Biohazard

10

I dozed for an hour or so and when I woke, Gremlin and Texas Slim were giggling. I had been dreaming of my wife. What a waste to open my eyes to this fucking nightmare. I drank some water and smoked a cigarette, watched Janie’s long legs cross over one another and wished we were alone so I could screw the hell out of her. Typical male thoughts. Even Doomsday couldn’t change the male animal.

Carl was cleaning weapons. Texas Slim was humming some old John Cougar song and laughing as he did so. Gremlin was staring at me. He had a funny look in his eyes.

“What is it?” I asked him, already suspecting it would be trouble.

Gremlin smiled. “Just wondering when it’s gonna be and who it’s gonna be. That’s all.”

“Hell are you talking about?”

“You know.”

“No, maybe you ought to elaborate.”

He kept smiling and I wanted to slap that grin off his face. “When you gonna do it, Nash? When you gonna call The Shape? When you gonna call it up?”

That snapped my eyes open.

Yes, it was time to make a selection, to offer someone up, but I didn’t need this sonofabitch to remind me of the fact, to rub my nose in it. Now and then I liked to forget. Pretend my soul wasn’t dirty. The wind out there was still blowing, dust and grit scraping against the building. I listened to it, felt a different sort of wind blowing through my heart. A wind that was hot and ugly and searing.

Janie saw it coming, said something, but I wasn’t hearing her.

Gremlin saw then that he’d crossed the line. “Listen, I just mean?”

I don’t know what came over me. I balled my hand into a fist and punched him in the mouth. Gremlin’s head jerked back and his lips mashed against his teeth and then the blood was flowing. I hadn’t really even thought about it; it was a reflexive kind of thing.

“You stupid motherfucker!” I shouted at Gremlin’s cringing, bleeding face. “We don’t talk about that! We never fucking talk about that!”

Gremlin babbled out some silly excuse, his lips and teeth all stained red, and he was so pathetic, so ridiculous that the anger rose in me like lava up the cone of a volcano. It burned bright and hot. I lost all reason and just started swinging. Gremlin warded off a few with his upraised arms, but most of them landed and I had the satisfaction of hearing him beg and bleed and hurt. Gremlin’s left eye was blackened, his nose bloodied, lip split. There were some nice eggs on his head. I would have kept going, lost in the idiotic violent splendor of the thing, but then Carl pulled me off and Janie shouted at me with such utter disappointment and hopeless resignation that I just curdled inside.

Carl finally let go and by then there was no fight left. “It’s cool, Nash,” he said and you could tell by the sound of his voice that he didn’t think it was cool at all. “You got him good. Taught him a lesson and all. Got it out of your system. Chill now. Step away.”

“Well, you certainly whomped his cookies, Nash,” Texas Slim said. “You worked him like three miles of dirty road.”

They were all staring at me and I didn’t like it one bit.

But I guess I would have stared, too. Irrational, violent outbursts have a way of attracting attention just like they have a way of shaking your trust in people. I felt foolish, guilty, angry with myself. I’d always prided myself on my cool head. Patient, understanding. This wasn’t me. I didn’t hit people. Not unless they were a threat. And what threat had Gremlin been? He was just an annoying little windbag that never knew when to shut up.

“Nice job,” Janie said. “Jesus Christ, Rick.”

The others just kind of turned away. All of them except for Gremlin. He kept eyeballing me with an accusatory stare. There was blood all over his face, purple welts. His lower lip was swollen like a sausage and his right eye was nearly closed. It hurt just looking at him.

“Feel better now, Nash?” Gremlin, said spitting blood onto the floor. He chuckled. “I’ve been beat worse. A lot worse. That’s okay. I got out of hand and you showed me my place. I know better now. I know how I rank.”

I reached out to him, to put a hand on his shoulder, and Gremlin slapped it away, almost putting me on my ass in the process. “Don’t you fucking touch me, you goddamn asshole.”

Nobody disagreed with what he said.

I went and sat by myself, smoked, brooded, listened to the storm. Pouted. I was angry and at the same time I was beside myself with guilt. I kept thinking: You could kick them all to the curb right now. Get rid of ‘em and in a week you’d have a new posse. Who are they to fucking judge you? Who the hell do they think they are?

Crazy thinking, I know. I couldn’t kick Janie to the curb without kicking a big part of myself there, too.

Shit.

Ultimately, I had just shaken their confidence in me and I knew it. I didn’t really know why it happened, only it had been coming for a long time. It just happened as such things will. Partly it was the damn depression that ate me open most days, made it feel like there was a black hole south of my belly that wanted to suck me into the darkness alive and kicking. And another part was probably general frustration, unhappiness, and the very real fact that Gremlin was really, really getting on my nerves. Add to that that the waiting was killing me. We had to move. We had to get west before…well before something caught up with us.

Nobody spoke and I kept my mouth shut.

Gremlin hadn’t bothered washing the blood off his face. He wore it like warpaint. He sat on the floor, legs drawn up, arms wrapped around them, head cradled between his knees. His eyes were crazy and wild and full of pain and they were on me. Only on me.

Staring.

Hating.

I had the most ugly feeling that as soon as my eyes were closed Gremlin would slit my throat. So I watched him. Watched him close. And as I did so, feeling that my little posse was fragmenting, I felt more alone and vulnerable than ever. I started thinking about Shelly. I started thinking about Youngstown.

I remembered standing on the roof of our building the night the bombs came down. Lots of people were up there. New York City had taken a direct hit. Though it was a long way from Youngstown, if you looked to the east you could see where it was…or had been…because the horizon was glowing blue.