Biohazard

by Tim Curran

  Carl lit a cigarette. “Fuck of a way to fight a war,” he said.

  Janie burst out laughing, only this laughter was high-pitched and near hysterical. I understood it: I had the mad desire to do the same. I clutched her to me, that honeyed bug stench so ripe on her my stomach rolled over. Texas kicked bugs into the corner and the rest of us just let the tension run from us.

  About the time Carl finished his cigarette, we heard a creaking.

  Then a snapping.

  And that’s when the window exploded inward.

  4

  The eruption of glass had not even made it more than a few inches, I bet, before we were in motion. I suppose we were all pumped hard with adrenaline and just ready to jump. Later, I was impressed at how we reacted, how we moved as a single unit: fast, cohesively, and without question.

  The window blew in and we moved.

  Texas threw open the door to the closet and we piled in…along with four or five bugs which, considering that hundreds had just blown into the room, was not so bad. I was the last one in, shoving Janie before me, and as I slammed the door shut I saw the room fill with insects.

  And I do mean fill.

  They came in through the shattered window in a droning storm like autumn leaves blown by the wind, an absolute tempest of bloodsuckers that erupted in a single boiling mass of wings and thoraxes and bulbous red eyes, fanning out and inundating the room in their numbers. That’s what I saw in the second or two before I slammed the door shut, smashing three or four between the door and jamb that were trying to follow us in.

  It was pretty hairy for a moment after we got in there and the room filled with that ominous cacophony of buzzing. First off, I wasn’t exactly accurate in calling the closet a walk-in closet. It was your basic coat closet with a rod to hang jackets and what not from. About three feet deep, maybe four wide. And all of us in there with rifles. It was like the proverbial sardine can. When you took into account that we were trapped in a confined space with four or five mutant bloodsucking insects, it was not a good thing.

  It was pitch black in there, of course.

  The only light coming in was from the lantern and candles outside and this filtered through a space at the bottom of the door that was maybe half an inch wide. There was a lot of screaming and shouting as we smashed the intruders. One of them latched itself to Janie’s throat and she went absolutely wild. Carl was the one that finally got it off her. When all was settled and done, dead insects at our feet, we were pretty banged up and bruised. My face was scratched from Janie’s nails. I think I had punched Texas…or maybe Carl. Janie had elbowed me in the belly and stomped on my toes. Carl had backhanded me or, more precisely, back-elbowed me. Texas was complaining that somebody had kneed him in the balls and Carl said his left shin had been laid raw.

  I suppose if somebody had watched us in there with a hidden camera or something, they would have found it hilarious. Basically, four adults in a box beating the hell out of each other as they tried to kill the bugs. It reminded me of that Three Stooges episode where the boys get stuck in a phone booth together.

  Anyway, it was your classic closet. No standing room, of course, with the coat rod there. It was hell being packed in like that and having to stoop over. Especially when we realized that it might be hours before the swarm got bored and moved on. They were buzzing loudly outside the door and being in the closet was like being tucked away in the cell of a bee honeycomb.

  “Whose hand is on my ass?” Janie said. “Kindly remove it.”

  “Where am I suppose to remove it to?” Texas Slim wanted to know. “I’m simply trying to make use of every available space for the comfort of the group, darling.”

  “Leave that space alone.”

  “This is bullshit,” Carl said. “We’re going to be fucking pretzels by the time we get out.”

  Texas laughed. “Well, I’m betting you’ll make a really awful tasting pretzel, Carl.”

  “Yeah? Well, fuck you.”

  Carl shoved into me, knocking me and Janie against the wall. Texas shoved him and soon they were grappling and we were getting the worst of it. Go figure. I shoved back and Janie elbowed me and I made to push Texas and I cracked Janie alongside the head and she kicked me and Carl said we were all a bunch of fucking morons and brought his head back and nearly broke my nose.

  “All right!” I finally shouted. “Knock this shit off!”

