Biohazard

22

Thirty minutes later we saw the bridge. It stretched about half a mile over the Calumet River and the railroad tracks below. It was a steel bridge with two high arches near the center, sagging and twisted like it had withstood an airstrike. Maybe it had. I estimated that it was probably a good hundred foot drop to the river below. The closer we got to it the more we all saw the wreckage: mangled girders, blackened uprights, overhead beams sheared and hanging, the whole thing crowded with debris, smashed cars and trucks. Everything from big semis to minivans. It almost looked like they had been driven up on the bridge to form some kind of barricade. Many of them were charred.

As we neared it, Janie said, “Are you sure this thing is stable?’

Mickey nodded. “It doesn’t look like much, but it’s safe.”

I don’t think any of us were very reassured. It looked like some kind of war had been fought up there and not that long ago. In my mind, the bridge was the monstrous exoskeleton of some gigantic insect, shattered and broken and rawboned, just waiting to fall into the polluted depths of the river below.

I checked Texas Slim’s wound by flashlight, just to see if all the commotion had torn it open but it was okay. So on we went.

Mickey led the way, seeming to know it quite well as she slipped around the burnt hulks of cars, trucks, and nameless machinery. We saw quite a few skeletons, some cremated behind the wheels of vehicles and others scattered underfoot, birdpicked and disjointed. It was like a graveyard. My flashlight picked out more than one skeleton that was punctured with bullet holes and that made me certain that a war was fought up here, or at the very least dozens of small skirmishes. Several trucks had burst through the railing and hung precariously on the edge, their noses pointed out into the misting blackness. A sluggish, gray-green fog with the consistency of ectoplasm drifted over the river below. Now and then there was an opening in it and I could see the wrecks of vehicles rising from the murky, stinking water.

Mickey continued to lead us on, threading us through the wreckage. Five minutes into it, both Carl and I lit cigarettes to calm our nerves. “You know she could be leading us into a trap, don’t you?” he whispered to me as he cupped a match to light my smoke.

It had occurred to me, of course.

A sleek, attractive woman like her. How easy it would have been for her to draw in men and then use their own raging hormones and that very male need to protect women-especially sexy ones-against them. But I didn’t really doubt her. I had a good feeling about her. Maybe her motives weren’t entirely altruistic, but then again whose were? I did not get the sort of bad feeling from her I’d gotten from Gremlin after he hooked back up with us. And that had probably not been any sixth sense on my part, but maybe an intuition planted in my head by The Shape.

We walked on.

The bridge canted slowly upward and leveled out beneath the arches where it ran flat for about two city blocks before canting back down to the other bank. The closer we got to the arches, the more wrecked vehicles I saw. The entire thing was nothing but a vast junkyard. It made me nervous. With all that scrap metal lying around, we could have walked right into an ambush at any moment. It would have been tricky in full daylight, but at night…just death waiting to happen.

So when Janie stopped walking and said, “I think there’s something out there,” I was not really surprised. Maybe I’d been feeling it for awhile, too, telling myself that it was nothing but shellshock, post-traumatic stress from our encounter with the beast. But as I stopped, yes, I was feeling it, too.

Carl and Texas looked around, then looked at each other. They were not convinced.

“I don’t see anything,” I said. “Maybe you got the jitters.”

“Sure,” Texas Slim said.

“No, it’s not that,” Janie assured us.

Mickey was hugging herself, looking troubled. “She’s right, Nash. I feel it, too. Like a hundred eyes are staring at me.”

Well, by that point I had learned to trust Mickey’s intuition. Janie’s was pretty well developed, too, but Mickey’s was practically a sixth sense. I decided we’d wait a moment. We got up by the arches, sidled around a fuel tanker, and then kept an eye on what was beneath us, that strip of bridge running back towards the bank we’d just left. The moon had abandoned us. It was rafting through clouds high above. The tension inside me was like hot metal. I was waiting for the moon to come back out. Without it, all those cars stretching out below were just shadows heaped upon shadows.

“Let’s move,” Carl said.

“Wait,” I told him. “Just a few more minutes.”

A few more minutes became five and then ten before the moon broke free of the clouds up there and illuminated the bridge. I saw the wrecked vehicles, but I also saw other shapes down there in-between. I thought one of them moved.

I handed Carl my Savage. “You see that minivan with the crushed-in side? Right there by the Land Rover? There’s a shadow on its right side that don’t belong. Put a round in it if you can.”

Carl was more than happy to. He stepped away from us, balanced the rifle on the roof of a Mazda, sighted, and squeezed off a shot. The report was booming, echoing out across the silent river. But a split-second after I heard it, I heard somebody down there scream.

“Shit,” Texas said.

There were lots of moving shadows down there, all mulling about like worms on tasty roadkill. And there was no doubt who and what they were: Hatchet Clans. And they were coming.

We all spread out and got ready to start shooting. The Clansmen were moving up through the wreckage and I had to wonder how long they’d been dogging us. In the moonlight, I could see the masks they wore, the shine of the eye pieces. They were no longer practicing stealth. They were shouting and screeching, letting out that wailing war cry I knew so well. Down at the foot of the bridge I saw what looked like hundreds of them. Maybe it wasn’t that many, but it was more than enough to overrun us even with the guns.

I told the others to hold their fire until they had something closer to fire at.

Carl was firing at them indiscriminately, trying to kill a few, but mostly trying to drive them back. My plan was to have Carl hold them off while I got the others away. Maybe it would have worked…but we never got the chance to find out.

“They’re here!” Mickey screamed. “They’re here!”

And they were. About a dozen of them had slipped up on us, probably crawling amongst the smashed cars on their bellies. They waited until they were in range and then leaped up, brandishing spears and axes and clubs with spikes driven into the ends. Strictly Stone Age shit, but lethal at close range.

They charged.

We started shooting with wild abandon, putting rounds in them, over their heads, to all sides. We put up a manic defense and our firepower was enough that they didn’t make it within ten feet of us. A wounded one dragged itself off. And another with no less than six smoking bullet holes in it dragged itself at our position and Texas killed it with a headshot.

“We won’t stop the next wave,” Carl said.

And I knew he was right: I could see them advancing on us, ducking low and slipping amongst the cars and trucks, staying low so we couldn’t draw a good bead on them. I was guessing there were thirty or forty of them. And behind them, at least three times that many.

“We have to run for it,” I told the others.

But Texas Slim had other ideas. “What we need here is something that will tip the odds in our favor. Something like a down-home barbecue, if you catch my meaning.” He was staring up at the tanker truck just behind us. He was smiling. “That is…if you catch my meaning.”

“Carl?” I said. He had driven trucks for a living once upon a time.

The tanker had stalled out or been stopped just as it had reached the first bridge arch, which meant that its hind end was not perfectly level, but sort of hanging down on the canting road way. The cant was slight, maybe 12? at most, just a gently sloping incline you had to drive up until you reached the arches and the perfectly vertical plane of the bridge itself. I had some crazy idea of popping the emergency brake on the tanker…but it would only have rolled twenty feet before crashing into more wreckage.

We needed something better and Carl had it.