Biohazard

8

In the building, after a meal of Spam and crackers, I sat by the window listening to the radioactive dust blow through the streets below. We were up on the fourth floor in a locked room. It was good to get up as high as you could because the truly lethal supercharged dust was near ground-level. It was saturated with fissile waste materials such as Strontium-90, Cesium-137, and Plutonium. The higher dust was really just plain old dust and debris caught in the cyclone. So the higher you were, the safer you were.

But down on the streets it was deadly.

I sat there, body aching, eyes crusty from lack of sleep. The storm had died down somewhat and the building was no longer shaking, plaster falling from the walls, but it was still blowing. Every now and then a good gust would grab the building and shake it like a fist and we’d cling to each other and cover our heads, blessing the people who had built that pile of bricks to last.

Janie was leaning up against me with her head on my shoulder. Her eyes were closed, but she wasn’t really sleeping. Just shutting out the world, the moan of the wind, the stink of the apartment that smelled like cat piss and woodrot. The boys?Texas Slim, Carl, and Gremlin?were trading tales as they did, each trying to outdo the other like old men discussing who had the most miserable childhood or teenage boys boasting of sexual excesses.

“We’re going to have to spend the night, aren’t we, Nash?” Janie whispered.

“Yeah. It’s too hot out there right now.”

The wind had died down some, but not enough for my liking. Once the wind blew itself out and the dust dispersed, the roentgens would die out. But not until.

So we were staying.

“What’s the Geiger saying?”

Carl took a reading. “Were getting sixty up here. It’s dropping.”

Two hours before it was pegging nearly a hundred micro-roentgens and that was getting a little warm. Still not too bad, not like down below where the dust was probably putting out at least 400 or in places like Chicago, which had taken a direct hit from a 500-megaton device and had a lingering radioactivity so high it could only be measured in rem. There were a million micro-roents in one rem and, before civilization passed, rumor had it that Chicago was cooking at something like 5,000 rem. If anything was still alive there, I didn’t want to know what it was.

Gremlin’s voice was droning on and on about some black chick named Homegirl he had known in Fort Wayne. Hatchet Clans got her one day, just outside the city, he claimed. They gang-raped her in the street, scalped her with a butcher knife. Then, while she was still breathing and the last Clan-boy was still pumping on her, the others started cutting off her fingers and pulling her teeth and slicing off her ears for souvenirs as the Clans were wont to do.

“What did you do?” Carl said. “Just fucking watch?”

“What was I supposed to do? There was ten of them and one of me.”

Texas Slim thought that was funny. “Thought you said you loved her?”

“I did. Every chance I got.”

That sent Texas Slim into gales of laughter. “Ain’t that something? Ain’t that just something?” he said. “I loved a girl like that once. She was colored, too…no, maybe she was Indian. I use to bone her in the ass every chance I got. She only had one tit, though. But that was okay.”

“One tit,” Gremlin said. “You ain’t real picky are you?”

Carl laughed. “Oh, he’s picky, all right. He only fucks his left hand. Got himself a thing for it.”

“I fuck them both. You know that,” Texas Slim admitted. “And when I do, I only think of your mother.”

“There you go again.”

“That’s sick,” Gremlin said. “Real sick shit talking about somebody’s mother like that. When I jack off, I think only of hot, young stuff.”

He cast an eye on Janie when he said that and nobody missed it. I saw it. I think he wanted me to see it.

Texas Slim said, “Hey, Gremlin? Are you aware they have a romantic day for couples, Valentine’s Day?”

“Yeah. I heard that.”

“Well, they have a romantic day for single fellows like you, too. It’s called Palm Sunday.”

“No shit?”

Janie was trying not to laugh, but she couldn’t help herself. Either could I. This was my bunch, my posse. Like kids in a locker room. Christ.

Gremlin laughed for a bit, too, then got right down to doing what he did best: complaining.

“I’m so sick of this waiting I could puke,” he said. “We gonna have to stay in this shithole all damn day, Nash?”

“Yeah, and probably the night, too.”

“Shit. I ain’t got nothing to drink and nothing to fuck. I can’t stand this waiting around.” He stood up and paced back and forth while Texas Slim and Carl talked about radioactive women they’d known. “I mean, shit, Nash, what we need is some wheels. Get our ass out of this city.”

“Sure. And if you want to go out and look for one in that dust, you go right ahead. Me? I’m staying. Too hot out there for my ass. My dick is already glowing in the dark.”

Janie punched me and Texas Slim laughed.

“Yeah, quit your fucking whining, man,” Carl said.

“Yeah,” Gremlin said. “But it stinks in here.”

