Biohazard

5

It was on those glaring, overcast days where the world was sank in a saffron haze that you could never see danger until it was right upon you. Sometimes when the dust storms came we were caught out in the open. It always started the same way with a silence that was heavy and sullen, a stillness that would make your flesh crawl. Then the wind would come howling like banshees, screaming through the streets, engulfing the world in a whipping tempest of radioactive dust. If you couldn’t get to cover and fast, the wind would scrape your skin right off and the radiation would roast you from the inside out.

I had once seen a pack of ragbags out picking through the gutters get caught in a storm like that.

They didn’t make it ten feet before the wind nailed their coffins shut. When it lifted and the dust had dispersed, the roentgens dropping away to near-normal, there was nothing out there but six bodies laying in the street. They were blistered and baked, brown as old shoe leather, tendrils of smoke rising from them with a nauseating stench of burning flesh.

Regardless, Gary was desolate.

About what you’d expect a year after Doomsday. The Geiger was reading fifty micro-roentgens per hour, background radiation, which was warm but certainly not hot. Livable. Other than that, it was more of the same: deserted streets blown with rubbish, smashed vehicles, burned-out houses. Lots of rubble from the last days when Martial Law was declared and the Army tried to put down all the private militias.

Gary was no worse than any other city, of course, but I wasn’t for hanging around and either were the others. We needed a dependable set of wheels. We needed to be free and mobile. We needed something else, too, but we weren’t talking about it.

Carl, being military-minded, wanted a Hummer with a mounted fifty-cal. Texas Slim wanted a hearse. Janie didn’t care either way and I just wanted something dependable. Gremlin, of course, had no opinion. He’d bitch whatever we got.

With a third of the human population wiped out in thirty-six hours and millions more dying from fallout in the weeks and months following, you’d think autos would be easy to come by.

Not so.

“C’mon, you piece of shit,” Carl said, turning into a crowded avenue that was strewn with the hulks of rusting cars and trucks. All the tires had been stripped away for fires. Most of the windshields were shattered. He had to snake his way through them and it was no easy bit with that wheezing old bus jerking and stopping and flooding out all the time. “Cocksucker…fucking cocksucker.”

Texas Slim giggled. “I like that. I like how he does that. Swearing like a sailor.”

“Kiss my ass,” Carl told him.

“See? He keeps doing that. It’s hilarious.”

Texas Slim was a little odd. He wasn’t from Texas at all. Somewhere in Louisiana, he claimed, but Carl called always called him Texas and so did we. He was good with a gun, good with scavenging, good with doing what he was told without question. He was just a little off sometimes and it was often hard to tell whether he was serious or just laughing his ass off at everyone and everything.

“Hey, you suppose they have any willing ladies around here?” he wanted to know. “Or even a few that aren’t so willing?”

“You just keep fucking your hand and shut up,” Carl told him.

Janie sighed and I leaned back in the rear seat, thinking about what we would have to do once we got some wheels and who we might have to do it to.

“Hey,” Gremlin said. “Check it. We got some local action here.”

There were a couple old ragbags in their tattered salvation army coats picking up dead rats and dumping them into potato sacks. Once upon a time before the world went mad, they had been bums, homeless people, but in this brave new scary world there were no more bus stations to sleep in and no soft tourists to panhandle. Now they were scavengers and they’d eat just about anything.

Carl eyed them warily. “I got me a real funny feeling here.”

“So get your hand out of your pants,” Texas Slim told him.

I waited, not putting much on Carl’s feeling, but then Janie began to tense up next to me and I knew something was going on.

“Shit,” Carl said.

The ragbags had no sense of intuition. They just kept picking up their goods and dreaming of browned rat-stew and humbleberry rat-pie, happily ignorant in the fog of their own stench. Carl hit the brakes and everyone almost fell out of their seats. But nobody bitched, because by then we all saw what Carl was seeing.

Scabs.

Three of them were standing on top of an old rusted station wagon. They had metal pipes in their hands. They were paying no attention to anything but the ragbags. They jumped off the wagon, hit the dirty street running and, just like that, they fell on the ragbags and started piping them. The ragbags just went down, curling themselves into protective balls, and the Scabs just beat them until their pipes were red and crusted with hair and tissue and the ragbags were no longer moving.

Then they looked over at the us.

Just the three of them. They were naked, their faces a scabrous dead-white, burst open with sores.

“Get us out of here!” Gremlin said. “Why are we just fucking sitting here?”

Carl got the van moving. The flesh at the back of my neck was prickling, every muscle in my body standing taut and trembling. That’s when the other Scabs showed.

Not just two or three, but dozens. Most of them were naked.

They were coming from every direction. Leaping off cars and running from ruined buildings, crawling out of alleys and dropping from broken windows. They had knives and axes, pipes and broomsticks, hammers and meat cleavers. This was their turf and they were going to protect it. Up until then, I had never seen Scabs organized like that. It was not a good thing.

There was no going back and everyone knew it.

Time to go hunting.

