by Tim Curran
I pulled up a chair before the window, cradling my Savage bolt-action. 30.06 in my lap. I was figuring there wasn’t much Gary could throw at me that I couldn’t cut down with that.
I was sitting watch. Carl was snoring in the back room with Texas. Janie was sleeping, too.
There was nothing to do but watch that empty, waiting street. Now and then I’d lean forward up against the glass and see the moon up there above the town. It was not quite full, but damn close. Just round and fat and leering like a yellow eye, its gaze painting the buildings a phosphorescent yellow.
It reminded me of when I was a kid.
There was an older girl named Mary LaPeer who had this flowing dark hair and brilliant blue eyes. I was just absolutely in love with her. Mary had a telescope and on warm summer nights she’d take it out in the backyard and look at the moon and stars, sometimes until one or two in the morning. I’d watch out my window, my heart beating with a slow and expectant roll, waiting for Mary to come out. When she did, I’d slip out my window and join her. Mary showed me the moon and Mars and the Crab Nebula one time, but no heavenly body she showed me burned brighter than the stars in my eyes when I looked at her and listened to her talk about the rings of Saturn or the misty yellow orb of Venus.
Mary was five years older than me. I was infatuated with her until the day she graduated high school and moved away, off to college. On that day, I cried and cried because I knew I’d never see her again and I didn’t. Even now the memory of that pained me, cut something open inside my belly and made me bleed. But I never forgot those summer nights or the crickets chirping, the soft whisper of Mary’s voice and the Milky Way spread out over the sky and Mary telling me that one day, her and I would travel out there. Together.
Sitting there at the window, peering off into graveyard of the world, that moon poised above, I remembered Mary and missed her and wanted to sob. Maybe I lost myself in my memories too much, because I think I drifted off.
And when I woke, the Geiger Counter was ticking madly at my feet.
There was someone out in the street.
I started in my chair and nearly fell right out of it. I blinked my eyes a few times to see if I was imagining things, but I wasn’t.
There was a girl standing out in the street looking right at me.
She was like some wraith that had burst the gates of a tomb, just thin and ragged and flyblown. And that’s when I knew she wasn’t a girl at all. That’s when something jumped in my stomach and I could smell the acrid stink of fear sweating out my pores.
She was one of the Children.
I think I tried to call out to the others, but my mouth went all rubbery like I’d just gotten a shot of Novocaine in the gums. I made a sound, but not enough of one for anybody but myself to hear. More than anything, I just sat there stiffly like something whittled from a log. Maybe I thought if I played dead, pretended I wasn’t alive, then that awful little girl out there would just go on her way. But no dice.
She saw me.
She knew I was there. Maybe she saw me move or maybe she smelled me, tasted the fear rising from me and decided she wanted more. In the dappled moonlight, I could see her just fine-the colorless hair falling to her shoulders, the gray skin and horribly seamed face that looked more like an African fetish mask than human features, something worked with a knife and chisel. Her eyes were yellow and luminous, sunk deep into exaggerated bony orbits like candles burning from the depths of mine shafts.
Breathing hard, the spit dried up in my mouth, I brought up the. 30.06 with what I thought was a careful, confident motion. But the truth was that my hands were shaking so badly I could barely hold onto the damn thing.
The girl out there had not come any closer.
She stood her ground and I stood mine.
I had to shoot her. I had to put her down. I had to spray the irradiated filth in her skull all over the pavement and I had to do it soon. Because whether it was out and out telepathy or something biochemical, when one of them knew where you were, they all knew.
But I hesitated.
I knew Carl wouldn’t have and not Texas Slim either. But even after all I’d seen and done, the various encounters I’d had with these little ghouls, I still was human enough where the idea of killing a child…or something that had once been a child…just turned something sour inside me, filled me with rot and venom, made me want to vomit out my stomach.
