Biohazard

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Biohazard Page 19

by Tim Curran


  Gremlin looked to me for support and got nothing but a cool blank stare. “I heard it, same as you did. But I hid out. You think I was going to come out and face that fucking thing with the way it was howling and tearing this place apart?”

  “You were armed, weren’t you? You had a three-fifty-seven. Why didn’t you try and pop our visitor?”

  I stood there, waiting, as did the others.

  Texas Slim was interrogating the guy, but someone had to. Something just didn’t wash about Gremlin’s story and it didn’t wash so much that it just plain stank rotten.

  “What is this? What are you insinuating?”

  “Yeah,” Carl finally put in. “Fuck are you insinuating, asshole?”

  But Texas, being Texas, just shrugged and smiled thinly, let it all go. He’d made his point and he knew it. He’d cast doubt on Gremlin and a doubt that was tangible enough so that even thick heads like Carl picked up on it.

  After all that, I got them organized, got everyone loaded up with their duffels and sacks and on the road. There was only so much daylight and I didn’t want to waste a second of it.

  14

  By late afternoon the next day, we still had no wheels.

  We wandered for hours, searched as far west as the Tri-City Plaza on 5^th, but the Geiger started beeping because we were getting too close to Chicago. So we cut back to Midtown, then down as far as Glen Park, searching Gleason Park and the University lots and still came up with nothing. Then back downtown to Union Station to check parking garages. Just about everything had been stripped of tires or was smashed-up or had a dead battery. It seemed pretty hopeless.

  We were marooned in Gary.

  Trapped in that cemetery.

  We had to get out. That was the bottom line. The background radiation was a little high, not too bad, but we were practically on Chicago’s doorstep and if a good gust came blowing east from the Windy City we would be in trouble.

  As we walked, I thought about all the things I missed. Fresh food, TV, and motorcycles came to mind right away. There were bikes around, but most of them were either wrecked or in pretty bad shape. All the dealerships had been looted after society and law and order had collapsed. People being people had helped themselves to all those little extras they’d never been able to afford. It was tough finding good vehicles, too. Most cars and trucks were either smashed up out on the roads, abandoned and rusting, or had been stripped of useable parts. You’d see a lot of that. Really nice pick-ups, SUVs, sports cars sitting around on flat tires with shattered windshields, engines stripped or destroyed. Oh, there were plenty of drivable rides out there, but the people who had them also had guns. Lot of times you’d just find cars with skeletons in them.

  Nobody was in a real good mood. We were tense, expectant, waiting for something truly horrible and truly dangerous to come around every corner. Because it was there. We all felt that. It was watching us, waiting for us, we just didn’t know what form it would take. And after those sounds we’d heard last night, we expected only the worse.

  But that was night.

  This was day: a misty, damp sort of day that carried an unpleasant chill to it. I didn’t like us being this vulnerable. In a vehicle we had the luxury of protection, of shooting and driving off…but not on foot. Any pack of crazies could chase us, corner us, and we only had so much ammo.

  As we walked down yet another street, scoping out the rusted hulks of vehicles, the rubble and refuse, the bones heaped in the gutters, I was thinking about Gremlin.

  Gremlin in general annoyed me in ways I could not exactly put a finger on…but after that weird howling last night, he had popped back up this morning and something had been very off about him. I was not sure what. There was something there and my gut-sense told me it was trouble, but of what variety I could not imagine. The howling. Gremlin coming back. That fucked-up, creepy grin on his face. Maybe I was just tired and wigged, but I was also certain I was not wrong in my assessment of him.

  We kept going. Another street, plodding along. More wrecks, more staring empty buildings. Drifts of sand in the street. A light breeze that smelled dirty and low. I watched Texas Slim watch Gremlin and wondered what was going through his mind.

  “Years ago,” Texas was saying, “I worked at a quaint little establishment called the Horas Brothers Family Mortuary in Lafayette. That’s in Louisiana, Carl, case you were wondering.”

  “Yeah, I know where the hell it is.”

