by Tim Curran
Make no mistakes about it. After our adventure in the sewer, I was strung out: shaking, sweating, my guts tied in knots. Part of me wanted to scream and another part wanted to laugh uncontrollably. But I wasn’t about to let that happen.
“We couldn’t have seen that,” I said after a time. I was drawing off a stale cigarette, smoking it with both hands because I couldn’t keep it steady with one.
“Oh, we saw it, all right, brother,” Sean said, slapping my shoulder. “All kinds of crazy shit down below. Things that caught a good dose of radiation and then crawled down there to breed. There’s shit down there that’ll never see the light of day and we can be thankful for that.”
Specs hadn’t said anything. He just stared at us, his eyes glassy and fixed. Mostly he stared at Sean. Wouldn’t stop staring at him, in fact. Finally, Sean said, “Hell’s your problem, bitch?”
Specs was pissed. I could see that. “We could have been killed down there hunting for your fucking Trogs!” he said, letting it all out. “You’re a fucking maniac! Worse, you’re a fucking inconsiderate, reckless maniac who doesn’t give a shit about anybody else! Fuck you and your Trogs! You hear me? Fuck the both of you.”
At which point, he stood up and just started walking down the street. We followed him and I calmed him down bit by bit. Of course, Sean kept laughing about it and that only made matters worse.
“Don’t worry, little brother,” Sean finally told him. “I won’t ask you to go down below again. It ain’t your thing.”
He led us through the streets, keeping an eye out for the Hatchet Clans. About a block from his apartment I saw someone standing in the street. It was a girl. And she looked normal. She stood there, seeing us, and did not move, did not speak. I called out to her, but she didn’t answer. I motioned the others to hang back.
“Well don’t dirty her up too much, Nash,” Sean said.
As I got closer I saw that she was probably around college age, nineteen or twenty, no more than that, girl-next-door pretty with high cheekbones and big blue eyes, a honey-blonde ponytail down the middle of her back. She was dirty and ragged, but you couldn’t get around the fact that she was very stunning.
I held my hands out. “I’m normal,” I said. “So are they. It’s okay. Really.”
Her eyes were glacial, emotionless. When I got up close to her she came alive and there was a knife in her hand. I wrestled with her for it while Sean laughed and Specs panicked. Finally, I pinned her and it wasn’t easy: she was strong, determined.
“Knock it off,” I told her. “Nobody’s going to hurt you! Nobody’s going to kill you or beat you or rape you!”
“Speak for yourself,” Sean said.
“Shut up,” I told him.
I could see in the girl’s eyes she wanted to believe me, but there was doubt and who could blame her?
“I’m gonna let you up now,” I said. “You wanna run away, go ahead. We’re not coming after you. You wanna come with us, that’s fine. We have shelter and food.”
She gave me a hard look. “And what will that cost me?”
“Not a damn thing. You have my word.”
I let her up and she ran off, stopped, watched us. We just went on our way and paid no attention to her, but we knew she was following us.
“Well?” I finally said, turning around.
“My name’s Janie,” she said, offering me a sliver of smile.
13
We hung around for a few more weeks. I’m not sure why. I needed to go west. That’s what The Shape wanted. But I was in no hurry then. That didn’t come until later. Life in Cleveland wasn’t exactly fun and games, but I liked being with Sean. I’d never met a guy who was more resourceful. He knew where everything was. He had stashes of food, survival gear, and weapons all over the city. Later I learned all that stuff had been hidden away by the Cleveland chapter of the Hell’s Angels who’d been friends of his. They’d been preparing for war.
The city was full of Scabs. There were some street gangs you had to watch for and the Hatchet Clans, of course. Night was a bad time with the rats and mutants and the Children. The Red Rains came and went. I found a nice piece of equipment at a scientific supply house: a solar-powered Geiger Counter. It was to come in very handy. Whenever the Children showed, the radiation count skyrocketed so it was a pretty decent early warning device. I came to the conclusion that the Red Rains were not just blood, rendered meat, and acid, but were charged with fallout, too. I took readings on a puddle of the stuff and it was hot.