A voice in my head that did not belong to The Shape, but was probably simple old instinct told me, Look at that fucking thing, Rick, it’s not human, it’s not a child. It’s gray and shriveled and embalmed-looking, dusty and filthy like something that crawled from a grave. It’s walking meat, nothing more.
Great advice. I brought the gun up and I was going to kill that thing because I knew I had to. But as frightening as that child was, she was also somehow pathetic, more victim than victimizer even if she was lethal as the glowing rods pulled from a reactor core. At that moment, perhaps sensing my indecision, she brought up her hands, held them out palms up like some miserable waif begging for alms, for a couple dirty nickels to feed her starving siblings with.
Just do it, you idiot.
I sighted her in with the rifle, seeing her for what she really was: a monster. A seething, creeping horror from a pit of radioactive waste. Even at that distance, I could see those eyes perhaps too well and they seized something up inside me. Maybe they weren’t luminous exactly, but a shiny translucent silver-yellow staring from those depressions like shimmering opals planted in the sockets of a skull. There was nothing in those eyes. That were flat and dead, voids filled with a blankness, a blackness that existed, perhaps, beyond the rim of the universe.
I hesitated too long.
Her hands fell away and then one came right back up, pointing at me and her oval mouth opened like the maw of lamprey, moonlight winking off all those tiny hooked teeth. And she screamed. Made a shrill droning sound like a locust in a summer field, but loud enough to make my ears bleed.
And the others started coming.
I heard a commotion in the back room that I knew was Carl and Texas coming to do some killing.
I took aim again and put a round right into that little girl. It shattered the plate glass window and caught her right in the chest, throwing her back and down, spraying blood and meat twenty feet or more. It happened immediately to her as it always does with the Children: she began to burn up. It was like whatever was stored up inside her went at once, potential energy going kinetic. By the time she hit the pavement, about as dead as dead gets, she was already smoking like a bag of burning shit. Some crazy blue fire erupted inside her and her flesh liquefied like hot tallow, steaming and sputtering, her face sliding off the bone and her blackened skeleton trembling in the street for a moment, than crumbling away.
It happened that fast.
But by then there were other Children.
I never saw where they came from, maybe from under the rusting wrecks of cars or out of sewers and cellar windows, spilling from chimneys and skittering down the brick facades of buildings like spiders. No matter, they were in the street. A dozen of them and more on the way.
They ringed the front of the machine shop, chattering and squealing with delight, eyes shining and mouths opening and closing like eels sucking air, skeletal fingers all pointing at me while each and everyone of them made that high, keening noise that I knew meant, there, there he is, one of the different ones, the alien in our midst, kill him, kill him, kill him…
They started to close in, a ragged and emaciated band, heads tangled with matted hair and faces contorted and vicious.
“Motherfucker,” I heard Carl say, “it’s the goddamn brats again.”
He kicked out what remained of the window and by then Texas was at my side, a Browning. 45 in one hand and a Desert Eagle in the other like some death-crazy guerrilla that wanted to die hard with smoking pistols in both fists.
The Children, maybe twenty or thirty of them, swarmed at us like
insects, hopping and jumping, screeching and droning. I dropped three of them and Texas four others. Carl cut two of them nearly in half. And it was sheer pandemonium, the dying ones sending up great clouds of ash and greasy smoke and the living ones pouring forth right over the tops of them.
But none of them made it through the volley of fire.
A few got within three or four feet of us and we blew them away, opening skulls and perforating chests. I put my last two rounds in the belly of a little boy and he actually stumbled and fell almost on top of me, impaling himself on a shelf of jagged glass, burning up right in front of me. Carl kicked his carcass back outside before we asphyxiated on the fumes.
And about the time the others started to pull away, the street out there blazing bright like the mouth of a crematorium, somebody hit us from behind. I heard Janie cry out and then somebody knocked me and Carl aside and the next thing I knew, the crazy lady we’d captured was diving through the missing window, rolling across the sidewalk and coming up on her feet, hands still tied behind her back. Carl reloaded and was about to put her down, but he didn’t get the chance.
