Biohazard

4

It was getting on dark and we still hadn’t found a ride and I was getting sick to death of Specs speculating about The Shape-he was convinced it was an old pagan god that had resurfaced now that Christianity had bottomed out-and asking me fifty questions about it.

“Listen,” I finally said. “What I told you was a secret and we’re not going to talk about it, okay? Just let it lay.”

We had other things to worry about.

I knew well enough from Youngtown that you didn’t want to be caught out in the open after dark. We had to find a place to lay low. We were down along the Cuyahoga River. There wasn’t much but a lot of industrial sites, many of which looked long abandoned, and the usual assortment of neighborhoods and storefronts that spring up around places like that. Lots of bars and lunch counters and not much else. We needed the right place. Something defensible.

As I looked around, Specs tugged on my elbow. “Nash,” he said. “Oh boy, Nash. Look.”

Shit. Scabs. About five or six of them just up the street sitting atop a pile of rubble, half-naked and moon-fleshed and filthy, like birds of prey on their high perches looking for tasty rodents. I wasn’t entirely convinced that they’d even seen us. One of them, a woman in a black motorcycle jacket and nothing else, was staring intently in the direction we’d just come from. The others were staring dumbly at their own feet.

I carefully slipped the. 38 from my jacket pocket.

Specs and I moved very slowly towards a run of ruined buildings about twenty feet away. I was very aware of how debris crunched under our boots. I think I held my breath the entire way. It was the longest twenty feet of my life. We ducked through a massive hole in the brick facade of a bar. It looked like it had been hit by an anti-tank round and it probably had been.

We made it.

“Hey, not bad-” Specs started to say.

“Shut up,” I told him. “They’re not fucking deaf.”

I peaked around the corner. They hadn’t moved. Holding my finger to my lips, I led Specs farther into the bar room. Whatever had blasted through that wall had kept going and blew out a good portion of the rear wall, taking out most of the bathroom. We climbed free of the building into a little alley paved in bricks. The shadows were starting to get long. The alley was a cul-de-sac whose entry was blocked by more rubble. We climbed through a missing window into another building and we soon saw that it was gutted inside. The upper floors were nearly gone. You could see the sky through a jagged chasm in the roof.

“What the hell happened here?” Specs asked.

“Must’ve been some kind of battle. Looks like this place took an airstrike or an artillery barrage.”

A great section of the floor was missing, having fallen into the cellar below. We moved around this carefully, found a door, and on the other side, it was even worse. What we were looking at was like London after the blitz: heaps of rubble, buildings that were entirely gutted and reduced to debris. Roofs were gone, windows blasted out, entire walls missing. And floors? There were no floors. Just huge pits that looked down into the cellars below that were dark and ominous, choked with debris and flooded with black water. There was only a skeletal framework of joists to walk on. It would be risky.

“Oh, I don’t know about this, Nash,” Specs said. “I don’t like this at all.”

But we really didn’t have a choice. Behind us, I could hear a lot of shouting and screaming. More Scabs had shown up. Going back that way wasn’t an option.

“You can do it,” I told him. “The joists are an easy foot across. Just don’t look down.”

We moved over to the edge of the pit, kicking up clouds of brick dust. I started out on one of the joists and it wasn’t so bad. Plenty of room to walk. The trick was not to look down. It wasn’t that it was a deep drop…probably eight feet or so, but eight feet into rubble and twisted metal, that rank-smelling water and who knew what kind of things lay right beneath the surface that would impale you?

“Come on,” I told him. “Don’t look down.”

Hesitantly, he started across. He moved like a turtle at first, but once he got his feet under him it was no problem. We crossed the joists, ducked through a jagged archway and found ourselves in another building lacking a floor. I noticed that a cobwebbed rocking chair hung from the floor above by a section of electrical wiring. It swayed back and forth. The water below us was caked with leaves. A few plastic bottles bobbed.

I was about two-thirds of the way across on the center joist when I heard a muted splashing. Maybe not a splashing exactly, but sort of a slopping sound. I looked back and Specs was still coming, offering me a goofy smile. He hadn’t heard it.

“This ain’t so bad,” he said. “Like walking curbs when you’re a kid.”

I nodded, smiling thinly. I heard that slopping again and looked back. This time I saw something. Something that froze me up and made my heart start hammering. Cool sweat ran down my face. Near to where Specs was I saw…thought I saw…a puckered white face pull down beneath the leaves and water.

I made it across.

“Something wrong, Nash?” Specs asked me.

“No, it’s cool,” I told him, just waiting for a pair of white, mottled hands to reach up and pull him into the flooded stygian depths. But it didn’t happen. He made it across and we darted through a missing wall. Before us was a solid expanse of brick with no egress. Instead of going forward, I feared, we had somehow gotten turned sideways and were moving lengthwise through the buildings. We’d have been at it quite a while at that rate. I compensated, led us around some huge heaps of shattered brick, through a near-collapsed doorway, and into the utter darkness. In the distance I could see a patch of light.

We were in some kind of warehouse, I thought.

Boxes and barrels were stacked around us. It was very gloomy in there. There were roughly a million places for unfriendlies to hide and about the same amount of ways to die. The floor was concrete and unbroken.

I led Specs forward and he clung to me, pulling at the back of my jacket, bumping into me, grabbing me by the arm. It was like going through a carnival spookhouse with your badly frightened kid brother. The. 38 in hand, I moved us along, trying not to trip over anything. We were not alone in there. I heard a scratching once and a dragging sound another time.

When the patch of light-a missing door-was about fifteen feet away, Specs pulled me to a stop.

“Listen,” he said.

I heard it right away: a sort of low, coarse breathing in the darkness. Behind us, I could swear I saw grotesque forms threading through the shadows. Whatever was in there was closing in on us. I grabbed Specs and raced him to the door and out into the blinding light.

Nothing followed us.

The sky above looked odd, I thought. Kind of roiling with bloated pinkish clouds that started to look less and less pink and more brilliantly red by the moment. A drop of rain splatted at my foot. Another ran down the windshield of a wrecked pickup truck. Except it wasn’t rain…it wasn’t water. It was red. Like blood.

“Shit,” I heard Specs say.

I turned to find the nearest shelter and there was a big guy with a pump shotgun in his hands. He looked mean. “Where do you assholes want it?” he said. “In the belly or in the head?”