Biohazard

8

We walked down those empty, leaf-blown streets of Bitter Creek and I knew we weren’t alone. We were being watched and it wasn’t by The Shape, even though I could feel my significant other getting nearer. It was funny, but I could actually feel it, feel The Shape out there-in my guts and along the back of my neck like a hand coming out of the darkness. You didn’t need to see it to know it was there. It wasn’t time for a selection, not for another week or more.

But The Shape was active.

We were in Bitter Creek.

It had been waiting for this.

But what I felt watching me was not The Shape. It could have been more of the infected like in that park. Because we’d already come across five or six other little communes like that, all of them dying or dead, but waiting. Just waiting.

I didn’t think it was them, though. This was something else.

I could feel it just fine. I didn’t know if the others could. There was someone out there. I just hoped that whoever it was, was human.

“When are you going to tell us why we’re here?” Janie asked me. “When will the grand plan be revealed to the faithful?”

I ignored the sarcasm. “When it’s revealed to me, that’s when.”

The tension between us was almost unbearable now. Everyone was aware of it, but nobody was talking about it. Too much shit to deal with without all that fucking baggage that Janie and I had so carefully packed. Mickey felt the tension and sidled up right next to me, making sure a bare arm or bare leg was in contact with me. Skin to skin. There was alchemy in that and she knew it.

I stood on a street corner, swallowing, feeling the town, sending out fingers of perception in every direction. Where was it? Where was the revelation? I knew it was here. I could feel it going up my spine like fingernails, coiling in my belly, filling my blood with electricity…where was it? When would it show itself?

I reached out to that sphere of darkness in my brain which I acquainted with The Shape’s WiFi, but got nothing. The Shape was near, but very much offline.

“Well, Nash?” Janie said. “Are we going to stand here while Mickey dry humps your leg or are we going to get to this already?”

“Fuck you,” Mickey told her.

“Wouldn’t put it past you,” Janie said.

I started walking again.

We came up to something like a town square. Lots of brick-fronted businesses with dusty windows, simple frame houses spread out beyond. The lawns were all yellow and overgrown, the streets plastered with wet leaves. A Mobil station, a video store, a bowling alley, a cafe…this could have been any of a thousand towns in the country. They were all laid out approximately the same…Main Street or Elm or whatever as a hub, everything else radiating out from it like the spokes of a bike tire. Same old, same old. Just another dismal little town filled with death. You could smell it in the air…a sharp, almost pungent yellow smell of age and decay and memory sucking into itself. The moldering, old smell of a library filled with rotting books…except it wasn’t the books that were rotting here.

I saw more white crosses. They seemed to be in the windows of every business and every home.

“What do you make of it?” I asked Texas.

He shrugged. “Damned if I know. The cross, as I understand it, only exists for two purposes: to call something in or ward something else off.”

I wondered what Specs would have made of it with that mind of his.

As we walked, sensing the place, letting it fill us like poisoned blood, Janie kept looking at me. I pretended I wasn’t aware of it. But, eventually, I looked over at her and those blue eyes of hers were blazing. Hate? Anger? No, maybe something like disappointment. Something beyond disappointment. I didn’t know what it was. Not then. But it was coming. She was brooding something inside. Something she was going to share with me when the time came.

But not before.

We all had our guns out and we were feeling tense. There was a thickness in the air, the sense that although maybe we were the only ones wading through this particular stream, there were others watching us from the grassy banks, just biding their time, studying us.

About that time, Mickey stopped. Stopped and cocked her head. “I feel…I feel like I’m being watched,” she said.

Janie sucked in a breath. Maybe I did, too.

“That’s just me,” Texas said. “I been watching your ass is all.”

“Shut up,” she said.

Mickey, as I’ve said, was intuitive as all hell…she could read people, she could read situations. And she wasn’t liking this one at all.

Morse, of course, seeing her standing there looking darkly beautiful and haunted like she did when she was sensing something, snapped a picture of her. Mickey didn’t even flinch. She’d had lots of pictures of her taken in the old days and she was a natural at it.

We moved through the streets very slowly, trying to pick up on what was watching us. Outside a little drug store, we found two bodies. Children. They were curled up on the sidewalk, reduced to husks… just wiry and blackened, crumbling. When Carl nudged one with his boot, it fell apart like cigarette ash. I’d seen it before. Sometimes, the Children just decayed like isotopes, burned themselves up from the inside out.

We kept moving.

And still, those eyes watched us.

“Nash,” Mickey said, gripping the Browning Hi-Power she carried in both hands like a cop on a shooting range, “I’m getting a real bad feeling here. There’s somebody watching us out there.”

Even Carl didn’t have a smartass response for that.

