Biohazard

by Tim Curran

  “What’re you going to do, Rick?” Janie said to me, reading my mind.

  “About what?”

  “You know what.”

  All eyes were on me then. Mickey was watching me especially close. I knew then that Texas or Carl had told her, tipped her off about the whole business. That was okay. She knew now. We all knew. We all understood. We were thick as thieves, coveting our dirty little secret.

  “Nash,” Carl said.

  I looked over at him.

  He had his AK up. “Somebody out there. Out in those trees.”

  “He’s right,” Mickey said.

  “If they were bad boys, they would have attacked,” I said. “Let’s assume they’re friendly. Let’s assume they’re in need of company.”

  We waited. A few insects buzzed and a coyote howled low and mournful in the distance. I could hear our friend moving around out there. Carl slipped away from the fire and took up a shooting position by the Jeep. The rest of us stayed put.

  I heard a stick crack, saw a dark shadow slip behind a tree.

  “You out there,” I called. “Come on in. We’re friendly. We got food and coffee. You’re welcome to it.”

  Silence.

  Then the shadow came around the tree and walked almost sheepishly towards the fire. It was a woman, fortyish, but so ragged and dirty that she looked like a ragbag. I wondered who she was before the bombs fell.

  “Your welcome to what we have,” I said.

  She came in closer.

  Mickey knew exactly what I was doing. She smiled at me in the firelight.

  25

  The woman enjoyed our coffee, our meager food. She ate with her fingers like an animal while she watched us warily like we might steal her dinner away from her. About the time I was pretty sure she was a deaf mute or something, she said, “Ronny got the pox, had the Fevers something terrible. Blood came out of his eyes. It squirted out. I think he threw up part of his intestines. Looked like intestines.” She shook her head, very matter-of-fact about it as if the true horror of the situation had lost its power to shock. “Ronny didn’t want to get burned. He was always saying, Marilynn, don’t you let them burn me. But I didn’t have a choice. Army said so. We put him in the pyre. They made us put him in the pyre with the rest. They burned him. Thousands of ‘em burning in the pit. You could smell it all the way to Beloit. It stank.”

  “Where are you from, Marilynn?” Janie asked her.

  “Janesville, Wisconsin. Lived there my whole life. Army started clearing us out block by block. Put us in a camp. Like one of them German camps you hear about it the war, kind with the Jews in ‘em. Little huts we lived in. Barbwire all around. We couldn’t leave. They wouldn’t let us,” she told us, the firelight reflected in her eyes. “Lot of us fought. Didn’t want to go. Shiela Reed fought, too. She was hiding her husband’s body. Shiela was manager at the Rite-Aid, started as a checker but she blew her boss in the storeroom every day, they said, so she got manager. She was crazy. Hiding that body. Army came in and she shot at them. They gunned her down. Threw her in the street and left her there.” She looked around at us as if realizing for the first time that we were there. “Where you going in that Jeep?”

  “West,” Carl told her.

  Marilynn’s eyes got wide, filled with light. “West, you say? Hear lots of people are going west. Funny. Where west you going?”

  “Des Moines.”

  “That’s an awful place. I was there two months ago. I ain’t going back.”

  “What’s going on there, darling?” Texas Slim asked her.

  “Ain’t you heard? Half the town is burned down, rest of its wreckage. It was bombed by the Air Force to clean out the militias. Nothing there now but rats and corpses and big craters from the bombs, lots of fallen down buildings. I been there. I know. Yes sir, I know. Bones everywhere. Lots of cars with skeletons in ‘em. Not much else.”

  “No people?” Mickey said.

  Marilynn was sucking tomato sauce from her fingers. “Oh, sure. There’s people. Wild people. They run around in animal skins or go naked. They’re all crazy. They drool. You don’t wanna go there in broad daylight, let alone the dark. Don’t get there after sundown. That’s when the bad ones come out.”

  But that’s where we were going. I don’t know why, but the need was very strong and I wasn’t about to ignore it. I kept watching our guest. I didn’t speak to her. If I spoke to her, I would feel connected to her and I didn’t want that kind of connection. I had to look at her like a farmer looks at a pig he’s going to slaughter. That’s what it had come to.

