Biohazard

2

“You smell that?” Carl said about ten minutes later.

I stopped brooding. The wind was coming from the other direction, through the half-open door at the far side, and I could smell death on it: hot, putrefying. It was a smell I knew well, the bouquet of every city in the country and the world for that matter. But in that barn you did not expect it. It was high, nauseating and it was getting stronger.

Carl, Texas, and I grabbed our guns.

We tracked the smell to the far end of the barn and each step I took on the way there made my heart sink a little lower. We didn’t need more trouble. We had to get to Bitter Creek. And with what might be waiting there, wasn’t that enough?

“Something around that stall,” Texas said, his Desert Eagle. 50 cal in his hands.

Carl moved forward with his AK. I followed.

Corpses.

There was some kind of trough cut into the floor and its purpose was unknown to me. There were five or six bodies in there. They were greening, going soft with rot. They were all bloated up, that stink so thick it was nearly palpable.

“Shit,” Carl said.

One of the bodies moved. Then another. It was incredible, but I saw it and despite all I knew about horror by that point-which was considerable, I might add-I found myself gripped with an unreasoning superstitious terror at the idea of a moving corpse.

But there was nothing supernatural about it.

The bodies were infested. That’s all it was. A corpse-worm that was perfectly white and perfectly smooth slid out of the eye socket of one of the bodies. It was slimy and steaming, about three feet of it wavering side-to-side in the air, that bulb-like head opening and closing like it was breathing.

Carl shot it, cut it in half before it could spit some of its digestive enzymes at us. The bullets shattered it into a fleshy sauce of black bile. The rest of it slid back into the eye socket.

“We should burn those bodies or something,” Carl said.

“Why?” Texas asked him. “Once those worms are done eating, they’ll just starve anyway with no more meat to be had.”

“True,” I said.

Texas and I turned away and walked towards the others. I called out to them that it was nothing but a worm and they relaxed. Carl was right behind us. He couldn’t help himself, he pointed his AK into the pit and gave the remains a couple of three-shot bursts.

And that’s when we all heard the screaming.