  “I had…well, gotten myself into some difficulties with a young lady in New Iberia and it necessitated that I seek gainful employment to pay my child support, you understand,” he said, chuckling to himself. “Well, one day we received the body of a criminal named Tommy Carbone. He was known in underworld circles as Tommy the Tripod and the reason for that should be quite obvious. Anyhow, this poor soul died in prison. Apparently…and you’ll excuse me, Janie…all this poor man did was masturbate three, four, five times a day, I learned. And then it became worse and it was every hour on the hour. In his cell, the prison workshop, the dining hall. Finally, the prison authorities took him to the infirmary and strapped him down. Poor Tommy. He laid there hour after hour with that quite mammoth penis of his standing straight up.

  “Finally, he went into convulsions and died and then he came to us. The problem was, you see, that his large and particularly ungainly member was still quite hard. Death will do that, you see. Even after we suctioned the blood from him, it would not lay down like a good dog. Well…we had a sheet thrown over him and it looked like a tent. As it was, his manhood being so long, we simply couldn’t close the lid on the casket so, necessity being the mother of invention-”

  “Do we have to hear this?” Janie said, slapping at a fly.

  “-we used a rotary saw to cut it off. I’ll never forget that day as long as I lived when I felled that high timber. I felt just like a lumberjack. Timber! I cried when it came crashing to earth. Of course, the director, Archie Horas, being a man of the most morbid imagination, had that gargantuan member stuffed, shellacked, and made into a fine walking stick.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Carl told him. “A walking stick. Jesus Christ.”

  “I smell smoke,” Janie said.

  I did, too. It could’ve been a good thing and it could’ve been a bad thing.

  “Let’s follow it,” Gremlin said. “Might be somebody cooking grub.”

  “And could be somebody cooking somebody else,” Carl pointed out.

  “All right,” I said, a headache beginning to thread its way through my skull. “Let’s shitcan the talking for awhile. Everybody keep their eyes open. We gotta find something here.”

  And we did as we reached the western edge of the city, skirting what had once been Tolleston and moving north towards Westbrook across West 6^th and Taft. The stink of smoke grew very heavy.

  “Just ahead,” Carl said.

  Plumes of smoke were rising over the roofs of buildings.

  And there was something on the warm, dusty wind: the stink of death.

  15

  I took point, ready for just about anything.

  In the overcast sky above, I saw birds circling: crows, buzzards.

  I led my posse down an alley and around the collapsed remains of a building which had fallen into its own gaping cellar. There was water down there, black and clogged with leaves.

  Scanning what lay ahead with my rifle, I said, “C’mon. Move slow. Move quiet.”

  There was rubble in the streets, of course, the fire-scarred facades of buildings, buses and cars and trucks scattered about, some smashed, other overturned, many just rusted to hulks of iron in which birds and rats nested. But it wasn’t just this or the bullet-pocked storefronts, the broken glass, and rivers of sand blown over everything.

  There were bodies. Fresh ones.

  At least a dozen bodies in the street in every imaginable state of mutilation. Some were missing arms or legs, one woman looked like she had been partially skinned. Another had apparently been trying to c
rawl beneath an overturned truck and somebody had pinned her to the ground with a homemade spear shaft.

  I led the way in with my. 30.06 and the others fell in behind, Carl and Texas Slim flanking them, ready to start busting.

  “You know what happened here, don’t you?” Texas Slim said.

  And I did, all right. But I had other things on my mind and I wasn’t spending any effort thinking about it, doing anything that might divert my attention from what might be waiting out there in the wreckage and the shadowy ruins of buildings. The stench of recent death was in the air. Flies were buzzing in clouds, carrion crows circling high overhead. Three of four cars were burning and I was guessing that they had been running before this happened.

  We came upon a young couple spread-eagle in the street. There was blood all over their naked, pale bodies. They had been decapitated, the heads nowhere in sight. Flies swarmed over the stumps of their necks. With a sickening lurch in my stomach, I figured that some of that blood was from what had happened to them before their heads were chopped off.

