Biohazard

25

The woman enjoyed our coffee, our meager food. She ate with her fingers like an animal while she watched us warily like we might steal her dinner away from her. About the time I was pretty sure she was a deaf mute or something, she said, “Ronny got the pox, had the Fevers something terrible. Blood came out of his eyes. It squirted out. I think he threw up part of his intestines. Looked like intestines.” She shook her head, very matter-of-fact about it as if the true horror of the situation had lost its power to shock. “Ronny didn’t want to get burned. He was always saying, Marilynn, don’t you let them burn me. But I didn’t have a choice. Army said so. We put him in the pyre. They made us put him in the pyre with the rest. They burned him. Thousands of ‘em burning in the pit. You could smell it all the way to Beloit. It stank.”

“Where are you from, Marilynn?” Janie asked her.

“Janesville, Wisconsin. Lived there my whole life. Army started clearing us out block by block. Put us in a camp. Like one of them German camps you hear about it the war, kind with the Jews in ‘em. Little huts we lived in. Barbwire all around. We couldn’t leave. They wouldn’t let us,” she told us, the firelight reflected in her eyes. “Lot of us fought. Didn’t want to go. Shiela Reed fought, too. She was hiding her husband’s body. Shiela was manager at the Rite-Aid, started as a checker but she blew her boss in the storeroom every day, they said, so she got manager. She was crazy. Hiding that body. Army came in and she shot at them. They gunned her down. Threw her in the street and left her there.” She looked around at us as if realizing for the first time that we were there. “Where you going in that Jeep?”

“West,” Carl told her.

Marilynn’s eyes got wide, filled with light. “West, you say? Hear lots of people are going west. Funny. Where west you going?”

“Des Moines.”

“That’s an awful place. I was there two months ago. I ain’t going back.”

“What’s going on there, darling?” Texas Slim asked her.

“Ain’t you heard? Half the town is burned down, rest of its wreckage. It was bombed by the Air Force to clean out the militias. Nothing there now but rats and corpses and big craters from the bombs, lots of fallen down buildings. I been there. I know. Yes sir, I know. Bones everywhere. Lots of cars with skeletons in ‘em. Not much else.”

“No people?” Mickey said.

Marilynn was sucking tomato sauce from her fingers. “Oh, sure. There’s people. Wild people. They run around in animal skins or go naked. They’re all crazy. They drool. You don’t wanna go there in broad daylight, let alone the dark. Don’t get there after sundown. That’s when the bad ones come out.”

But that’s where we were going. I don’t know why, but the need was very strong and I wasn’t about to ignore it. I kept watching our guest. I didn’t speak to her. If I spoke to her, I would feel connected to her and I didn’t want that kind of connection. I had to look at her like a farmer looks at a pig he’s going to slaughter. That’s what it had come to.

I felt like shit. This woman…Marilynn…was dirty and smelly and probably crazy, but she was harmless. Very pathetic, really. I felt sorry for her and I knew that I couldn’t and the guilt of what was coming was eating a hole straight through me. Carl and Mickey kept watching me, amused by what was coming. Texas Slim did not look at me. I dared not look at Janie because I knew what was in her eyes and I didn’t want to see it.

“Where are you going now?” Janie asked her.

Marilynn considered it as she licked at a sore on her thumb. “Got a sister in Streator. She was alive last I heard. I’ll go look her up. Maybe I’ll live with her. Maybe together we can make it. All I want is just to make it.”

I looked away from her.

Janie said, “Well, I hope you make it to Streator. I really hope nothing gets in your way.”

Which was directed at me, of course.

“Yup,” Texas said. “Sure would suck the old willy wonka if something prevented you from reaching your sister.”

Carl giggled.

Janie glared at him. I glared at Janie. What had to happen now was for the good of all of us, but try and make her get off her soapbox and realize it. Mickey, on the other hand, was a totally different sort of woman. She saw the way things were and knew how they would never be again. I’m not saying that she was a better person-because she sure as hell was not-but she was more like the rest of us: desensitized, desperate, willing to do whatever it took to see another day.

“Well, maybe you should be on your way,” Janie said, starting to get nervous. She knew she couldn’t guilt me out of this one.

“Was hoping I could sleep the night by your fire,” the woman said.

“Well, of course, darling,” Texas Slim told her. “Our fire is your fire.”

Carl giggled again.

“Nash,” Janie said and her voice was pleading. “Rick…”

“Why don’t you go take a walk?” I told her, beginning to lose my patience with the Pollyanna shit. “Texas’ll go with you.”

“Stay the fuck away from me,” Janie said. “All of you.”

She stomped away into the darkness. I didn’t like it because there were too many things out there.

In the distance you could see a faint greenish glow at the horizon that I thought was Chicago. There were weird pale blue auroras licking over the city, just pulsating like electrical fields. I saw occasional flashes of something like cloud-to-ground lightening that were a brilliant orange. I couldn’t even imagine what that hellzone was like at ground zero.

“Okay, Carl,” I finally said. “Let’s get this done.”

Marilynn put her bovine eyes on me. I’ll never forget the way she looked at me as if she knew, as if she sensed the horror that was coming. One human being trying to make a connection with another, looking for mercy, for compassion, for understanding. What she got instead was the butt of Carl’s rifle to the back of her head. Her eyes shut and she fell over.

Ten minutes later, we had her tied to a fence with some bailing wire from our heaps of firewood.

Then Carl and Texas Slim backed well away. They knew what was coming.

I just stood there, sweat rolling down my face. The self-loathing and hatred filled me, hatred of who I was and what I had let myself become. And guilt. Oh God, the guilt of it all, knowing that once I had been an ordinary guy with an ordinary life and I wouldn’t have hurt a fly.

Mickey stood next to me. Her eyes were huge, dark, liquid. She was breathing hard, her long limbs tensed with excitement. She was getting off on it. Really getting off. I could feel the heat coming off her, the musk that made my cock unfurl itself and go hard. As crazy and twisted as it sounds, I wanted nothing better than to throw her to the ground and fuck the hell out of her.

That’s testament to the bizarre workings of the human mind.

“Do it, Nash,” she breathed in my ear. “Call The Shape.”

So I did.