Morse scanned the streets with his telephoto lens, humming under his breath. Janie looked at me and I looked at her. Maybe I was going to take charge like a true leader, maybe I was about to rally my troops, but something happened.

A door slammed.

Slammed damn hard.

We all jumped.

Then we went after it. We cut down an alley and came out on another tree-lined street. Houses, buildings, and then a little ma and pa lunch counter at the end. I saw movement behind the plate glass windows and went after it. I went in first with my Beretta in my hands, ready to start busting caps. Inside, it was typical…flyspecked windows, a long counter, lots of empty tables. Everything dusty and wreathed with cobwebs. A cross on the glass.

And a girl.

She could have been eleven or twelve, I was thinking. She just sat there in a booth like she’d been waiting for us. She was out in the daytime, so I knew she wasn’t one of the Children.

“Hey,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

But she wouldn’t answer me.

She was dressed in rags that might have been jeans and a sweatshirt once. Her face was grimy, her red hair clotted with filth. And she stank like she hadn’t had a bath in months, like she’d been pissing and shitting herself. And judging from those dark stains at her crotch, I think she’d been menstruating, too.

“Take her,” I told Carl.

Carl liked that bit. Strictly stormtrooper fantasy. He handed his shotgun to Morse and went over to the girl.

“You got a name, sunshine?”

She just looked up at him with this dull, bovine look. He put the questions to her about who had survived and where they were and what she was doing alone. She just kept staring, though, either an idiot or mad or simply made that way by the world pissing down its own leg and leaving her stranded in a dead town.

He slapped her, just warming up. “Talk, you fucking cunt,” he said.

But the girl didn’t even make a sound. He might have been striking a rump roast thawing on the counter…this girl wasn’t much more than that: animate meat.

“Stop it!” Janie said. “She’s just a child! Don’t you dare hit her!”

Carl drew back his hand to start again, but I shook my head and he stopped. He shrugged, grabbed the girl by her hair and threw her to the floor. He planted a knee in the center of her back and dug some duct tape from his pack, taped her wrists together behind her back. She did not fight. She did not struggle. When Carl was done, he yanked her to her feet.

“Nash?” he said. “Request permission to piss all over this wench so she at least smells a little better.”

Morse took a picture of her.

“Request denied,” I said.

“All right,” I said to my troops. “Let’s take a five.”

“I’m all for ten,” Texas said.

“Yeah, I need to sit down a minute,” Mickey said, dropping into a booth and crossing her long bronze legs, making sure I saw her do it.

I did.

And Janie saw me looking, too.

We ate some MRE spaghetti and pork and beans. Nobody’d had breakfast and we were hungry. I sat there watching the girl and had a smoke, maybe feeling sorry for myself and the shell of the world at the same time. I was looking at the big picture and seeing me and my people, all the other scattered bands, as insects crawling over the rotting cadaver of some dead beast. I think, essentially, the analogy worked.

I closed my eyes for a moment and all I could see was that formless gray pestilence getting closer. The Medusa. I had the shakes. My heart was pounding. I had an overwhelming urge to vomit out everything I had bottled up inside.

“Okay,” I finally said. “Break’s over. We got shit to do.”

We all got to our feet and right away, I was feeling that same old bit again, that we were being watched. I just couldn’t shake it. It wasn’t The Shape and it wasn’t that girl, so then what?

I remember Mickey looking over at me, telling me with her eyes that she was feeling it, too. And then I heard a thudding report out in the streets and it took me almost a split second to realize it was the bark of a rifle.

A hole opened in the plate glass window.

We all dove down, except the girl and Morse. Jesus, stupid harmless Morse. Now he wasn’t a fashion photographer doing spreads for Newport News and Spiegels, no, now he was a combat photographer. For as those rounds kept chewing into the dusty windows and they fell apart like candy glass, shattering amongst us, Morse just stood there with his Nikon to his left eye, working his telephoto and f-stop, trying to get a good shot for Newsweek or Time.

I yelled for him to get down. I don’t remember what I said, but something about getting his fucking head down and then there was another report and a slug caught Morse right in the telephoto. Lucky shot or really good aim, I didn’t know. But I saw that camera fly apart and blood and meat blast out the back of Morse’s skull. He folded up and died without saying a word. I told everyone to shut the hell up. Somebody out there had a long-range rifle, maybe a. 30-30 or a. 30.06. I wanted them to get closer so I wouldn’t miss.

Silence.

No sound out in the streets and none in the cafe. After a few moments, I heard a couple voices calling out there. Sounded like kids, teen-agers maybe. We stayed put, drew those bastards in. And they came, muttering amongst themselves. I whispered for the others to just get ready and I rose up behind one of the booths so I could get a look. Sure, maybe a half-dozen kids and some older guy with a rifle. They didn’t bother sending out a scout, they came towards the cafe in a group.

