Biohazard

by Tim Curran

  There were too many.

  Gremlin looked at me and I nodded.

  We brought our weapons up and fired simultaneously right through the windows. The. 357 shattered the glass and it dropped away, but it took two or three rounds from my 9mm to do the same. Everyone was shooting then, knocking the Scabs down and watching more swarm in, bodies dropping and faces splashed off skulls, the bus lurching as it smashed into one after the other, jerking as it rolled over their writhing bodies.

  A Scab with the craziest, glassiest eyes I had ever seen knocked two or three of his brothers away, holding a long-handled axe up for the swinging. I put a round in his left eye socket and he fell back, twisting around in a circle, screeching, hands pressed over his face, blood gushing from between his fingers.

  “KILL ‘EM!” Carl shouted with a sort of manic glee as he steered and fired his Mossberg. “GREASE THESE MOTHERFUCKERS! PUT ‘EM DOWN!”

  The bus was taking a beating and there was only so much ammo. Already the inside was filled with smoke and glass and blood from the Scabs, everyone’s ears ringing from the close-quarter firing.

  We made it through the first gauntlet of Scabs and most fell away as the bus rounded the next block, but others still chased on foot and there was just not enough room to get up any speed out of the old VW. I drilled three more before my Beretta was empty and then I started smashing faces with it. But the Scabs, juiced to the gills on hate and rage, didn’t give in easily. They kept coming, leaping right over the bodies of their comrades. I caught a fist in the jaw, another in the temple, nails scraped across my face. Then hands had me, yanking me right out of my seat. Janie was pulling on me, shouting, screaming, but she was losing the tug-of-war.

  I fought the best I could, clawing and punching, but there was only so much I could do. In my brain, defeat already echoed: I’m done, I’m fucking done in! Them sonsofbitches have me!

  Then Carl swiveled around in his seat, driving with his knees, bringing out a. 38 Airweight and putting a round right into the face of the guy who was trying to drag me out. The bullet passed so close to my left ear I could feel the heat. But it was right on target. The Scab took it right in the nose and he fell away like he was kicked. Carl fired two more times and cored two more Scabs just like that.

  Texas Slim knocked one more away then he was out of ammo, too.

  So was Gremlin.

  There were more guns and ammo in the back, but there was no time to get at them. Carl stomped on the accelerator and the bus jerked, coughed, sounded like it was going to stall out, then it found some speed and flattened two Scabs that ran at it. Another was hanging on the driver’s side and Carl shot him with the Airweight, but he wouldn’t let go. So he shot him again and again. Another tried to dive through Texas Slim’s window and Texas Slim drove a lockblade right into his throat and still he hung on, blood bubbling from the wound.

  “You need to die, friend! Let me show you!” Texas Slim cried out and started stabbing him in the face, the neck, the head, and finally he dropped away.

  Janie was holding me so tight I thought she was going to break my arm, but we made it through.

  “Well, that was a fucking trip,” Carl said.

  And we all started laughing. Just laughing like crazy, everyone cut and bleeding and dirty.

  But in the confusion and haze, Carl never saw the little overturned Ford Focus until it was too late. He jammed the brakes and spun the wheel and the bus glanced off it, jumped the curb and smashed through the plate glass window of an old video store.

  And there it died.

  6

  “Everybody out!” I said.

  We were unharmed for the most part, just bruised and cut. We grabbed the guns from the back, the Geiger and medical kit, a few nylon bags of odds and ends. Carl had his AK-47 and I had my. 30.06. Texas Slim reloaded his Eagle and Gremlin had done the same now with his. 357. I made Janie take the. 45 Browning, but she wasn’t too happy about it. She held onto it like I’d given her a moist brown turd to call her own.

  Outside, I saw no more Scabs.

  We were lucky, real lucky.