  I was not only sick to my stomach now, I was pissed off. And getting more pissed off by the minute. We moved around a pickup truck that was still blazing with a sharp stink of burning rubber, plastic, and oil. Smoke twisted in the air, ground mist blowing around in damp sheets.

  “Oh, God,” Janie said.

  There was a heap of bodies on the sidewalk. All of them were naked. They had been slashed and hacked and disemboweled, dumped here in a bloody heap of limbs and staring, sightless faces. Their eyes had been carved out, noses slit free, and the bleeding ovals of their mouths bore witness to the fact that their teeth had been yanked. And every one of them had been crudely scalped.

  “Fucking Clans,” Carl said.

  Yeah, it was true. The Hatchet Clans always scalped their victims. People said they wore belts and sashes of scalps. Nobody but them came through an area and butchered like this. The Scabs and the other gangs of crazies were violent and bloodthirsty, but they were not this methodical, this viciously creative. The Hatchet Clans were-as Sean had pointed out-like army ants on the march, killing and destroying everything in their path. I knew little about them other than that they were brutal and deranged beyond belief. And that they came in numbers, in huge mobs like swarms of locusts come to devour a field. I didn’t know what held them together, whether it was some social or religious grouping or just a shared bond of insanity.

  One thing was for sure: they were tribal and they had gone native. I had heard they were all infected by some kind of morbid fungus. Maybe that was it. Beyond that, they were sinister and smart. They liked to set up ambushes, draw you in by sacrificing a few of their own. Make you think you had the upper hand and then storm in by the hundreds and overrun you.

  Everyone was very tense. Other than the Children or the risk of Fevers, nothing could inspire terror like these guys.

  We found seven heads, mostly women’s, that had been arranged in some kind of spiraling circle on the hood of a sedan. Symbols were painted in blood on their foreheads. Two men were laying in front of an apartment building. They had been dismembered completely…then with a wicked sense of humor, their torsos and attendant limbs had been arranged in proper anatomical order…just no longer connected.

  From a street sign a woman had been hanged by the feet, her fingertips just brushing the pavement. She had been eviscerated, her body cavity hollowed right out. Her breasts had been cut off, her scalp and deathmask peeled free. On her back were more bloody symbols of the sort we were beginning to see everywhere…on dusty windows, car hoods, sidewalks not covered in sand. They looked almost runic and there was something especially frightening about that.

  “Goddamn Gary,” Carl said. “This place has always been nothing but a shithole. I told you that when we came in. Fucking sewer. It wasn’t much before the bombs and it ain’t much now.”

  “Over here,” Texas Slim said.

  There was a Greyhound bus parked at the curb. I saw curtains in the windows. I moved around towards the bifold door. It was open. The safety bars you pulled yourself up the steps with were dark with sticky blood. There was a bloody handprint on one of the windows.

  Even outside, I could smell the death cooking in there.

  “Carl,” I said. “You and me.”

  I went in, Carl at my back. The bus had been converted into a dormitory of sorts with the seats removed and cots lined up in orderly rows…at least they had been. Now they were flipped over, tossed aside, everything painted a shocking red. Blood was sprayed in wild loops and whorls. The floor was sticky with it. Bits of flesh and clumps of hair were stuck in it.

  And bodies, of course.

  I figured at least a dozen or more, all cut and slit and hacked. And scalped. Limbs and entrails were scattered around, dangling from the shelves on the walls and tangled in old army blankets. It was hot in there, hot and closed-up and revolting with the smell of blood and meat and bowels. Several spear shafts were still sunk in torsos. They had been painted up with symbols that were unreadable because of the dirty handprints and bloodstains.

  I got outside before I threw up. And then, to my surprise, I did anyway.

  “Don’t go in there,” I told the white, drawn faces of my friends. “Don’t go in there.”

