Biohazard

GARY, INDIANA
1

We came into the city on a day that was still, ominous, and hazy. Our VW hippie microbus was on its last legs. Like the wild free-loving days of Haight-Ashbury, the bus was past its prime. She seized up twice out on I-80 coming into Gary and Carl said her bearings were shot and her carb was gummed up. As it was, we pretty much coasted into the city, the love machine wheezing like an asthmatic old man. We needed new wheels because hoofing it across country just wasn’t an option.

We skirted Tolleston and cut through Ambridge until we reached downtown. Coughing out clouds of blue smoke, our VW microbus rolled to a stop before a row of tenements and died with a backfire.

Inside, Carl swore. And then swore again.

I stepped out, fanning my sweaty face with a Cleveland Indians baseball cap. I lit a stale cigarette with a cupped match and then looked around at the devastation…the overturned cars, the rubble, the garbage blowing in the gutters. Drifts of sand were pushed up against the buildings. A crow sat atop the traffic light ahead, cawing. The day was hot and hazy, picked dry as desert bones,

Other than that, there was nothing.

Just the deathly silence that was uniform to most cities since the bombs had come down. A pick-up truck was pulled up to the curb, a crusty yellow skeleton behind the wheel. Birds had built nests in the slats of the ribcage.

I was trying to get a feel for things. Where we should go and what we should do when we got there.

From inside the bus, Texas Slim called: “Nothing here, Nash. Let’s pack it in.”

I ignored him, stepping away from the bus and studying the ruined buildings around me. I saw no life, no movement, but I knew it was out there somewhere. Hidden eyes were watching me, gauging me. The days had long since vanished when you welcomed strangers with open arms.

That’s not how it worked now.

There were people here, I knew, and not all of them were thick with radiation and Fevers. I had to find one of them. Somehow. Some way. The full moon was coming fast now.

If I couldn’t find someone, it meant selecting one of my own and I didn’t like that idea.

There were five of us now?Janie and I, Carl and Texas Slim, and the new guy, Gremlin. We called him Gremlin because we’d picked him up in Michigan City, found him trapped in the trunk of an old AMC Gremlin. Scabs were out the night before, he said, looking for recruits and he jammed himself in the trunk and then couldn’t get out. He was so wedged in there it took all of us to yank his sorry ass free.

I hadn’t made my mind up about him yet. There were things I didn’t like about him?his perpetual bitching?and things I did like: he did what he was told without question. Janie was neutral on him. Carl and Texas Slim liked to pick on him a lot, which was their way of feeling him out and finding out what he was made of.

I scanned the streets, looking for a decent vehicle but all of them were wrecks. I turned my back on the VW and then I heard something. At first, I wasn’t sure what it was, only that it seemed to be coming from the alley across the way. I called out for the others to stay in the bus in case it was a trap and walked over there. Plugging my cigarette into the corner of my mouth, I pulled the Beretta out of my waistband. I worked the slide and jacked a round into the breech, got ready for what might come.

In the alley, shrouded in shadow from the buildings on either side, there was a man.

Barely a man, in fact. Just some emaciated stick figure pulling itself along like a worm. He had three riders on him?rats. They were huge, the size of cats, their bodies swollen and tumorous beneath pelts of greasy gray fur. They looked up with shining rabid eyes and then got back to work eating the man. This is what I had been hearing…the chewing sounds of rats feeding, moist and slobbering like dogs working juicy bones.

There wasn’t much meat on the man, but the rats were taking what they could get. One of them had its snout buried in his throat and was tugging at something in there. The other two were digging in his belly, yanking out his entrails and gnawing on them.

Bold bastards…and in the daytime yet.

The rat that was digging in the man’s throat pulled its gore-smeared snout free and made a low hissing sound. It was ready to defend against all and any poachers. It rose up on its haunches, ready to fight. Droplets of blood glistened on its whiskers. There were wriggling worm-like growths suspended from its belly that looked like teats…except that they moved, pulsed. I aimed, fired, knocking the rat free of the man and pulverizing its head into splashing meat. It rolled over once, legs kicking, and died.

The other two abandoned the man’s belly, leering at me with flat red eyes. They both opened their mouths, blood-stained teeth bared. Strips of tissue hung from their jaws. I shot first one and then the other. The first took a head-shot and died quick enough, the other, a hole punched through its belly, tried to crawl away, squealing and bleeding, dragging its viscera behind it over the dirty pavement. I shot it again and it did not move.

The dying man looked up, his face contorted in utter agony. He had crawled out from behind a dumpster, the rats eating him the entire time, no doubt. He left a smear of blood in his wake. I watched him, wishing there was something I could do. Times were hard, savage, yes, but I still felt compassion at times like these and I wanted nothing more than to help the poor guy.

But it was too late and I was no surgeon.

The rats had done irreparable damage, the trauma gruesome and unpleasant. The guy’s belly was open, his throat was open, his bowels had been pulled out and bitten. Bad enough, but he was obviously dying long before they attacked. Radiation poisoning. I had seen it plenty of times by then and I knew it when I saw it. Most of the guy’s hair had fallen out, his scalp and skin split open in jagged ruts. There were sores everywhere. Most of his teeth were gone and those that remained were rotting brown in the gums. He was bleeding from his ears, his nose, his mouth, even his eyes.

He held a hand up to me, a sickly blotched claw really, as if needing to make contact with a human being one last time. Then his arm fell and he lay there, bleeding, vomiting out bile and blood, gasping in pain.

“Sorry, old man,” I said. “Wish there was something I could do.”

Tensing myself, I put a bullet in the old timer’s head to alleviate his suffering. It was the only thing I could do, but doing so made me feel cold and empty inside. Had I known any good prayers, I might have used one then.

“Don’t mean nothing,” I said under my breath, amazed, as always, that after all the shit I’d been through there could still be something as intangible as guilt in my soul.

Deeper in the shadows of the alley…a rustling, a skittering.

More rats.

Probably a colony near.

I walked quickly back to the van. It was mid-afternoon and usually the rats didn’t get too active until night, but you never knew. They could be unbelievably vicious if you threatened their nests. If they came after me in numbers I could empty my gun into them and it still would do no good. They’d bury me alive in teeth and claws and lice-infested bodies. My bones would be licked clean in minutes.

When I got back in the van, I told Carl to get us the hell out of there.

The van started to roll again, jerking and wheezing, but gradually picking up speed.