During those weeks I got to know Janie real well.
She didn’t seem to trust Sean or Specs. She clung to me. She was always at my side, a sweet and wonderful girl. She was almost twenty years younger than me and for some reason, she took to me and fell in love with me. I figured in the old world, she wouldn’t have looked twice at me even if I’d been her own age, but it was a new world with a whole new set of expectations and priorities and Janie had changed with it. She’d been in her freshman year of college-pre-med at Ohio State-when the world ended. Back in high school, I learned, she had been an honor roll student and class president, civic-minded and caring…gone to church, volunteered at the local children’s hospital, collected coats for the needy in the winter and canned food for the elderly in the summer.
When the bombs fell, she’d made her way back home with some other students to Painesville, Ohio, and pretty much watched her friends and family die. She left for Cleveland a month ago and the Hatchet Clans had gotten her friends, leaving her stranded in the city.
She’d been through it like everyone else. Regardless, she was a real peach in every way who wore her heart on her sleeve.
We all liked her. We all felt protective of her…even Sean, despite himself. We all, I think, envied the fact that she had survived the end of the world with morals and ethics intact. But for all that we could not be like her. The world was a jungle now and only the strong and the vicious survived. Janie just didn’t get that. That’s why we had to keep an eye on her. That heart of hers was too big for its own good and there were too many things out there that would take a bite out of it.
Towards the end of our stay in Cleveland, The Shape started whispering in my head again. This time it wasn’t about us going west. It wanted something else, but as usual it was vague about what it wanted. All I knew is that it wanted an offering. In the back of my mind I knew exactly what that meant, but it was too horrible to consider.
So I told the others about The Shape.
Janie didn’t seem surprised at all. She accepted what I told her. But Sean thought I was fucking nuts, hearing voices in my head and all. Specs liked the idea of an offering, of course.
“It wants a sacrifice, Nash,” he said. “And we better give it one.”
“A sacrifice?” Sean said. “Like what? You mean like a human sacrifice?”
“Exactly.”
“You are one crazy bastard, little brother. But what the hell? Let’s go get some old ragbag and offer him up.”
Janie said nothing. Nothing at all. She didn’t have to; I could see the disappointment in her eyes. It was barbaric and wrong. She knew it and I knew it, but we went ahead anyway.
Specs was excited at the idea. Like I told you, he was into all that new age shit, crystals and astrology and you name it. He had read lots of books about witchcraft and Satanism and all that high, happy horseshit, so it all came natural to him. We grabbed some old man, some ragbag, tied and gagged him, then dragged him into a vacant lot one night and tied him to a tree. We piled wood all around him in a big heap and then we lit him up. Specs said it was expiation, that we had to make a burnt offering and that would keep The Shape happy and on our side.
It was horrible.
The old man died screaming, lit up like a candle. I saw his eyes actually boil out of his head and his skin superheat like wax and run off the skeleton and into the flames. When he was smoldering I told The Shape to come and get him. That was the first time it ever appeared to us, took on
physical form. It took our offering…absorbed it…but somehow I knew it wasn’t what it wanted.
It wanted something living, not something burnt.
It was angry at what had been offered.
It wanted another.
Two days later, Specs got sick.
14
We’d just come back from scouting out some vehicles to get us out of the city and Specs had been acting funny all day. He wasn’t saying much. After we’d settled in, he came over to me.
“I got something, Nash,” he said. “I got something real bad.”
“You’re just tired,” I told him.
“I been coughing for three days.”
And he had been. I think we were all aware that something was going on, but maybe we justified it in our own minds by saying it was just a cold or something…even though we all damn well knew that even cold bugs were serious business these days.
“I can’t even breathe out of my nose, Nash,” he told me. “My muscles and joints ache all the time. Sometimes I have trouble breathing.”
