Biohazard

by Tim Curran

  “Hey,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

  But she wouldn’t answer me.

  She was dressed in rags that might have been jeans and a sweatshirt once. Her face was grimy, her red hair clotted with filth. And she stank like she hadn’t had a bath in months, like she’d been pissing and shitting herself. And judging from those dark stains at her crotch, I think she’d been menstruating, too.

  “Take her,” I told Carl.

  Carl liked that bit. Strictly stormtrooper fantasy. He handed his shotgun to Morse and went over to the girl.

  “You got a name, sunshine?”

  She just looked up at him with this dull, bovine look. He put the questions to her about who had survived and where they were and what she was doing alone. She just kept staring, though, either an idiot or mad or simply made that way by the world pissing down its own leg and leaving her stranded in a dead town.

  He slapped her, just warming up. “Talk, you fucking cunt,” he said.

  But the girl didn’t even make a sound. He might have been striking a rump roast thawing on the counter…this girl wasn’t much more than that: animate meat.

  “Stop it!” Janie said. “She’s just a child! Don’t you dare hit her!”

  Carl drew back his hand to start again, but I shook my head and he stopped. He shrugged, grabbed the girl by her hair and threw her to the floor. He planted a knee in the center of her back and dug some duct tape from his pack, taped her wrists together behind her back. She did not fight. She did not struggle. When Carl was done, he yanked her to her feet.

  “Nash?” he said. “Request permission to piss all over this wench so she at least smells a little better.”

  Morse took a picture of her.

  “Request denied,” I said.

  “All right,” I said to my troops. “Let’s take a five.”

  “I’m all for ten,” Texas said.

  “Yeah, I need to sit down a minute,” Mickey said, dropping into a booth and crossing her long bronze legs, making sure I saw her do it.

  I did.

  And Janie saw me looking, too.

  We ate some MRE spaghetti and pork and beans. Nobody’d had breakfast and we were hungry. I sat there watching the girl and had a smoke, maybe feeling sorry for myself and the shell of the world at the same time. I was looking at the big picture and seeing me and my people, all the other scattered bands, as insects crawling over the rotting cadaver of some dead beast. I think, essentially, the analogy worked.

  I closed my eyes for a moment and all I could see was that formless gray pestilence getting closer. The Medusa. I had the shakes. My heart was pounding. I had an overwhelming urge to vomit out everything I had bottled up inside.

  “Okay,” I finally said. “Break’s over. We got shit to do.”

  We all got to our feet and right away, I was feeling that same old bit again, that we were being watched. I just couldn’t shake it. It wasn’t The Shape and it wasn’t that girl, so then what?

  I remember Mickey looking over at me, telling me with her eyes that she was feeling it, too. And then I heard a thudding report out in the streets and it took me almost a split second to realize it was the bark of a rifle.

  A hole opened in the plate glass window.

  We all dove down, except the girl and Morse. Jesus, stupid harmless Morse. Now he wasn’t a fashion photographer doing spreads for Newport News and Spiegels, no, now he was a combat photographer. For as those rounds kept chewing into the dusty windows and they fell apart like candy glass, shattering amongst us, Morse just stood there with his Nikon to his left eye, working his telephoto and f-stop, trying to get a good shot for Newsweek or Time.

  I yelled for him to get down. I don’t remember what I said, but something about getting his fucking head down and then there was another report and a slug caught Morse right in the telephoto. Lucky shot or really good aim, I didn’t know. But I saw that camera fly apart and blood and meat blast out the back of Morse’s skull. He folded up and died without saying a word. I told everyone to shut the hell up. Somebody out there had a long-range rifle, maybe a. 30-30 or a. 30.06. I wanted them to get closer so I wouldn’t miss.

  Silence.

  No sound out in the streets and none in the cafe. After a few moments, I heard a couple voices calling out there. Sounded like kids, teen-agers maybe. We stayed put, drew those bastards in. And they came, muttering amongst themselves. I whispered for the others to just get ready and I rose up behind one of the booths so I could get a look. Sure, maybe a half-dozen kids and some older guy with a rifle. They didn’t bother sending out a scout, they came towards the cafe in a group.

