Biohazard

by Tim Curran

  I fell over a box and promptly went on my ass. The gun fell from my fingers and he could have had me right there. But he didn’t want me. He wanted Janie. So when I pitched on my ass he quickly lost interest. He targeted Janie and went right after her. She ran towards the door and he tackled her, brought her down like a lion with a tasty gazelle.

  As I scrambled to my feet and grabbed my gun, he had Janie face down. She fought and squirmed, but he was on her, dry humping her ass, sliding his erect penis between her legs.

  I ran over there and kicked him in the head twice before he fell off her.

  Then Janie was up and behind me and the Scab boy got to his feet. The side of his head was damaged-it looked fucking dented, to tell you the truth, like it was an aluminum can-and smashed-in from my steel-toed boot. Green puss and a pink tracery of blood ran from the wound.

  He made a growling, snapping sound and went right after me.

  I put two bullets into him. I tried to get him in the head, but my hand was shaking so badly they both went right into his throat, tearing it open in a jetting splash of arterial blood. It was like slitting a high pressure hose. He danced around in wild, drunken circles, gnashing his teeth, making choked gargling sounds, blood pissing from his neck. It probably only went on for a couple seconds, but that grisly dance macabre was forever imprinted in my mind.

  He went down and that’s when the most horrible thing happened.

  “Rick!” Janie said.

  I heard a scream…a series of screams…but none of them were from Janie and they sure as hell weren’t screams of terror, but screams of delight. Of ecstasy. Three women came rushing out from behind the stacked boxes where they’d been hiding. They brought a high, sharp smell of rotting fruit with them. Scabs. They came bounding out, bald, corpse-faced, graying, flesh hanging in discolored folds. They didn’t come after us; they went after the dying boy.

  They rushed in with a frenzied hunger, fighting for the blood that pumped from his neck. They drank it, licked it from their hands, bathed in it. While Janie and I watched in amazement and horror, they crowded the boy, slurping and sucking, pressing in like piglets at their mother’s teats. It was appalling. The sight of it. The sound of it. I should have shot them all dead because it would have effortless.

  But I didn’t.

  I stood there, disgusted, shocked, paralyzed like a fat juicy bug wrapped up tight in a spider’s web. They had to die and I knew it, yet I think some perverse part of me just had to see how it played out.

  Finally, one of them made a belching sound and pulled her lips from the boy’s neck. She looked right at me. Her face was like yellow tallow, melted, hanging in runnels and loops, her mouth smeared with blood. A low, revolting odor of spoiled meat came from her. Her naked body was covered in scabs, eaten through with ulcers. One of her breasts was flattened, the other hung low and pendulant, ghastly white, the vein lividity beneath a purple that was almost shocking in contrast.

  “You are a beeeee-utiful man,” she said with a voice that scraped dryly like a shovel across a tomb lid. “So pretty, so lovely.” She licked her flaking, blackened lips with a tongue that was bloated and gray. “How about a kiss, a hot little kiss on the mouth?”

  It was like deja vu. She reminded me of that other crazy Scab bitch back in Youngstown that I’d met up with at that deli. She was no less offensive, no less horrible, and certainly no less horny. What she did then I almost hate to put into words. She advanced on me, grinning with gray-black teeth, her tongue hanging out and rapidly licking the air. She put one scabrid hand between her legs and slid a few fingers into herself. The sound was juicy, repellent like somebody jabbing their thumb into a swollen, rotting peach. She worked herself, breathing faster and faster, some kind of drainage running from between her legs and striking the floor like piss. The stink of it was indescribable.

  She got closer and I think I screamed or cried out. I remember jerking from the sound of my own voice. Then I remembered the gun in my hand. I brought it up and jacked a round right in her face. Tissue and blood splashed out the back of her head and she went down hard with a violent splatting sound. Her body shook with convulsions and then there was a hissing, bubbling sound and slime pooled out from between her legs with a stink of rotting fish.

  It was enough to make us gag.