“Don’t say anything to the others, not yet.”
He shook his head. “Afraid I can’t do that, Nash. I can’t take the chance of infecting them with what I have.”
Good old Specs. Guy went through life pretty much afraid of everything. One of those people that God or Nature or what have you had given barely enough strength and fortitude to get through day by day. But when the chips were down, he was as strong as they came. As selfless as you could imagine.
We told Janie and Sean and they would have been totally justified to want to get away from him, but they didn’t. He was one of us and we were going to make it together.
“Don’t you worry, little brother,” Sean told him. “We’ll get you on your feet. Before you know it, me and you’ll be hunting Trogs again.”
Specs tried to smile at that and a tear slid from his eye.
The next few days were bad. Specs’ skin began to take on a bluish, cyanotic tinge that concerned us all. He couldn’t breathe. He was gasping all the time. He was hot to the touch and a sour-smelling sweat rolled down his face. He’d have choking fits that would go on for ten minutes. In a last ditch attempt, Sean went and found us some military-grade antibiotics and we shot Specs full of them. It did no good. It was simply too late.
Mostly he was incoherent, thrashing in his sleep and even convulsing. There was little we could do. Janie mothered him the best she could. Now and again, he’d wake up, look at me, and start talking about throwing corpses in the back of the garbage truck in Youngstown or sleeping in cars or any of the other stupid things we’d done.
It was then I realized he was going to die. The idea of that cut me open, made me bleed. We’d been through a lot. Specs was like some stupid little brother that annoys you, hangs around, but won’t go away and you’re secretly glad for it. I didn’t want to be without him.
Then one day, he said to me, “Nash…don’t let me die like this…it hurts…everything fucking hurts…I can’t even breathe. Put me out of my fucking misery.”
I just shook my head; it was unthinkable.
But Specs was insistent. “Please, Nash, don’t make me suffer. Give me…give me to The Shape.”
It was insane and I told him so, but he kept pushing and he made Sean and Janie hear him out, too. See, Specs was of the mind that The Shape was pissed off at him because it had been his idea to do the burnt offering of that old man. That’s not what The Shape had wanted at all, Specs said. So it had let him get infected with some germ as a punishment. Maybe it was true, maybe it was bullshit. Who knew?
“See, that’s why this is perfect,” he told us. “I’ll be a sacrifice. I’ll give myself to that monster and it’ll save me from dying slow and it’ll keep The Shape happy. He’ll take care of you guys, keep you safe.”
I was absolutely against it. True, The Shape did want something more. I knew that. I felt that. I’d heard it in my mind. My big mistake was telling Specs that. But it was too late.
“Please, Nash. Please,” he kept saying.
We were all against it…but that pathetic, pleading look in his eyes wore us down. Sean broke first and said it was the only goddamn decent thing we could do for him. And then Janie…
“He’s our friend,” she told me. “I’m against wasting life of any sort…but we can’t make him suffer. If this is what he wants…I guess you should allow him it.”
There was argument, but he got his way.
We were going to sacrifice Specs.
We were going to give him to The Shape.
15
Sean scavenged us a stretcher and we carried Specs to a warehouse on around sunset. We weren’t going to burn him or any of that fucked up pagan madness. We were going to do it the right way and just let The Shape have him. We set the stretcher atop some crates. We lit candles because Janie said we should. Specs loved all that occult pageantry.
Then it was time.
I’ll never get that night out of my mind. The candles flickering. The cavernous silence. That creeping chill that came in off the river. The warehouse felt like a tomb.
I held his hand and we talked. “Remember that day when we sat on that bench, Nash? We ate Dinty Moore stew and drank Dew. That’s the day I knew you were my best friend in the world.”
I couldn’t take it. I started balling my eyes out. I told them all that I just couldn’t go through with it. I lashed out at Sean and Janie and they just watched me with defeated, sad eyes. Then I looked at Specs fighting for every breath, then I knew I had to do it.