  “Get ready,” I whispered.

  Mickey had her Browning, Texas had his Desert Eagle. 50. I had my Savage 30.06 and Carl had his AK.

  I watched those peckerwoods converge on the diner. They were quite a crew. They were all long-haired and so filthy that you couldn’t tell if they were boys or girls. They carried pipes and axe handles and baseball bats. From the stains on them, I figured they knew how to use them, too. The older guy kept his rifle up, urging the others forward. As they made to climb through the shattered windows, we came up shooting. We drilled three of them before the others even knew what happened. The old guy started shooting and killed one of his ratpack with a wild shot, but did no other damage. We kept shooting and pretty soon they were all down. Even the old guy. Mickey had jacked a couple rounds into his right kneecap and he was done.

  Carl hopped out there first, kicking his rifle away.

  I followed with Mickey behind me. A couple of those teenagers were still alive, vomiting out blood into the street. They smelled so bad and were so dirty, even Janie wasn’t rushing to their rescue. They looked like Neolithic savages, filthy and bruised and pockmarked, their teeth rotting from their mouths. The air stank of gunpowder, violent death, and voided bowels…but I don’t think they were infected.

  Carl was kicking the old guy when I got there.

  I told him to stop. Mickey had done quite a job on his knee. It was blasted to mucilage, one of the bones sticking right through his pant leg like the end of a shattered Pepsi bottle.

  “Filth! Trash! Fucking garbage!” he yelled at us. “Y’all ain’t nothing but trash and dirt and cunting animals, that’s all you is!”

  “Shut the fuck up,” I told him.

  He just stared at me, eyes simmering with hate. “Think you’re something all special, eh boy? You ain’t shit.” To prove that, he spit. “You…you and these animals…y’all don’t know what yer in for. No sir, y’all ain’t got a clue. But I know. Yes sir, I know.”

  Texas Slim was kneeling next to him. “So why don’t you elaborate, kind sir.”

  “Hell he say?” the old man wanted to know.

  “He wants to know what we’re in for,” I said.

  The old man laughed with a bitter, resentful sound. “Idiots…y’all don’t know, do you? Ha! This town ain’t gonna be nothing but a boneyard come tonight or tomorrow or the next day! It’s coming for all of us! Coming out of the east, yes sir! And there’s those here that want it to come! You see all them sick ones? They been pouring in for weeks! For weeks! Some have died, but others is hanging in just so they can see it! Look it in the face when it comes home to roost!”

  “Look what in the face?” Mickey asked him.

  The old man offered her a grin of brown, rotten teeth. “The Devil,” he said. “The Devil.”

  Everyone bristled at this, but none of them were surprised. I had talked with them about it and they had not needed my words. For inside, they knew just as I knew.

  Mickey came over and wiped some dirt from my cheek. You should have seen how she did it. She licked her fingertip and then drew it real slow over my skin.

  Mickey wanted me and I suppose I wanted her again, too. I mean, really, how could a guy not want Mickey? She was a pin-up girl, a centerfold. She had the tits and the ass and the legs, was darkly pretty and seductive. You could just imagine how many guys had whac
ked off over pictures of her in magazines. Yeah, she was hot. So hot a picture of her in your pocket would have burned a hole in your pants and started a brushfire in your crotch.

  But the truth was, she scared me.

  She really did.

  While Janie turned her head when I called up The Shape and it took its sacrifice, Mickey liked to watch. She really liked to watch. Death and violence got her off. Maybe it always had or maybe it was something the end of civilization had unlocked in her. I didn’t know, but I did know that she had some seriously scary psychosexual issues. She liked to watch The Shape take its offerings of meat and blood. She liked shooting people. She liked looking at the aftermath of bodies and shattered anatomies. And right then? Looking down at those dead teen-agers? She was getting off. If we weren’t there, she would probably have masturbated. Her nipples were standing hard against her t-shirt and I was willing to bet that if I slipped my hand down the front of her cut-offs, I could have slid two fingers into her without much trouble.

