Biohazard

by Tim Curran

“See that, Texas?” Carl said. “Halloween horror show. Be like a fucking family reunion for a peckerwood like you.”

  “Quiet,” Janie said.

  As I saw the marquee, the decorations, the memories weighed down on me. Good God, Halloween. I’d forgotten about that being that every day was fucking Halloween now. The bombs had come down a week or so before Halloween and that was almost a year ago now.

  Shit.

  We kept going, waiting for something to show its ugly face, but so far nothing had. Janie was right behind me, Texas Slim behind her, and Carl taking up the backdoor with his shotgun.

  So many shadows…spilling, pooling, spreading over the streets in tar-like lagoons of night. A light breeze was blowing, leaves skittering about, sand trickling against windows. I led them around a car stalled on the sidewalk, a Chevy. It looked like it had popped the curb and been abandoned there, two of the doors still thrown open. Moonlight flooded it. There was sand and leaves inside. The browned skeleton of a child was curled up on the back seat nearly buried in sand. It still had blonde curls. A girl. Looked like she had gone to sleep, gone peacefully, probably waiting for her mother to come back.

  Radiation. Plague. Who could say?

  We skirted more wrecks, refusing to look inside them, but always wary of anything moving in them. Nothing did. We came around a dead minivan and there was movement. People.

  “Stay back,” I told them, keeping my rifle on them. “Just stay back and we won’t have any trouble.”

  But these people were not going to try anything.

  We all saw what they were. Four or five of them…a man and a woman and a few kids, a family maybe. They were crouched there, holding onto one another. The stench coming off them was nauseating, like hospital dressings rank with gangrene and drainage. And there was a good reason for that: their faces were lumpy with rising sores, splitting and bleeding. It looked like one of the kids had some kind of growth coming out of his eye. They all breathed with rasping, phlegmy sounds. The man reached out a hand, broke into a fit of coughing, and vomited a dark slick of blood onto the walk.

  The stink was unbelievable.

  “Fever,” Janie said. “They have the Fever.”

  Everyone backed away.

  The family crawled towards us with squishing sounds, but nobody fired. Last thing we wanted was to be blasting blood and fluids into the air. Lot of the germs that had mutated with the fallout were airborne pathogens. These days, it was all collectively known as the Fever: a lethal zoo of what military biohazard specialists call “hot agents.” And unfortunately, at this zoo, the cages were wide open and all the creeping beasties were in the air, the water, you name it.

  I jogged away and the others followed. Next to the Children, there was nothing scarier than bodies hot with plague.

  I ran across the street kicking my way through drifted sand, around a rusting furniture truck, and my luck almost ran out right there. A dog was waiting for me, a big one, in a pool of moonlight. Looked like it might have been a shepherd once, but it was hard to say. Its hide was patchy, threadbare, grotesque pink tumors and open sores rising like bread dough. A dark sap dripped from them.

  I went down on my ass to avoid colliding with it.

  I crawled away and then the others were with me. The beast was making a low mewling in its throat. Its fur, what there was of it, was sticky and spiky with discharges from its open wounds. It had only one eye, the other consumed in a pulsing pink growth that had burst out of its skull. The entire body was flabby and loose.

  It opened its jaws and growled, slime dripping.

  “Well, come on then,” I told it.

  And it did.

  It tensed itself to leap and as it vaulted up I fired twice, dropping it to the pavement. One round punched through its chest and the other smashed its head open, cleaving it apart almost perfectly. It lay there, mewling and jerking around, its head waving from side to side on a snaking trunk of a neck that almost looked boneless. Blood spattered the walks.

  We got out of there.

  I could hear more dogs howling in the distance. I had no idea what I was looking for, but I knew I’d recognize it when I saw it. And then there it was: an Army/Navy store. The door was open, a down of leaves and sand having blown in.

  We went inside, clicking on flashlights.

  Displays were tipped over, a case of war medals smashed…but other than that, the store was relatively unscathed and that was a real rarity these days. All of which made me think that South Bend must have been hit pretty hard by disease.

