Biohazard

17

I decided Mickey was going to come in handy because she was a resourceful girl. I just had the feeling that she was going to work out. We stood around talking more for a bit, ducking into a building nearby for a bite of MREs-freeze-dried spaghetti and meatballs, yum-and started swapping war stories while Gremlin drooled over Mickey and Texas Slim watched Gremlin and Carl watched everyone and Janie…Janie just kept her eye on the new girl.

There was something between them that was unspoken. At least on Janie’s side of things. What had been sympathy and understanding was blossoming into something along the lines of jealousy and you could plainly see it in her eyes. Women sometimes got territorial, I knew, without meaning to. And I was sensing that in Janie.

She had competition now. And she didn’t look like she cared for the idea.

Mickey was an interesting girl. There was no doubt about that. Not just easy on the eyes, but smart. Maybe she’d never be invited into Mensa or win the Nobel Prize for physics, but what she lacked in book smarts she more than made up for in practical schooling. And intuition. She had an almost sixth sense where danger was concerned. Something we all soon learned about.

After our impromptu luncheon, it was out into the streets again. It would be dark in a few hours and I wanted the Jeep before that happened. Mickey led the way, knowing exactly where we had to go. She barely made it to the end of the block before she stopped dead and started shaking her head back and forth.

“What is it?” I asked her.

“I don’t know…something’s wrong. I can feel it,” she said. “Something’s wrong.”

Texas Slim and Carl just looked at each other.

“She’s giving me the willies,” Carl said.

“That ain’t what she gives me,” Gremlin said.

Mickey shrugged. “Sometimes…sometimes I just sense things before they happen.”

Texas laughed nervously. “Had a grandmother on my mother’s side, a Taney from Terrabonne County. Swamp country. She had the gift, too. Oh…she was old, old, old, was old Mother Taney. Had but two or three working teeth and a narrow face, big old nose looked like a coat hook. One eye was bad…lost it when she was a child in an unpleasant spearfishing accident…but the other was just big and round, kind of yellow and staring. Made her look like that witch in the old comic book…you know the one I mean? Gave me the creepy-crawlies, it did, that staring yellow eye. One day she says, Whet yee looking fowa, booy? Cause that’s how she talked. I says, I lost my socks, Mother Tee…that’s what I called her. Mother Tee. She says, Thems socks bee out yondah the sweetgoom, hear? And they was. Right where I left them by the sweetgum. Couple weevils made a home in them, but that was all. She had the sight and she could find anything, anytime-”

“Quiet,” I told him. I knew Texas was just nervous and whenever he was nervous he started telling wild tales, but now was not the time. “What is it, Mickey?”

Everyone was waiting and Janie was getting perturbed, liking the new girl a little bit less all the time. The poison between them was thickening away on the back burner.

Mickey turned and looked at me. She was pale beneath her tan, her eyes huge and wet. “Clans. The Clans are coming.”

To which Carl immediately disagreed…but then he heard it. We all heard it.

Heard them coming.

Six or seven rose up from behind the hulks of smashed vehicles, screeching and wailing. It was an ambush. I was certain of that. A carefully staged ambush of the sort that the Clans were so very good at. But for some reason…they just couldn’t wait. Maybe it was that Mickey had somehow sensed them out there and stopped everyone in the street. Maybe they’d known the gig was up.

But now they were waiting no more. They charged from their hides, screaming and hissing. They ran in zig-zagging patterns through the street, just insane and bloodthirsty.

“Son…of…a…bitch,” Carl said.

I brought my Savage up and dropped two of them. When a third got in range, Carl opened up with his AK and stitched him…or her…or it, crotch to throat. They were merciless, these things. Remorseless, relentless. For even when they squirmed dying in the streets, riddled with bullets, they still fought and shrieked. Only a couple of them carried crude weapons…clubs and spears. Carl and I dropped all but two, but it wasn’t going to be enough. For these few had only been the spearhead. The others were coming now.

A beat-up pick-up truck came rambling down the street, glancing off dead vehicles and bouncing over drifts of sand. There were two Clansmen in the cab and a dozen more in the back. I saw them, swallowed, figured I knew what the Romans must have felt like when the Picts came at them.

Berserkers.

That’s what they were. Every one of them just psychotic and vicious.

