Biohazard

15

I took point, ready for just about anything.

In the overcast sky above, I saw birds circling: crows, buzzards.

I led my posse down an alley and around the collapsed remains of a building which had fallen into its own gaping cellar. There was water down there, black and clogged with leaves.

Scanning what lay ahead with my rifle, I said, “C’mon. Move slow. Move quiet.”

There was rubble in the streets, of course, the fire-scarred facades of buildings, buses and cars and trucks scattered about, some smashed, other overturned, many just rusted to hulks of iron in which birds and rats nested. But it wasn’t just this or the bullet-pocked storefronts, the broken glass, and rivers of sand blown over everything.

There were bodies. Fresh ones.

At least a dozen bodies in the street in every imaginable state of mutilation. Some were missing arms or legs, one woman looked like she had been partially skinned. Another had apparently been trying to crawl beneath an overturned truck and somebody had pinned her to the ground with a homemade spear shaft.

I led the way in with my. 30.06 and the others fell in behind, Carl and Texas Slim flanking them, ready to start busting.

“You know what happened here, don’t you?” Texas Slim said.

And I did, all right. But I had other things on my mind and I wasn’t spending any effort thinking about it, doing anything that might divert my attention from what might be waiting out there in the wreckage and the shadowy ruins of buildings. The stench of recent death was in the air. Flies were buzzing in clouds, carrion crows circling high overhead. Three of four cars were burning and I was guessing that they had been running before this happened.

We came upon a young couple spread-eagle in the street. There was blood all over their naked, pale bodies. They had been decapitated, the heads nowhere in sight. Flies swarmed over the stumps of their necks. With a sickening lurch in my stomach, I figured that some of that blood was from what had happened to them before their heads were chopped off.

I was not only sick to my stomach now, I was pissed off. And getting more pissed off by the minute. We moved around a pickup truck that was still blazing with a sharp stink of burning rubber, plastic, and oil. Smoke twisted in the air, ground mist blowing around in damp sheets.

“Oh, God,” Janie said.

There was a heap of bodies on the sidewalk. All of them were naked. They had been slashed and hacked and disemboweled, dumped here in a bloody heap of limbs and staring, sightless faces. Their eyes had been carved out, noses slit free, and the bleeding ovals of their mouths bore witness to the fact that their teeth had been yanked. And every one of them had been crudely scalped.

“Fucking Clans,” Carl said.

Yeah, it was true. The Hatchet Clans always scalped their victims. People said they wore belts and sashes of scalps. Nobody but them came through an area and butchered like this. The Scabs and the other gangs of crazies were violent and bloodthirsty, but they were not this methodical, this viciously creative. The Hatchet Clans were-as Sean had pointed out-like army ants on the march, killing and destroying everything in their path. I knew little about them other than that they were brutal and deranged beyond belief. And that they came in numbers, in huge mobs like swarms of locusts come to devour a field. I didn’t know what held them together, whether it was some social or religious grouping or just a shared bond of insanity.

One thing was for sure: they were tribal and they had gone native. I had heard they were all infected by some kind of morbid fungus. Maybe that was it. Beyond that, they were sinister and smart. They liked to set up ambushes, draw you in by sacrificing a few of their own. Make you think you had the upper hand and then storm in by the hundreds and overrun you.

Everyone was very tense. Other than the Children or the risk of Fevers, nothing could inspire terror like these guys.

We found seven heads, mostly women’s, that had been arranged in some kind of spiraling circle on the hood of a sedan. Symbols were painted in blood on their foreheads. Two men were laying in front of an apartment building. They had been dismembered completely…then with a wicked sense of humor, their torsos and attendant limbs had been arranged in proper anatomical order…just no longer connected.

From a street sign a woman had been hanged by the feet, her fingertips just brushing the pavement. She had been eviscerated, her body cavity hollowed right out. Her breasts had been cut off, her scalp and deathmask peeled free. On her back were more bloody symbols of the sort we were beginning to see everywhere…on dusty windows, car hoods, sidewalks not covered in sand. They looked almost runic and there was something especially frightening about that.