  Everybody calmed a bit and we had three or four seconds of unbroken, cramped peace. Then Carl made a growling sound in his throat. “Texas? You’re jabbing me in the ass with your gun.”

  “That ain’t my gun,” he said.

  “You sonofabitch.”

  More scuffling. I finally told them to knock it off and told Texas Slim to quit jabbing Carl with whatever he’d been jabbing him with-I didn’t want to know what-and we settled in and started waiting. The bloodsuckers were buzzing, bumping into the walls, crawling over the outside of the door and scratching at it, making those appalling sucking sounds that were terrible to hear. Carl switched on his flashlight and, sure enough, about a dozen of those proboscises had slipped through the aperture at the bottom of the door, the flared lips at the ends looking for something to attach to. We stomped them and the bloodsuckers made sharp trilling sounds, but after awhile they learned not to stick their beaks into the crack. That sweet scent they carried was so thick in the closet I thought we would asphyxiate.

  We spent nearly three hours like that.

  Three hours is a long time when you’re cramped and contorted. I defused a lot of fights between Carl and Texas Slim and prayed the insects would leave, but mostly I did a lot of thinking. And what I thought about most was not our predicament or the death that was held at bay by two inches of wood, but about Sean. Sean was dead. I had seen him get his brains blown out but I still couldn’t believe it. Sean who had pulled my ass out of the fryer again and again in places like Cleveland, Toledo, and Bowling Green. He was a good guy. Tough, loyal, smart, and very wise in his own way. A guy who had run guns, pushed meth and heroin, been a blood member and enforcer for the Warlocks motorcycle gang back east, and did time for armed robbery and aggravated assault…but when it was just he and I alone, I had gotten to know a side of the man no one would ever have suspected existed. A very wise and compassionate side.

  “Nash,” he said one night as we sat on the shores of Lake Eerie in this little town called Vermilion. “Nash…what we gotta start doing here in this big crazy fucked up world of ours is forgetting about what we were and concentrating on what we are. The cavalry’s not coming over the hill and the U.S. Marines are just another piss-stain. The only luck we got is the luck we make and the only hope we got is the hope we carry. You dig this shit?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s gonna be up to guys like me and you. Especially you.”

  “Me?”

  Sean nodded. “That’s right. You’re special. We all know it. We can all feel it when we’re with you. You’re leading us somewhere and into something. Something important.” Before I could disagree, he said, “And it ain’t because The Shape let’s you pick out sacrifices for it. It could have chosen anyone to do that. It picked you because you’re on the road to something big. Might not be a good thing, might be real fucking ugly when you get there, but that’s where you’re going. That’s why The Shape is pushing you along. Because it’s out there. Your destiny. And I just got this freaky feeling that whatever it is, it’s important to the race, to all of us.”

  He would always say things like that that made very little sense to me at the time. But, later, when I thought it out, I would understand. In his own way, the man was a prophet. He knew what I could not know and felt things he had no right feeling. But he was right. With what came later, he was absolutely right: I was on the road to something big. We all were. And it was more terrible than anything we could imagine.

  Wedged into that closet, I just couldn’t believe he was gone. I didn’t know what I’d do without him. Witho
ut his insight and wisdom and his unshakable confidence in me. He was always the first guy into a fight to save us and the last one out. And he was always the guy who made everyone retreat to safety while he held off the “Indians” as he called them. And in the end, trying to protect us had cost him his life and he wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

  Thinking about him, I felt tears roll down my cheeks.

  It was like losing a brother.

  But like he had said so many times, I had to concentrate on the here and now and not the before. Sean was now part of the before and as much as it hurt, I had to let him go.

  After the buzzing was gone for a good thirty minutes, we cracked the door. There were dozens of dead bloodsuckers on the floor. Cause of death: unknown. There were two or three living ones clinging to the walls, but they must have been old or sick or something because when we swatted them they fell to the floor, moving very sluggishly. The candles were both tipped over and out. Six bugs had died suctioned to the lantern like they were trying to fuck it. We peeled carapaces off our packs, made sure nothing had crawled inside, and gathered up our belongings.

