Biohazard

3

Carl stopped shooting and backed away from the window. “Listen,” he said. “You hear it? They’re coming…”

“That smell,” Janie said.

I didn’t know what the hell either of them were talking about. I was smelling burning gasoline and scorched metal, melted rubber and plastic, the stink of burnt cordite in the room. My ears were ringing from the shooting. So I truly didn’t hear or smell anything for a moment. But then I did: a rising steady drone that seemed to be coming from every direction and a smell: sweet, almost gagging, like sugar liquefied in a pan. The droning got louder until it became a high, whining buzz and that stink…nauseating, like thrusting your head into the innards of a hive dripping with honey. Absolutely overwhelming.

“Close those fucking windows!” I cried out.

But Carl and Janie were already doing so and I joined in. None of us seemed to give a shit about the fact that we had exposed ourselves to gunfire from below. We knew what was coming and we knew very well what would happen if we didn’t get those damn windows closed up fast.

“They’re down in the lobby!” Texas Slim called out, rushing into the room and slamming the door behind him.

We got the windows closed and just in time-for something landed on the glass outside. An insect. It was about six-inches long, segmented, a pale cream in color like a larval termite with tiny spines rising up from the thorax. Looking like some weird mutant hybrid of a wasp, a fly, and a mosquito, it fluttered wide, transparent purple-hued wings, two sets of them that were intricately veined with a dark tracery. It had bulbous red-orange eyes the size of marbles and I swear it was looking at us, hungering for us. Carl thumped the window and three more landed followed by a fifth, sixth, and seventh. They knew we were in there and they wanted us. They crawled over the glass, buzzing their wings, each extending a fleshy proboscis to the window, investigating it. The most obscene thing about them was that proboscis. It was rubbery, pulsing, the tip flaring out like a set of moist pink lips, suckering on the glass, inflating and deflating like it was kissing.

The dread of insects, especially large ones, is instinctual and that instinct becomes manic when the insects arrive in numbers, swarm like these things did. I don’t know what they were. Nobody really did. Just horrors that rose from the ashes of nuclear saturation, the radiation mutating their genes, adapting them perfectly to the hunting grounds of the new lopsided world. We called them bloodsuckers and that was as good of a name as any because they were bloodsuckers. They flew in dense, buzzing clouds, descending on anything with red blood in them and draining them dry.

I’d seen it happen and it was a horrible thing.

Carl thumped the glass again and something shrank inside me as I feared it might break, but it didn’t break. The insects flew off. Out in the parking lot below there were hundreds of them gathered in a huge buzzing swarm like mayflies, rising and falling, darting in and out of the mass, dancing about each other.

But even with that shrill buzzing in my ears I could hear the bad boys below screaming.

It’s not a sound I think I’ll ever forget. They were covered in bloodsuckers, literally enveloped in them. They were on the ground, writhing, squishing bug bodies beneath them and more poured in to feed all the time. Those blubbery lips-I don’t know what else to call them-on the end of the proboscises were attached to the men, suctioning the blood from them and I could hear that, too. It sounded like a kid sucking pudding through a straw.

Janie backed away from the window, shaking violently, hugging herself, then covering her ears. She was crying, her mouth was open like it wanted to scream but all that came out was an airless whine.

Texas was shaking, too. They shared an absolute terror of insects and these things only multiplied that tenfold. He wrapped his arms around her and she held on tight and maybe I would have tried to pacify them with a calm reassuring word if my skin hadn’t been crawling.

Even Carl wasn’t doing too well and nothing scared him. Beads of sweat were rolling down his face and I bet they were ice-cold. Just like the sweat beading my forehead.

Down in the parking lot, the feeding continued. The swarm found the bodies of the two dead men and were feeding on them. The gasoline had long since burned off and the truck sat there smoldering, but not putting out enough smoke to drive the bugs away.

As I said, the bloodsuckers were a dull, pale cream in color, but as they fed, juicing their veins and capillaries with stolen blood, they bloated up and their flesh went a bright, vibrant red like the ass end of female mosquito after she has just drank her fill on your forearm. Some of them were so distended with blood they could barely get off the ground, they looked almost absurd with their bulging, brilliant red thoraxes. Like glistening scarlet softballs with wings. Several were scrambling along sluggishly on the ground, too fat to fly, dragging their wings behind them. Their fellows chipped in by landing on them and suctioning off the excess with their proboscises.