A half dozen of the Children fell on her, taking her down effortlessly, putting their hands all over her and suctioning themselves to her with those lamprey mouths. The woman screamed and shook, but she couldn’t throw her riders. They clung on, incinerating her, reducing her to a smoldering, insane thing that vomited out loops of cremated entrails.
We shot through her to get the Children.
And then they were all blazing and smoking and writhing, curling up and sputtering like bacon on a hot skillet. One of them broke free in its death agonies and shambled maybe five or six feet in our direction, then collapsed to the sidewalk, shuddering and flaking away, finally puking out some black and bubbling mass before going still.
And that was it.
We’d survived another attack by the Children. We just stood there, gasping and shaking, twenty or more Children lying in the street, fused into some blackened, steaming mass of bones and bodies.
“Those are some mean little shits,” Carl said.
“We better get out of here,” Janie said, refusing to view the carnage. “Those bodies are burning hot.”
So we went down into the cellar and waited for dawn.
There wasn’t much else we could do.
5
It was on those glaring, overcast days where the world was sank in a saffron haze that you could never see danger until it was right upon you. Sometimes when the dust storms came we were caught out in the open. It always started the same way with a silence that was heavy and sullen, a stillness that would make your flesh crawl. Then the wind would come howling like banshees, screaming through the streets, engulfing the world in a whipping tempest of radioactive dust. If you couldn’t get to cover and fast, the wind would scrape your skin right off and the radiation would roast you from the inside out.
I had once seen a pack of ragbags out picking through the gutters get caught in a storm like that.
They didn’t make it ten feet before the wind nailed their coffins shut. When it lifted and the dust had dispersed, the roentgens dropping away to near-normal, there was nothing out there but six bodies laying in the street. They were blistered and baked, brown as old shoe leather, tendrils of smoke rising from them with a nauseating stench of burning flesh.
Regardless, Gary was desolate.
About what you’d expect a year after Doomsday. The Geiger was reading fifty micro-roentgens per hour, background radiation, which was warm but certainly not hot. Livable. Other than that, it was more of the same: deserted streets blown with rubbish, smashed vehicles, burned-out houses. Lots of rubble from the last days when Martial Law was declared and the Army tried to put down all the private militias.
Gary was no worse than any other city, of course, but I wasn’t for hanging around and either were the others. We needed a dependable set of wheels. We needed to be free and mobile. We needed something else, too, but we weren’t talking about it.
Carl, being military-minded, wanted a Hummer with a mounted fifty-cal. Texas Slim wanted a hearse. Janie didn’t care either way and I just wanted something dependable. Gremlin, of course, had no opinion. He’d bitch whatever we got.
With a third of the human population wiped out in thirty-six hours and millions more dying from fallout in the weeks and months following, you’d think autos would be easy to come by.
Not so.
“C’mon, you piece of shit,” Carl said, turning into a crowded avenue that was strewn with the hulks of rusting cars and trucks. All the tires had been stripped away for fires. Most of the windshields were shattered. He had to snake his way through them and it was no easy bit with that wheezing old bus jerking and stopping and flooding out all the time. “Cocksucker…fucking cocksucker.”
Texas Slim giggled. “I like that. I like how he does that. Swearing like a sailor.”
“Kiss my ass,” Carl told him.
“See? He keeps doing that. It’s hilarious.”
Texas Slim was a little odd. He wasn’t from Texas at all. Somewhere in Louisiana, he claimed, but Carl called always called him Texas and so did we. He was good with a gun, good with scavenging, good with doing what he was told without question. He was just a little off sometimes and it was often hard to tell whether he was serious or just laughing his ass off at everyone and everything.
“Hey, you suppose they have any willing ladies around here?” he wanted to know. “Or even a few that aren’t so willing?”
“You just keep fucking your hand and shut up,” Carl told him.
Janie sighed and I leaned back in the rear seat, thinking about what we would have to do once we got some wheels and who we might have to do it to.