  Radiation had made the Scabs. Who they were before did not matter. The radiation stewed their chromosomes, made their hair fall out, made their faces go white and, yes, scabby. Most of them had black glistening eyes, but some had pink eyes like albinos. Dosed with radioactivity or not, they were mean and violent as hell. And insane. Just crazy mad. They’d come at you with weapons, with their bare hands, with their teeth. All anyone knew was that they were dangerous like rabid dogs and you had to put them down the same way.

  Anyway, things were real quiet in the streets.

  A dirty, glaring haze hung in the sky, glancing off the buildings and the cracked windshields of cars. You had to squint to see anything. And that’s probably why we didn’t see the three Scabs waiting for us.

  One of them was drooling, his body twitching with spasms like he was amped up on Meth. The one next to him was doing the same, his eyes rolling in their sockets, his entire body jerking around like he was a marionette hooked up to strings. There was some kind of bubbling gray slime coming out of his left nostril. Both of them were grunting like rooting hogs. They all had knives and they wanted to use them.

  Knives against guns…didn’t make much sense, but nothing about these guys made sense.

  The third one was semi-coherent. “The cunt,” he said. “We want your cunt. Give us that cunt. We want her.”

  “Only cunt here is you,” Carl said.

  Texas Slim giggled. “I don’t think the lady cares for the term.”

  “Shut up,” I told him.

  “We want that cunt,” the Scab said again.

  I kept Janie behind me. “Come and get her. She’s yours.”

  Their brains were so melted, they just didn’t get it.

  They stepped forward and I dropped two of them with the. 30.06, both gut-shot, and Carl put two rounds in the other guy. He fell over dead. The other two were squirming around, bleeding and moaning, making weird squealing noises. They were in pain and death would be a long time in coming.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  “Nash,” Janie said. “You can’t let them suffer.”

  “Fuck I can’t.”

  “Rick.”

  “C’mon, Janie. Enough already. Save the Pollyanna shit for another time.”

  “Rick, you can’t.”

  “Sure he can, Janie,” Texas Slim said, pulling out his knife. “In fact, if one were to employ a bit of creativity, they could die that much slower.”

  He bent over to have a little carefree fun mutilating the dying Scabs and I told him to knock it off. Goddamn Texas Slim. He’d spawned in the shallow end of the gene pool. Maybe he had tortured puppies as a boy and had moved on to bigger things since. You had to keep your eye on him. He claimed to have studied mortuary science in Baton Rouge and had an unhealthy interest in corpses and those about to become so. I had seen him do some things with the dead that were not only unpleasant, but obscene.

  “You’re going to let them die like that?” Janie said.

  “They’re not even human,” I told her.

  I pulled her away and she wrenched free and I knew we were about to have a fight and make the others uncomfortable, but suddenly then and there, out in the middle of that hazy dead street, we all just stopped. The only sound was the dying Scabs rolling in their own blood. Just silence. A silence that was so heavy it seemed to have physical weight.

  Nothing moved.

  No breeze stirred.

  The air suddenly grew very dry, charged with static electricity. And hot. Sweat popped on Janie’s face. It rolled down my brow and dripped off my nose.

  “Oh shit,” Texas Slim said. “Here comes the blow.”

  Dust storm.

  The ground started to shake and there was a distant rumbling. I looked around, wondering where we were going to make shelter. My throat was dry. The world began to thrum as the storm grew nearer.

  Gr
emlin looked desperate. “Nash! C’mon, fucking Nash! Are we just going to stand here and wait for it or what?”

  I wanted to backhand that bastard, put him to the ground and leave him there until that storm cycled in and fried his shit. The need to do that was very strong.

  “Look,” Carl said.

  There it was. It was coming out of the east in a raging tempest, gathering up dust and dirt and refuse and anything that wasn’t tied down. It was huge and hungry and roaring like a primeval monster. Everything was shaking now: the streets, the buildings. As the storm came-and it came really fast-it cast a murky shadow before it. That shadow engulfed block after block and?

  “Run!” I said. “Over there!”

  There was a building across the way that looked pretty sturdy and pretty solid. We made for it, but the door was locked. Carl blew it open and everyone jumped in, clambering around in the darkness. Texas Slim found an old desk and used it to secure the door shut.