  When I felt better, I drank some water from my bottle, had a cigarette with Carl. I felt hopeless and helpless, outnumbered and just beside myself. The carnage. Dear God, the carnage. There must have been a somewhat thriving community of people here before last night. Before the Clans marched in and slaughtered them. I thought they had been normal, too. In the bus, I had seen baskets of clothes, books, tools. These people had not been crazies, they had not been animals.

  Texas Slim had been sweeping the area, finding nothing but more bodies. But he had found something else, too. “Got one,” he said. “Over here.”

  We followed him. He stopped and there, lying in a twisted heap just inside the display window of a store, was one of them.

  A dead Clansman.

  He was perforated with bullet holes and must have taken quite a volume of fire before he went down. He wore a filthy green army overcoat and heavy scuffed boots. His hands were curled up like dying spiders. They were yellow, bony, mottled with open sores. His head was shaved bald, but he wore a greasy scalplock like an old time Pawnee warrior. And he had a gas mask on. They all wore them like some kind of fetish mask. Strictly war surplus, as Sean had said, it was made of leather with an oval breathing filter and two glaring buglike eyepieces. It was strapped on.

  Finding a dead Clansman was rare because they always carted off their dead with them.

  “Let’s see what this fuck looks like,” Carl said. He shouldered his AK and pulled out a K-Bar fighting knife. Being careful not to touch the corpse, he slit the straps and peeled the mask back with the tip of his knife. And then recoiled in horror.

  “Shit,” he said.

  The face was an atrocity. The flesh was yellow and spongy, grotesquely distorted like the skull beneath was swollen. There was only one eye which was glazed white and staring. The other was gone, a bubbly white mass of fungus growing from the socket and engulfing the entire left hemisphere of the face and head. It seemed to be dissolving the tissue. Tiny rootlets had grown from it in a wiry mass, feeding right into the flesh and up the nostrils. The growth had contorted the muscles, pulling up one side of the face in a hideous toothy grin. The blind eye that had once been powered by a diseased brain watched impassively.

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

  We turned away, turning a blind eye to the slaughterhouse around us. Even Janie, who was helplessly sympathetic, just turned away because there was simply too much of it to take inside and hold there. She was drained. We were all drained. The first normal people we’d seen in months and they had been butchered.

  I pushed on farther down the street, getting us away from the carnage and the smell, wondering if we should have searched the buildings for survivors
and knowing that it was pointless. I rounded the corner ahead and that’s when the first shot rang out.

  16

  I hit the ground with the others, crawling towards the safety of an overturned car. Bullets zipped around me, thudding into storefronts and street signs. Whoever was doing the shooting was not real precise. Another shot rang out and punched through a plate glass window, knocking a dusty cobwebbed mannequin over.

  “Hole in one,” Texas Slim said.

  “Coming from that building over there, Nash,” Carl said, pointing to a brick walk-up across the street. “See the glint of the barrel? Second story window?”

  I did. The window was gone and pink curtains were blowing out.

  “Sounds like a medium caliber. Maybe a thirty-thirty or a thirty-ought.”

  “You, sir, are a violent man,” Texas said. “Such a knowledge of firearms. Shame on you.”

  We were effectively pinned down. Other than a few wrecked cars the street was wide open. A perfect kill zone. The only thing we had going for us, way I saw it, was that the sniper out there wasn’t much of a shot. The bullets came intermittently and always pretty wide of our position as if the shooter was just trying to scare us off or keep us contained.

  “Well, what do you think?” Carl asked, sighting on the building with his AK.

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  “Maybe they’ll just go away,” Janie said.

  “And maybe Carl’s mother should have kept her legs closed, child,” Texas Slim said.

  “You better shut your fucking hole,” Carl warned him.

  I put a hand on him. “Easy.”

  “I’m all for waiting until they run out of bullets,” Gremlin said.

  Carl laughed. “You would be.” He turned to me. “Let me see your Savage.”

  I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea or not. Carl had a way of stirring up the hornet’s nest and particularly when he had a gun. And then another shot rang out and punched into the hood of the car and I handed Carl the rifle.

 

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