  I didn’t want to look, but I did. And that’s when I noticed something was moving in that discharge. No, many things were moving. What I saw were literally dozens of red beetles, each about the size of your thumb. They were crawling in the slime, more of them coming out all the time and moving up over the dead Scab with a horrid, flesh-crawling clicking sound. They engulfed her, hundreds of them. Her flesh was mucid, pulpy, and they burrowed right into her.

  And then the other two women came over, looking for food and for love, I assume. Their faces were gray, pocked with sores, wrinkled and sagging. Their eyes were radiant yellow like candleglow. They grinned and their teeth were very long, very sharp. I shot one of them in the head and fired at the other and missed. And I missed because the moment I squeezed the trigger on her sister, she went airborne. She hit me and knocked me flat. She didn’t seem as interested in fucking me as in feeding on me.

  I heard Janie scream.

  The Scab woman straddled me, greasy and undulant. It was like trying to wrestle a jellyfish. She breathed hot tomb-breath in my face. She spit on me, yellow foam breaking against my cheek. She tried to get her teeth at my throat and I punched her in the face again and again, her flesh soft and spongy. Then I got my hands around her throat. I would squeeze until her fucking head popped off, I decided. The flesh of her throat was like living pulp, seeming to crawl and ooze and flow beneath my fingers. She fought against me, scratching at my face, panting, making hideous slithering sounds.

  She was strong, godawful strong.

  But I had her, thought I had her. As disgusted as I was, I would not let go and I could feel my fingers and thumbs sinking deeper into her gray mushy flesh. Then there was a loud resounding bang, a flash, and she fell away, dead putrescent weight.

  Janie stood there with my Beretta nine in her hands.

  “You okay, Rick?” she said, truly concerned.

  I brushed some of the woman’s remains off me. “I’ll live,” I breathed. Then I looked over at the corpse, smelled what flowed from between the legs, saw what crawled in it, and promptly vomited. It was an economical vomiting and lasted only a few seconds and then the waves of hot nausea passed.

  I heard the sounds of fists pounding on the door.

  Jesus, would the lock hold?

  And then a voice, a very calm voice said, “You better come with me.”

  5

  The voice belonged to a graying, rather distinguished-looking man in a brown leather jacket. He was standing at the other end of the room. “I would suggest some expediency.”

  I didn’t know who he was or what his game might be. But he seemed sane or close to it and there were no sores on him. We followed him to the end of the room as the door shook in its frame. Down at the end of the stacked rows of boxes there was a little ell with another fire door set in it. He opened it for us and we went in. He closed it and threw a couple locks.

  “They won’t get through that,” he said, “trust me. My name is Price. And you?”

  We told him our names.

  “Very good,” he said. “You made short work of them out there. Nice shooting.”

  “Thanks,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

  We were in a storeroom, boxes and crates everywhere. There were candles flickering and a Coleman gas lantern burning away. And that’s when I saw that it wasn’t just Price in there. Over near the wall, there was a guy stretched out on a sleeping bag and he looked to be in rough shape. His breathing was ragged and hoarse. It sounded like his lungs were filled with fluid. But I didn’t look any closer, not then, because there was another guy in the corner. Some dude with a bushy afro that looked like a badly pruned bush. He had a Nikon 35mm came
ra. He was snapping shots of me with it.

  “What’s his thing?” I asked Price.

  “This is Morse,” he said. “He was a photographer once. He’s harmless.”

  He snapped a few shots of Janie.

  “He has no film, but it doesn’t seem to concern him,” Price told me.

  Janie scowled at him. “Tell him to stop it. It’s weird.”

  Morse did.

  “Nice to meet you,” I told him.

  He snapped a shot of me.

  “He doesn’t speak,” Price said. “We’ll never know what happened to him. He does whistle sometimes, though. Now and again he’ll write something for me to read. That’s how I learned his name and his profession. Other than that…who can say?”

