by Tim Curran
Specs was wide-eyed. “You mean you’re a hit man? You mean you came to kill those bikers?”
“No, I came to fucking dance with ‘em,” Sean said. He looked over at me. “Something wrong with this guy?”
“No, he’s just been through a lot.”
Sean shrugged. “I got one of those dirt bags, then the bombs fell and I been here since. I was shacked up with an Angel called Dirty Sanchez and his old lady, Long Tall Sally. A couple weeks ago the Trogs got ‘em. I been hunting Trogs since.” He told us the Trogs lived underground, were real bad news, barely human. “When I’m not killing Trogs, I waste Scabs. But they’re like shooting ducks. Easy. Trogs takes skill. There’s sport involved.”
Out in the streets, the rain had dried up, leaving a world that was stained red. Night was coming on fast. We needed a place to crash for the night where we didn’t have to worry about getting our throats slit.
I heard a squeaking sound and saw a rat. I made to shoot it and Sean stayed my hand. Pretty soon there were seven or eight of them, big, ugly things with red eyes and those weird growths popping through their threadbare hides. They paid no attention to us. They went after the bones and within minutes there were no bones left. The rats were gone.
“You know where there’s any good rides?” I asked.
Sean nodded. “Sure. I can get you anything you want. But not tonight. Heard a rumor from a ragbag this morning that the Hatchet Clans are pushing in from the north. You don’t want to be out in the streets tonight.”
“Hell are the Hatchet Clans?” I asked.
He laughed. “Brother, you don’t wanna know.”
6
“I puked out my last year of high school and stole a couple cars,” Sean told us later in his heavily-fortified basement apartment while we ate pork and beans and drank warm beer. “They sent me to Juvie. I got out and stole another car, led the State Police on a merry chase. Judge said join the Army or do time. I joined the Army. I was a scout with the 4^th Cavalry. I did my bit over in Iraq during Desert Storm, first one. Soon as I got out, I hooked up with my old friends and we started a bike club called the Dirty Dozen. Problem was, man, there were only four of us. Then we got six and the other clubs called us the Dirty Half-Dozen. They gave us lots of shit. By the time there were thirty of us and we backed down from no one, they stopped giving us shit. The Pagans and the Warlocks wanted to charter us, bring us in with them. Even the Outlaws and Angels were looking at us. We liked the Warlocks because they were fucking crazy like the Mongols out in California. That’s how I got where I am. I’m leaving out the time I did and the drugs I pushed, the mothers I beat and all the bodies I got out there, but what’s it matter now?”
“We’re going west,” Specs told him. “You should go with us.”
“Fuck I wanna go west for?”
“Because that’s where it’s at. That’s where it’s gonna happen.”
I caught Specs eye and let him know that we weren’t going to be discussing The Shape. Not at this time. And maybe not ever again and sure as hell not with this thug. Sean seemed okay, but he was a very bad boy and I wasn’t exactly comfortable with turning my back on him.
Sean stretched out on the couch. We were on the floor in sleeping bags. There was a locked green metal gun cabinet that I wanted badly to loot. There were all kinds of Army surplus around: food, clothing, tools, medical equipment, you name it. I figured Sean had been real busy at the local Army base or National Guard Armory. I stared at the flickering flame of a Primus stove, listening to him talk.
“Yeah, I got me some good prospects for tomorrow, my brothers,” he said, staring up into the darkness. “There’s a nest of Trogs not two blocks from here, over near where I found you boys. There’s gotta be a sewer grating or manhole cover around there that I haven’t found. They’re down there somewhere, brothers. I’ll get ‘em. Fuck yes, I’ll get ‘em. Nothing finer than Trog-hunting. You boys oughta pitch in with me. I’ll show you how it’s done.”
“We need a car,” Specs said.
“Maybe I can help you with that tomorrow. First you gotta help me kill some Trogs.” He laughed. “We better get some sleep. Trog-hunting is hard work. Nash, kill that stove. Let’s rack out.”
