He fell into me, clutching at me, pulling at me, trying, it seemed, to wrap himself around me. “Nash, Nash, Nash…it’s there, Nash! It’s right there I tell you! I saw it…I fucking saw it looking at me—”

Then my light found it, too, and something in me sank, submerged forever. I looked right at it and to this day I know I saw it, but I couldn’t have. For there are mutants and then there are mutants.

It was a rat the size of a pick-up truck.

Maybe not one rat, but two or three that had grown into a single flaccid nightmare mass that was horribly puckered, hairless, and fish belly white. That’s what I saw. It reposed on a filthy, stinking pile of debris, cannibalized human bodies, and bones in a huge oblong cavity in the wall. It was like some kind of fucking altar. That clownwhite flesh was nearly transparent like some kind of pulsating jelly and you could see the bones beneath it. The skin seemed to move, to writhe, vibrate with a slick, boneless motion as if everything beneath it was in constant, sickly motion. Two bobbing heads sprouted from trunklike necks, jaws of yellow knifeblade teeth gnashing together. But the worst part were the eyes. One head had three oozing, red orbs the size of softballs. The other had but one, filmed and pustulant. There was a third head that was limp, dangling on a stalk of neck

And I swear to you, that growing out of that body were a dozen other smaller fetal heads like on that other rat, each filled with an unnatural, atavistic life that would not die.

Sean was panning his light over it, making gasping sounds in his throat. Its underbelly was set with roping, snakelike growths. I think I saw eyes…yellow, mucus-filled eyes…opening amongst them.

I was floored, sickened, offended…it’s hard to put into words. But terror belongs there, too, for never have I set my eyes upon anything as revolting, as perfectly loathsome as that gigantic grub-like rat.

The other rats had backed off.

It was all too obvious why: we had been led to this hideous mutation, unharmed, as food. We were living sacrifices laid down at the feet of this deformed, nightmare mother. They had offered her only scraps…until now.

And she wanted more.

Unfurling her glistening claws from the leathery sheaths of her paws, she moved forward. It was almost a hopping, slinking motion, a slithering. Everything seemed to move at once, a biological shuddering profusion.

A ribcage vacuumed free of meat tumbled down from the heap in her pulsing wake. At her feet, wriggling in the human carnage of bone and limb, were her young. Hundreds of hairless, squealing things with transparent hides. Misshapen like deformed fetuses, they wormed through the cadavers and skinless husks like maggots in pork.

This maybe is what put us into action.

The mother hopped down, her clawed, spade-feet slapping the wet timbers. Her lips pulled back from blackened gums, fence-post teeth licked by whipping tongues. A freight train roar of hissing anger vomited from those throats as she came on, her huge, pendulous teats swinging back and forth like sacks of grain.

Sean started shooting.

Something like this…something degenerate and perverse and evil…it had to be killed, it had to be crushed.

The first of Sean’s rounds from his shotgun pulverized one of the eyes like a rotten grape, the next blew a snout apart. Specs and I started firing, too. Bullets thudded into throats and clawing limbs. They snapped off teeth and bisected teats in sprays of foul milk.

“Run!” he told us. “Over there! Get into that pipe!”

There was a small junction pipe coming out of the wall. It was big enough to crawl through on our hands and knees. Specs and I splashed our way over there, tripping over things and pulling each other up out of the water. We fired at the other rats. Specs slid into the pipe.

I turned back and saw Sean empty his shotgun at the mother rat and then pull the pin on his phosphorus grenade. He tossed it right at her and dove into the water. There was a blinding explosion of white light and flames engulfed her, they spread over the water and up the jutting beams. Rats scattered.

Sean emerged a few feet away, shouting, “Into the pipe! Go! Go!”

Everywhere there was the awful, nauseating stink of cremated flesh and hair. The squealing, mewling mother and her legions as they were roasted alive.

