Biohazard

2

The thing I hated about Janie most of all was that she was brutally honest, absolutely not a shred of bullshit in her soul. Way things were, deceiving yourself and those around you was a way of life. It kept you sane, kept your feet on the ground. But not Janie.

Whenever we were alone, Janie would look at me with those eyes so clear and so blue, and she’d ask me that same question again and again and again: “Where, Nash? Where are we going? Where are you pointing us to?”

“West,” I’d say. “We’re going west.”

“Why west? What’s out there but more of the same?”

“Because that’s where we have to go. That’s all.”

Janie would keep her mouth shut for a few moments. Then she’d say: “Is that what it wants? Is that what The Shape tells you to do?”

And I would suddenly feel absolutely numb with fear, a gnawing anxiety rising up from within that threatened to swallow me alive. I would not be able to speak. I would lay there, dumbly, Janie in my arms, feeling the cool sweat on her body, smelling her musk and sweetness. The Shape, The Shape, The Shape. Oh dear God. What it wanted, what it demanded.

What I had to give it once a month during the cycle of the full moon.

Jesus.

See, that was Janie: no bullshit. The others would never dare ask me something like that. They knew about The Shape. They knew what it wanted…but it didn’t make for pleasant conversation so it was not brought up.

But Janie wasn’t like that. She’d hit me with questions and I would have to answer them. I’d find my voice, some old and scratchy thing that sounded distant and tinny like an old 78, and tell her, “Yes, that’s what it wants. It wants us to go west. There’s something out there.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Something out there and maybe something we have to get away from back here. I don’t know.”

I wouldn’t say anymore than that. She did not need to know what I suspected was behind us, chewing its way across country, city by city, leaving charnel waste in its path.

Janie would breathe in and out and I’d run a hand over her naked back, that deliciously smooth tanned skin, thinking how she was so much like Shelly. Except that Shelly was dead and Janie was alive.

“How long, Nash? When will it be satisfied? When will The Shape have enough?”

But I would never answer that one because it sickened me to contemplate it. What I would have to do and who I might have to do it to. For I knew with an awful certainty, sure as there was blood rushing through my veins, that there would never be an end to it. I didn’t know what The Shape was exactly, but I sensed that it was part of this new world, a natural force now like wind and water and sunshine.

It would ask things.

I would do them.

And if it ever asked for Janie? If it ever did that…if it ever goddamn well did that…I didn’t know what I’d do. Because there was no fucking way it would touch her.

I would not allow it.

I didn’t care how hungry it was…