BIOHAZARD (5 page)

The soldiers burst out laughing.

Weeks said, “You don’t like that shit, Fuckhead? Maybe next I’ll throw your ass in there, you fucking pussy.”

Specs helped me to my feet. “You get used to it, man. It’s fucked up, but you do.”

No draftee in any war went through worse shit than we did.

You stood there in those hot suits, flies buzzing around you and maggots dropping from your gloves, just filthy with all the revolting shit that oozed from the bodies. And that was bad enough, but what was worse was
hearing
those cadavers compact. Even our helmets couldn’t muffle the sound of dozens of putrefying corpses being crushed, bones snapping and flesh being squished to mush. Every time a load was cycled through, black muddy ooze would run from the bottom of the hopper and rain to the street, squeezed from the corpses like pulp from tomatoes.

And the smell of it…dear God, it was unspeakable.

But we had no choice.

While I and the other poor bastards tossed bodies in the hopper, the soldiers would keep their guns on us. If you tried to break out, tried to run, they’d cut you right down, throw you in the back with the stiffs.

When the honeybuckets were full, we drove them outside the city to the dump, emptying the hoppers into the immense body pits where the corpses were burned. A mile from the dump, you could see clouds of black smoke rising into the sky, smell the cremated flesh and burning hair. It was like standing downwind from the ovens at Treblinka.

If there was truly a hell on earth, then this was it.

11

Weeks was not only a psychotic who shot anything that moved, he was deluded and paranoid and should have been in a loony bin somewhere. I never learned what his deal was, whether he was born nuts or if Doomsday had totally unhinged him, but he did not believe that the United States had been decimated by nuclear weapons. At least, not the kind fired by
people.
He was certain that aliens from outer space were responsible and that even now, they were spreading disease and pestilence and were hiding out in human form.

“Tell me where you came from,” he said to me one day.

“Youngstown.”

“Oh, you think you’re funny? You think this is a fucking joke?”

“You asked me, I told you.”

He put his carbine on me. “And how am I supposed to know you ain’t one of
them?
You ain’t an Outsider?”

That’s what Weeks called them:
Outsiders.
He never once used the word “alien” but then he did not have to. Everyone knew.

I didn’t even know what the guy looked like. He never, ever took off his biosuit. He even slept in it. Even back at the barracks he wore it religiously because he had no intention of any Outsider bugs getting him and changing him into some
thing.
He liked to toy with us, his Shitheads, trying to scare us by threatening to throw us into the hoppers. That worked at first. But after handling the cold cuts day in and day out, it took a lot to ruffle our feathers.

The truth was, Weeks was terrified.

He was afraid of everybody and everything.

He was particularly scared of Paulson because he thought Paulson was an Outsider and he hadn’t made his mind up about Specs just yet. So whenever he talked to them, he kept his distance and when he wanted to throw them a beating, he always made his bullyboy soldiers do it. I found out just how afraid he was one day when he slipped on some corpse slime leaking out of the back of the truck and I grabbed him before he fell down.

He screamed.

Screamed bloody murder.

He was so petrified that he brought up his carbine, fully intending to waste me right then and there, only he was hyperventilating so bad and his hands were shaking so wildly that he couldn’t even hold onto the gun. He finally dropped it and crawled away.

“
Unclean! Filthy! Dirty!”
he cried out.
“You put those dirty filthy rotten hands on me! You’re infested like all the rest!”

He finally got to his feet and jumped in the cab where, no doubt, he was spraying himself down with antiseptics.

One of soldiers came over and put the barrel of his carbine right into my face. “I oughta fucking kill you right now, you stupid asshole!”

I felt no fear. Death was hardly a threat by that point. “Go ahead.”

“
What?”

“
I said,
go ahead.”

The soldier looked to his comrades and didn’t know exactly how to handle this. The other soldiers just stood there, feeling awkward and no doubt stupid in their white biosuits. I did not back down. For after being on the collection team for over a month I knew the score. Lately, Weeks hadn’t been able to draft anyone. Word had gotten around about what the Army was up to and people hid out when the vans came around. Only the diseased, the crazy, and the Scabs came out, but they were of no use.

Weeks needed me. He needed all of us.

That’s why the soldier didn’t kill me.

That’s why he was
afraid
to kill me. Because the way things were, we were short-handed and if I died it meant one of the soldiers would take my place. Weeks would insist upon it. He threatened his boys with it all the time. And whoever pulled the trigger and killed his Shithead would get the job.

“
I’m not kidding,” the soldier said.

I stepped forward until the barrel of the carbine was so close I could smell the burnt cordite in the barrel. “So kill me, asshole. Do it. Go ahead. Then you can take your turn handling the meat.”