  “Looks like we’re clear,” Texas Slim said, appraising the parking lot through the shattered window. “Swarm’s gone.”

  “Let’s get that Bronco,” I said.

  We hurried downstairs, found a few more dead bugs, a couple sluggish ones that Carl took great joy in stomping, but other than that it was safe. When we got outside, the parking lot was a carpet of dead and dying insects. I didn’t know what had sickened them, but I was grateful for it. There were hundreds of them underfoot, a veritable mat of exoskeletons that made the most revolting crunching sounds as we walked over them. It was like the parking lot was carpeted with peanut shells. They were all over the Bronco, but thankfully the windows and doors had been closed. We brushed off what we could, loaded our stuff, and jumped in.

  Judging by the sun in the hazy sky above, it must have been nearly noon by the time we pulled from the parking lot. There were so many dead bugs on the windshield that Carl turned on the wipers and made a grisly brown smear of them that took the wipers and squirting washer fluid some time to clear.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” I said.

  5

  My plan was to head it out of the city and keep rolling until we hit South Bend, because that’s where we had to go. Whether that was intuition on my part or The Shape planting ideas in my head, I didn’t know and didn’t really want to. We had a mission, I knew that much. We had to go west. And I had a feeling that we needed to get moving, that somewhere, somehow, time was running out.

  Leave Mother Nature to ball up the works.

  We were maybe a block down South Main when a sandstorm brewed-up and within five minutes, visibility was down to maybe twenty feet. Carl didn’t waste anytime. A good sandstorm can gum up an engine in no time flat. And to get caught out in one on foot is unthinkable. He took the first opening he found which happened to be the parking lot of the Concord Mall. We didn’t stop and run inside. Nothing so refined: Carl drove the Bronco right through the plate glass front of JC Penney, smashing through displays and tossing silver-skinned mannequins in every which direction.

  But we were inside.

  Sand was blowing into the store, but we manhandled displays out of the way and drove the Bronco right out into the atrium itself where it was sheltered from the blow. Sandstorms were a bitch, of course. Sand would blow hot and dry for three days or three hours, just burying everything in the streets and then it would just die down and another wind would scour it all clean. You just had to wait it out.

  There were worse things than sandstorms.

  Dust storms, for example. When they blew?and if you’d survived long enough in the nuclear wasteland you learned to tell the difference?they brought intense radioactivity with them. You got caught out in them, you were dead. But ever since the bombs came down, pissing fallout across the country in seeking toxic clouds, the weather just hadn’t been the same. Dust, debris, fine particulate matter had been blown up into the atmosphere and for some time the weather had been cold because the sun just wasn’t getting through. But, thankfully, that hadn’t lasted. All that dust and sand and what not settled back down. But now and again, a good gust picked it up and blew it around and sometimes it was just sand and sometimes it was dust so saturated with fallout it would burn everything in its path.

  There were weird electrical storms, too, that would turn the sky black and boiling, slit through with jagged red and purple seams. Winds would start blowing again, cloud-to-ground lightning splitting open trees and shattering roofs and starting firestorms that would burn for days.

  Maybe some day the planet would heal itself, but it would be a long time in coming.

  So we were trapped in the mall, waiting it out.

  With nothing really better to do, we went shopping. For the most part, the mall was relatively untouched. Maybe when people were dying in numbers from plague and radiation sickness, suddenly Elder Beerman, Footlocker, and the Great American Cookie Company didn’t seem so important anymore. There was some wreckage, of course, but not as much as you would expect. We stocked up on tools and automotive supplies at Goodyear, got new boots and socks over at Champs Sports, jackets at Leather amp; More, and while Texas and Carl fooled around in Spencer’s gifts, Janie raided Bath amp; Body Works. By that time I was shopped out and I stood around in the food court staring with lust at the things I missed most in life: Papa John’s Pizza and Taco Bell.