  I felt like shit. This woman…Marilynn…was dirty and smelly and probably crazy, but she was harmless. Very pathetic, really. I felt sorry for her and I knew that I couldn’t and the guilt of what was coming was eating a hole straight through me. Carl and Mickey kept watching me, amused by what was coming. Texas Slim did not look at me. I dared not look at Janie because I knew what was in her eyes and I didn’t want to see it.

  “Where are you going now?” Janie asked her.

  Marilynn considered it as she licked at a sore on her thumb. “Got a sister in Streator. She was alive last I heard. I’ll go look her up. Maybe I’ll live with her. Maybe together we can make it. All I want is just to make it.”

  I looked away from her.

  Janie said, “Well, I hope you make it to Streator. I really hope nothing gets in your way.”

  Which was directed at me, of course.

  “Yup,” Texas said. “Sure would suck the old willy wonka if something prevented you from reaching your sister.”

  Carl giggled.

  Janie glared at him. I glared at Janie. What had to happen now was for the good of all of us, but try and make her get off her soapbox and realize it. Mickey, on the other hand, was a totally different sort of woman. She saw the way things were and knew how they would never be again. I’m not saying that she was a better person-because she sure as hell was not-but she was more like the rest of us: desensitized, desperate, willing to do whatever it took to see another day.

  “Well, maybe you should be on your way,” Janie said, starting to get nervous. She knew she couldn’t guilt me out of this one.

  “Was hoping I could sleep the night by your fire,” the woman said.

  “Well, of course, darling,” Texas Slim told her. “Our fire is your fire.”

  Carl giggled again.

  “Nash,” Janie said and her voice was pleading. “Rick…”

  “Why don’t you go take a walk?” I told her, beginning to lose my patience with the Pollyanna shit. “Texas’ll go with you.”

  “Stay the fuck away from me,” Janie said. “All of you.”

  She stomped away into the darkness. I didn’t like it because there were too many things out there.

  In the distance you could see a faint greenish glow at the horizon that I thought was Chicago. There were weird pale blue auroras licking over the city, just pulsating like electrical fields. I saw occasional flashes of something like cloud-to-ground lightening that were a brilliant orange. I couldn’t even imagine what that hellzone was like at ground zero.

  “Okay, Carl,” I finally said. “Let’s get this done.”

  Marilynn put her bovine eyes on me. I’ll never forget the way she looked at me as if she knew, as if she sensed the horror that was coming. One human being trying to make a connection with another, looking for mercy, for compassion, for understanding. What she got instead was the butt of Carl’s rifle to the back of her head. Her eyes shut and she fell over.

  Ten minutes later, we had her tied to a fence with some bailing wire from our heaps of firewood.

  Then Carl and Texas Slim backed well away. They knew what was coming.

  I just stood there, sweat rolling down my face. The self-loathing and hatred filled me, hatred of who I was and what I had let myself become. And guilt. Oh God, the guilt of it all, knowing that once I had been an ordinary guy with an ordinary life and I wouldn’t have hurt a fly.

&nb
sp; Mickey stood next to me. Her eyes were huge, dark, liquid. She was breathing hard, her long limbs tensed with excitement. She was getting off on it. Really getting off. I could feel the heat coming off her, the musk that made my cock unfurl itself and go hard. As crazy and twisted as it sounds, I wanted nothing better than to throw her to the ground and fuck the hell out of her.

  That’s testament to the bizarre workings of the human mind.

  “Do it, Nash,” she breathed in my ear. “Call The Shape.”

  So I did.

  26

  It was coming.

  The Shape was coming.

  It was cycling itself into being, burning through the ether.

  Gutting the fabric of this world.

  I had called it and now it was coming. Right away I felt something in the air around me change…break open…twist in upon itself as if the very atoms were being realigned or shattered, turned inside out. The air was heavy. Heavy and thrumming and I could not move. Some yawning, pulsing electromagnetic field had seized me and squashed me flat, pushing me down to my knees at the altar of my god.