“So do you, man, but you don’t hear me complaining.”

Gremlin didn’t even laugh at that. “I’m sick of this shit. We left our food in the van, nothing to eat. This fucking bites it.”

“You had Spam like the rest of us,” Janie said.

“I don’t want Spam, woman. I want a steak and a baked potato with sour cream. I want some bread and butter. I want a piece of pie and some ice cream and?”

“That all?” Carl said.

“No, that ain’t all. I want some decent grub. I want some booze. I want some cigarettes that aren’t stale and I want a blowjob.”

Carl just shook his head. “Texas, suck his dick, will ya?”

Texas Slim smiled, shook his head “No sir, doctor told me to go easy on the sausage and gravy. I follow his orders.”

“This is fucked up,” Gremlin said. “You guys just joke and laugh and where the hell’s any of it getting us?”

He was starting to get on everyone’s nerves. We were getting sick of listening to him. At first, it had been kind of humorous the way he’d complain about anything, from sleeping bags to canned beans to the lint in his belly button. Always bitching about something and complaining about something else. But it was not humorous anymore, it was just plain bullshit. Way things were these days, you just had to take what you could get. Wasn’t anybody’s fault that the Scabs attacked and the storm came. Shit happened. You lived through it, that’s all. Armageddon taught a body patience if nothing else.

Carl said, “Hey, Nash, wanna get high? Wanna get reeeeaaal high?”

I declined as a joint was lit.

We were always finding dope. There was no shortage of it. There was just a shortage of people to smoke it, was all.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the world and what it had been and what it was now and what it might be in ten years or a hundred. How do you live through something like Doomsday and not become as shattered as the cities around you? And how do you find the plaster to patch up all those jagged cracks and crevices that have split open your mind and your soul and made you maybe something less than human? How do you hold yourself together and find any sort of optimism again? God knew, I wanted to be like Janie. Wanted to be kind and caring and tolerant like I once was. Part of me wanted that very badly. But it was fantasy. And another part of me knew that only too well and that part was the dogged, grim realism that cemented me to this new fucked-up world.

The world was shit.

To survive you had to be an animal.

The end had brought things into being that had no right to exist and it had changed others to absolute nightmares. That was the world these days. Like something Roger Corman had envisioned back in the fifties…mutants and roving gangs, religious crazies and nature run wild. Like in one of those old movies that I used to watch on the late show when I worked three to eleven at the shoe factory in Youngstown, The Day the World Ended or Panic in the Year Zero or World Without End. Just laying there on the couch, chewing takeout pizza and drinking beer, never once thinking I would be living through some kind of fucked-up horror movie.

But I was.

We all were.

Things had changed. The fallout had killed hundreds and hundreds of millions. There were resulting mutations and degeneration and savagery on the part of those that did survive. I had seen my share, but I knew there were worse things out there. Things I could not or would not want to imagine and one of them had come to me in a dream. Regardless, I knew very little about radiation or nuclear physics or genetics or any of it. Yes, I had a solar-powered Geiger Counter. But I didn’t really know how it worked or how radiation affected things like atoms or biology.

Back in Youngstown, after it happened and everyone was just kind of wandering around in shock, the germs started sweeping the cities. There was a guy in my building named Mike Pallenberg. He taught physical sciences at East Palestine High. A real smart guy. He was an assistant football coach for the Bulldogs and when I was in high school I was a running back for the Lisbon Blue Devils. So we had a little rivalry going. A friendly one. When he was dying from radiation sickness, on his deathbed, he said, You just wait, my friend, you just fucking wait. There’s things gonna happen now I’m glad I won’t be around to see. All that nuclear energy released at once…it’ll affect the weather, living things, everything. You wait. See, it’s the molecules. They’ve changed just as cells have mutated and physics as we understand it has been bent on its ear. This world is mutating, organically and physically, microscopically, matter and energy and subatomics going haywire. Nothing will ever be the same. Not for a hundred-thousand years.

If ever.

Mike was absolutely right.

I had seen mutations. They were real. The radiation wrought evolutionary changes that would never have to come to be in a sane, sunlit world beneath the eye of a loving god. And it wasn’t always the changes you could see. Much of it was, as Mike hinted, microscopic. Diseases that men had beaten off years ago mutated and spread like wildfire after the bombings. And that’s what worried me now. The germs. What they were becoming. Because I had seen cities where plagues, super-plagues, the Fevers, had turned them into leper colonies.

And those germs were still out there.

Mutating, waiting to burn through what was left of the human race.

Like David Bowie said, this ain’t rock and roll, this is genocide.