Biohazard

2

The city was a cesspool of standing water, rubble, and unburied bodies. It looked like the mother of all battles had been fought here and maybe it had been. The buildings were shattered, blackened like charcoal, trees standing up like solitary masts, entirely devoid of limbs. Skyscrapers had been reduced to heaps of slag. No birds sang. Nothing grew. Nothing moved. There was only the stench of old death on the faint breeze, pungent and pervasive and secret. The way a tomb might smell.

“This place is dead,” Carl said. “Absolutely dead. Can’t you smell it?”

I could, but I didn’t mention the fact. Nobody else did either. They could feel it, all right, and they did not like it. The silence in the Jeep was heavy, almost crushing. They were waiting for me to tell them what this was all about or at least point them in the right direction. But I was clueless, absolutely clueless. Like every other city, every rawboned urban graveyard, we rolled in with no clear reason of why we had to go there other than the fact that I said so. I doubted if it was enough for my people because it sure as hell was not enough for me.

As we drove in up 94, I was thinking about Marilynn. She was the last thing I wanted to be thinking about, but I couldn’t forget what she had said.

Nothing there now but rats and corpses and big craters from the bombs, lots of fallen down buildings.

How right she was. But there was something else here, something important and I could feel it in my guts.

The city lay around us like some crumbled, exhumed corpse. Entire neighborhoods had been bombed to rubble while others were relatively unscathed. It made no sense really, but even those still standing were desolate and eerie, silent and forlorn like monoliths erected over the grave of mankind. Some buildings had walls blasted free and you could see the tiny cubicles within…offices, apartments, like cross-sections of a doll’s house. Many were nothing but twisted and mangled skeletal frames of girders waiting to fall and still others were marked by but a single standing chimney or facade. Roads were often cut by jagged crevices like fault lines, sewer piping thrust up through the pavement like the bones of compound fractures.

It was no easy bit navigating our way through.

Entire thoroughfares were blocked by rubble and mountainous debris or had fallen into the sewers below. I saw the huge bomb craters that Marilynn had talked about. They pocked the landscape like the craters on the dark side of the moon. They were filled with pools of foul-smelling water, caked with leaves and garbage and the occasional rotting hulk of a half-submerged SUV. Other streets were blocked by buses and trucks and overturned cars, the burnt husks of military vehicles.

There were bones everywhere, scattered in the streets, rotting in the slimy gutters. Some were still dressed in rags, pushed up beneath the overhangs of standing buildings or huddled in cars that were perforated with bullet holes.

Carl was playing with the Geiger Counter. “Rad’s a little high…about fifty. Not too bad. Net yet.”

We passed a cathedral that was nothing but heaped stones spread out for nearly a city block. All that was left standing was the steeple and it was leaning hard. Neighborhoods of homes were reduced to kindling or blackened from raging fires long since burned out.

“Well,” Texas said, pulling off a cigarette, “this is lovely country. Looks like Berlin in ’45. But despite its scenic charm, I’m all for heading out. Getting a funny tickle at the base of my balls and I’m pretty sure it ain’t Carl’s middle finger.”

“Kiss my ass,” Carl said.

I giggled…a high, nervous, frantic sort of giggle. I couldn’t help myself. Something was very wrong here. Des Moines felt like a cemetery and the comparison was applicable…yet, I knew there was life out there in those blasted ruins. I could feel it watching us.

“He’s right,” Mickey said. “There’s something out there. I can feel it.”

“What are we after here, Nash? You got any idea what it is we’re looking for?” Carl wanted to know.

But I could only shake my head. “I’ll know it when I see it. Keep driving.”

Janie was sitting next to me, but she hadn’t said a word to me since I gave Marilynn to The Shape. I loved Janie. I would never pretend otherwise. But I was starting to get tired of her moody bullshit. I think we all were. It was getting to the point that her high blown ethics and morals were getting the best of her. Time was when we did what we had to do, she disapproved, but she moved on, let it go. Now she kept sinking into these deep blue funks and would refuse to even speak to anyone. It was immature and whiny. Like dealing with a bratty five-year old. I didn’t have the patience for it and I was pretty sure the others didn’t either.

“We need to start getting some gas here, Nash,” Mickey said. “We got about a quarter tank…but it won’t last long.”

Fuel was never a problem in the brave new world. If you had a running vehicle it was very easy to siphon all the gas you wanted from the armies of dead vehicles. Carl always carried his little siphon pump with him.

“All right, we better get that done. Let’s look for a parking lot or something, a car dealer.”

Mickey drove on, steering the Jeep through those devastated, war-torn streets. She was a good driver, steering us around heaped rubble and squeezing in-between wrecked cars. I watched the desolation around us, looking for anything that moved and saw nothing. Not even a stray dog drinking from a puddle. Street signs were missing, stoplights laying in the streets. Telephone poles had fallen right over and those that still stood were leaning badly, their lines strung like limp spaghetti.

“Here we go,” Mickey said.

She pulled into the parking lot of a huge white building that went on for about a city block. In huge blue plastic letters it said: CHEVROLET, HUMMER. There were lot after lot of cars, many of which were damaged or rusting, tires stripped away and windshields shattered. But many were untouched.

We piled out.