BIOHAZARD (17 page)

He would always say things like that that made very little sense to me at the time. But, later, when I thought it out, I would understand. In his own way, the man was a prophet. He knew what I could not know and felt things he had no right feeling. But he was right. With what came later, he was absolutely right: I
was
on the road to something big. We all were. And it was more terrible than anything we could imagine.

Wedged into that closet, I just couldn’t believe he was gone. I didn’t know what I’d do without him. Without his insight and wisdom and his unshakable confidence in me. He was always the first guy into a fight to save us and the last one out. And he was always the guy who made everyone retreat to safety while he held off the “Indians” as he called them. And in the end, trying to protect us had cost him his life and he wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

Thinking about him, I felt tears roll down my cheeks.

It was like losing a brother.

But like he had said so many times, I had to concentrate on the here and now and not the before. Sean was now part of the before and as much as it hurt, I had to let him go.

After the buzzing was gone for a good thirty minutes, we cracked the door. There were dozens of dead bloodsuckers on the floor. Cause of death: unknown. There were two or three living ones clinging to the walls, but they must have been old or sick or something because when we swatted them they fell to the floor, moving very sluggishly. The candles were both tipped over and out. Six bugs had died suctioned to the lantern like they were trying to fuck it. We peeled carapaces off our packs, made sure nothing had crawled inside, and gathered up our belongings.

“
Looks like we’re clear,” Texas Slim said, appraising the parking lot through the shattered window. “Swarm’s gone.”

“
Let’s get that Bronco,” I said.

We hurried downstairs, found a few more dead bugs, a couple sluggish ones that Carl took great joy in stomping, but other than that it was safe. When we got outside, the parking lot was a carpet of dead and dying insects. I didn’t know what had sickened them, but I was grateful for it. There were hundreds of them underfoot, a veritable mat of exoskeletons that made the most revolting crunching sounds as we walked over them. It was like the parking lot was carpeted with peanut shells. They were all over the Bronco, but thankfully the windows and doors had been closed. We brushed off what we could, loaded our stuff, and jumped in.

Judging by the sun in the hazy sky above, it must have been nearly noon by the time we pulled from the parking lot. There were so many dead bugs on the windshield that Carl turned on the wipers and made a grisly brown smear of them that took the wipers and squirting washer fluid some time to clear.

“
Let’s get the hell out of here,” I said.

5

My plan was to head it out of the city and keep rolling until we hit South Bend, because that’s where we had to go. Whether that was intuition on my part or The Shape planting ideas in my head, I didn’t know and didn’t really want to. We had a mission, I knew that much. We had to go west. And I had a feeling that we needed to get moving, that somewhere, somehow, time was running out.

Leave Mother Nature to ball up the works.

We were maybe a block down South Main when a sandstorm brewed-up and within five minutes, visibility was down to maybe twenty feet. Carl didn’t waste anytime. A good sandstorm can gum up an engine in no time flat. And to get caught out in one on foot is unthinkable. He took the first opening he found which happened to be the parking lot of the Concord Mall. We didn’t stop and run inside. Nothing so refined: Carl drove the Bronco right through the plate glass front of JC Penney, smashing through displays and tossing silver-skinned mannequins in every which direction.

But we were inside.

Sand was blowing into the store, but we manhandled displays out of the way and drove the Bronco right out into the atrium itself where it was sheltered from the blow. Sandstorms were a bitch, of course. Sand would blow hot and dry for three days or three hours, just burying everything in the streets and then it would just die down and another wind would scour it all clean. You just had to wait it out.

There were worse things than sandstorms.

Dust storms, for example. When they blew―and if you’d survived long enough in the nuclear wasteland you learned to tell the difference―they brought intense radioactivity with them. You got caught out in them, you were dead. But ever since the bombs came down, pissing fallout across the country in seeking toxic clouds, the weather just hadn’t been the same. Dust, debris, fine particulate matter had been blown up into the atmosphere and for some time the weather had been cold because the sun just wasn’t getting through. But, thankfully, that hadn’t lasted. All that dust and sand and what not settled back down. But now and again, a good gust picked it up and blew it around and sometimes it was just sand and sometimes it was dust so saturated with fallout it would burn everything in its path.

There were weird electrical storms, too, that would turn the sky black and boiling, slit through with jagged red and purple seams. Winds would start blowing again, cloud-to-ground lightning splitting open trees and shattering roofs and starting firestorms that would burn for days.

Maybe some day the planet would heal itself, but it would be a long time in coming.

So we were trapped in the mall, waiting it out.

With nothing really better to do, we went shopping. For the most part, the mall was relatively untouched. Maybe when people were dying in numbers from plague and radiation sickness, suddenly Elder Beerman, Footlocker, and the Great American Cookie Company didn’t seem so important anymore. There was some wreckage, of course, but not as much as you would expect. We stocked up on tools and automotive supplies at Goodyear, got new boots and socks over at Champs Sports, jackets at Leather & More, and while Texas and Carl fooled around in Spencer’s gifts, Janie raided Bath & Body Works. By that time I was shopped out and I stood around in the food court staring with lust at the things I missed most in life: Papa John’s Pizza and Taco Bell.

