by Tim Curran
Somewhere during the process, Janie came out. “Are you all right, Nash?”
I looked up at her, my face warm and waxy, my eyes bloodshot and tearing. I swallowed. Swallowed again. I could not speak. We went inside and I drank some water, smoked a cigarette, and all the while she was staring at me, wanting answers. “Nash? Nash? God, Nash, speak to me…” Oh, but I couldn’t. Because if I opened my mouth and powered up the old voice box what was going to come out in a gushing flood of pure unbridled terror was the scream to end all screams. I was afraid I would start and never, ever stop.
So I said nothing. Absolutely nothing.
I could see it in her eyes, the concern, yes, but also the fear as she wondered if I was shot through with the Fevers. But what I couldn’t say, what I dared not frame into worms, was that I was not sickened with Fevers but had been embraced by the Mother of Fevers.
And it was coming.
Getting closer day by awful day.
An unnamable horror that had come to exterminate what remained of the human race.
6
Texas Slim and Carl found a vehicle for us and it was really something. They came back with it about an hour before the sandstorm hit, noticing with some discomfort the uneasy silence that lay between Janie and I. They did not ask about it. They took us out to show us what they had found.
I started laughing when I saw it.
So did Janie.
Of all the dinosaurs in the automotive jungle they had somehow come across a VW microbus that had been new when the Vietnam War had still been raging. The bus was worn and dented, painted up with ancient flowers, peace signs, and other psychedelic hieroglyphics that had faded with age. It was an ugly vehicle for an ugly world.
“Where in the hell did you find this?”
“Some guy’s garage,” Carl said, scratching his thick black beard. “We were checking out this neighborhood, just looking in garages for anything we could get. We found this. Looks like shit, sure, but it moves and it can get us out of here. Maybe Michigan City or Gary, wherever.”
“It’s been serviced some, Nash,” Texas Slim added. “We found the fellow what owned it. He was on the floor, still had an oily rag in his hand.”
“Fever?” I asked, almost breathlessly, remembering my dream.
Texas Slim shook his head. “No…looked like radiation. His hair had fallen out and that sort of thing.”
“Yeah, but we almost didn’t get it because of the dog in the yard,” Carl said.
“Oh, you’re going to go into that, are you?” Texas Slim said.
“Dog?”
“Sure,” Carl said. “Big black mutha. Probably chained out there for days, crazy and foaming at the mouth. Texas here, he tries to make friends with it. Tries to pet it.”
“I didn’t try to pet it.”
“Sure you did.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did, you idiot. You were talking all sweet and sassy to it like you wanted to bone that fucker. Not that I’d be surprised.”
Texas just laughed. “Now see, Nash, that’s sheer invention on the part of my friend here with the small penis. Carl gets confused sometimes. His head isn’t right. But, you know, what with his mother mixing it up out in the barnyard with anything willing, it’s no wonder he turned out this way.”
Carl took a step towards him. “What I tell you about my mother?”
“Nothing I hadn’t already read on the bathroom wall.”
“Keep it up, you peckerwood sonofabitch. One of these days you’re going to dip that wee little pee pee into something and it’s going to get bit off.”
“So I’ll keep it out of your mouth.”
I had to break them apart at this point because the last thing I needed were these assholes swinging on each other and busting out each other’s teeth. Like we didn’t have enough to worry about. And it was about that time that the sandstorm started kicking up. I told Carl to find a garage somewhere to store the bus and by the time he got back the sand was already blowing.
So we hid out in the Army/Navy store and just waited.
There was nothing else to do.
We spent another four days in South Bend because we could not leave.
Visibility was down to a few feet. We listened to the sand blow and blow. It was driven by high winds that howled through the town, burying the streets in drifts and swirling eddies, churning sand-devils whipping and lashing against the building. For days it was like that, the moaning wind and the sound of sand grating against the windows and walls in a fine granulated grit. It found hairline cracks and seams and blew into the store, dusting the floor and covering the displays and shelves in a powdery down.
We waited downstairs in the storeroom, listening to it rage.
Even down there we could feel the sand on our skin, clogging our pores, getting in our hair and dusting our faces. It went on and on.
We huddled together and paged through old magazines and nobody said much. We all wanted to be on the road. We wanted to ditch this desolate burg.
But Mother Nature had other ideas.
As we waited, Carl and Texas Slim tried to stare each other down almost constantly and Janie was pretty much ignoring them and giving me the cold shoulder. It was a long goddamn wait. I spent my time consulting the dog-eared map in my pocket, wondering what we might run into out on the interstate, the whole time my belly filled with needles because we were trapped there. Waiting. I couldn’t shake the dream. Maybe I was paranoid-definitely-but I was feeling that hideous something coming from the east as maybe I’d been feeling it for a long time. I did not doubt its reality. The bottom line was we had to keep moving west. That’s the way it had to be and nobody asked why.
They knew.
They knew, all right.
Just like they knew that the next full moon was less than a week away and it would soon be time for me to make a selection.