  The mall was depressing. Personally, I find malls depressing on a good day. But empty, forlorn, and dusty, the Concord was far worse. It was creepy, disturbing. The world had gone toes up and dragged things like civilization, art, intellect, and poetry into the grave with it. Libraries and schools had probably been burned or bombed, but synthetic places like this were still standing. Plastic museums of greed and money and fuck-you-I-got-mine mass consumerism. The dark side of the American dream, the cancer that had rotted us from within, the hungering worm that was never full. But buying and spending had been our drug, hadn’t it? All those things you couldn’t really afford. All those things you bought anyway. And the corporations got rich and the credit card companies got fat and the little guy sold off his soul and dignity for a phony lifestyle that was never his in the first place.

  Standing there, looking at the stores and displays, I couldn’t help but feel nauseous at it all. And I couldn’t help but think that maybe, just maybe, if we’d all been less concerned with our wallets and more concerned with our brother man that the world might have still been green and sunny and filled with the laughter of children and not a radioactive wasteland haunted by mutants, crazies, and pandemic germs. I had to wonder, really, if maybe we had deserved this. That with the road we were on, becoming shallower by the day, if something like Doomsday hadn’t been inevitable.

  But ultimately, in a way, we weren’t to blame. Nature had engineered us into what we were. Our ancestors were greedy by necessity. They had to be to survive. The more your tribe had the better chance you’d make it through the winter. And that greed, of course, became materialism. The human animal always wanted more and there were those that profited obscenely by exploiting this common, inbred need. And somewhere down the line, we destroyed ourselves.

  I suppose if visitors from another star ever showed up, they’d look around, shake their heads, and go somewhere else.

  After awhile, I got off my soapbox and found Janie looking around in Underground Attitude. “Do you ever wonder,” she said, “how long we can keep playing the odds like we do and survive?”

  “Long as we have to.”

  “Do you really believe that, Nash?” she said, her face very long. “Do you really believe we can keep fighting against the inevitable?”

  “And what’s the inevitable, Janie? Death? Should we just lie down and not bother? Is that what you think?”

  “I don’t know, Nash. Is it what I think?”

  “Don’t talk in r
iddles. I’m too tired for that shit.”

  Janie just stared at me. There were vast crystalline depths in the blue of her eyes. “What I’m saying is that we keep running and running, moving west. What are we running from? And better yet, what are we running to? What do you think is out there, Nash? Do you expect we’ll find paradise, some kind of oasis from all this or do you know better?”

  “I don’t know shit, Janie.”

  “You know more than you’re saying.”

  I hated when she did things like this. It was all hard enough without over-analyzing why things were and why they weren’t. “Janie, all I know is that we’re being driven west-”

  “Like cattle.”

  “-it’s what The Shape wants and you know what? It’s what I want, too, because I’m just optimistic enough to believe there’s something better than this. There has to be.”

  “But the germs…”

  “I’m fully aware of the germs. I have nightmares about them.”

  She sighed. “What I mean is that we can’t keep playing the odds. Sooner or later, we’re going to pick up one of these germs. One of us is going to get infected. And if one does, we all do.”

  “Maybe we’re immune.”

  “Specs wasn’t.”

  “No, but the rest of us didn’t get what he had, now did we? Maybe there’s a reason for that.”

  “The Shape? Do you really believe that, Nash?”

  I honestly wasn’t sure what I believed anymore. “Listen to me, Janie. All I know is that since The Shape picked me I have skirted one danger after the other. That’s all I know. That’s my convoluted logic. We do what it wants and it keeps us alive. Maybe it even makes us immune…I just don’t know. We’ve got an edge that no one else does, we’d be goddamned stupid not to use it.”

  “Even if it means taking a life every month?”

  “Yes.”

  “You really believe that?”