  She was looking from the bodies to me, the hunger all over her. She looked like she wanted to take a bite out of something or have something take a bite out of her.

  Janie was watching this, of course.

  I caught her eyes once and quickly looked away. Something in them made me wither. I had slept with both girls now, Janie repeatedly.

  Trust me, it was no notch on my belt. Because it was always there in the back of my mind, that dread question of what I would have to do if either of them became pregnant. Because if the stories were true, babies always became like the Children and usually right away. Monsters. They came right out of the womb like that, literally burning their way out and killing their mothers in the process.

  Could I let Janie or Mickey suffer like that?

  And better, would I have the balls to put them down if and when it happened?

  9

  The Hatchet Clans came not thirty minutes later.

  Just when you think things can’t much worse, they usually do.

  I decided to let the old man and the girl go. We didn’t need them and I was pretty sure they didn’t need us. I didn’t know what to do with the old man. I did my best splinting his leg. He looked like he wanted to tear my throat out the entire time.

  Carl cut them loose and the girl ran off. The old man looked at us one last time, spit at my feet, and out the door he went, hobbling off with a broken broomstick for a crutch. He looked almost casually at the corpses of his posse and then went on his way. He didn’t make it half a block before he screamed.

  Carl and I were just dragging Morse’s corpse out the door…and I saw three Clansmen hacking on the old guy. Scouts. That meant the main body was coming. I got back inside and told the others to hide. And just in time. For rolling down the streets like a storm, the main body was coming. Screaming, breaking windows, they had arrived.

  I watched them storm past the front of the diner in their filthy, ragged olive drab overcoats and gas masks, scalp locks greased, axes and pikes, chains and clubs in their hands. Several carried decapitated human heads. They swung them by the hair. They found the bodies of Morse and the teenagers and set on them in a pack, more pressing in all the time like swarms of insects. They scalped the teenagers. They eviscerated them, dismembered them. They took Morse’s head with them.

  We were in unbelievable danger.

  If it came to it, we could kill quite a few, but I knew that in the end they’d overwhelm us with sheer numbers. They mulled about for about an hour, marching around and hissing to one another through their masks. None of them came into the diner. I figured that was a real spot of luck.

  I thought we were going to make it.

  Then twenty of them charged. They weren’t as stupid as I thought. They knew where we were and they played us, let us relax, let our guard go down slightly-because with the Clans in the street it never went down completely-then they attacked.

  We killed at least ten of them, ducked into the back room and went out the rear door into the alley. Right into a nest of those assholes. We started shooting and dropped quite a few, but it was close-quarters combat and they came from every direction.

  I saw Carl go down beneath a tangle of five or six of them.

  And Texas Slim shouted: “Nash! On your left!”

  I turned and shot another that was bearing down on me with an axe. And then Texas knocked me to the pavement and took a spear in the belly for it. He’d saved my life but sacrificed his own. They kicked my rifle away and beat me down with clubs. They had Texas down. He was screaming as he was jabbed repeatedly with five or six spears.

  I fought to my feet and something collided with the back of my head. The last thing I saw was them hacking on Texas and Janie being dragged away down the alley.

  10

  I remember coming awake to the sound of my own voice: “Janie? Janie? Janie…where are you, Janie?”

  I blinked and blinked again. Finally my eyes opened, focused, and I saw the Hatchet Clans. We had been taken to some kind of encampment outside town. In the distance I saw those crucified mummies up on the crosses. There were fires burning, canvas tents pitched. I was tied to a post driven in the ground. Mickey was to one side of me and Janie was to the other. Both of them were unconscious. They were still dressed, so I supposed they hadn’t been raped or tortured yet.

  But that was coming.