The soldier stepped back, then shouted out something and clubbed me with his rifle. Under the circumstances, it was his only option. He couldn’t kill me, but on the other hand he couldn’t just walk away from such open disobedience. I mean, shit, what would the Army be if people stopped following orders and actually began thinking for themselves?

I pulled myself up, spit out some blood and grinned. “You raise that rifle to me again, sonny, and I’ll ram it so far up your ass it’ll tickle your tonsils.”

He brought it up again as I knew he would in a typical threat response.
“You’re dead! You’re fucking dead! You hear me? You’re fucking dead!”

“
So pull the trigger, you goddamn pussy.”

He hesitated. I stepped forward. He backed up.

The other soldiers were watching closely, very closely.

“
You ain’t got the balls for it,” I told him.

And there the confrontation ended. After what I’d been through, that little bully boy was pathetic. He was terrified of taking my place. He knew it. I knew it. There was always the chance that he’d lose it and gun me down, but that was no real threat either. So what? Shoveling corpses for a living doesn’t exactly put you on the road to a brighter future. What I had done—and what my intention had been from the start—was to symbolically emasculate that little pushbutton jarhead in front of everyone. And I had. From that point on, as far as we were concerned, he wore a fucking skirt.

I had sown the seeds of open rebellion and the big one was coming.

The showdown.

I think all us shitheads were ready for it, hungry for it even. I knew it was coming because The Shape had already told me. Just like he/she/it had told me that it was going to work out in my favor.

12

When we weren’t out collecting corpses for the common good, Weeks and his bully boys were based out of the National Guard Armory over in Austintown. It had once housed elements of the 838
^th
Military Police Company. There was a bunkroom that looked like a hospital ward in an old movie. That’s where we shitheads slept. They locked us in at night and let us out in the morning. It was quite a life. We’d come in after a day of handling the cold cuts, just filthy and stinking of decay, and they’d stick us in that room, make us sleep in our own filth.

At night, Specs would have awful nightmares. He’d be crying out or sobbing in his sleep which pissed the other guys off because they needed their rest. He’d be in the bunk next to mine and I’d have to shake him awake.

“Specs, Specs,” I’d say. “Knock it off for chrissake.”

He’d lay there in the darkness, face shiny with sweat, just blinking. He was all messed-up from Doomsday and who wasn’t?

One night as I sat there sharing a smoke with him, he said, “You know what, Nash? I believe in omens and portents. I think the future’s already written if you can figure out how to read it.”

“No shit?” I said.

“Really, Nash, I’m not kidding.”

I pulled off my smoke. “Specs, what difference would it make? The future is fucking black. You don’t wanna know about it.”

“Oh yes you do. If you read the signs they can keep you alive, keep you safe. If I had some Tarot cards I could show you your life path. What’s gonna happen.”

“I don’t wanna know what’s gonna happen.”

Specs went on and on about all that whacky new age shit he was into. They could call it what they wanted, but it all sounded like fairground gypsy fortune telling to me. But Specs loved it, loved talking in great detail about everything from pyramid power to the energy of crystals.

After about twenty minutes of that, Paulson said, “Why don’t you girls go get a room? I’m trying to fucking sleep here.”

Specs was excited, though. “But, Nash, listen—”

“Go to sleep,” I told him. I shut my eyes, thinking about all that crazy shit and remembering my wife. That night I had my own nightmares. I dreamed that rats were eating Shelly.

13

The showdown, the endgame as it were, came not three days later.

We were making the rounds, collecting the dead, and Weeks got a call over the radio that there were a bunch of corpses dirtying up the parking lot over at the Southern Park Mall. Couldn’t have that. In a city inundated in the unburied dead, what remained of the civic authority wanted that goddamn mall parking lot cleaned up. Couldn’t have all the friendly tourists that came to American Eagle or Victoria’s Secret or Build-A-Bear Workshop seeing all the carrion out there. What would they think? Didn’t matter that the mall was in ruins now and what tourists usually showed up were either crazy or burning with fallout.

Outside Sears, there was a heap of bodies pretty much on the order of what I had seen at the 7-11. One big stinking ugly mess. When we pulled up in the truck, we could already hear the flies buzzing. A flock of gulls and crows took to the air.

We shitheads jumped off the back of the truck, looked at each other, and just shook our heads. The stink was bad enough to put a maggot off meat. Just a great, flyblown heap of corpses that had to number in the hundreds. The scavengers had been at them and had dragged bits and pieces off in every direction.

“
Okay, Fuckhead,” Weeks said. “Take Shit-fer-Brains with you and wade in. Ain’t gonna smell any better ten minutes from now.”

“
This is ridiculous,” Specs said. “They’re all soft…we’ll need shovels.”

“
Shut the fuck up, Mama’s Boy. Get in there. You, too, Mr. Fucking Useless. Load that hopper. Let’s go!”