“Hey,” Gremlin said. “Check it. We got some local action here.”
There were a couple old ragbags in their tattered salvation army coats picking up dead rats and dumping them into potato sacks. Once upon a time before the world went mad, they had been bums, homeless people, but in this brave new scary world there were no more bus stations to sleep in and no soft tourists to panhandle. Now they were scavengers and they’d eat just about anything.
Carl eyed them warily. “I got me a real funny feeling here.”
“So get your hand out of your pants,” Texas Slim told him.
I waited, not putting much on Carl’s feeling, but then Janie began to tense up next to me and I knew something was going on.
“Shit,” Carl said.
The ragbags had no sense of intuition. They just kept picking up their goods and dreaming of browned rat-stew and humbleberry rat-pie, happily ignorant in the fog of their own stench. Carl hit the brakes and everyone almost fell out of their seats. But nobody bitched, because by then we all saw what Carl was seeing.
Scabs.
Three of them were standing on top of an old rusted station wagon. They had metal pipes in their hands. They were paying no attention to anything but the ragbags. They jumped off the wagon, hit the dirty street running and, just like that, they fell on the ragbags and started piping them. The ragbags just went down, curling themselves into protective balls, and the Scabs just beat them until their pipes were red and crusted with hair and tissue and the ragbags were no longer moving.
Then they looked over at the us.
Just the three of them. They were naked, their faces a scabrous dead-white, burst open with sores.
“Get us out of here!” Gremlin said. “Why are we just fucking sitting here?”
Carl got the van moving. The flesh at the back of my neck was prickling, every muscle in my body standing taut and trembling. That’s when the other Scabs showed.
Not just two or three, but dozens. Most of them were naked.
They were coming from every direction. Leaping off cars and running from ruined buildings, crawling out of alleys and dropping from broken windows. They had knives and axes, pipes and broomsticks, hammers and meat cleavers. This was their turf and they were going t
o protect it. Up until then, I had never seen Scabs organized like that. It was not a good thing.
There was no going back and everyone knew it.
Time to go hunting.
More of them were pouring into the streets now, streaming out of their coverts and hides, all carrying axes and pikes and hammers. But no guns. I looked real closely and saw no guns. And at that point, it was all we had going for us. I didn’t need to tell anyone what had to come down. Their hands were already filled with guns. We were going to cowboy our way out, Wild West it.
Janie looked at me with raw panic in her eyes, but there was no time for reassuring words. Carl had his Mossberg 500 across his lap. The beauty of the Mossberg was that it was no longer than your arm but it had real killing power. Texas Slim had his big bluesteel Desert Eagle. 50 cal ready to bust and Gremlin was holding a chromed-up Smith. 357. I jacked a fresh magazine into my Beretta.
Janie wouldn’t take a weapon.
“Put your head down and keep it there,” I told her. “Okay, Carl. Roll.”
Carl eased the bus into motion, got it rolling to ten and then twenty miles an hour. Windows were rolled up, doors locked.
The Scabs converged.
“Come on, you ugly pricks,” Texas Slim said. “Come get you some lovely fifty-cal.”
They went after our hippie bus like it was a living thing that needed to be brought down, a primal beast in need of slaying. Like stone-age hunters attacking a mammoth, they charged right in. Hatchets and axes flew, pipes rose and fell, hammers banged and knives gouged. The rearview mirrors were knocked free, the windshield feathering out with cracks as rocks and bricks glanced off it. The front passenger side window collapsed inward in a spider-webbed tangle as Texas Slim fired three rounds from his Eagle point-blank at the screaming Scabs. A cluster of them fell away. Nothing speaks quite as loud as. 50 cal. Carl didn’t wait for them to get his window. When they crowded in, jabbing and pounding and scratching with their long white fingers, he brought the Mossberg up and fired. The window disappeared and a couple Scabs had buckshot sprayed in their faces.