On hands and knees I went through the pipe as fast as I could. I could hear Sean swearing behind me. Specs was way ahead of us. I could see the bobbing light of his helmet. Behind us there was nothing but the roaring of the mother rat and the shrill, angry squeaking and squealing of her pack. I figured we’d never make it. We’d be devoured alive in that narrow, claustrophobic pipe. But eventually it opened up into another main drainline. It must have been some sort of overflow.

I climbed out and Specs was waiting there, his grime-streaked face pulled tight, his eyes huge. Sean got out after me and led us through the water to a ladder. He went up first and handled the manhole cover. I doubted I would have been strong enough to do it. Then up went Specs. Then me, leaving the subterranean world of echoing scratching and screeching behind.

Sean pushed the cover back on and it clattered into place.

We were all sitting on the pavement in the broad daylight, nothing but rusting cars on an empty street around us.

Sean was breathing hard. With his helmet on, face dirty and sweating, he looked like a coal miner just up out of the shafts. He saw us looking at him and he grinned. Then he laughed under his breath. “Dammit,” he said. “I lost my damn Trog head.”

 

12

Sean was crazy.

Make no mistakes about it. After our adventure in the sewer, I was strung out: shaking, sweating, my guts tied in knots. Part of me wanted to scream and another part wanted to laugh uncontrollably. But I wasn’t about to let that happen.

“We couldn’t have seen that,” I said after a time. I was drawing off a stale cigarette, smoking it with both hands because I couldn’t keep it steady with one.

“Oh, we saw it, all right, brother,” Sean said, slapping my shoulder. “All kinds of crazy shit down below. Things that caught a good dose of radiation and then crawled down there to breed. There’s shit down there that’ll never see the light of day and we can be thankful for that.”

Specs hadn’t said anything. He just stared at us, his eyes glassy and fixed. Mostly he stared at Sean. Wouldn’t stop staring at him, in fact. Finally, Sean said, “Hell’s your problem, bitch?”

Specs was pissed. I could see that. “We could have been killed down there hunting for your fucking Trogs!” he said, letting it all out. “You’re a fucking maniac! Worse, you’re a fucking inconsiderate, reckless maniac who doesn’t give a shit about anybody else! Fuck you and your Trogs! You hear me? Fuck the both of you.”

At which point, he stood up and just started walking down the street. We followed him and I calmed him down bit by bit. Of course, Sean kept laughing about it and that only made matters worse.

“Don’t worry, little brother,” Sean finally told him. “I won’t ask you to go down below again. It ain’t your thing.”

He led us through the streets, keeping an eye out for the Hatchet Clans. About a block from his apartment I saw someone standing in the street. It was a girl. And she looked normal. She stood there, seeing us, and did not move, did not speak. I called out to her, but she didn’t answer. I motioned the others to hang back.

“Well don’t dirty her up too much, Nash,” Sean said.

As I got closer I saw that she was probably around college age, nineteen or twenty, no more than that, girl-next-door pretty with high cheekbones and big blue eyes, a honey-blonde ponytail down the middle of her back. She was dirty and ragged, but you couldn’t get around the fact that she was very stunning.

I held my hands out. “I’m normal,” I said. “So are they. It’s okay. Really.”

Her eyes were glacial, emotionless. When I got up close to her she came alive and there was a knife in her hand. I wrestled with her for it while Sean laughed and Specs panicked. Finally, I pinned her and it wasn’t easy: she was strong, determined.

“Knock it off,” I told her. “Nobody’s going to hurt you! Nobody’s going to kill you or beat you or rape you!”

“Speak for yourself,” Sean said.

“Shut up,” I told him.

I could see in the girl’s eyes she wanted to believe me, but there was doubt and who could blame her?

“I’m gonna let you up now,” I said. “You wanna run away, go ahead. We’re not coming after you. You wanna come with us, that’s fine. We have shelter and food.”

She gave me a hard look. “And what will that cost me?”