More bugs landed on the window and when Carl went to thump them, I stopped him. If that glass broke we were dead. It was safety glass and safety glass does not break easily like in the movies, but all we needed was for one of those windows to have an imperfection. If it broke, we’d be drained dry before we even made the door.

And at that point, running from the room was no longer an option: I could hear them on the door, thumping and scratching about, their suckers attached to the wood.

I looked out the window. The bloodsuckers had abandoned the bad boys. They were bled white, every drop of blood vacuumed from them. They were curled up on the pavement like dead, dehydrated spiders. They were contorted, limbs drawn up, faces corded and withered, looking like mummies that had dried out for 2,000 years in a tomb beneath the sands.

“Why don’t they leave?” Janie said. “What the hell do they want?”

“They want us,” Carl said under his breath.

It wasn’t the right thing to say, of course. It was like telling somebody who was terrified of snakes that the snake in the backyard won’t leave until it crawls up your pantleg and bites you. But Carl was never known for his sensitivity.

The noise outside the door was growing. The buzzing was getting very loud, the thumping, scraping and sucking sounds going right up my spine.

I looked outside.

The bugs were still out there, flying around, covering the pick-up and the Bronco, so thick on the ground you couldn’t see the pavement. More of them were settling onto the windows all the time. Drunken and distended with blood, the fat ones flew around in crazy circles, crashing into the others and hitting the ground. And then one, just intoxicated, flew right at the window at full speed. I jumped just as it hit the glass with enough force to make the glass rattle in its frame. The bug was so swollen with blood it literally exploded on impact like a water balloon. Blood and bits of tissue, a few assorted limbs, ran down the window in a vivid crimson smear.

Janie screamed.

I think I did, too.

The spilled blood drove the swarm wild and they pressed into the glass to lick it up, dozens and dozens of them. The buzzing outside the windows was then louder than that outside the door. More of them flew in, covering the glass and each other, more all the time, until the light was shut out and the room went dark.

Carl fumbled in his pack and lit a couple candles. Texas Slim pulled out his Coleman lantern and lit it. We didn’t need to be waiting in the darkness, listening to those things buzzing and sucking, wondering if one might land on our necks. That would have been too much. It would have been living on the edge of panic and we were already there.

“Just wait it out people,” Carl said, sounding somewhat calm. “When they realize the pickings are all picked, they’ll move on. They always do.”

That was sensible. And as the little leader of our little group, I probably should have said it but my mouth was so dry I think anything I might have said would have come out in a broken squeak.

Carl walked over to the door and studied it with the beam of his flashlight. He lit a cigarette. “Too bad we couldn’t pump some smoke out there, Nash, it would drive them off.”

“Just…get away from the door,” Janie told him.

“Had to make sure it was secure,” Carl said.

Texas Slim chuckled. “And is it secure?”

“Seems to be.”

“That’s good news, Carl,” Texas said. “You make me feel all warm and cozy like I was in my mother’s arms.”

“Kiss my ass, peckerwood.”

“All right,” I said. “Let’s shitcan the fighting, okay?”

Texas was still holding Janie to him-and liking it, I’m sure-over on the couch against the wall. “Well, you know it ain’t me, Nash. It’s Carl. He just likes to pick and the more picking you do the better chance you have of making the blood run.”

“Shut up about blood,” Janie said.

“Yes, darling,” he said. “Whatever you want, my dove. I’m here to comfort you.”

“And watch your hands. My tits don’t need comforting and neither does my ass.”

We all shared a brief laugh at that.

But it didn’t last. This time, I heard it: a scratching sound. In that room of shadows, it was hard to say where it was coming from, only that it was there and it was growing more insistent by the moment. I looked around. The couch. The desk. A few leather chairs. The radiator. A potted plant long since wilted. File cabinets. A walk-in closet, door closed. A few stray chairs pushed up to the desk.

“I’m not liking that,” Texas Slim said.

Carl and I started looking around with our flashlights. At first we thought it was coming from the walls. But that wasn’t it. I walked around the desk, shining my light around. My beam fell on the clean air vent in the floor. It gleamed off two bulging red eyes.

I shrieked and stumbled back.

A bloodsucker came up out of the vent and circled the room lazily like a moth around a streetlight. It was in no hurry. Texas and Janie ducked, crying out. Carl made ready to put a round in it with his carbine. I grabbed up the wastebasket and tried to swat it. The glow of the candles and flickering lantern light cast a mammoth, leggy shadow of the thing against the wall. It flew like a wasp you see in slow mo on one of those nature documentaries on the Discovery Channel: back hunched, legs dangling beneath, just drifting around.