  “Carl? Get that door shut. Lock it and prop something against it to keep it closed,” I said. “Help him out, Texas.”

  “I suppose somebody’s has to.”

  I turned away from them. “Janie, let’s find a place for us to spend the night. Dawn won’t be for six hours yet.”

  Everyone did what they were told and the long night began.

  4

  Good thing was, save for the barking of dogs and the occasional sound of rats running in the streets, nothing at all happened. We found a storeroom in the back and crashed there for the night, sleeping in shifts.

  And so the night passed.

  When daylight finally came, sweeping the night terrors back into their holes, it turned out that the Army/Navy store was a real windfall. We found another locked storeroom in the basement and it was just full of goodies…once we popped the door with a crowbar. Cartons of military MREs and freeze-dried hiking food, cases of bottled water and packets of water purification tablets. Sleeping bags and flashlights, waterproof raingear and parkas and blankets and first aid equipment. Upstairs there was camo clothing in every size, some of it American and some of it British DPM.

  While Janie and I took inventory, Texas Slim and Carl went out hunting a new vehicle. They bickered their way out the door, trying to decide whose mother had entertained more bikers in a single night. I was glad to get rid of them. That shit went on almost constantly, the nipping and arguing and insulting. It was what they did and they enjoyed it, but it got old after awhile.

  “There’s a ton of stuff here, Nash,” Janie said, standing amongst heaps of blankets and clothing and green metal boxes.

  “We’ll just take what we need.”

  That was an unwritten rule these days. No sense being a glutton, no sense being a hog, just take what you needed and leave the rest for some other unfortunate soul. I believed in this completely. I knew others did, too. There were always plenty who didn’t, of course, but I truly believed that karma would sort their asses out in the end.

  “What do you think the chances are they’ll get us a decent ride?”

  Janie laughed. “Pretty good if they don’t kill each other first.”

  “Ah, they’re pretty tight, I think. They just express their feelings for one another in a strange way.”

  “Let’s go to the storeroom, Nash. I want to show you something.”

  I followed her downstairs and when we were in there, she locked the door.

  “What do you want to show me?”

  “What do you think?” she said, something blazing just behind her eyes. “You’ve been thinking the same thing I have so quit playing innocent.”

  The heat that burned inside her spread out and consumed me. She was beautiful…but still the image of my wife came to me unbidden and dominating as it often did. Shelly. Dear God, Shelly. I remembered the mole on her thigh and the way she laughed and the little notes she would stick inside my lunch pail and the way her hand felt in mine and how she had looked the day we were married and how lucky, how blessed, I had felt knowing that she was mine. And then I saw her, as I would always see her, dying in my arms that night from cholera, nothing but bones wrapped in yellow skin, her chest trembling with each shallow gasp of air, and my own voice saying again and again, this is Shelly, this is my wife, this is how I bleed.

  But that was gone.

  It was faded with age.

  Janie looked at me and something crossed her ey
es like a shadow and then was gone and I was with her, losing myself in her.

  She came right up to me and grabbed my hands and put them up her shirt and on her breasts. They were hot to the touch. I could feel her heart pounding with a steady delicious rhythm. I kissed her with my lips and then with my tongue and that’s how it started. Later, thinking about it with a warm satisfaction, I thought I actually melted into her. It sounds like something from a cheap paperback romance, but that’s how it was. It was no gentle seduction, there was nothing subtle or soft about any of it…just a union born of absolute need, trembling fingers working buttons and zippers and then I was on top of her and inside her, pumping, and she was breathing hot and heavy in my ear. Moaning. Begging me never to stop. I think I told her I loved her. When we came, we both cried out. It didn’t last long, but what there was of it was completely molten.

  Later, still wrapped together in a twine of hot flesh and cooling sweat, she balanced herself on one elbow and said, “You think about your wife a lot, don’t you?”

  “I guess.”

  “But you never speak of her.”

  “No.”

  “Why not, Nash? Don’t you think it would be better if you did?”