“Not a damn thing. You have my word.”

I let her up and she ran off, stopped, watched us. We just went on our way and paid no attention to her, but we knew she was following us.

“Well?” I finally said, turning around.

“My name’s Janie,” she said, offering me a sliver of smile.

 

13

We hung around for a few more weeks. I’m not sure why. I needed to go west. That’s what The Shape wanted. But I was in no hurry then. That didn’t come until later. Life in Cleveland wasn’t exactly fun and games, but I liked being with Sean. I’d never met a guy who was more resourceful. He knew where everything was. He had stashes of food, survival gear, and weapons all over the city. Later I learned all that stuff had been hidden away by the Cleveland chapter of the Hell’s Angels who’d been friends of his. They’d been preparing for war.

The city was full of Scabs. There were some street gangs you had to watch for and the Hatchet Clans, of course. Night was a bad time with the rats and mutants and the Children. The Red Rains came and went. I found a nice piece of equipment at a scientific supply house: a solar-powered Geiger Counter. It was to come in very handy. Whenever the Children showed, the radiation count skyrocketed so it was a pretty decent early warning device. I came to the conclusion that the Red Rains were not just blood, rendered meat, and acid, but were charged with fallout, too. I took readings on a puddle of the stuff and it was hot.

During those weeks I got to know Janie real well.

She didn’t seem to trust Sean or Specs. She clung to me. She was always at my side, a sweet and wonderful girl. She was almost twenty years younger than me and for some reason, she took to me and fell in love with me. I figured in the old world, she wouldn’t have looked twice at me even if I’d been her own age, but it was a new world with a whole new set of expectations and priorities and Janie had changed with it. She’d been in her freshman year of college—pre-med at Ohio State—when the world ended. Back in high school, I learned, she had been an honor roll student and class president, civic-minded and caring…gone to church, volunteered at the local children’s hospital, collected coats for the needy in the winter and canned food for the elderly in the summer.

When the bombs fell, she’d made her way back home with some other students to Painesville, Ohio, and pretty much watched her friends and family die. She left for Cleveland a month ago and the Hatchet Clans had gotten her friends, leaving her stranded in the city.

She’d been through it like everyone else. Regardless, she was a real peach in every way who wore her heart on her sleeve.

We all liked her. We all felt protective of her…even Sean, despite himself. We all, I think, envied the fact that she had survived the end of the world with morals and ethics intact. But for all that we could not be like her. The world was a jungle now and only the strong and the vicious survived. Janie just didn’t get that. That’s why we had to keep an eye on her. That heart of hers was too big for its own good and there were too many things out there that would take a bite out of it.

Towards the end of our stay in Cleveland, The Shape started whispering in my head again. This time it wasn’t about us going west. It wanted something else, but as usual it was vague about what it wanted. All I knew is that it wanted an offering. In the back of my mind I knew exactly what that meant, but it was too horrible to consider.

So I told the others about The Shape.

Janie didn’t seem surprised at all. She accepted what I told her. But Sean thought I was fucking nuts, hearing voices in my head and all. Specs liked the idea of an offering, of course.

“It wants a sacrifice, Nash,” he said. “And we better give it one.”

“A sacrifice?” Sean said. “Like what? You mean like a human sacrifice?”

“Exactly.”

“You are one crazy bastard, little brother. But what the hell? Let’s go get some old ragbag and offer him up.”

Janie said nothing. Nothing at all. She didn’t have to; I could see the disappointment in her eyes. It was barbaric and wrong. She knew it and I knew it, but we went ahead anyway.

Specs was excited at the idea. Like I told you, he was into all that new age shit, crystals and astrology and you name it. He had read lots of books about witchcraft and Satanism and all that high, happy horseshit, so it all came natural to him. We grabbed some old man, some ragbag, tied and gagged him, then dragged him into a vacant lot one night and tied him to a tree. We piled wood all around him in a big heap and then we lit him up. Specs said it was expiation, that we had to make a burnt offering and that would keep The Shape happy and on our side.

