Biohazard

14

By late afternoon the next day, we still had no wheels.

We wandered for hours, searched as far west as the Tri-City Plaza on 5^th, but the Geiger started beeping because we were getting too close to Chicago. So we cut back to Midtown, then down as far as Glen Park, searching Gleason Park and the University lots and still came up with nothing. Then back downtown to Union Station to check parking garages. Just about everything had been stripped of tires or was smashed-up or had a dead battery. It seemed pretty hopeless.

We were marooned in Gary.

Trapped in that cemetery.

We had to get out. That was the bottom line. The background radiation was a little high, not too bad, but we were practically on Chicago’s doorstep and if a good gust came blowing east from the Windy City we would be in trouble.

As we walked, I thought about all the things I missed. Fresh food, TV, and motorcycles came to mind right away. There were bikes around, but most of them were either wrecked or in pretty bad shape. All the dealerships had been looted after society and law and order had collapsed. People being people had helped themselves to all those little extras they’d never been able to afford. It was tough finding good vehicles, too. Most cars and trucks were either smashed up out on the roads, abandoned and rusting, or had been stripped of useable parts. You’d see a lot of that. Really nice pick-ups, SUVs, sports cars sitting around on flat tires with shattered windshields, engines stripped or destroyed. Oh, there were plenty of drivable rides out there, but the people who had them also had guns. Lot of times you’d just find cars with skeletons in them.

Nobody was in a real good mood. We were tense, expectant, waiting for something truly horrible and truly dangerous to come around every corner. Because it was there. We all felt that. It was watching us, waiting for us, we just didn’t know what form it would take. And after those sounds we’d heard last night, we expected only the worse.

But that was night.

This was day: a misty, damp sort of day that carried an unpleasant chill to it. I didn’t like us being this vulnerable. In a vehicle we had the luxury of protection, of shooting and driving off…but not on foot. Any pack of crazies could chase us, corner us, and we only had so much ammo.

As we walked down yet another street, scoping out the rusted hulks of vehicles, the rubble and refuse, the bones heaped in the gutters, I was thinking about Gremlin.

Gremlin in general annoyed me in ways I could not exactly put a finger on…but after that weird howling last night, he had popped back up this morning and something had been very off about him. I was not sure what. There was something there and my gut-sense told me it was trouble, but of what variety I could not imagine. The howling. Gremlin coming back. That fucked-up, creepy grin on his face. Maybe I was just tired and wigged, but I was also certain I was not wrong in my assessment of him.

We kept going. Another street, plodding along. More wrecks, more staring empty buildings. Drifts of sand in the street. A light breeze that smelled dirty and low. I watched Texas Slim watch Gremlin and wondered what was going through his mind.

“Years ago,” Texas was saying, “I worked at a quaint little establishment called the Horas Brothers Family Mortuary in Lafayette. That’s in Louisiana, Carl, case you were wondering.”

“Yeah, I know where the hell it is.”

“I had…well, gotten myself into some difficulties with a young lady in New Iberia and it necessitated that I seek gainful employment to pay my child support, you understand,” he said, chuckling to himself. “Well, one day we received the body of a criminal named Tommy Carbone. He was known in underworld circles as Tommy the Tripod and the reason for that should be quite obvious. Anyhow, this poor soul died in prison. Apparently…and you’ll excuse me, Janie…all this poor man did was masturbate three, four, five times a day, I learned. And then it became worse and it was every hour on the hour. In his cell, the prison workshop, the dining hall. Finally, the prison authorities took him to the infirmary and strapped him down. Poor Tommy. He laid there hour after hour with that quite mammoth penis of his standing straight up.

“Finally, he went into convulsions and died and then he came to us. The problem was, you see, that his large and particularly ungainly member was still quite hard. Death will do that, you see. Even after we suctioned the blood from him, it would not lay down like a good dog. Well…we had a sheet thrown over him and it looked like a tent. As it was, his manhood being so long, we simply couldn’t close the lid on the casket so, necessity being the mother of invention-”

“Do we have to hear this?” Janie said, slapping at a fly.

“-we used a rotary saw to cut it off. I’ll never forget that day as long as I lived when I felled that high timber. I felt just like a lumberjack. Timber! I cried when it came crashing to earth. Of course, the director, Archie Horas, being a man of the most morbid imagination, had that gargantuan member stuffed, shellacked, and made into a fine walking stick.”

“Oh, shut up,” Carl told him. “A walking stick. Jesus Christ.”

“I smell smoke,” Janie said.

I did, too. It could’ve been a good thing and it could’ve been a bad thing.

“Let’s follow it,” Gremlin said. “Might be somebody cooking grub.”

“And could be somebody cooking somebody else,” Carl pointed out.

“All right,” I said, a headache beginning to thread its way through my skull. “Let’s shitcan the talking for awhile. Everybody keep their eyes open. We gotta find something here.”

And we did as we reached the western edge of the city, skirting what had once been Tolleston and moving north towards Westbrook across West 6^th and Taft. The stink of smoke grew very heavy.

“Just ahead,” Carl said.

Plumes of smoke were rising over the roofs of buildings.

And there was something on the warm, dusty wind: the stink of death.