Biohazard

7

Ever since Doomsday, germs terrify me.

No, I’m not talking OCD here or anything so trifling, I’m talking about the horror that I feel when I think of all the really nasty germs floating around out there and what they can do. The radiation, as I said, did something to those germs, made bigger, badder, more virulent bugs out of them, creating deadly strains and mutated life forms of the sort I didn’t even want to think about. I suppose some are the same old bugs, but many I know for a fact are much deadlier than they once were. Case in point, it was rumored that some exotic form of hemorrhagic fever similar to Ebola was burning its way through Akron and had already devastated what was left of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

Except, as it turned out, it was no rumor.

The form of hemorrhagic fever we’re talking about here is, like I said, very much like Ebola. You remember good old Ebola, don’t you? It laid waste to quite a few villages in Zaire, the Sudan, and the Ivory Coast back when the wheels of the world were still turning and not completely flat. It was big news. Scary news. A deadly, communicable “hot” virus that was filling graveyards with no end in sight. But it did end. It came and then left, ostensibly of its own choosing.

Now this lethal strain of hemorrhagic fever-let’s call it Ebola-X, that sounds suitably frightening-is like Ebola squared, Ebola to the tenth power, Ebola with a seriously pissy disposition, Ebola jacked-up on Meth and feeling extremely virile and kill-happy. I know these things because, at the very end, after Doomsday and right before our government collapsed, this new virulent Ebola-X was already laying siege to places like Washington D.C., Baltimore, and Boston.

And it’s still out there, mutating, generating, taking what godawful form I can only guess at.

Let’s say for the hell of it that you have contacted Ebola-X. From what I understand, communicability is roughly 98% and fatality 100%. This is death row, people, with no governor’s last minute reprieve. It begins with muscle aches, the sweats, and a spiking fever. Next comes agonizing abdominal pains, pinpoint hemorrhages in your brain. Your eyes go a bright, glistening blood-red. Your skin goes yellow and cracks open with sores. By this point your brain is pretty much jelly and blood gushes from any and all orifices while you vomit out black goo, infected blood, and macerated sections of your stomach and intestines. Death is within sixteen hours of first contact and those sixteen hours are the longest sixteen hours imaginable. I personally am not religious. I don’t believe there’s a little invisible deity in the sky who watches over us. It’s a nice, comforting thought, but I don’t believe in spiritual fairy tales and I’m pretty sure neither do the millions who’ve died in concentration camps, from mass murder, witch hunts, race crimes, and disease outbreaks. So while I don’t believe in God-though I would like to-I do believe in the Devil and the Devil is Ebola-X.

So, you get the picture, Ebola-X to human beings is pretty much like direct sunlight to a vampire…except that crumbling to dust would probably be far less painful (and messy).

Now let me tell you about Texas Slim. I haven’t said much about him; I’ve let you form your own opinions from my, hopefully, objective impressions and memories. Now Texas has an unusual past. He’s a bit quirky, offbeat, possibly borderline sociopathic. He laughs at things that make others cringe, tells very unpleasant stories that like piss in the punch don’t go down well in mixed company. Enough said. But I think beyond all that, he’s okay. He’s tough, he’s disciplined, he’s loyal, and unusually compassionate. Maybe that’s how they breed ‘em down there in Dixieland Louisiana. Regardless, I like him. He stands by me and I stand by him.

Now it would be easy enough to dismiss him as a weirdo, but don’t make that mistake. Let me tell you what happened to him before he joined up with my posse, which we could call the Loyal Order of The Shape or the Fraternal Order of the Esoteric Shape. Neither of which is very funny.

Anyway, Texas was living in Morgantown, West Virginia when the bombs fell. Being that he had a second cousin in Pittsburgh, he went there. His cousin-a large, pear-shaped woman named Jemmy Kilpatrick, who sported more tattoos than teeth-was holed-up in her apartment building with a posse of twenty others. Texas joined the posse. He was warmly welcomed…even if he did not find the romantic attentions of Jemmy so welcoming, that is. Things at the “commune,” as he called it, went well. Everyone pitched in. Everyone scavenged for food, weapons, fresh water. They did a high, fine job of it.

Then Jemmy came down with a fever.

Her symptoms pretty much followed those I mentioned above. Within six hours, her eyes were bright red-“Dracula eyes” as Texas Slim himself put it-and blood was literally gushing from her nose, her vagina, ass, bubbling out of her pores and dripping from her ears. She was like a ticking bomb for several hours, then she exploded. Burning with fevers, smelling of dank rot and drainage, she could no longer sit up and just stared off into space as the blood welled out and her skin went the waxy yellow of a transparent apple. Her flesh cracked open and bled. She became a seething mass of fevers and running blood and then…she “crashed and bled out” as the biohazard specialists say. She began shuddering with spasms. She vomited out great gouts of black-red arterial blood, spraying it liberally around and spattering those, Texas included, who were trying to care for her. She heaved out a great quantity of some greasy black substance as well. Texas said the room smelled like “a bag of hot vomit.” I don’t doubt it. But the most horrible thing of all, he told me, was the ripping sound of her anus as it opened to vent blood and tissue, which was probably what was left of her bowels. She died very quickly after that, submerging in a pool of her own blood and waste.

Now most people would have run off long before and most of the commune had.

But not Texas Slim. He stayed right to the end, drenched in Jemmy’s blood and drainage. He said the idea that he was infected by a lethal organism did not occur to him. I think he’s bullshitting. He knew, but he was not the sort to abandon those in need even at the risk of his own life.

Of the twelve people who stayed behind, all of them-save Texas himself-were infected within twenty-four hours.

For the next two days Texas was busy taking care of them as they crashed and bled out. It was as close to hell as he’d ever want to go, he told me. All those infected people stuck in that tight room stinking of rancid blood and sour vomit, convulsing and shitting out their insides, their bright red watery eyes staring at him as they fell into terminal shock and vomited out everything that was inside.

He buried all of them in a vacant lot next door.

When he told this story, it was just him and me with a bottle of Jack Daniels. He would not share it with anyone else. And as I listened, it was like the poison was being squeezed from his soul. It scared me. Scared me because I wondered if he still carried the virus and scared me because I finally had a first person account of exactly the sort of shit that was making the rounds out there. What he had been through made my own experiences with my wife wasting away of cholera sound like pink party cake and balloons.

But he survived. Both the bug and the experience.

But you can see now why I’m terrified of those germs. What they were and what they are even now becoming. Because they’re constantly changing, mutating. It’s their nature. But the very worst thing is that germs make me think of that dream I had in the Army/Navy storeroom in South Bend. For what were they now mutating into? What sort of twisted, hideous evolution had spawned that thing I saw or dreamed of? What sort of pathogenic viral horror had the moldering plague graveyards finally given birth to?

I didn’t know.

But I could feel it out there, getting closer and closer, spreading a tenebrous shroud over the ruined cities of men as it came creeping ever westward.