7
The next morning we ate good. Better than I had in many, many weeks. Sean’s larder was far superior to our usual fair of cold Spaghettios and tins of deviled ham. He had lots of Army MREs and we ate scrambled eggs and bacon, crackers and jelly, and had some peach cobbler for dessert.
“Fill yourselves, my brothers,” Sean told us. “You’ll need your strength.”
As it turned out, he was right. And that was something I learned to remember later: Sean was very often right.
Well, he armed us and led us out on a Trog hunt. He gave me a Beretta 9mm handgun and a 30.06 Savage. He gave Specs a bluesteel. 357 Smith and told him not to blow his fucking foot off with it. He also made us wear yellow miner’s hardhats with lights on them. Batteries being scarce, we weren’t allowed to turn them on without his say so.
He showed me two white phosphorus grenades he had.
“For Trogs?” I said.
“If you get a pack of ‘em, these’ll sort ‘em out. Hope I get to use them.”
Christ.
Why did we go along with him? I don’t know. There was no threat intended or implied. We could have walked-sans the guns-anytime we wanted, but we really didn’t want to. I was amazed by Sean. He was a cool head that never lost his temper. Deadly as they came, but honest and loyal in his own way. And resourceful. Jesus, he was resourceful. Wasn’t much he didn’t know about guns and ammunition and fighting. He knew how to stay alive, that was for sure.
A few hours after breakfast-which was served at the crack of noon-we were back in the same vicinity where Sean had found us. He led us into a collapsing building down near the river. Most of the windows were boarded up and there was graffiti all over it. I figured it had been derelict long before Doomsday. Inside, it was dusty and dirty, cobwebs hanging down like party streamers. There were offices, storage rooms, and a big garage in the back. It looked kind of like an old fire hall. Light came in through missing boards in the windows and holes in the walls, but not a lot of it.
We moved through the dimness, past rotting cardboard boxes of ancient ledgers and file folders, water-damaged crates of rusting machine parts.
“What was this place?” Specs asked.
“Hell if I know,” Sean told him. “Come on.”
He directed us through the heaped wreckage, pawing through cobwebbed corridors. The masonry was crumbling around us. There were rat droppings everywhere. Sean found a human skull, kicked it, and laughed when it bounced off the wall and dropped neatly into a garbage can.
“Two points,” he said.
A few bats were disturbed from their daytime sleep and winged angrily over our heads.
“Gah,” Specs said. “I really hate bats.”
“Least they’re normal bats,” Sean said. “Ain’t the size of condors and got teeth like jaguars, laugh like hyenas. Seen a colony of ‘em like that over in Detroit-Shoreway. Enough to give you fucking nightmares for a month.”
He brought us through the garage and into a smaller room just off it. The ceiling was arched, fallen masonry on the floor. It not only smelled damp and fusty, but like warm decay and the reason for that soon became apparent.
There was the corpse of a woman in there.
“Oh God,” Specs said.
The corpse was hung by the feet with rope, tied off to a beam above. It was just as white as boiled bone, looked like the blood had been drained from it drop by drop. It had been opened from belly to crotch and what had been inside was scooped free, leaving a great hollow. It looked like a side of beef in a slaughterhouse.
Sean waved the flies away from it with the barrel of his shotgun.
He stood there, nodding, intrigued by what he was seeing. He had a . 44 magnum in a green Army-style web belt at his waist. There was a big M
arine K-bar knife on the other hip, as well as a big hatchet and an empty white potato sack. I didn’t want to know what that was for and he wasn’t saying.
“See here?” he said. “She’s been eaten on. Here and here. See the teeth marks?”
I saw them. The corpse was riddled with gouges and scratches. It looked like something had taken a bite out of her shoulder. Her vagina was missing.
“They like private parts, them Trogs,” Sean explained. “Don’t ask me why. Guts first, then the privates. I hung her up here yesterday morning and they must’ve went at her last night.”