  Because that’s what the Clans did with women. With men, they generally killed them outright. But maybe they had a special purpose for me. Maybe they would make a grand spectacle of my death.

  For the time being, we were of no interest to them.

  I watched them sharpen axes and spears, fashion weapons from slats of wood and lengths of iron. If they had voices, real voices, I never heard them, just that indecipherable hissing. Now and again they’d make ratlike squealing sounds as a fight broke out between individuals. And when they fought, trust me, they fought to the death.

  I watched a couple of them-women, I thought-threading things onto a length of metal bailing wire. Human heads. Five or six of them. They jabbed the wire into the ear and pushed it right through and out the other ear. Then they tied off the wire between two green tree limbs jabbed into the ground.

  One of the heads belonged to Carl.

  11

  I must have went out cold again because when I awoke, two of the Clansmen were standing right before me and I could smell the hot stink of raw meat, filth, and urine coming from them. One had a knife and he cut me free. Numb, I pitched straight forward like a tree into the grass. Blinking in the hazy sunlight, I looked up at those gas masks on their faces. I knew the subhuman things that were beneath them.

  They hissed something at me.

  And when I didn’t understand, one of them kicked me.

  I wanted them to kill me. It was the best I could hope for. I didn’t want to see what they did to the girls. Texas and Carl were dead. I was having trouble wrapping my brain around that. Because with their deaths, in a way, everything had died. The core of my posse was gone. My connections were severed. Because Texas and Carl connected me to Sean who connected me to Specs who connected me to Youngstown and Shelly and my life. And now it was gone. I had no center.

  “Fuck you,” I said at the Clansmen which is what stupid, thick-headed idiots like me always say when we know we’re the ones who are fucked.

  They said something in their garbled voices.

  Then I heard thunder. Or what I thought was thunder. But it wasn’t thunder at all. Because it came again, a lot closer: a shrieking explosion that vaporized five or six Clansmen, scattering pieces of their anatomy in every direction. Another round hit. Another and another. I could smell fire and smoke and blood.

  The encampment was under siege.

  The Hatchet Clans were scurrying around madly. I heard the reports of automatic weapons. I saw Clansmen fall beneath volleys of bullets. Through clouds of twisting smoke and around blazing tents I saw the raiders step into view: forms in shiny plastic orange
suits with helmets on. There were faces behind the darkened plastic helmet bubbles and air lines leading from the mouthpieces to tanks on their backs. They were completely enclosed. They carried stout, short-bodied submachine guns in their hands.

  I remember thinking: Those are Hazmat suits, biocontainment suits. The kind of suits people like Price wore when they worked with hot agents. Space suits. That’s what Price called them.

  This was a fucking biocontainment team.

  The Hatchet Clans were outnumbered, out gunned.

  They died in numbers. I could hear Janie and Mickey shouting out. I scrambled over the ground, found a dying Clansman and took his machete. He grabbed my leg, snarling at me. I brought the machete down on him again and again. I didn’t stop until the blade was gored with blood and he stopped moving.

  And when I turned back to race to the girls, two men were standing there in their orange space suits. I could not see their faces through the visors. I could only hear the sound of their respirators hissing in and hissing out. They had their guns aimed right at me-H amp; K machine pistols, I thought, the kind counterterrorist units used. They did not lower them.

  Speaking through an external speaker with a modulated, artificial voice, a man said: “Drop your weapon please.”

  I was overwrought, I suppose. My life had disintegrated in the last twenty-four hours. I wanted blood. I wanted payback. I wanted some sweet, clean revenge. I suppose I must have looked dangerous with a bloody machete upraised to attack. “But my friends…they fucking killed my friends…” I said.

  “They’re dead now, the Clans are dead,” the voice told me. “They can’t hurt you anymore.”

  I could hear an occasional report of a submachine gun as the Hatchet Clans were mopped up. Soon, I didn’t even hear that. There was only silence. The murmuring sound of voices coming through speakers.

  I dropped the machete.