  “Okay,” I told them. “Let’s find those stairs.”

  Through a grime-streaked window, I watched the street out there darken as the storm moved in. And by then, the whole building was shaking.

  7

  Ever since Doomsday, germs terrify me.

  No, I’m not talking OCD here or anything so trifling, I’m talking about the horror that I feel when I think of all the really nasty germs floating around out there and what they can do. The radiation, as I said, did something to those germs, made bigger, badder, more virulent bugs out of them, creating deadly strains and mutated life forms of the sort I didn’t even want to think about. I suppose some are the same old bugs, but many I know for a fact are much deadlier than they once were. Case in point, it was rumored that some exotic form of hemorrhagic fever similar to Ebola was burning its way through Akron and had already devastated what was left of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

  Except, as it turned out, it was no rumor.

  The form of hemorrhagic fever we’re talking about here is, like I said, very much like Ebola. You remember good old Ebola, don’t you? It laid waste to quite a few villages in Zaire, the Sudan, and the Ivory Coast back when the wheels of the world were still turning and not completely flat. It was big news. Scary news. A deadly, communicable “hot” virus that was filling graveyards with no end in sight. But it did end. It came and then left, ostensibly of its own choosing.

  Now this lethal strain of hemorrhagic fever-let’s call it Ebola-X, that sounds suitably frightening-is like Ebola squared, Ebola to the tenth power, Ebola with a seriously pissy disposition, Ebola jacked-up on Meth and feeling extremely virile and kill-happy. I know these things because, at the very end, after Doomsday and right before our government collapsed, this new virulent Ebola-X was already laying siege to places like Washington D.C., Baltimore, and Boston.

  And it’s still out there, mutating, generating, taking what godawful form I can only guess at.

  Let’s say for the hell of it that you have contacted Ebola-X. From what I understand, communicability is roughly 98% and fatality 100%. This is death row, people, with no governor’s last minute reprieve. It begins with muscle aches, the sweats, and a spiking fever. Next comes agonizing abdominal pains, pinpoint hemorrhages in your brain. Your eyes go a bright, glistening blood-red. Your skin goes yellow and cracks open with sores. By this point your brain is pretty much jelly and blood gushes from any and all orifices while you vomit out black goo, infected blood, and macerated sections of your stomach and intestines. Death is within sixteen hours of first contact and those sixteen hours are the longest sixteen hours imaginable. I personally am not religious. I don’t believe there’s a little invisible deity in the sky who watches over us. It’s a nice, comforting thought, but I don’t believe in spiritual fairy tales and I’m pretty sure neither do the millions who’ve died in concentration camps, from mass murder, witch hunts, race crimes, and disease outbreaks. So while I don’t believe in God-though I would like to-I do believe in the Devil and the Devil is Ebola-X.

  So, you get the picture, Ebola-X to human beings is pretty much like direct sunlight to a vampire…except that crumbling to dust would probably be far less painful (and messy).

  Now let me tell you about Texas Slim. I haven’t said much about him; I’ve let you form your own opinions from my, hopefully, objective impressions and memories. Now Texas has an unusual past. He’s a bit quirky, offbeat, possibly borderline sociopathic. He laughs at things that make others cringe, tells very unpleasant stories that like piss in the punch don’t go down well in mixed company. Enough said. But I think beyond all that, he’s okay. He’s tough, he’s disciplined, he’s loyal, and unusually compassionate. Maybe that’s how they breed ‘em down there in Dixieland Louisiana. Regardless, I like him. He stands by me and I stand by him.

  Now it would be easy enough to dismiss him as a weirdo, but don’t make that mistake. Let me tell you what happened to him before he joined up with my posse, which we could call the Loyal Order of The Shape or the Fraternal Order of the Esoteric Shape. Neither of which is very funny.