“You did this?” Specs said.
“She was dead already, little man. I just used her as bait.”
It was sickening. He was obsessed with those things. The world had ground to a halt and he was carefree and happy hunting mutants. There was something very disturbing about that.
“They’re not still around, are they?” I said.
Sean told me we had nothing to worry about. He had a theory that the underdwellers only came out at night like B-movie vampires because they had been living under the streets for so long, hiding in cellars and drainage ditches and sewers, that their eyes couldn’t take the sunlight anymore. Like burrowing worms or moles or bats. It was a good theory, I thought, and it made sense. For the underdwellers-or Trogs as we called them-were essentially nocturnal like cave-dwellers, troglodytes. The radiation had started it; the darkness took care of the rest.
“They only come out at night,” he said and I had absolutely no reason to dispute what he said.
I went over closer to the body. It was as revolting as any corpse and by that point I’d seen so many-especially after working on that clean-up crew-that it took quite a bit to gross me out. It smelled pretty bad, but it wasn’t the decay I was smelling but something sharp and acrid, almost like cat pee mixed with ammonia if you can imagine that.
“Smell it, don’t ya?” Sean said. “You know what that is, brother?”
I told him I didn’t.
“That’s Trog piss. Once you get a smell of it, you never forget it. See, Trogs like eating dead things. They ain’t against taking you or me down and eating our ‘nads on a stick, but what they like is something kind of soft, rotten…seasoned up, so to speak. They mark their goodies by pissing on ‘em kind of like dogs marking territory.” He showed me his wrist. There was old scar tissue there. “See that burn? Trog piss. Had one of ‘em piss on me once. Shit burns.”
Specs wouldn’t come by the corpse. Even with working the clean-up crew, he was looking a little green. And that was mostly Sean’s talk more than anything.
“I can smell it, too,” he said. “But it’s over here.”
He was standing by a doorway. A set of steps led down into the darkness. Sean went over there right away. As ridiculous as it sounds, he went down on his hands and knees sniffing like a bluetick hound. “Yup. Trog piss. One of ‘em must have marked this spot. Bet you ten to one we got us a Trog down there in the basement. Who’s for taking a look?” He stood up. “How about you, little man?”
“Me?” Specs said.
Sean laughed. “You ain’t got the balls. I’ll go down.”
Specs stepped in front of him. “I’ll do it.”
Sean smiled. “Listen for ‘em. They breathe real loud.”
I didn’t like it. Specs was one of those guys that must have been a toilet in another life because he always took shit. But he didn’t like to be challenged. He felt the need to prove himself.
“I’ll go with,” I said.
Specs gave me a look. “I don’t need you.”
He turned on his helmet light, took out his. 357, and down he went. I told him to be careful. I didn’t like any of this. I had a cigarette and I was nervous as hell. I always looked after Specs. I didn’t like Sean pulling this macho shit on him, goading him like that.
“He’ll be all right,” Sean told me.
“He fucking better be,” I said.
Sean gave me a hard look and I gave it right back. If anything happened to Specs, I was going to kill him and I think he knew it. We watched each other.
The minutes ticked by.
8
It wasn’t long before Specs let out a scream and came jogging up the steps, his eyes wide behind his glasses, his brow beaded with sweat. There were cobwebs on his coat.
“OH GOD! OH MY FUCKING GOD!” he cried out, absolutely hysterical. “IT’S DOWN THERE! I SAW IT! IT LOOKED RIGHT FUCKING AT ME! DON’T GO
DOWN THERE! JESUS, DON’T GO DOWN THERE!”
He was ready to jump out of his skin. He was shaking and gasping for breath and I held onto him until he calmed down. Sean was smiling; he thought it was funny as hell.
“They ain’t too active in the day, little man,” he said.
“Bullshit,” Specs said. “This one looked pretty fucking active.”
“I’ll take a look.”
“You better not go down there,” Specs warned him.