The mall was depressing. Personally, I find malls depressing on a good day. But empty, forlorn, and dusty, the Concord was far worse. It was creepy, disturbing. The world had gone toes up and dragged things like civilization, art, intellect, and poetry into the grave with it. Libraries and schools had probably been burned or bombed, but synthetic places like this were still standing. Plastic museums of greed and money and fuck-you-I-got-mine mass consumerism. The dark side of the American dream, the cancer that had rotted us from within, the hungering worm that was never full. But buying and spending had been our drug, hadn’t it? All those things you couldn’t really afford. All those things you bought anyway. And the corporations got rich and the credit card companies got fat and the little guy sold off his soul and dignity for a phony lifestyle that was never his in the first place.

Standing there, looking at the stores and displays, I couldn’t help but feel nauseous at it all. And I couldn’t help but think that maybe, just maybe, if we’d all been less concerned with our wallets and more concerned with our brother man that the world might have still been green and sunny and filled with the laughter of children and not a radioactive wasteland haunted by mutants, crazies, and pandemic germs. I had to wonder, really, if maybe we had deserved this. That with the road we were on, becoming shallower by the day, if something like Doomsday hadn’t been inevitable.

But ultimately, in a way, we weren’t to blame. Nature had engineered us into what we were. Our ancestors were greedy by necessity. They had to be to survive. The more your tribe had the better chance you’d make it through the winter. And that greed, of course, became materialism. The human animal always wanted more and there were those that profited obscenely by exploiting this common, inbred need. And somewhere down the line, we destroyed ourselves.

I suppose if visitors from another star ever showed up, they’d look around, shake their heads, and go somewhere else.

After awhile, I got off my soapbox and found Janie looking around in Underground Attitude. “Do you ever wonder,” she said, “how long we can keep playing the odds like we do and survive?”

“
Long as we have to.”

“
Do you really believe that, Nash?” she said, her face very long. “Do you really believe we can keep fighting against the inevitable?”

“
And what’s the inevitable, Janie? Death? Should we just lie down and not bother? Is that what you think?”

“
I don’t know, Nash. Is it what I think?”

“
Don’t talk in riddles. I’m too tired for that shit.”

Janie just stared at me. There were vast crystalline depths in the blue of her eyes. “What I’m saying is that we keep running and running, moving west. What are we running
from?
And better yet, what are we running
to?
What do you think is out there, Nash? Do you expect we’ll find paradise, some kind of oasis from all this or do you know better?”

“
I don’t know shit, Janie.”

“
You know more than you’re saying.”

I hated when she did things like this. It was all hard enough without over-analyzing why things were and why they weren’t. “Janie, all I know is that we’re being driven west—”

“
Like cattle.”

“—
it’s what The Shape wants and you know what? It’s what
I
want, too, because I’m just optimistic enough to believe there’s something better than this. There has to be.”

“
But the germs…”

“
I’m fully aware of the germs. I have nightmares about them.”

She sighed. “What I mean is that we can’t keep playing the odds. Sooner or later, we’re going to pick up one of these germs. One of us is going to get infected. And if one does, we all do.”

“
Maybe we’re immune.”

“
Specs wasn’t.”

“
No, but the rest of us didn’t get what he had, now did we? Maybe there’s a reason for that.”

“
The Shape? Do you really believe that, Nash?”

I honestly wasn’t sure what I believed anymore. “Listen to me, Janie. All I know is that since The Shape picked me I have skirted one danger after the other. That’s all I know. That’s my convoluted logic. We do what it wants and it keeps us alive. Maybe it even makes us immune…I just don’t know. We’ve got an edge that no one else does, we’d be goddamned stupid not to use it.”

“
Even if it means taking a life every month?”

“
Yes.”

“
You really believe that?”

“
I do. And deep down, you do, too.” I went over to her and put my hands on her shoulders. “I
have
to make selections, Janie. You know it. I know it. If we don’t…if we
don’t,
The Shape will do its own selecting. Me, you, Carl, Texas, maybe all of us.”

Her arms loaded with clothes, she turned and walked away from me. Just like that. She was good at heart, she was true gold. But her morals were having trouble with how we lived. I wished to God there was another way. But there wasn’t. There just wasn’t. The germs floating around out there were unbelievably infectious and deadly. I didn’t want to go down with black plague or cholera, typhoid or the flu. And especially not with Ebola. If that meant sacrificing an innocent each full moon to protect me and my friends, I was going to do it.

At least, that’s what I told myself as I watched her walk away.

I felt very grand, very high and mighty, maybe even noble at that moment like I was some kind of fucking hero, some errant knight sacrificing all for God, country, and queen. But later, my delusions failed as they often do. I found a place where I could be alone, the very back aisle of Waldenbooks where I sat on the carpeted floor, surrounded by racks of kidlit—Junie B. Jones, Dr. Suess, Horrible Harry, the Boxcar Children, Henry Higgins, assorted Roald Dahl’s and Beatrix Potter’s—and I cried. Face in my hands, I cried my eyes out, remembering when I’d had a wife, a life, and, yes, some dignity.