So I summoned The Shape.
I closed my eyes and concentrated on that sphere of darkness in my mind that I always associated with it. Right away, I could feel it coming and I was flooded with a primal terror that was ice-cold, freezing. The atmosphere of the warehouse immediately went from being simply neutral to activated. That’s the only way I can describe it. Around us there was no longer just dead air, but an ether that was charged and deadly and thrumming with energy. The hairs on my arms and at the back of my neck stood up like I had come into contact with a charge of static electricity.
I went down on my knees, absolutely senseless.
Janie and Sean pulled me back to safety.
I smelled a sharp stink of ozone and something like burning flesh, hot blood boiled to steam. Then an awful, acrid stench like melting wires and blown fuses. The warehouse seemed to tremble. The concrete floor vibrated. There was a searing hot flash of something like chain lightening that blinded me momentarily and then the Shape was coming: a boiling black mass like thunderheads getting ready to shoot lightening at the earth. It was a spinning, roaring, unstable irradiated elemental force that came with the heat of coke ovens and the toxic glow of nuclear reactors. Looking at it was like looking into the primeval fires of cosmic creation.
Janie screamed.
Sean fell on his ass trying to get away from it.
The Shape was pulsing, revolving on an axis of pure atomic force that was frightening to behold, a storm of fallout and dust and particulated matter with a heart of superhot plasma. It made a buzzing sound like a million angry hornets.
I stood there, feeling its heat burning the fine hairs on the back of my hands. It was matter and force and pulsating energy, but it was not mindless. It was sentient and directed. Absolute nuclear chaos that was living and evil and hungry. At the very center of the whirlwind itself, there was a zone of blackness darker than anything I had ever seen before, the blackness that must exist beyond time and space. And flickering luminously within that shrieking void of antimatter were two red eyes that looked hot enough to melt steel.
Without further ado, it took Specs.
Dear God, it took him.
The mass of The Shape was constantly changing and reinventing itself, but I suppose if you had to give it spatial dimensions I would have said it was probably something like twelve feet in height, maybe six in width. It hovered over Specs for a moment or two and that’s when he rea
lized exactly what he had given himself to.
He screamed.
Probably with his last reservoir of air he screamed like I’ve never heard a man scream before with a wild, cutting, hysterical sound that echoed through the warehouse. Sean made to go to his aid and I held him back. Specs was beyond our help. If Sean had gotten close to that radioactive furnace, he would have been vaporized.
Because that’s what happened to Specs.
He was sucked into it and I saw him spinning in that godless void, I saw him bulge up and then literally explode into particles that were vacuumed into the central mass, made part of it, every atom leeched of its energy in the whirling subatomic storm. And then he came back out again. He hit the floor and he was a blackened, smoldering heap of refuse that sparked and popped.
The buzzing sound faded, seemed to come from a great distance. There was a resounding hollow explosion that sounded much like a sonic boom when the air collapses back into the void left by a supersonic fighter.
That was it.
It was gone and so was Specs. What was left was a smoking heap of debris that had been supercharged, disassembled at the molecular level and then, reassembled, and vomited back into this time/space.
Janie and Sean practically had to carry me out of there. They did not speak for some time and I didn’t blame them. For I had shown them something no sane, reasoning mind should ever look upon.
The face of the Devil.
16
For weeks afterwards, I had nightmares about that night. I kept seeing The Shape take Specs and what had become of him. I kept seeing the blackened, burning heap of refuse he had been reduced to. He had been my friend. A very loyal, very kind-hearted guy. And I had given him to that fucking nightmare and how in God’s name could I ever get it out of my mind or learn to live with myself?
It was that night as Sean went off by himself to brood and drink, that Janie and I made love for the first time. She was so much younger than me that I felt like some kind of deviant, but I did it anyway. I lost myself in her and her hot body against mine was the finest thing I’d ever known. At least, that’s what I told myself.