  Anyway, Texas was living in Morgantown, West Virginia when the bombs fell. Being that he had a second cousin in Pittsburgh, he went there. His cousin-a large, pear-shaped woman named Jemmy Kilpatrick, who sported more tattoos than teeth-was holed-up in her apartment building with a posse of twenty others. Texas joined the posse. He was warmly welcomed…even if he did not find the romantic attentions of Jemmy so welcoming, that is. Things at the “commune,” as he called it, went well. Everyone pitched in. Everyone scavenged for food, weapons, fresh water. They did a high, fine job of it.

  Then Jemmy came down with a fever.

  Her symptoms pretty much followed those I mentioned above. Within six hours, her eyes were bright red-“Dracula eyes” as Texas Slim himself put it-and blood was literally gushing from her nose, her vagina, ass, bubbling out of her pores and dripping from her ears. She was like a ticking bomb for several hours, then she exploded. Burning with fevers, smelling of dank rot and drainage, she could no longer sit up and just stared off into space as the blood welled out and her skin went the waxy yellow of a transparent apple. Her flesh cracked open and bled. She became a seething mass of fevers and running blood and then…she “crashed and bled out” as the biohazard specialists say. She began shuddering with spasms. She vomited out great gouts of black-red arterial blood, spraying it liberally around and spattering those, Texas included, who were trying to care for her. She heaved out a great quantity of some greasy black substance as well. Texas said the room smelled like “a bag of hot vomit.” I don’t doubt it. But the most horrible thing of all, he told me, was the ripping sound of her anus as it opened to vent blood and tissue, which was probably what was left of her bowels. She died very quickly after that, submerging in a pool of her own blood and waste.

  Now most people would have run off long before and most of the commune had.

  But not Texas Slim. He stayed right to the end, drenched in Jemmy’s blood and drainage. He said the idea that he was infected by a lethal organism did not occur to him. I think he’s bullshitting. He knew, but he was not the sort to abandon those in need even at the risk of his own life.

  Of the twelve people who stayed behind, all of them-save Texas himself-were infected within twenty-four hours.

  For the next two days Texas was busy taking care of them as they crashed and bled out. It was as close to hell as he’d ever want to go, he told me. All those infected people stuck in that tight room stinking of rancid blood and sour vomit, convulsing and shitting out their insides, their bright red watery eyes staring at him as they fell into terminal shock and vomited out everything that was inside.

  He buried all of them in a vacant lot next door.

  When he told this story, it was just him and me with a bottle of Jack Daniels. He would not share it with anyone else. And as I listened, it was like the poison was being squeezed from his soul. It scared me. Scared me because I wondered if he still carried the virus and scared me because I fin
ally had a first person account of exactly the sort of shit that was making the rounds out there. What he had been through made my own experiences with my wife wasting away of cholera sound like pink party cake and balloons.

  But he survived. Both the bug and the experience.

  But you can see now why I’m terrified of those germs. What they were and what they are even now becoming. Because they’re constantly changing, mutating. It’s their nature. But the very worst thing is that germs make me think of that dream I had in the Army/Navy storeroom in South Bend. For what were they now mutating into? What sort of twisted, hideous evolution had spawned that thing I saw or dreamed of? What sort of pathogenic viral horror had the moldering plague graveyards finally given birth to?

  I didn’t know.

  But I could feel it out there, getting closer and closer, spreading a tenebrous shroud over the ruined cities of men as it came creeping ever westward.

  8

  In the building, after a meal of Spam and crackers, I sat by the window listening to the radioactive dust blow through the streets below. We were up on the fourth floor in a locked room. It was good to get up as high as you could because the truly lethal supercharged dust was near ground-level. It was saturated with fissile waste materials such as Strontium-90, Cesium-137, and Plutonium. The higher dust was really just plain old dust and debris caught in the cyclone. So the higher you were, the safer you were.

  But down on the streets it was deadly.

  I sat there, body aching, eyes crusty from lack of sleep. The storm had died down somewhat and the building was no longer shaking, plaster falling from the walls, but it was still blowing. Every now and then a good gust would grab the building and shake it like a fist and we’d cling to each other and cover our heads, blessing the people who had built that pile of bricks to last.