“Get ready,” I whispered.

Mickey had her Browning, Texas had his Desert Eagle. 50. I had my Savage 30.06 and Carl had his AK.

I watched those peckerwoods converge on the diner. They were quite a crew. They were all long-haired and so filthy that you couldn’t tell if they were boys or girls. They carried pipes and axe handles and baseball bats. From the stains on them, I figured they knew how to use them, too. The older guy kept his rifle up, urging the others forward. As they made to climb through the shattered windows, we came up shooting. We drilled three of them before the others even knew what happened. The old guy started shooting and killed one of his ratpack with a wild shot, but did no other damage. We kept shooting and pretty soon they were all down. Even the old guy. Mickey had jacked a couple rounds into his right kneecap and he was done.

Carl hopped out there first, kicking his rifle away.

I followed with Mickey behind me. A couple of those teenagers were still alive, vomiting out blood into the street. They smelled so bad and were so dirty, even Janie wasn’t rushing to their rescue. They looked like Neolithic savages, filthy and bruised and pockmarked, their teeth rotting from their mouths. The air stank of gunpowder, violent death, and voided bowels…but I don’t think they were infected.

Carl was kicking the old guy when I got there.

I told him to stop. Mickey had done quite a job on his knee. It was blasted to mucilage, one of the bones sticking right through his pant leg like the end of a shattered Pepsi bottle.

“Filth! Trash! Fucking garbage!” he yelled at us. “Y’all ain’t nothing but trash and dirt and cunting animals, that’s all you is!”

“Shut the fuck up,” I told him.

He just stared at me, eyes simmering with hate. “Think you’re something all special, eh boy? You ain’t shit.” To prove that, he spit. “You…you and these animals…y’all don’t know what yer in for. No sir, y’all ain’t got a clue. But I know. Yes sir, I know.”

Texas Slim was kneeling next to him. “So why don’t you elaborate, kind sir.”

“Hell he say?” the old man wanted to know.

“He wants to know what we’re in for,” I said.

The old man laughed with a bitter, resentful sound. “Idiots…y’all don’t know, do you? Ha! This town ain’t gonna be nothing but a boneyard come tonight or tomorrow or the next day! It’s coming for all of us! Coming out of the east, yes sir! And there’s those here that want it to come! You see all them sick ones? They been pouring in for weeks! For weeks! Some have died, but others is hanging in just so they can see it! Look it in the face when it comes home to roost!”

“Look what in the face?” Mickey asked him.

The old man offered her a grin of brown, rotten teeth. “The Devil,” he said. “The Devil.”

Everyone bristled at this, but none of them were surprised. I had talked with them about it and they had not needed my words. For inside, they knew just as I knew.

Mickey came over and wiped some dirt from my cheek. You should have seen how she did it. She licked her fingertip and then drew it real slow over my skin.

Mickey wanted me and I suppose I wanted her again, too. I mean, really, how could a guy not want Mickey? She was a pin-up girl, a centerfold. She had the tits and the ass and the legs, was darkly pretty and seductive. You could just imagine how many guys had whacked off over pictures of her in magazines. Yeah, she was hot. So hot a picture of her in your pocket would have burned a hole in your pants and started a brushfire in your crotch.

But the truth was, she scared me.

She really did.

While Janie turned her head when I called up The Shape and it took its sacrifice, Mickey liked to watch. She really liked to watch. Death and violence got her off. Maybe it always had or maybe it was something the end of civilization had unlocked in her. I didn’t know, but I did know that she had some seriously scary psychosexual issues. She liked to watch The Shape take its offerings of meat and blood. She liked shooting people. She liked looking at the aftermath of bodies and shattered anatomies. And right then? Looking down at those dead teen-agers? She was getting off. If we weren’t there, she would probably have masturbated. Her nipples were standing hard against her t-shirt and I was willing to bet that if I slipped my hand down the front of her cut-offs, I could have slid two fingers into her without much trouble.

She was looking from the bodies to me, the hunger all over her. She looked like she wanted to take a bite out of something or have something take a bite out of her.

Janie was watching this, of course.

I caught her eyes once and quickly looked away. Something in them made me wither. I had slept with both girls now, Janie repeatedly.

Trust me, it was no notch on my belt. Because it was always there in the back of my mind, that dread question of what I would have to do if either of them became pregnant. Because if the stories were true, babies always became like the Children and usually right away. Monsters. They came right out of the womb like that, literally burning their way out and killing their mothers in the process.

Could I let Janie or Mickey suffer like that?

And better, would I have the balls to put them down if and when it happened?