It was horrible.

The old man died screaming, lit up like a candle. I saw his eyes actually boil out of his head and his skin superheat like wax and run off the skeleton and into the flames. When he was smoldering I told The Shape to come and get him. That was the first time it ever appeared to us, took on physical form. It took our offering…absorbed it…but somehow I knew it wasn’t what it wanted.

It wanted something living, not something burnt.

It was angry at what had been offered.

It wanted another.

Two days later, Specs got sick.

 

14

We’d just come back from scouting out some vehicles to get us out of the city and Specs had been acting funny all day. He wasn’t saying much. After we’d settled in, he came over to me.

“I got something, Nash,” he said. “I got something real bad.”

“You’re just tired,” I told him.

“I been coughing for three days.”

And he had been. I think we were all aware that something was going on, but maybe we justified it in our own minds by saying it was just a cold or something…even though we all damn well knew that even cold bugs were serious business these days.

“I can’t even breathe out of my nose, Nash,” he told me. “My muscles and joints ache all the time. Sometimes I have trouble breathing.”

“Don’t say anything to the others, not yet.”

He shook his head. “Afraid I can’t do that, Nash. I can’t take the chance of infecting them with what I have.”

Good old Specs. Guy went through life pretty much afraid of everything. One of those people that God or Nature or what have you had given barely enough strength and fortitude to get through day by day. But when the chips were down, he was as strong as they came. As selfless as you could imagine.

We told Janie and Sean and they would have been totally justified to want to get away from him, but they didn’t. He was one of us and we were going to make it together.

“Don’t you worry, little brother,” Sean told him. “We’ll get you on your feet. Before you know it, me and you’ll be hunting Trogs again.”

Specs tried to smile at that and a tear slid from his eye.

The next few days were bad. Specs’ skin began to take on a bluish, cyanotic tinge that concerned us all. He couldn’t breathe. He was gasping all the time. He was hot to the touch and a sour-smelling sweat rolled down his face. He’d have choking fits that would go on for ten minutes. In a last ditch attempt, Sean went and found us some military-grade antibiotics and we shot Specs full of them. It did no good. It was simply too late.

Mostly he was incoherent, thrashing in his sleep and even convulsing. There was little we could do. Janie mothered him the best she could. Now and again, he’d wake up, look at me, and start talking about throwing corpses in the back of the garbage truck in Youngstown or sleeping in cars or any of the other stupid things we’d done.

It was then I realized he was going to die. The idea of that cut me open, made me bleed. We’d been through a lot. Specs was like some stupid little brother that annoys you, hangs around, but won’t go away and you’re secretly glad for it. I didn’t want to be without him.

Then one day, he said to me, “Nash…don’t let me die like this…it hurts…everything fucking hurts…I can’t even breathe. Put me out of my fucking misery.”

I just shook my head; it was unthinkable.

But Specs was insistent. “Please, Nash, don’t make me suffer. Give me…give me to The Shape.”

It was insane and I told him so, but he kept pushing and he made Sean and Janie hear him out, too. See, Specs was of the mind that The Shape was pissed off at him because it had been his idea to do the burnt offering of that old man. That’s not what The Shape had wanted at all, Specs said. So it had let him get infected with some germ as a punishment. Maybe it was true, maybe it was bullshit. Who knew?

“See, that’s why this is perfect,” he told us. “I’ll be a sacrifice. I’ll give myself to that monster and it’ll save me from dying slow and it’ll keep The Shape happy. He’ll take care of you guys, keep you safe.”

I was absolutely against it. True, The Shape did want something more. I knew that. I felt that. I’d heard it in my mind. My big mistake was telling Specs that. But it was too late.

“Please, Nash. Please,” he kept saying.