  Expiation.

  Sacrifice.

  Burnt offerings.

  I tried to forget that the woman tied to the fence had a name. I turned my face away, the air crawling with static electricity. The woman moaned, thrashed, cried out. But I did not hear her. I refused to hear her. All around, a humming and a crackling. A raw, cutting stench of ozone. And then the heat, the burning cremating heat of the living thermonuclear oven as it took on physical form.

  Hungry.

  Starving.

  The heat…the blazing energy…the sound of a million, billion hornets buzzing…sawblades ripping into steel…a screeching…a whirring…the world shrieking out as it was disemboweled at the subatomic level. Then the woman-Marilynn, God yes, Marilynn-screamed. A single economical scream that lasted only seconds.

  The Shape took her, consumed her.

  I did not look.

  But Mickey did. You could not have pried her eyes from it. She stared in rapt, almost erotic fascination at what was happening.

  Marilynn…

  I heard her melt with a crackling sound like burning cellophane. And then it was over and the world was just the world again. I opened my eyes. I made myself look as I made myself look every month on the night of the full moon.

  Marilynn was a blackened scarecrow, still smoldering.

  A pall of greasy black smoke hung in the air.

  Burnt offerings.

  She had been melted, reduced to a fused clot of bone and meat and marrow. A bubbling black slime that liquefied, smoking and popping, oozing down the fence into a pool of superhot irradiated refuse. The dry grass blazed where it made contact.

  The stench of her burning flesh was still in the air.

  I vomited.

  And later, still feeling The Shape and knowing that it owned me, I looked up at the night sky, the pale moon brooding high above like a skull.

  I opened my mouth.

  And screamed.

  DES MOINES, IOWA

  1

  Did I like it?

  Did I get off making offerings to that monstrosity?

  No, I did not. The guilt was thick on me like an infection, it was rotting me from the inside out. My dreams were sweaty, disturbing, goddamned ugly if you want to know the truth…people lined up, people I knew and didn’t know, people I’d admired and, yes, even loved, all waiting for me to decide who lived and who died. I’d wake up seeing their eyes, accusing and hating. I felt like a guard in Birkenau or Treblinka, deciding who went to the gas chamber and who didn’t. You think that was easy to live with? That it didn’t eat my guts out? You can’t do what I did without losing part of yourself and after I’d been doing it for a year, I couldn’t honestly remember the sort of person I’d been before.

  But I didn’t do it alone.

  My posse did it with me. A communal guilt. We were like soldiers doing a really terrible job…we just didn’t talk much about it. It made things go down easier that way. I had a lot of graves out there on my conscience, a lot of ghosts trying to claw their way out, and, Jesus, I had to keep them down. Some how, I had to.

  2

  The city was a cesspool of standing water, rubble, and unburied bodies. It looked like the mother of all battles had been fought here and maybe it had been. The buildings were shattered, blackened like charcoal, trees standing up like solitary masts, entirely devoid of limbs. Skyscrapers had been reduced to heaps of slag. No birds sang. Nothing grew. Nothing moved. There was only the stench of old death on the faint breeze, pungent and pervasive and secret. The way a tomb might smell.

  “This place is dead,” Carl said. “Absolutely dead. Can’t you smell it?”

  I could, but I didn’t mention the fact. Nobody else did either. They could feel it, all right, and they did not like it. The silence in the Jeep was heavy, almost crushing. They were waiting for me to tell them what this was all about or at least point them in the right direction. But I was clueless, absolutely clueless. Like every other city, every rawboned urban graveyard, we rolled in with no clear reason of why we had to go there other than the fact that I said so. I doubted if it was enough for my people because it sure as hell was not enough for me.

  As we drove in up 94, I was thinking about Marilynn. She was the last thing I wanted to be thinking about, but I couldn’t forget what she had said.

  Nothing there now but rats and corpses and big craters from the bombs, lots of fallen down buildings.

  How right she was. But there was something else here, something important and I could feel it in my guts.

