reason, it sucked up what was in those tanks nearly every time. The tanks never dried out because the rain filled them up and the wind-spouts stirred them like cauldrons, scraping all the goodies from the bottom.
“I’ve seen the tanks,” he said. “You can smell ‘em for a mile. My guess is that in the plant there are other storage vats full of blood and slime, probably gravity-fed. Sooner or later, the rendering tanks’ll dry up and run out of remains. But it hasn’t happened yet.”
We stood under the awning, smoking and chatting. Sean said we had to wait until the rain had completely dried or it would eat holes in our boots. So we waited and he told us about his life as an outlaw biker. He’d been a sergeant-at-arms for the Warlocks motorcycle gang out of New Jersey, which meant he was an enforcer that knocked heads together and killed people when the club ordered it. On the back of his vest there was a flaming skull. Above it, a rocker read: WARLOCKS MC. Below it, BAYONNE, NJ.
“You’re a long way from Bayonne,” I said.
“Yeah, I am, brother. Came here to straighten out some shit. It’s what I do,” he told me. “See…just before they dropped them fucking bombs, I was sent here to straighten out some business. It was club business. Private. But since there ain’t no more law, no more feds, and no more clubs, I’ll tell you. Here in Cleveland, there was a Hell’s Angels charter, a clubhouse. One of their people-Ray Coombs, called him ‘Ratbait’-got hisself killed. A couple hitters from the Blood Brothers did him in Newark. Blood Brothers were a bunch of kill-happy maggots that were trying hard to impress the Outlaws out of Detroit, so they started offing Angels. Hell’s Angels and Outlaws were the big two in bike gangs then, you see, and they hated each other. Lots of killing on both sides, lots of retiliation and turf wars. I rode with the Warlocks. We were tight with the Angels. Word came out of Oakland, C-A, that they wanted these Blood Brothers done. They were hiding out in Cleveland, over in Stockyards. I got the job.”