We were all against it…but that pathetic, pleading look in his eyes wore us down. Sean broke first and said it was the only goddamn decent thing we could do for him. And then Janie…

“He’s our friend,” she told me. “I’m against wasting life of any sort…but we can’t make him suffer. If this is what he wants…I guess you should allow him it.”

There was argument, but he got his way.

We were going to sacrifice Specs.

We were going to give him to The Shape.

 

15

Sean scavenged us a stretcher and we carried Specs to a warehouse on around sunset. We weren’t going to burn him or any of that fucked up pagan madness. We were going to do it the right way and just let The Shape have him. We set the stretcher atop some crates. We lit candles because Janie said we should. Specs loved all that occult pageantry.

Then it was time.

I’ll never get that night out of my mind. The candles flickering. The cavernous silence. That creeping chill that came in off the river. The warehouse felt like a tomb.

I held his hand and we talked. “Remember that day when we sat on that bench, Nash? We ate Dinty Moore stew and drank Dew. That’s the day I knew you were my best friend in the world.”

I couldn’t take it. I started balling my eyes out. I told them all that I just couldn’t go through with it. I lashed out at Sean and Janie and they just watched me with defeated, sad eyes. Then I looked at Specs fighting for every breath, then I knew I had to do it.

So I summoned The Shape.

I closed my eyes and concentrated on that sphere of darkness in my mind that I always associated with it. Right away, I could feel it coming and I was flooded with a primal terror that was ice-cold, freezing. The atmosphere of the warehouse immediately went from being simply neutral to activated. That’s the only way I can describe it. Around us there was no longer just dead air, but an ether that was charged and deadly and thrumming with energy. The hairs on my arms and at the back of my neck stood up like I had come into contact with a charge of static electricity.

I went down on my knees, absolutely senseless.

Janie and Sean pulled me back to safety.

I smelled a sharp stink of ozone and something like burning flesh, hot blood boiled to steam. Then an awful, acrid stench like melting wires and blown fuses. The warehouse seemed to tremble. The concrete floor vibrated. There was a searing hot flash of something like chain lightening that blinded me momentarily and then the Shape was coming: a boiling black mass like thunderheads getting ready to shoot lightening at the earth. It was a spinning, roaring, unstable irradiated elemental force that came with the heat of coke ovens and the toxic glow of nuclear reactors. Looking at it was like looking into the primeval fires of cosmic creation.

Janie screamed.

Sean fell on his ass trying to get away from it.

The Shape was pulsing, revolving on an axis of pure atomic force that was frightening to behold, a storm of fallout and dust and particulated matter with a heart of superhot plasma. It made a buzzing sound like a million angry hornets.

I stood there, feeling its heat burning the fine hairs on the back of my hands. It was matter and force and pulsating energy, but it was not mindless. It was sentient and directed. Absolute nuclear chaos that was living and evil and hungry. At the very center of the whirlwind itself, there was a zone of blackness darker than anything I had ever seen before, the blackness that must exist beyond time and space. And flickering luminously within that shrieking void of antimatter were two red eyes that looked hot enough to melt steel.

Without further ado, it took Specs.

Dear God, it took him.

The mass of The Shape was constantly changing and reinventing itself, but I suppose if you had to give it spatial dimensions I would have said it was probably something like twelve feet in height, maybe six in width. It hovered over Specs for a moment or two and that’s when he realized exactly what he had given himself to.

He screamed.

Probably with his last reservoir of air he screamed like I’ve never heard a man scream before with a wild, cutting, hysterical sound that echoed through the warehouse. Sean made to go to his aid and I held him back. Specs was beyond our help. If Sean had gotten close to that radioactive furnace, he would have been vaporized.

Because that’s what happened to Specs.

He was sucked into it and I saw him spinning in that godless void, I saw him bulge up and then literally explode into particles that were vacuumed into the central mass, made part of it, every atom leeched of its energy in the whirling subatomic storm. And then he came back out again. He hit the floor and he was a blackened, smoldering heap of refuse that sparked and popped.

