BIOHAZARD (35 page)

I wiped the sleep from my eyes. Slowly, it all came back to me and I slid back down in the seat of the Jeep, relaxing a bit. We had found the Jeep in the garage just like Mickey said. It was a good vehicle. Well-maintained. Battery charged. Full tank of gas. We’d driven out of Gary last night, crossing the Indiana state line into Illinois and, cutting well south of Chicago, got onto to Route 80 which was our ticket west. The highway was a mess with stalled cars and trucks, overturned buses and you name it. We’d been on it all day, creeping along, and now it was night again.

Mickey was driving. Carl was snoring in the passenger seat.

“Hell we at?” I asked.

“Signs say we’re outside some little dive called Utica,” Mickey told me. “Road’s been clear the last twenty miles or so. How long you want to keep going?”

That was a good question. All I knew is we had to hit Des Moines on our way west. That’s what The Shape had said inside my head. Then again, maybe I’d imagined it, but I didn’t think so because the need to reach Des Moines as fast as we could was overpowering. It’s hard to explain. But when that voice whispered in my head—and I can’t honestly be sure it really was a voice as such—and pointed me in the right direction, it became an obsession to get there. It was almost a physical need. Like getting to a toilet when your bladder is full to bursting, if you can dig that.

“Why’d you hit the horn?” I asked.

“Your girlfriend thought a giant bird was attacking us,” Janie said.

“I didn’t say it was a
bird,”
Mickey told her, practicing great patience, I thought. “Something swooped us. It was big and it was dark. It came out of the air, hence, I’m assuming it had wings.”

“I’d say that’s a good assumption,” Texas said. “And blaring horns are known to frighten off giant birds.”

I looked out my window, watching the moonlit countryside passing by. There was mist or smoke hanging in the sky as if something nearby was burning. I could see streaks of color that were pink and almost luminous. I don’t know what they were or what could have caused them. Then I saw the moon. It was full. Everything inside me dried up at the sight of it. Full moon and no offering for big bad Brother Shape. A selection would have to be made some way and somehow. It filled my belly with poison just thinking about it. I saw a flock of winged creatures pass over the face of the moon. They looked kind of like giant bats, but maybe they were witches out on a lark. Nothing would have surprised me. Mickey definitely wasn’t seeing things.

“We need to stop sooner or later,” Janie said at my side. “These people need to rest, Nash.”

Sure, rest. Like food, one of those things the human body just had to have sometimes. Janie was not stupid. She knew it was the night of the moon, she knew what that entailed. I got the feeling from her that she was nursing a secret joy inside her that I had nothing to offer up. That my feelings for the others would prevent me from choosing from their ranks. This is what she wanted. To tell Big Brother Shape to fuck himself or herself or
itself
. No more free lunches. No more offerings. We’re better than that, we will no longer sink to the dehumanizing, uncivilized depths of offering one of our own to some malignant horror from the pit.

But, once again, sweet and kind as she was, she was also naïve.

The Shape would come.

I would have to make a selection.

We drove on for another hour. We saw a few wrecked vehicles but no more giant birds or much of anything else, unless you wanted to count the pack of wolves or coyotes or whatever the hell they were that cut across the road in front of us. We had to slow down so we didn’t hit them. They watched us as they passed. Their eyes glowed green in the darkness.

Finally, Mickey said, “There’s a turnoff for Utica. Something about a campground, Nash.”

“So what?” Janie said.

“You think that’s the place to crash for awhile?”

I nodded. “Yeah, I think so.”

“Then pull us in there.”

Janie was boiling next to me in the dark but I didn’t really have time to assuage her ego. She was feeling very threatened by Mickey. I understood that. I sympathized with it. Unfortunately, Mickey’s intuition was so well-developed that it was nearly prophetic. I would have been a fool not to use a tool like that to safeguard us.

The place was dead. No fires burning. No vehicles. The campground had gone wild, most of the sites grown over. There were lots of rock formations and a big river. I figured it was a pretty nice place back in the day, the perfect getaway from Chicago. Mickey scouted us out a spot on a hill that overlooked most of the park and we stopped there. We found some wood at a ranger station down the way and started a blaze in the firepit. It was nice. All we needed were some marshmallows and hot dogs.

No such luck.

We ate Chef Boyardee ravioli and canned mandarin oranges. But outside like that by the fire, it tasted pretty damn good. Nobody was saying much of anything. They were all tired. Nobody had slept much in the past few days. Carl was just staring into the flames. Texas Slim did not regale us with crude stories. Janie kept her eye on Mickey who kept her eye on me. Meanwhile, I watched the moon and it watched me.

I could feel The Shape out there like some malefic dark star orbiting around us, each pass bringing it a little closer. I sat there and chain-smoked. I had no idea what I was going to do. It was the night of the full moon. There was a possibility The Shape might wait until tomorrow night before making an appearance, but there was no guarantee of that.

“What’re you going to do, Rick?” Janie said to me, reading my mind.

“About what?”

“You know what.”

All eyes were on me then. Mickey was watching me especially close. I knew then that Texas or Carl had told her, tipped her off about the whole business. That was okay. She knew now. We all knew. We all understood. We were thick as thieves, coveting our dirty little secret.