The time of The Shape was nearing…
GARY, INDIANA
1
We came into the city on a day that was still, ominous, and hazy. Our VW hippie microbus was on its last legs. Like the wild free-loving days of Haight-Ashbury, the bus was past its prime. She seized up twice out on I-80 coming into Gary and Carl said her bearings were shot and her carb was gummed up. As it was, we pretty much coasted into the city, the love machine wheezing like an asthmatic old man. We needed new wheels because hoofing it across country just wasn’t an option.
We skirted Tolleston and cut through Ambridge until we reached downtown. Coughing out clouds of blue smoke, our VW microbus rolled to a stop before a row of tenements and died with a backfire.
Inside, Carl swore. And then swore again.
I stepped out, fanning my sweaty face with a Cleveland Indians baseball cap. I lit a stale cigarette with a cupped match and then looked around at the devastation…the overturned cars, the rubble, the garbage blowing in the gutters. Drifts of sand were pushed up against the buildings. A crow sat atop the traffic light ahead, cawing. The day was hot and hazy, picked dry as desert bones,
Other than that, there was nothing.
Just the deathly silence that was uniform to most cities since the bombs had come down. A pick-up truck was pulled up to the curb, a crusty yellow skeleton behind the wheel. Birds had built nests in the slats of the ribcage.
I was trying to get a feel for things. Where we should go and what we should do when we got there.
From inside the bus, Texas Slim called: “Nothing here, Nash. Let’s pack it in.”
I ignored him, stepping away from the bus and studying the ruined buildings around me. I saw no life, no movement, but I knew it was out there somewhere. Hidden eyes were watching me, gauging me. The days had long since vanished when you welcomed strangers with open arms.
That’s not how it worked now.
There were people here, I knew, and not all of them were thick with radiation and Fevers. I had to find one of them. Somehow. Some way. The full moon was coming fast now.
There were five of us now?Janie and I, Carl and Texas Slim, and the new guy, Gremlin. We called him Gremlin because we’d picked him up in Michigan City, found him trapped in the trunk of an old AMC Gremlin. Scabs were out the night before, he said, looking for recruits and he jammed himself in the trunk and then couldn’t get out. He was so wedged in there it took all of us to yank his sorry ass free.
I hadn’t made my mind up about him yet. There were things I didn’t like about him?his perpetual bitching?and things I did like: he did what he was told without question. Janie was neutral on him. Carl and Texas Slim liked to pick on him a lot, which was their way of feeling him out and finding out what he was made of.
I scanned the streets, looking for a decent vehicle but all of them were wrecks. I turned my back on the VW and then I heard something. At first, I wasn’t sure what it was, only that it seemed to be coming from the alley across the way. I called out for the others to stay in the bus in case it was a trap and walked over there. Plugging my cigarette into the corner of my mouth, I pulled the Beretta out of my waistband. I worked the slide and jacked a round into the breech, got ready for what might come.
In the alley, shrouded in shadow from the buildings on either side, there was a man.
Barely a man, in fact. Just some emaciated stick figure pulling itself along like a worm. He had three riders on him?rats. They were huge, the size of cats, their bodies swollen and tumorous beneath pelts of greasy gray fur. They looked up with shining rabid eyes and then got back to work eating the man. This is what I had been hearing…the chewing sounds of rats feeding, moist and slobbering like dogs working juicy bones.
There wasn’t much meat on the man, but the rats were taking what they could get. One of them had its snout buried in his throat and was tugging at something in there. The other two were digging in his belly, yanking out his entrails and gnawing on them.
Bold bastards…and in the daytime yet.
The rat that was digging in the man’s throat pulled its gore-smeared snout free and made a low hissing sound. It was ready to defend against all and any poachers. It rose up on its haunches, ready to fight. Droplets of blood glistened on its whiskers. There were wriggling worm-like growths suspended from its belly that looked like teats…except that they moved, pulsed. I aimed, fired, knocking the rat free of the man and pulverizing its head into splashing meat. It rolled over once, legs kicking, and died.
The other two abandoned the man’s belly, leering at me with flat red eyes. They both opened their mouths, blood-stained teeth bared. Strips of tissue hung from their jaws. I shot first one and then the other. The first took a head-shot and died quick enough, the other, a hole punched through its belly, tried to crawl away, squealing and bleeding, dragging its viscera behind it over the dirty pavement. I shot it again and it did not move.
The dying man looked up, his face contorted in utter agony. He had crawled out from behind a dumpster, the rats eating him the entire time, no doubt. He left a smear of blood in his wake. I watched him, wishing there was something I could do. Times were hard, savage, yes, but I still felt compassion at times like these and I wanted nothing more than to help the poor guy.
But it was too late and I was no surgeon.
The rats had done irreparable damage, the trauma gruesome and unpleasant. The guy’s belly was open, his throat was open, his bowels had been pulled out and bitten. Bad enough, but he was obviously dying long before they attacked. Radiation poisoning. I had seen it plenty of times by then and I knew it when I saw it. Most of the guy’s hair had fallen out, his scalp and skin split open in jagged ruts. There were sores everywhere. Most of his teeth were gone and those that remained were rotting brown in the gums. He was bleeding from his ears, his nose, his mouth, even his eyes.