The buzzing sound faded, seemed to come from a great distance. There was a resounding hollow explosion that sounded much like a sonic boom when the air collapses back into the void left by a supersonic fighter.

That was it.

It was gone and so was Specs. What was left was a smoking heap of debris that had been supercharged, disassembled at the molecular level and then, reassembled, and vomited back into this time/space.

Janie and Sean practically had to carry me out of there. They did not speak for some time and I didn’t blame them. For I had shown them something no sane, reasoning mind should ever look upon.

The face of the Devil.

 

16

For weeks afterwards, I had nightmares about that night. I kept seeing The Shape take Specs and what had become of him. I kept seeing the blackened, burning heap of refuse he had been reduced to. He had been my friend. A very loyal, very kind-hearted guy. And I had given him to that fucking nightmare and how in God’s name could I ever get it out of my mind or learn to live with myself?

It was that night as Sean went off by himself to brood and drink, that Janie and I made love for the first time. She was so much younger than me that I felt like some kind of deviant, but I did it anyway. I lost myself in her and her hot body against mine was the finest thing I’d ever known. At least, that’s what I told myself.

What a wonderful world it indeed was. Empty cities and spawning mutants, bioplagues and Red Rains and fallout and…The Shape. I didn’t know what it was and I refused to speculate. Though when I had looked on it I was certain that it was the very stuff the universe was made of. The meat, as it were, of primary cosmic generation.

Sean did not come back that night.

We were worried. Around noon he showed up with an SUV and a full tank of gas. He had two men with him. One was tall and lanky, the other shorter and heavily muscled. Pretty as Janie was, they did not even give her a second glance. They stared at me and I was certain I saw something like fear and awe in their eyes. I wondered what Sean had told them and decided it really didn’t matter.

“This is Carl and Texas Slim,” Sean told me. “They want to go west, too.”

“Welcome,” I told them, wondering if one of them would have to burn some day to keep the rest of us safe. “Welcome.”

There were five of us then.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ELKHART, INDIANA

 

1

I was in league with The Shape.

If I’d doubted it before, there was no mistaking it after Cleveland.

I made sacrifices to it, I did the selecting and I did it not only to save my sorry ass but the asses of my little posse. We took care of The Shape and The Shape took care of us. We were healthy. We weren’t riddled with sores and radiation burns like the others. There was no disease in our bodies and our genes weren’t going crazy from fallout. The Shape led me on, always pointing me in the right direction and I always found a few treats for him and, in return, we were alive and we were strong, we always had full bellies, safe places to lay our heads at night. No, I don’t know how it worked. Not really. Only that being in league with that thing gave us all a sort of protective magic.

 

2

We stood around by the river watching the woman burn for maybe a half hour or so, the stink of cremated flesh hot in our faces. Long after it was done and she was nothing but a smoldering skeleton, we stared at the flames licking from her ribcage and the hollows of her skull. It was morbid, but we were fascinated, unable to look away as a child cannot look away from a roaring campfire. Something about the mystical call of the flames, I suppose, as transfixing and hypnotic now as they’d been to our ancestors huddled in an Ice Age cave.

The smell was sickening.

You would think after all the incinerated bodies we’d come across—and, yes, produced—the smell would be something we wouldn’t even notice anymore like a guard at Belzec feeding corpses into the ovens. But we did notice. All of us. The burnt scarecrow tied to the blackened tree was something we’d see in our minds for days. And smell. Because the smell of burnt hair, roasted flesh, and oxidized bones would stay with us, haunting us, coming into our dreams until we’d wake, sweating and terrified, certain that a charred and grinning skull would be on the pillow next to our own.

“I think she’s done,” Carl finally said, lighting a twig off the burning corpse and firing his cigarette with it.

Texas Slim chuckled. “A little honey sauce, some taters and beans, we got ourselves a barbecue.”

