BIOHAZARD (22 page)

He held a hand up to me, a sickly blotched claw really, as if needing to make contact with a human being one last time. Then his arm fell and he lay there, bleeding, vomiting out bile and blood, gasping in pain.

“Sorry, old man,” I said. “Wish there was something I could do.”

Tensing myself, I put a bullet in the old timer’s head to alleviate his suffering. It was the only thing I
could
do, but doing so made me feel cold and empty inside. Had I known any good prayers, I might have used one then.

“
Don’t mean nothing,” I said under my breath, amazed, as always, that after all the shit I’d been through there could still be something as intangible as guilt in my soul.

Deeper in the shadows of the alley…a rustling, a skittering.

More rats.

Probably a colony near.

I walked quickly back to the van. It was mid-afternoon and usually the rats didn’t get too active until night, but you never knew. They could be unbelievably vicious if you threatened their nests. If they came after me in numbers I could empty my gun into them and it still would do no good. They’d bury me alive in teeth and claws and lice-infested bodies. My bones would be licked clean in minutes.

When I got back in the van, I told Carl to get us the hell out of there.

The van started to roll again, jerking and wheezing, but gradually picking up speed.

2

The thing I hated about Janie most of all was that she was brutally honest, absolutely not a shred of bullshit in her soul. Way things were, deceiving yourself and those around you was a way of life. It kept you sane, kept your feet on the ground. But not Janie.

Whenever we were alone, Janie would look at me with those eyes so clear and so blue, and she’d ask me that same question again and again and again: “Where, Nash? Where are we going? Where are you pointing us to?”

“West,” I’d say. “We’re going west.”

“Why west? What’s out there but more of the same?”

“Because that’s where we have to go. That’s all.”

Janie would keep her mouth shut for a few moments. Then she’d say: “Is that what it wants? Is that what The Shape tells you to do?”

And I would suddenly feel absolutely numb with fear, a gnawing anxiety rising up from within that threatened to swallow me alive. I would not be able to speak. I would lay there, dumbly, Janie in my arms, feeling the cool sweat on her body, smelling her musk and sweetness. The Shape, The Shape, The Shape. Oh dear God. What it wanted, what it demanded.

What I had to give it once a month during the cycle of the full moon.

Jesus.

See, that was Janie: no bullshit. The others would never dare ask me something like that. They knew about The Shape. They knew what it wanted…but it didn’t make for pleasant conversation so it was not brought up.

But Janie wasn’t like that. She’d hit me with questions and I would have to answer them. I’d find my voice, some old and scratchy thing that sounded distant and tinny like an old 78, and tell her, “Yes, that’s what it wants. It wants us to go west. There’s something out there.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Something out there and maybe something we have to get away from back here. I don’t know.”

I wouldn’t say anymore than that. She did not need to know what I suspected was behind us, chewing its way across country, city by city, leaving charnel waste in its path.

Janie would breathe in and out and I’d run a hand over her naked back, that deliciously smooth tanned skin, thinking how she was so much like Shelly. Except that Shelly was dead and Janie was alive.

“How long, Nash? When will it be satisfied? When will The Shape have enough?”

But I would never answer that one because it sickened me to contemplate it. What I would have to do and who I might have to do it to. For I knew with an awful certainty, sure as there was blood rushing through my veins, that there would never be an end to it. I didn’t know what The Shape was exactly, but I sensed that it was part of this new world, a natural force now like wind and water and sunshine.

It would ask things.

I would do them.

And if it ever asked for Janie? If it ever did that…if it ever goddamn well did that…I didn’t know what I’d do. Because there was no fucking way it would touch her.

I would not allow it.

I didn’t care how hungry it was…

3

Although we found no vehicle that day, we caught a woman for The Shape. Carl got her while out scouting on foot. She was hiding in a building. As he passed by, she threw a rock at him. So he went after her, beat her into submission, bound and gagged her and brought her back.

Janie wasn’t real cool with that.

The woman was barely human, that’s all I can say. She wasn’t infected like a Scab, not yet, but from the look in her eyes that wasn’t too far off. She looked like she wanted to tear out somebody’s throat.

Janie pulled the whole sympathetic thing and told us how that woman was a human being with rights like everyone else. “I want to talk to her, Nash.”

“She’s fucking whacko,” I said.

“Please.”

“Well,” Carl said. “She wasn’t acting real human or ladylike when I found her, Janie. But you can give it a try if you want.”

Carl pulled the duct tape from her mouth.

She watched us with beady, metallic eyes.

Janie put a hand on her shoulder. “Honey…” she said.

The woman flinched, screamed full in Janie’s face, then lunged forward trying to bite her. Carl knocked her to the floor, crouched on her back, and taped her mouth shut again.

“So much for that,” I said.

“She’s nuts,” Janie said. “Absolutely fucking nuts.”