  I pulled away, pain breaking loose inside me. “I can’t. I just can’t.”

  Janie didn’t push it, it wasn’t in her to do so. She lay next to me, her skin golden and her limbs long. “Do you trust me, Nash?”

  “I think you’re the only one I do trust.” I meant it.

  “I want you to tell me about your wife. Not now. But some day. When you do that, when you share it with me and trust me with it, I know I’ll trust you, too.”

  The idea that maybe she didn’t trust me, not completely, hurt. I knew the others were with me because they thought I could keep them safe. It was not devotion, really, it was need and maybe it was even fear. Fear of what I could do and what I would call up on the next night of the full moon. That made me somehow omnipotent in their eyes. They respected the power, feared how I wielded it.

  They did not fear me.

  They feared what I called: The Shape.

  But Janie?

  No, Janie did not fear me. The connection between us was different, deeper, hard to know or understand. But it was there. It was always there. Sometimes I feared that she would leave and I would be alone. Completely alone and when I woke in the night, shivering and sweating from nightmares, she would not be there to hold onto. Then it would be just me, the memories of Shelly coming in the dead of night and sucking the blood from my soul.

  I reached out and touched Janie, loving the smoothness of her skin. And as I did so, that old voice said, Jesus Christ, she’s just a kid…she’s nineteen and you’ll be forty in three years. You could be her father for chrissake. Don’t you see that? And yet you cling to her and you sleep with her, and how do you feel about that? Do you feel dirty? Unclean? But I didn’t. Maybe once I would have but that once was so far gone, dropped into the deepest well imaginable, and I could no longer know what was right and what was wrong. I only knew that it felt right and that was enough.

  It was all I had.

  I thought I loved her.

  And loving her, wished she were dead.

  She was just too good to be thrown into the ashcan with the rest. She had morals and ethics. And those things just didn’t have a place now.

  “I want you to trust me,” I said. “I need you to.”

  “Do you trust me?”

  “Yes.”

  “I hope so.”

  “I love you,” I said.

  She laid her head on my chest. “Then I suppose I love you, too.”

  “That’s pretty noncommittal.”

  “It’s a noncommittal world now, Nash.”

  I laid there, feeling her, feeling part of something and more alone than I’d ever felt in my life. There was pain inside for what I had done and what I had lost and what I would never find again. I could feel it in each heartbeat and in the steady flow of my blood. I opened my mouth to tell Janie about it, but I closed it again as I saw my wife’s face looking down at me from some window in my mind.

  Yes, pain. Nothing but pain and it did not need to be given a name.

  5

  I think it was our first night in South Bend that I began having the nightmares. I, like you, have had my share of night frights, but this was like nothing I’ve ever had before. To call them dreams is like calling a 500-megaton thermonuclear weapon just a bomb. And the real scary part here, you see, is that I’m not really sure they were dreams. The experience was too…corporeal, too organic, if that makes any sense.

  All I can tell you is we were in the storeroom. Janie was sleeping at my side and Texas Slim and Carl were across the room. In the dream, I opened my eyes and what I saw was the shadowy storeroom. I sat there, blinking, looking around, filled with a terror that was positively nameless. I wanted to get out, to do anything…but I could not move. Or maybe I was afraid to. There was no window in the room, but the entire far wall suddenly lit up like it was washed by pale moonlight. More than moonlight. Luminous, flickering, energized. That’s when I saw that the light wasn’t just light but some whirling vortex of phosphorescent matter that was alive, expanding, engulfing the entire wall until there was no wall. It made a hissing, boiling sort of noise that put my nerves right on edge.

  I was filled with revulsion and horror. I wanted to scream and maybe I did.