I laughed; so did Sean. It was funny. Even funnier the way the human mind works. In the worst of situations there is some kind of psychological trigger or safety valve in the brain that overrides all else, releasing stress by making us joke about the most horrible things. I suppose it’s the same thing that made soldiers in the trenches of World War I adopt human skulls as pets, giving them silly names like “Mr. Jingles” and “Lippy” and the same thing that made people burst out laughing at funerals.

“That’s enough,” Janie said, standing far and away and downwind from the burning woman. “I won’t listen to it.”

“Sure, Janie,” I said. “We were just kidding.”

Janie didn’t like that kind of shit. She saw nothing funny in the dead even though they were scattered everywhere now. The cities were graveyards and the streets were littered with remains. To her, a body was still a body. To the rest of us a body was of no more importance than a bag of leaves or a cardboard box. But that was Janie. The last of the bleeding hearts. An endangered species.

It had been nearly two months since we rolled out of Cleveland with Carl and Texas Slim in tow. And a hard two months they had been, fighting with the Hatchet Clans, hiding from radioactive dust storms, searching for vehicles and finding food. The days went by in a blur.

And now, there I was, staring at the remains of another offering for The Shape.

Janie stomped off.

Texas Slim and Sean kind of eyed me warily as friends will do when your girlfriend is in a mood. I bummed a cigarette from Carl and stood there, uncomfortably, smoking and watching the St. Joseph River roll on by.

“Hey, Nash,” Sean said. “I ever tell you about the time I sold my wife for a dollar?”

Texas Slim giggled. “This is a good one.”

Sean smiled in the moonlight, his teeth crooked and missing. “We were in Sturgis, man, you know, the biker rally? Well, sure as shit, me and the old lady were at each other’s throats. All day long. It was always like that with us. That’s why I got this scar on my forehead, you see. We was at this hop-and-grind joint and she passed out. So things being what they were, I started making out with her sister who was sitting next to me. She’d fuck anything with a third leg. Well, Trixie wakes up and I’m tongue-fucking her sister and she yells something and hits me in the face with a beer bottle. One mean bitch, that Trixie.” He laughed. “Anyway, there we was in Sturgis. We’d been drinking and smoking Cee all day long. We’re sitting at this bar putting back shots of Wild Turkey, just tearing into each other as was our way. This big dude, think he might have been with the Outlaws or the Pagans, he says, Hey, how much for your wife? I say, you want to buy that shit? He says, Sure I do. How much? A dollar, I tell him. He hands me a dollar and takes hold of Trixie and she screams something at me and that’s the last I saw of her.”

“Well, what happened?” Texas Slim wanted to know. “He kill her?”

Sean pulled off his cigarette. “No, nothing like that. She shows up back at the hotel about three in the morning, all dirty, clothes torn, and I say, Hey babe, how was it? She near beat the shit out of me. Next day, that big biker comes up to me, says, I want that dollar back. I say, That bad, eh? He don’t think it’s funny, says, You ought to have a license to sell poisonous snakes, you asshole.” Sean sighed. “Yeah, that Trixie. She was something. She was doing a nickel at Utah State Penn for possession last I heard of her.”

We all laughed again. But not Janie. She did not like stories like that. Things had changed so much now. You had to stick tight to survive these days, not like the old days where you and the boys went out to the man-cave to swap the salt and talk tit. You had a woman these days, you had to keep her by your side and she had to keep you by her side.

Carl said, “We best be on our way, Nash. I don’t like being out here in the dark.”

“All right,” I said. “Let’s get gone.”

We crossed Island Park, guns in our hands and packs on our backs, keeping an eye on the shadows and the things that might be hiding there. We saw nothing. We got on Jackson Boulevard, went over the bridge and Waterfall Drive, cutting down South Main. We needed a place to sleep for the night. We were all dead tired. Usually, well before sunset, we had a place. But today had been busy.