  I looked over at the man on the sleeping bag. I could almost feel the heat coming from him. “He’s got the Fevers,” I said.

  “Yes, he does,” Price said.

  Price went on to explain that his name was Bedecker and he’d been a first class accountant at one time, had gotten sick only yesterday and had finally fallen down as they looted through the wares upstairs. Then the Scabs had come and they’d brought him down here. He couldn’t be moved. So they were waiting. Waiting for him to die.

  Looking at the poor man, I wasn’t sure which was worse. Being out there with the Scabs or being in here with this man and his germs. His mouth was smeared with blood, his eyes bright red and glossy as he stared into space. This is what Texas Slim called Dracula eyes. His face was slack, mottled, set with expanding red sores. He looked bruised, swollen with purple contusions. Every now and then he would tremble and make low hissing sounds or he’d vomit out tarry black blood. It was all over his shirt, the sleeping bag, the floor. It smelled horrible.

  “Ebola-X,” I said, very near panic.

  “Yes, exactly,” Price told me, studying the man without emotion, almost analytically. “It’s dangerous to be in here with him. He’s burning with virus. Quite literally biological toxic waste. The best we can do is keep our distance and avoid his body fluids, particularly that vomit. It’s loaded with billions of particles of virus, highly infectious, all of which are lethal hot agents.”

  “You seem to know a lot about this stuff,” I said.

  “Hmmm. Yes. Once upon a time I was a microbiologist, a military biohazard specialist,” he told me, shrugging. “Now I’m just a survivor. Like you. Like us all.”

  Price just stood there, staring at Bedecker, watching it happen with the sort of cold detachment that I suppose only a scientist could have. He was mumbling stuff under his breath. I went over to Janie. Morse was standing there with her. He snapped another shot of me.

  I motioned Janie over to me, away from our intrepid photojournalist. “That guy’s boiling with fucking Ebola-X over there. We’re all in danger being in this room.”

  Janie didn’t seem concerned. “Too bad it’s not the full moon.”

  “Yeah, okay, Janie. Point is, we’re all in danger here.”

  “There’s nothing we can do about it. Not unless you want to be a hero and throw him to the Scabs.”

  “Why don’t you just stop it?”

  She looked at me long and hard. There was no warmth in her eyes. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said to me. “You’re thinking you have two new sacrifices for your friend. Which one goes first? Price or Morse?”

  “I wasn’t thinking about them, Janie. I was thinking about you.”

  “Prick.”

  She walked away from me. So that was the state of our relationship. I was beginning to realize that Janie was no longer in my corner and probably could not be trusted. The Shape was the farthest thing from my mind. For the next two weeks I would not allow myself to even think of a selection. It wasn’t until the third week that it began to creep into my mind. By the fourth week it became an obsession, one born not just out of fear of what The Shape might do if we didn’t offer it something, but of what we would do if The Shape abandoned us.

  But right now there were bigger fears.

  I went back over to Price and smoked a cigarette with badly shaking fingers. “What’s going on?” I said.

  “Hmm. We are watching a man die from an infectious organism. And as we do so we are at ground zero of an explosive chain of lethal transmission.” He was very clinical about the entire thing. “You see, Nash, when a hot virus infects its host, what it’s trying to do, essentially, is to convert that host into virus. The process, of course, is not successful and what happens is what we’re seeing here: a man literally turned into a morbid mass of liquefied flesh.”

  Price told me he had worked for the U.S. Army’s Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland. After the bombs came down, they were still in operation for several months, tracking outbreaks of infectious diseases in conjunction with the CDC. After nuclear winter lifted, one plague after another swept the country. It wasn’t until late January that the first reports of a highly infective hemorrhagic fever appeared. It started in Baltimore, then swept like a firestorm through the northeast, devastating Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and New York before setting its teeth into Ohio. The symptoms were similar to those of Ebola and the Marburg Virus-both of the filoviridae family-only much more virulent. There just wasn’t enough time to completely study this enhanced bug and it was never determined exactly whether the vector was airborne, through interpersonal contact, body fluids, or whether it was all of these things. Price saw enough of it, though, he said, to be certain that it could contaminate in all these ways.