  It kept expanding, swirling, a great worming mass like thousands and thousands of corpse-white snakes squirming and roping and tangling, being born from their own serpentine lengths, pushing out from a central mass that looked almost like a face…it had a contorted, leering slash for a mouth and something like eyes, evil, upturned eyes pulsating with the formless blackness of the void. The rest of it kept changing form, compressing, elongating, mutating. The face of Medusa. That’s what I thought in the dream: I was staring at the face of Medusa. Except this Medusa was absolutely alien, absolutely obscene, a corpuscular entity with a grotesque blur for a face made of thousands of those reaching white tendrils. Like the face itself, they were not a solid mass, but composed of millions of squirming threads and filaments who themselves were made of millions of roping fibers braided together down unto infinity. As I watched, the entire thing began to unwind until it looked the entire far side of the room was a nest of billions of writhing, smooth white cobras made of plaited, conjoined worms.

  But the face wasn’t gone…not entirely.

  It was eroding, flaking apart, unwinding into viscid living threads, but still those malefic eyes stared out at me. They watched me. As I cowered with bunched fists, a pounding heart, and a sour sweat running from my pores, it took a wicked delight in my terror. You can run, but you can’t hide, Nash. I’m coming just as you’ve always suspected, born in the microscopic ether and into the real. East to west, that’s my path. I leave nothing but graveyards and gleaming white bones in my wake. As you go westward, so do I. And you better hurry because I’m right behind you. Youngstown is a cemetery now. Those streets you played in as a child…filled with bloating white corpses and strewn with well-picked bones, nothing but flies and rats and buzzards, nothing more. Just the rising hot stench of decay and the silent blackness of tombs. I’m entering Cleveland now. Soon I’ll be coming for all that you have left. Will you scream when I take Janie, your sweet little cherry away from you? Or will you barter for your own miserable life as her flesh blackens with the pox, as she drowns in a yellow sea of her own infected waste and diseased blood bursts from her pores and she vomits out the black slime of her own liquefied intestines? What will you do, Nash? What will you offer to me?

  It was bad, that thing getting inside my head and tormenting me, but what was worse was that it touched me. All those coiling, unraveling threads came at me, covering me, sliding into me like slivers of ice, impaling me and filling my body with their pestilence and contamination. The agony of infestation was unbelievable. My body shook and gyrated with waves o
f agony as I was absorbed, assimilated, remade in the form of that monstrous Medusan parasite, my blood gone to cold clotted venom, my internals dissolving to a marrowy sauce, my brain rendered to a gray slopping jelly. My cells were polluted one by one, distended with waste, each finally exploding in a drainage of diseased cytoplasm. I was literally a living corpse, drowning in my own filth, poisoned bile, and putrescent blood.

  My mind was gone, pulled into some sucking black hole of insanity…but still I could hear a voice, my voice, wild and screeching: Nash, Nash, Nash! Can’t you see what it is and what it will do? Look behind you, look to the east, it’s nothing but a great bird-picked bone pile now! No more sunshine, no more light, no more anything! That thing destroys everything in its path and leaves a spreading ink-black swath of darkness in its wake! And it’s coming, getting closer day by day, for the love of God or Janie or yourself, you better run, you better run as fast as you fucking can-

  I came out of the dream at that point, if dream it was. Drenched with hot-cold sweat, I stumbled to the door and got out of the storeroom. My guts were flipping over themselves, rolling with a greasy peristaltic motion. My legs were so weak I could barely stand. I stumbled into walls and tripped over my own feet. My muscles were sore and throbbing. My back kinked. My hands trembling. White bolts of pain were trying to split my skull in two. Tears rolled down my face and my teeth chattered. I was filled with a sense of loathing as if I had been embraced by a wormy corpse.

  But what had embraced me was far worse.

  Not the corpse, but The Maker of Corpses.

  Outside the Army/Navy store, I fell to my knees in the cool night air. I didn’t care about dog packs or the Children or rats or any of it. That shit was pedestrian in comparison with what I’d just been through. I did not know if it was sheer nightmare or reality or some feverish, fucked up brew of both, all I knew was that I could smell the hot green odor of rotting corpses in the cities to the east and taste something in my mouth like hot-sweet bile. I threw up and kept throwing up until it was all purged from me. And even then the raw, fetid stench of it on the sidewalk-far unlike any vomit I’d ever known-made me shake with dry heaves.