“Nash,” Carl said.

I looked over at him.

He had his AK up. “Somebody out there. Out in those trees.”

“He’s right,” Mickey said.

“If they were bad boys, they would have attacked,” I said. “Let’s assume they’re friendly. Let’s assume they’re in need of company.”

We waited. A few insects buzzed and a coyote howled low and mournful in the distance. I could hear our friend moving around out there. Carl slipped away from the fire and took up a shooting position by the Jeep. The rest of us stayed put.

I heard a stick crack, saw a dark shadow slip behind a tree.

“You out there,” I called. “Come on in. We’re friendly. We got food and coffee. You’re welcome to it.”

Silence.

Then the shadow came around the tree and walked almost sheepishly towards the fire. It was a woman, fortyish, but so ragged and dirty that she looked like a ragbag. I wondered who she was before the bombs fell.

“Your welcome to what we have,” I said.

She came in closer.

Mickey knew exactly what I was doing. She smiled at me in the firelight.

25

The woman enjoyed our coffee, our meager food. She ate with her fingers like an animal while she watched us warily like we might steal her dinner away from her. About the time I was pretty sure she was a deaf mute or something, she said, “Ronny got the pox, had the Fevers something terrible. Blood came out of his eyes. It squirted out. I think he threw up part of his intestines. Looked like intestines.” She shook her head, very matter-of-fact about it as if the true horror of the situation had lost its power to shock. “Ronny didn’t want to get burned. He was always saying, Marilynn, don’t you let them burn me. But I didn’t have a choice. Army said so. We put him in the pyre. They made us put him in the pyre with the rest. They burned him. Thousands of ‘em burning in the pit. You could smell it all the way to Beloit. It stank.”

“Where are you from, Marilynn?” Janie asked her.

“Janesville, Wisconsin. Lived there my whole life. Army started clearing us out block by block. Put us in a camp. Like one of them German camps you hear about it the war, kind with the Jews in ‘em. Little huts we lived in. Barbwire all around. We couldn’t leave. They wouldn’t let us,” she told us, the firelight reflected in her eyes. “Lot of us fought. Didn’t want to go. Shiela Reed fought, too. She was hiding her husband’s body. Shiela was manager at the Rite-Aid, started as a checker but she blew her boss in the storeroom every day, they said, so she got manager. She was crazy. Hiding that body. Army came in and she shot at them. They gunned her down. Threw her in the street and left her there.” She looked around at us as if realizing for the first time that we were there. “Where you going in that Jeep?”

“West,” Carl told her.

Marilynn’s eyes got wide, filled with light. “West, you say? Hear lots of people are going west. Funny. Where west you going?”

“Des Moines.”

“That’s an awful place. I was there two months ago. I ain’t going back.”

“What’s going on there, darling?” Texas Slim asked her.

“
Ain’t you heard? Half the town is burned down, rest of its wreckage. It was bombed by the Air Force to clean out the militias. Nothing there now but rats and corpses and big craters from the bombs, lots of fallen down buildings. I been there. I know. Yes sir, I know. Bones everywhere. Lots of cars with skeletons in ‘em. Not much else.”

“No people?” Mickey said.

Marilynn was sucking tomato sauce from her fingers. “Oh, sure. There’s people. Wild people. They run around in animal skins or go naked. They’re all crazy. They drool. You don’t wanna go there in broad daylight, let alone the dark. Don’t get there after sundown. That’s when the bad ones come out.”

But that’s where we were going. I don’t know why, but the need was very strong and I wasn’t about to ignore it. I kept watching our guest. I didn’t speak to her. If I spoke to her, I would feel connected to her and I didn’t want that kind of connection. I had to look at her like a farmer looks at a pig he’s going to slaughter. That’s what it had come to.

I felt like shit. This woman…Marilynn…was dirty and smelly and probably crazy, but she was harmless. Very pathetic, really. I felt sorry for her and I knew that I couldn’t and the guilt of what was coming was eating a hole straight through me. Carl and Mickey kept watching me, amused by what was coming. Texas Slim did not look at me. I dared not look at Janie because I knew what was in her eyes and I didn’t want to see it.

“Where are you going now?” Janie asked her.

Marilynn considered it as she licked at a sore on her thumb. “Got a sister in Streator. She was alive last I heard. I’ll go look her up. Maybe I’ll live with her. Maybe together we can make it. All I want is just to make it.”

I looked away from her.

Janie said, “Well, I hope you make it to Streator. I really hope nothing gets in your way.”

Which was directed at me, of course.

“Yup,” Texas said. “Sure would suck the old willy wonka if something prevented you from reaching your sister.”

Carl giggled.

Janie glared at him. I glared at Janie. What had to happen now was for the good of all of us, but try and make her get off her soapbox and realize it. Mickey, on the other hand, was a totally different sort of woman. She saw the way things were and knew how they would never be again. I’m not saying that she was a better person—because she sure as hell was not—but she was more like the rest of us: desensitized, desperate, willing to do whatever it took to see another day.

“Well, maybe you should be on your way,” Janie said, starting to get nervous. She knew she couldn’t guilt me out of this one.