Carl and I laughed our asses off.

4

Night.

We holed up in a little machine shop after a day wasted looking for better wheels than the VW. I chose the machine shop because it was defensible and set back from the street. There were even bars on the windows. If anything or anyone tried to get at us, we’d see them just fine in the moonlight and the street outside would make an excellent killzone.

I pulled up a chair before the window, cradling my Savage bolt-action .30.06 in my lap. I was figuring there wasn’t much Gary could throw at me that I couldn’t cut down with that.

I was sitting watch. Carl was snoring in the back room with Texas. Janie was sleeping, too.

There was nothing to do but watch that empty, waiting street. Now and then I’d lean forward up against the glass and see the moon up there above the town. It was not quite full, but damn close. Just round and fat and leering like a yellow eye, its gaze painting the buildings a phosphorescent yellow.

It reminded me of when I was a kid.

There was an older girl named Mary LaPeer who had this flowing dark hair and brilliant blue eyes. I was just absolutely in love with her. Mary had a telescope and on warm summer nights she’d take it out in the backyard and look at the moon and stars, sometimes until one or two in the morning. I’d watch out my window, my heart beating with a slow and expectant roll, waiting for Mary to come out. When she did, I’d slip out my window and join her. Mary showed me the moon and Mars and the Crab Nebula one time, but no heavenly body she showed me burned brighter than the stars in my eyes when I looked at her and listened to her talk about the rings of Saturn or the misty yellow orb of Venus.

Mary was five years older than me. I was infatuated with her until the day she graduated high school and moved away, off to college. On that day, I cried and cried because I knew I’d never see her again and I didn’t. Even now the memory of that pained me, cut something open inside my belly and made me bleed. But I never forgot those summer nights or the crickets chirping, the soft whisper of Mary’s voice and the Milky Way spread out over the sky and Mary telling me that one day, her and I would travel out there. Together.

Sitting there at the window, peering off into graveyard of the world, that moon poised above, I remembered Mary and missed her and wanted to sob. Maybe I lost myself in my memories too much, because I think I drifted off.

And when I woke, the Geiger Counter was ticking madly at my feet.

There was someone out in the street.

I started in my chair and nearly fell right out of it. I blinked my eyes a few times to see if I was imagining things, but I wasn’t.

There was a girl standing out in the street looking right at me.

She was like some wraith that had burst the gates of a tomb, just thin and ragged and flyblown. And that’s when I knew she wasn’t a girl at all. That’s when something jumped in my stomach and I could smell the acrid stink of fear sweating out my pores.

She was one of
the Children.

I think I tried to call out to the others, but my mouth went all rubbery like I’d just gotten a shot of Novocaine in the gums. I made a sound, but not enough of one for anybody but myself to hear. More than anything, I just sat there stiffly like something whittled from a log. Maybe I thought if I played dead, pretended I wasn’t alive, then that awful little girl out there would just go on her way. But no dice.

She saw me.

She knew I was there. Maybe she saw me move or maybe she smelled me, tasted the fear rising from me and decided she wanted more. In the dappled moonlight, I could see her just fine—the colorless hair falling to her shoulders, the gray skin and horribly seamed face that looked more like an African fetish mask than human features, something worked with a knife and chisel. Her eyes were yellow and luminous, sunk deep into exaggerated bony orbits like candles burning from the depths of mine shafts.

Breathing hard, the spit dried up in my mouth, I brought up the .30.06 with what I thought was a careful, confident motion. But the truth was that my hands were shaking so badly I could barely hold onto the damn thing.

The girl out there had not come any closer.

She stood her ground and I stood mine.

I had to shoot her. I had to put her down. I had to spray the irradiated filth in her skull all over the pavement and I had to do it soon. Because whether it was out and out telepathy or something biochemical, when one of them knew where you were, they
all
knew.

But I hesitated.

I knew Carl wouldn’t have and not Texas Slim either. But even after all I’d seen and done, the various encounters I’d had with these little ghouls, I still was human enough where the idea of killing a child…or something that had once been a child…just turned something sour inside me, filled me with rot and venom, made me want to vomit out my stomach.

A voice in my head that did not belong to The Shape, but was probably simple old instinct told me,
Look at that fucking thing, Rick, it’s not human, it’s not a child. It’s gray and shriveled and embalmed-looking, dusty and filthy like something that crawled from a grave. It’s walking meat, nothing more.

Great advice. I brought the gun up and I was going to kill that thing because I knew I had to. But as frightening as that child was, she was also somehow pathetic, more victim than victimizer even if she was lethal as the glowing rods pulled from a reactor core. At that moment, perhaps sensing my indecision, she brought up her hands, held them out palms up like some miserable waif begging for alms, for a couple dirty nickels to feed her starving siblings with.

Just do it, you idiot.