“Goddamn Gary,” Carl said. “This place has always been nothing but a shithole. I told you that when we came in. Fucking sewer. It wasn’t much before the bombs and it ain’t much now.”

“Over here,” Texas Slim said.

There was a Greyhound bus parked at the curb. I saw curtains in the windows. I moved around towards the bifold door. It was open. The safety bars you pulled yourself up the steps with were dark with sticky blood. There was a bloody handprint on one of the windows.

Even outside, I could smell the death cooking in there.

“Carl,” I said. “You and me.”

I went in, Carl at my back. The bus had been converted into a dormitory of sorts with the seats removed and cots lined up in orderly rows…at least they had been. Now they were flipped over, tossed aside, everything painted a shocking red. Blood was sprayed in wild loops and whorls. The floor was sticky with it. Bits of flesh and clumps of hair were stuck in it.

And bodies, of course.

I figured at least a dozen or more, all cut and slit and hacked. And scalped. Limbs and entrails were scattered around, dangling from the shelves on the walls and tangled in old army blankets. It was hot in there, hot and closed-up and revolting with the smell of blood and meat and bowels. Several spear shafts were still sunk in torsos. They had been painted up with symbols that were unreadable because of the dirty handprints and bloodstains.

I got outside before I threw up. And then, to my surprise, I did anyway.

“Don’t go in there,” I told the white, drawn faces of my friends. “Don’t go in there.”

When I felt better, I drank some water from my bottle, had a cigarette with Carl. I felt hopeless and helpless, outnumbered and just beside myself. The carnage. Dear God, the carnage. There must have been a somewhat thriving community of people here before last night. Before the Clans marched in and slaughtered them. I thought they had been normal, too. In the bus, I had seen baskets of clothes, books, tools. These people had not been crazies, they had not been animals.

Texas Slim had been sweeping the area, finding nothing but more bodies. But he had found something else, too. “Got one,” he said. “Over here.”

We followed him. He stopped and there, lying in a twisted heap just inside the display window of a store, was one of them.

A dead Clansman.

He was perforated with bullet holes and must have taken quite a volume of fire before he went down. He wore a filthy green army overcoat and heavy scuffed boots. His hands were curled up like dying spiders. They were yellow, bony, mottled with open sores. His head was shaved bald, but he wore a greasy scalplock like an old time Pawnee warrior. And he had a gas mask on. They all wore them like some kind of fetish mask. Strictly war surplus, as Sean had said, it was made of leather with an oval breathing filter and two glaring buglike eyepieces. It was strapped on.

Finding a dead Clansman was rare because they always carted off their dead with them.

“Let’s see what this fuck looks like,” Carl said. He shouldered his AK and pulled out a K-Bar fighting knife. Being careful not to touch the corpse, he slit the straps and peeled the mask back with the tip of his knife. And then recoiled in horror.

“Shit,” he said.

The face was an atrocity. The flesh was yellow and spongy, grotesquely distorted like the skull beneath was swollen. There was only one eye which was glazed white and staring. The other was gone, a bubbly white mass of fungus growing from the socket and engulfing the entire left hemisphere of the face and head. It seemed to be dissolving the tissue. Tiny rootlets had grown from it in a wiry mass, feeding right into the flesh and up the nostrils. The growth had contorted the muscles, pulling up one side of the face in a hideous toothy grin. The blind eye that had once been powered by a diseased brain watched impassively.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” I said.

We turned away, turning a blind eye to the slaughterhouse around us. Even Janie, who was helplessly sympathetic, just turned away because there was simply too much of it to take inside and hold there. She was drained. We were all drained. The first normal people we’d seen in months and they had been butchered.

I pushed on farther down the street, getting us away from the carnage and the smell, wondering if we should have searched the buildings for survivors and knowing that it was pointless. I rounded the corner ahead and that’s when the first shot rang out.