  The city lay around us like some crumbled, exhumed corpse. Entire neighborhoods had been bombed to rubble while others were relatively unscathed. It made no sense really, but even those still standing were desolate and eerie, silent and forlorn like monoliths erected over the grave of mankind. Some buildings had walls blasted free and you could see the tiny cubicles within…offices, apartments, like cross-sections of a doll’s house. Many were nothing but twisted and mangled skeletal frames of girders waiting to fall and still others were marked by but a single standing chimney or facade. Roads were often cut by jagged crevices like fault lines, sewer piping thrust up through the pavement like the bones of compound fractures.

  It was no easy bit navigating our way through.

  Entire thoroughfares were blocked by rubble and mountainous debris or had fallen into the sewers below. I saw the huge bomb craters that Marilynn had talked about. They pocked the landscape like the craters on the dark side of the moon. They were filled with pools of foul-smelling water, caked with leaves and garbage and the occasional rotting hulk of a half-submerged SUV. Other streets were blocked by buses and trucks and overturned cars, the burnt husks of military vehicles.

  There were bones everywhere, scattered in the streets, rotting in the slimy gutters. Some were still dressed in rags, pushed up beneath the overhangs of standing buildings or huddled in cars that were perforated with bullet holes.

  Carl was playing with the Geiger Counter. “Rad’s a little high…about fifty. Not too bad. Net yet.”

  We passed a cathedral that was nothing but heaped stones spread out for nearly a city block. All that was left standing was the steeple and it was leaning hard. Neighborhoods of homes were reduced to kindling or blackened from raging fires long since burned out.

  “Well,” Texas said, pulling off a cigarette, “this is lovely country. Looks like Berlin in ’45. But despite its scenic charm, I’m all for heading out. Getting a funny tickle at the base of my balls and I’m pretty sure it ain’t Carl’s middle finger.”

  “Kiss my ass,” Carl said.

  I giggled…a high, nervous, frantic sort of giggle. I couldn’t help myself. Something was very wrong here. Des Moines felt like a cemetery and the comparison was applicable…yet, I knew there was life out there in those blasted ruins. I could feel it watching us.

  “He’s right,” Mickey said. “Th
ere’s something out there. I can feel it.”

  “What are we after here, Nash? You got any idea what it is we’re looking for?” Carl wanted to know.

  But I could only shake my head. “I’ll know it when I see it. Keep driving.”

  Janie was sitting next to me, but she hadn’t said a word to me since I gave Marilynn to The Shape. I loved Janie. I would never pretend otherwise. But I was starting to get tired of her moody bullshit. I think we all were. It was getting to the point that her high blown ethics and morals were getting the best of her. Time was when we did what we had to do, she disapproved, but she moved on, let it go. Now she kept sinking into these deep blue funks and would refuse to even speak to anyone. It was immature and whiny. Like dealing with a bratty five-year old. I didn’t have the patience for it and I was pretty sure the others didn’t either.

  “We need to start getting some gas here, Nash,” Mickey said. “We got about a quarter tank…but it won’t last long.”

  Fuel was never a problem in the brave new world. If you had a running vehicle it was very easy to siphon all the gas you wanted from the armies of dead vehicles. Carl always carried his little siphon pump with him.

  “All right, we better get that done. Let’s look for a parking lot or something, a car dealer.”

  Mickey drove on, steering the Jeep through those devastated, war-torn streets. She was a good driver, steering us around heaped rubble and squeezing in-between wrecked cars. I watched the desolation around us, looking for anything that moved and saw nothing. Not even a stray dog drinking from a puddle. Street signs were missing, stoplights laying in the streets. Telephone poles had fallen right over and those that still stood were leaning badly, their lines strung like limp spaghetti.

  “Here we go,” Mickey said.

  She pulled into the parking lot of a huge white building that went on for about a city block. In huge blue plastic letters it said: CHEVROLET, HUMMER. There were lot after lot of cars, many of which were damaged or rusting, tires stripped away and windshields shattered. But many were untouched.