Sean went anyway. He clicked on his helmet lamp, racked his shotgun, and started down. He made it maybe three steps and came right back up, backing all the way. “I’ll be goddamned,” he said.
“What?” I said.
“We got one coming up into the light.”
I felt a clammy chill run up my spine and there was good reason for it: that piss smell suddenly got stronger. Ammoniated urine and enough to ream the hairs right out of your nose.
“Let’s get the hell out of here!” Specs suggested.
“Not on your life, brother,” Sean told him. “I been waiting for this.”
Specs and I pulled back along the far wall, right near to the door so we could run the hell out of there if we had to. I could hear the slapping sound of bare feet coming up the steps and my mouth was so dry I could not swallow. I could hear the Trog breathing with a hollow hissing sort of sound. That urine stench grew stronger, a low and mean smell that made my eyes water.
“Get ready,” Sean whispered.
I saw a shadow emerge from the gloom…it was distorted, semi-human. It was making a low growling sound in its throat. It came up into the light, a grotesque caricature of a human being. It was woman, I thought. Broken, bent at the waist, one shoulder pulled up higher than that other. The left arm reached down near the knee and the other only to the waist. She was naked, her flesh a greasy yellow like leprosy, horribly corrugated, the fissures and clefts in her skin so deep you could have lost a penny in them. Her breasts looked like deflated, fleshy balloons.
“Jesus,” Specs said.
Her head was misshapen, long cobweb gray hair hanging from the raw scalp. She looked around with glossy pink eyes that were set with a fine tracery of purple veins like unfertilized eggs. Each set with a tiny black dot that must have been a pupil. Her puckered mouth pulled back from teeth that were black and overlapping, triangular in shape. They looked serrated. A watery brown juice ran from the corners of her lips.
She held a hand up before her face to block the light and I saw that the palm was set with ring-shaped protrusions that looked like the sucker scars of squids you see on whales.
“I’m over here, you bitch,” Sean said.
The Trog looked at him and I wondered at that moment if she did not recognize him. She let out a shrill, piercing scream that grew in volume, an unearthly wailing that went right through me, scraping along the inside of my skull like a fork. I thought my bladder would let go. I almost fell over Specs. The scream echoed through that deserted building and came right back at us: it was an agonized sound like an animal being put to death.
Then she spoke…or made sounds like speech. I’m not sure. But this is what I heard: “Yyyyyyoooooouuuuu,” she hissed with a timber that made everything inside me pull up tight. “Yyyyyyooooouuuuuu…”
If Sean hadn’t had that shotgun, she would have torn out his throat and washed herself in his blood. She stumbled towards him, blinded, hissing, and very pissed off.
Sean let her get within four feet and then he
gave her a round right in the belly. 12-gauge shot at close quarters, it nearly torn her in half. She went down screaming and thrashing. He gave her another right in the chest and she flopped, screeched, and then went still. The stink of her blood was just as bad as her urine.
“That’s how it’s done,” Sean said.
My legs went out from under me and I sat down hard next to Specs who’d already folded up. We sat there, speechless. We thought killing that thing would be enough. But it wasn’t. Not for Sean. He set aside his shotgun, kneeled down by the Trog. He wrapped her hair in his fist and pulled it tight. Then out came his hatchet. With a couple quick strokes, he decapitated her.
He stood up, holding that vile grimacing head by the hair. Blood dripped from the severed neck. “Either you boys want this for your trophy cases?” We just looked dumbly at him. “Didn’t think so.” He opened his potato sack and dropped the head in, tied the sack off at his belt.
I finally found my voice. “What the hell do you want that for?”
“I got my reasons, brother,” he said. “See, Trogs are superstitious, I think. Maybe they believe in ghosts or something. I don’t know. But they don’t care for their own dead or parts of ‘em, for that matter. I was in a pinch one time with three of the fuckers bearing down on me. I only had one round in my gun. What to do? I threw a trophy Trog head at the others and they ran off like the Devil was coming down to fucking Georgia. You should have seen it!”