  “What happened?” I asked him. “What the hell are you doing in Des Moines?”

  “I was born here. When Ebola-X nearly wiped us out in Maryland, a lot of us ran. I came back here. To my family.” He uttered a sarcastic laugh. “I watched them all die, one by one. Not from this organism, Nash, but from radiation sickness, typhoid, cholera. I believe my brother died from Septicemic Plague. My sister’s family was disease free. But the Hatchet Clans took care of that.”

  “How the hell did it get here?” I asked. “That virus? I mean, I heard of outbreaks in Africa and that one in the States in Washington DC, but that was just in monkeys.”

  He sighed, shook his head. “We needed more time, but we didn’t have it. It was probably brought here by someone from Africa. There was a rumor floating around that the U.S. Army Medical Command had weaponized a strain of Ebola. I suppose it could have been loosed during the turmoil of the final days. Russian virologists apparently weaponized a strain of Marburg at the Vector Institute in Koltsovo. It’s possible this strain could have found its way into the hands of bioterrorists. It’s anybody’s guess.”

  I decided to ask a stupid question. “Could…I mean, is it possible that a virus could actually convert an entire body?”

  “You mean turn a man into a walking viral body?” He shook his head but I saw uncertainty flash through his eyes. “We’d be giving the virus far too much credit, I’m afraid. It would have to perfectly assimilate the host cells, many of which like neurons are extremely complex.”

  I kept thinking about my dream of The Medusa, the Maker of Corpses, an immense disease entity, trailing us, always just behind, turning the devastated country into a graveyard city by city. I had no doubt whatsoever that Ebola and similar pathogenic germs had mutated in the radiation and were continuing to mutate. I imagined them evolving through countless generations every week, becoming something much more complex each time, finally transforming themselves into something diabolically intelligent and unbelievably deadly.

  I didn’t mention any of that to Price, though.

  He said that viruses are the bridge between the living and non-living, the undead, as it were, of the microscopic world. They only act alive when in contact with living cells. They are parasites, entirely dependent on their hosts for biological processes. They are more or less protein capsules filled with genetic material encoded to replicate the virus itself. That’s it. A virus lays around like its dead until it
comes into contact with a compatible cell, then it adheres to it and uses the cell’s machinery to make copies of itself. This goes on until the host cell literally explodes and out come countless baby viruses, each out to do the same thing to infinity unless the host dies or something like antibodies attack them.

  “The virus has no lofty, ambitious plans, son,” he told me. “They live only to replicate themselves which ultimately, in the case of Ebola-X, destroys the host. They are cellular predators, but not organized, not thinking. I can’t imagine a line of organic evolution which would allow them to do more than this. They are probably one of the world’s oldest life forms and as such, achieved perfection many, many eons ago.”

  I listened and learned, but I was not convinced. And I sure as hell was not about to argue with an expert and particularly when my only evidence was a series of fucking nightmares.

  “Ah, now we see the unpleasant results of extreme amplification of the viral body,” Price said, watching Bedecker’s torment. “See how he is now rigid as of a corpse? He is filling with bloodclots. They are forming everywhere. Brain, vitals, organs, skin, bones. Hmm.”

  I looked at Price like he was crazy. I didn’t know Bedecker, but he had been a human being once. Possibly a friend of Price’s and here the old man was carrying on with this insane running commentary like this was a sport’s event.

  Morse was on the scene, of course, snapping shots of the dying man from every imaginable angle. He even took a telephoto lens from his bag and got some good close-ups. It was insane.

  “See, Nash?” Price said. “Bedecker’s not really suffering now. His brain is liquefying. His vitality and humanity have been erased. This is called depersonalization. What you are watching now is no longer a dying man but a biological machine choking on its own poisoned by-products,” he told me. “The vomiting will continue, as will the bleeding…”