He held a hand up to me, a sickly blotched claw really, as if needing to make contact with a human being one last time. Then his arm fell and he lay there, bleeding, vomiting out bile and blood, gasping in pain.
“Sorry, old man,” I said. “Wish there was something I could do.”
Tensing myself, I put a bullet in the old timer’s head to alleviate his suffering. It was the only thing I could do, but doing so made me feel cold and empty inside. Had I known any good prayers, I might have used one then.
“Don’t mean nothing,” I said under my breath, amazed, as always, that after all the shit I’d been through there could still be something as intangible as guilt in my soul.
Deeper in the shadows of the alley…a rustling, a skittering.
More rats.
Probably a colony near.
I walked quickly back to the van. It was mid-afternoon and usually the rats didn’t get too active until night, but you never knew. They could be unbelievably vicious if you threatened their nests. If they came after me in numbers I could empty my gun into them and it still would do no good. They’d bury me alive in teeth and claws and lice-infested bodies. My bones would be licked clean in minutes.
When I got back in the van, I told Carl to get us the hell out of there.
The van started to roll again, jerking and wheezing, but gradually picking up speed.
2
The thing I hated about Janie most of all was that she was brutally honest, absolutely not a shred of bullshit in her soul. Way things were, deceiving yourself and those around you was a way of life. It kept you sane, kept your feet on the ground. But not Janie.
Whenever we were alone, Janie would look at me with those eyes so clear and so blue, and she’d ask me that same question again and again and again: “Where, Nash? Where are we going? Where are you pointing us to?”
“West,” I’d say. “We’re going west.”
“Why west? What’s out there but more of the same?”
“Because that’s where we have to go. That’s all.”
Janie would keep her mouth shut for a few moments. Then she’d say: “Is that what it wants? Is that what The Shape tells you to do?”
And I would suddenly feel absolutely numb with fear, a gnawing anxiety rising up from within that threatened to swallow me alive. I would not be able to speak. I would lay there, dumbly, Janie in my arms, feeling the cool sweat on her body, smelling her musk and sweetness. The Shape, The Shape, The Shape. Oh dear God. What it wanted, what it demanded.
What I had to give it once a month during the cycle of the full moon.
Jesus.
See, that was Janie: no bullshit. The others would never dare ask me something like that. They knew about The Shape. They knew what it wanted…but it didn’t make for pleasant conversation so it was not brought up.
But Janie wasn’t like that. She’d hit me with questions and I would have to answer them. I’d find my voice, some old and scratchy thing that sounded distant and tinny like an old 78, and tell her, “Yes, that’s what it wants. It wants us to go west. There’s something out there.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Something out there and maybe something we have to get away from back here. I don’t know.”
I wouldn’t say anymore than that. She did not need to know what I suspected was behind us, chewing its way across country, city by city, leaving charnel waste in its path.
Janie would breathe in and out and I’d run a hand over her naked back, that deliciously smooth tanned skin, thinking how she was so much like Shelly. Except that Shelly was dead and Janie was alive.
“How long, Nash? When will it be satisfied? When will The Shape have enough?”
But I would never answer that one because it sickened me to contemplate it. What I would have to do and who I might have to do it to. For I knew with an awful certainty, sure as there was blood rushing through my veins, that there would never be an end to it. I didn’t know what The Shape was exactly, but I sensed that it was part of this new world, a natural force now like wind and water and sunshine.
It would ask things.
&
nbsp; I would do them.
And if it ever asked for Janie? If it ever did that…if it ever goddamn well did that…I didn’t know what I’d do. Because there was no fucking way it would touch her.
I would not allow it.
I didn’t care how hungry it was…
3
Although we found no vehicle that day, we caught a woman for The Shape. Carl got her while out scouting on foot. She was hiding in a building. As he passed by, she threw a rock at him. So he went after her, beat her into submission, bound and gagged her and brought her back.
Janie wasn’t real cool with that.
The woman was barely human, that’s all I can say. She wasn’t infected like a Scab, not yet, but from the look in her eyes that wasn’t too far off. She looked like she wanted to tear out somebody’s throat.
Janie pulled the whole sympathetic thing and told us how that woman was a human being with rights like everyone else. “I want to talk to her, Nash.”
“She’s fucking whacko,” I said.
“Please.”
“Well,” Carl said. “She wasn’t acting real human or ladylike when I found her, Janie. But you can give it a try if you want.”
Carl pulled the duct tape from her mouth.
She watched us with beady, metallic eyes.
Janie put a hand on her shoulder. “Honey…” she said.
The woman flinched, screamed full in Janie’s face, then lunged forward trying to bite her. Carl knocked her to the floor, crouched on her back, and taped her mouth shut again.
“So much for that,” I said.
“She’s nuts,” Janie said. “Absolutely fucking nuts.”
Carl and I laughed our asses off.
4
Night.
We holed up in a little machine shop after a day wasted looking for better wheels than the VW. I chose the machine shop because it was defensible and set back from the street. There were even bars on the windows. If anything or anyone tried to get at us, we’d see them just fine in the moonlight and the street outside would make an excellent killzone.