Carl jumped at it, swung his carbine like a bat and struck it. It bounced off the wall, slid across the desk and landed on the floor about three inches from my boot. I instinctively stomped on it and then almost wished I hadn’t: the sound of its exoskeleton crunching beneath my boot made me shiver. It made a pained trilling sound right before my weight smashed it to paste.

“Oh God,” Janie said.

That cloying stench of hot, seething honey was getting stronger in the room and it wasn’t from what I was wiping off my boot onto the area rug under the desk. Because that scratching came again, only there was more of it. They were coming from the clean air vent.

I saw two of them flying around, bumping into the ceiling. Another settled onto a lampshade and Carl swore, brought up his carbine, and fired. He split it into two sections that skittered about on the floor for a moment or two before going still.

“No guns!” I said, looking over at the black, breathing mass covering the windows. “You break that window, we’re fucked.”

Texas and Janie were clinging tighter than ever. Texas had a throw pillow in one hand and was wildly swatting with it. It was probably the most ridiculous, effeminate defense I’d ever seen.

Carl was chasing the other bugs around. They flew in directionless spirals, bumping the walls, one of them knocking a vase off the desk that shattered on the floor. He knocked one down and smashed it with his boot and I cold-cocked the other with the wastebasket and it nose-dived to the floor. Its wing was damaged only it was too stupid to realize it and kept propelling itself in a buzzing circle on the floor. I killed it with the wastebasket.

But by then there were others.

One of them dove right at Janie and she punched it, knocking it aside and I stomped it. Texas beat another down with his pillow and crushed it under his boot. The sound of it smashing made him wince, say, “Oh Lord.”

One of them dove at my head and I swatted it away with the can. Two others went at Carl, one of them attached itself to his fist as he made to punch it and another latched onto the back of his arm. He smashed the one on his fist by punching the wall, but the other got a good grip and its proboscis suckered to his skin. He let out a wild cry and I took hold of him. I reached out and grabbed the bug in my fist. It was hot and greasy under my fingers, its body pulsating rapidly like the beat of a newborn’s heart. I squeezed it with everything I had. Its wings crackled like dry cellophane and its bony skeleton crunched like an egg shell, brown goo squirting between my fingers. With a swell of nausea in my belly, I yanked it free, the proboscis refusing to let go. As I pulled the mangled body free, the proboscis stretched like a rubber band, then the lips came free with popping, smacking sound and a ribbon of Carl’s blood sprayed against my cheek.

I tossed it to the floor.

Texas and Janie were on their feet, swatting the insects down.

“Cover that fucking vent!” Texas shouted.

Which was exactly what I was going to do, but Carl was way ahead of me. No gun? He had a better idea. He grabbed a can of silicone spray from the shelf on the wall, the kind used to lubricate machine parts and make leather upholstery gleam. He got down on his knees before the clean air vent, pressed the button on the can and held his Bic lighter to the spray. A foot long mushrooming tongue of flame shot out. He held it to the vent. He fried one of the bloodsuckers coming through and it curled up, making a shrill e-e-e-e-e-e-e sort of sound as it died. Others tried to come up but he cooked them and drove still more down the vent. When the lattices of the vent were glowing hot, he yanked one of the filing cabinets over it, sealing it shut.

As he did that, the rest of us killed bugs.

There were about a dozen of them. We smashed and stomped and hit them. One got tangled in Janie’s hair and Texas almost cold-cocked her when he hit it, knocking it free. One got on the back of my neck and I screamed. I tried to pull it off but I couldn’t get a grip on it. I felt those rubbery pulsing lips attach to my flesh. They were warm. There was a sudden piercing like an ice-cold pin.

Then Carl knocked me to the floor and tore the beasty free.

I saw it laying there, smashed, a long needle-like protrusion hanging from the lips. It was wire-thin and probably used to puncture veins and arteries.

The war we fought was horrendous and by the end we had bug guts smeared on our hands and bug blood on our faces and down our arms. But we won. And when we had, we stood there breathing hard, dozens of mangled insects and parts thereof at our feet.

Carl lit a cigarette. “Fuck of a way to fight a war,” he said.

Janie burst out laughing, only this laughter was high-pitched and near hysterical. I understood it: I had the mad desire to do the same. I clutched her to me, that honeyed bug stench so ripe on her my stomach rolled over. Texas kicked bugs into the corner and the rest of us just let the tension run from us.

About the time Carl finished his cigarette, we heard a creaking.

Then a snapping.

And that’s when the window exploded inward.