More of them were pouring into the streets now, streaming out of their coverts and hides, all carrying axes and pikes and hammers. But no guns. I looked real closely and saw no guns. And at that point, it was all we had going for us. I didn’t need to tell anyone what had to come down. Their hands were already filled with guns. We were going to cowboy our way out, Wild West it.

Janie looked at me with raw panic in her eyes, but there was no time for reassuring words. Carl had his Mossberg 500 across his lap. The beauty of the Mossberg was that it was no longer than your arm but it had real killing power. Texas Slim had his big bluesteel Desert Eagle. 50 cal ready to bust and Gremlin was holding a chromed-up Smith. 357. I jacked a fresh magazine into my Beretta.

Janie wouldn’t take a weapon.

“Put your head down and keep it there,” I told her. “Okay, Carl. Roll.”

Carl eased the bus into motion, got it rolling to ten and then twenty miles an hour. Windows were rolled up, doors locked.

The Scabs converged.

“Come on, you ugly pricks,” Texas Slim said. “Come get you some lovely fifty-cal.”

They went after our hippie bus like it was a living thing that needed to be brought down, a primal beast in need of slaying. Like stone-age hunters attacking a mammoth, they charged right in. Hatchets and axes flew, pipes rose and fell, hammers banged and knives gouged. The rearview mirrors were knocked free, the windshield feathering out with cracks as rocks and bricks glanced off it. The front passenger side window collapsed inward in a spider-webbed tangle as Texas Slim fired three rounds from his Eagle point-blank at the screaming Scabs. A cluster of them fell away. Nothing speaks quite as loud as. 50 cal. Carl didn’t wait for them to get his window. When they crowded in, jabbing and pounding and scratching with their long white fingers, he brought the Mossberg up and fired. The window disappeared and a couple Scabs had buckshot sprayed in their faces.

There were too many.

Gremlin looked at me and I nodded.

We brought our weapons up and fired simultaneously right through the windows. The. 357 shattered the glass and it dropped away, but it took two or three rounds from my 9mm to do the same. Everyone was shooting then, knocking the Scabs down and watching more swarm in, bodies dropping and faces splashed off skulls, the bus lurching as it smashed into one after the other, jerking as it rolled over their writhing bodies.

A Scab with the craziest, glassiest eyes I had ever seen knocked two or three of his brothers away, holding a long-handled axe up for the swinging. I put a round in his left eye socket and he fell back, twisting around in a circle, screeching, hands pressed over his face, blood gushing from between his fingers.

“KILL ‘EM!” Carl shouted with a sort of manic glee as he steered and fired his Mossberg. “GREASE THESE MOTHERFUCKERS! PUT ‘EM DOWN!”

The bus was taking a beating and there was only so much ammo. Already the inside was filled with smoke and glass and blood from the Scabs, everyone’s ears ringing from the close-quarter firing.

We made it through the first gauntlet of Scabs and most fell away as the bus rounded the next block, but others still chased on foot and there was just not enough room to get up any speed out of the old VW. I drilled three more before my Beretta was empty and then I started smashing faces with it. But the Scabs, juiced to the gills on hate and rage, didn’t give in easily. They kept coming, leaping right over the bodies of their comrades. I caught a fist in the jaw, another in the temple, nails scraped across my face. Then hands had me, yanking me right out of my seat. Janie was pulling on me, shouting, screaming, but she was losing the tug-of-war.

I fought the best I could, clawing and punching, but there was only so much I could do. In my brain, defeat already echoed: I’m done, I’m fucking done in! Them sonsofbitches have me!

Then Carl swiveled around in his seat, driving with his knees, bringing out a. 38 Airweight and putting a round right into the face of the guy who was trying to drag me out. The bullet passed so close to my left ear I could feel the heat. But it was right on target. The Scab took it right in the nose and he fell away like he was kicked. Carl fired two more times and cored two more Scabs just like that.

Texas Slim knocked one more away then he was out of ammo, too.

So was Gremlin.

There were more guns and ammo in the back, but there was no time to get at them. Carl stomped on the accelerator and the bus jerked, coughed, sounded like it was going to stall out, then it found some speed and flattened two Scabs that ran at it. Another was hanging on the driver’s side and Carl shot him with the Airweight, but he wouldn’t let go. So he shot him again and again. Another tried to dive through Texas Slim’s window and Texas Slim drove a lockblade right into his throat and still he hung on, blood bubbling from the wound.

“You need to die, friend! Let me show you!” Texas Slim cried out and started stabbing him in the face, the neck, the head, and finally he dropped away.

Janie was holding me so tight I thought she was going to break my arm, but we made it through.

“Well, that was a fucking trip,” Carl said.

And we all started laughing. Just laughing like crazy, everyone cut and bleeding and dirty.

But in the confusion and haze, Carl never saw the little overturned Ford Focus until it was too late. He jammed the brakes and spun the wheel and the bus glanced off it, jumped the curb and smashed through the plate glass window of an old video store.

And there it died.