They hopped from the truck while it was still moving and fanned out into the street. They looked much like the dead one we had found. They were all bald with warrior scalplocks, distorted faces hidden behind gas masks. They wore flapping overcoats and leather trenchcoats, jackets that were stitched patchworks of other coats, even what looked like ponchos made from tarps. They swarmed forward, brandishing homemade spears, spiked clubs, axes and pikes and, yes, hatchets.

We laid down a volley of fire and then got the hell out.

We ran for our dear lives like spooked rabbits. It was all confusing and there was no cohesion whatsoever. Should we make our stand in a building? On a rooftop? Behind a wrecked car? In the end we found ourselves back in the vicinity of Fisher’s little commune, which was now a commune of corpses. We spread out, armed, and got ready.

The truck came storming forward and I sighted on it, put a couple rounds right through the windshield. It blew into the cab in a spiderwebbed mass of candy glass. The passenger slumped over and the driver jammed on the gas.

I sighted again. I knew the only weapon that would work from this range was my. 30.06. This was my baby. Maybe I could have passed the rifle to Carl but Carl was behind a station wagon on the other side of the street. There just wasn’t the time.

“Nash,” somebody said.

I breathed in and out. Sighted. Squeezed the trigger with a half-assed prayer brushing past my lips. I caught the driver in the throat, I thought. He snapped back in his seat, hands flying from the wheel trying to stem the flow of blood from his neck. The truck went out of control, bouncing off a minivan, and spinning up onto the sidewalk and ramming the remains of a police patrol car. And there she died.

The driver struggled out and Texas ran up on him and blew him away with the. 50 cal Desert Eagle. But the others were coming.

As they got in closer, I saw it was true what they said about these animals. They did wear the scalps of their victims. They wore them in scarves and belts. And not just those things, but necklaces of blackened ears and teeth strung on wires, a wide and gruesome collection of mummified body parts.

Carl dropped two with his AK and it was just sheer pandemonium as we all cried out, firing, pouring everything we had at our attackers whose numbers were swelling as more of them came running down the street. Already, eight or ten of them were down and writhing and they’d been replaced by twice that many. Even Janie was shooting with the Browning. 45. Mickey had Carl’s. 22 Airweight.

One of them got with twenty feet of our position by crawling underneath some cars and I popped him right in the face. The slug went right in through one of the plexiglass eye ports and the Clansman was thrown up against a truck. But he did not go down. He took three or four shambling, zombie-like steps forward, bright red blood spouting from the entry wound and then went down, face-first.

Others closed in.

One jumped on top of a truck and threw his spear. It barely missed Janie. Carl blew him away. I ran out of rounds and had to switch to my Beretta 9mm. I shot one and then another and then something clubbed me in the back and I went down. I hit the ground and twisted away just as an axe bit into the pavement where I’d been. I jumped up and emptied the Beretta into my attacker and then another jumped me, tossed me against the car. He lashed out with a knife and I just avoided it, kicking him in the belly and hammering his scabby bald head with the butt of the Beretta until something gave in there with a wet snapping.

Carl emptied his AK and starting blasting away with his Mossberg. Texas Slim was hit with a spear in the side and went down. Gremlin was beaten down with a club. Mickey fired her Airweight, jumping around with great athletic grace and popping them one after the other and then she was out of ammo and two of them grabbed her. She fought and kicked and they slammed her face-down on the hood of a car. They were going to rape her then and there because that’s how the Clans operated…not with military precision or organization, but with sheer mania.

Carl blew one of them away with the Mossberg, scattering his guts for twenty feet and, dropping and turning, wasted another. Then three of them knocked him down and it was all over as they raised their hatchets.

But Janie grabbed an axe from one of the dying ones and buried it in the back of a Clansman. He spun around, axe sunk in his back and smashed her with his fist. She went down and he leaped on top of her, tearing away her shirt, her white breasts exposed. He grabbed them with his filthy, pocked hands.

“JANIE!” I cried out.

And then I was in the mix. I ran and punted the Clansman in the head like I was kicking the winning field goal and the Clansman rolled away, limp as a rag. Then I leaped, diving, and took out two more like bowling pins, jumping to my feet and kicking one of them until they were no longer moving. Then I took up Carl’s dropped Mossberg and cracked another in the face hard enough to rip the gasmask right off him. He stood there, his face like a fleshy, grinning skull covered in clots of oozing white jelly. Mickey hit him from behind with a club and his skull cracked with an audible snapping. I gave him the butt of the Mossberg full in the face and down he went. Four Clansman were left and they came on screaming and swinging chains and throwing hatchets.

And that’s when the birds came.