“Start checking some doors,” I told Texas Slim as we walked. “We gotta lay up somewhere.”

He did so, but door after door after door was locked. We could have blasted our way in, but I didn’t want to make all that racket and draw attention to ourselves. Besides, what good is a door that’s been blown off its hinges? I wanted a place with some security against what was outside, hiding in the dark.

“Too bad none of us can fly a plane,” Sean said. “Lots of planes at the airport. Maybe I should give it a try, Nash.”

“Oh, shut up,” Janie told him.

The full moon above was very bright. Main looked like a glowing ribbon of ether as it stretched away into the distance. Everything was silent and surreal. All those empty buildings and shops crowding each side of the street, the abandoned cars at the curbs. If it hadn’t been for the skeletons in the gutters and that unearthly quiet, you could have fooled yourself that there was still life here. Still people sleeping in beds and little kids dreaming little kid dreams, all charging up for another day in the life.

But it wasn’t that way anymore.

Those buildings were monuments to a way of life that had vanished now. Main Street, Elkhart, was like something kept under glass in a museum: carefully preserved but long dead and gone. As we walked, Carl out front with his rifle looking for trouble, I felt at ease with things. What we had done this night wasn’t something I was proud of, but we were alive, we were breathing. We would live to fight another day and another day after that.

I was wondering where we were going to hole up for the night and where in the hell we were going to get a vehicle come tomorrow. Most were either smashed-up or their batteries were dead, engine parts salvaged. But we needed a ride. We needed one bad. We had to get moving west.

“Open door,” Texas finally called out, standing in front of a tattoo parlor called INKED AND DANGEROUS.

It was good as any.

“C’mon, Carl,” I said, waiting for him as he scanned the streets with the barrel of his AK-47, looking for trouble, always looking for trouble.

We filed inside and I locked the door, pulled down the shade on the window. It was a tight little place, but it had a backdoor leading out into the alley in case we needed to make a quick escape. We rolled out our sleeping bags and the boys had a smoke while I tried to get Janie to act civil.

But after what had happened in the park she wasn’t speaking to me. She had retreated into herself, offended at every conceivable level by what we had done to the woman and what we had offered her up to. But I didn’t much care. All I knew was that it was done. It was over with. We’d made sacrifice and we were safe now. At least until the next cycle of the full moon.

Because that’s when The Shape would come knocking at the door again with an empty belly.

 

2

It seemed like my head had barely hit the pillow when Carl was shaking me awake. “Nash,” he said. “C’mon, Nash, wake the fuck up. We got activity here.”

“What?” I said.

“I think someone’s out there. In fact, I’m sure of it.”

I pulled myself out of my bag, looked out the window and saw absolutely nothing. Just the empty street, the rusting hulks of vehicles. Some at the curbs, others pulled right up onto the sidewalk. A few had been driven right through the plate glass windows of shops across the street.

“Looks pretty quiet,” I said.

“I think we were followed.”

I was still looking and not seeing anything.

“There was someone or something behind us, dogging us. I know it,” he said. “They’re out there right now.”

Carl’s intuition wasn’t always on target, but usually in situations of danger he was pretty damn perceptive. I watched the streets and though I did not see anything, I had the oddest feeling that as I watched, I was being watched. It made the flesh at the back of my neck creep.

Sean crawled out of his bag, stretched, said, “How the hell am I supposed to sleep with you two jabbering like this?”

“We’re being watched,” Carl said.

“You always think we’re being watched,” Sean told him. “Go lay the fuck down. Put a tampon in and get a few Z’s, for chrissake, you pussy.”

Carl almost hit him with the butt of his AK and it would not have been the first time. I stepped in-between them as I always stepped in-between them. Carl was always fighting with Sean or Texas. He had a short fuse and they knew it. He just couldn’t take a joke. One of those guys that walks around with a target on their backs.

I peered out the window again. I thought for just a second I saw someone dart behind a car. It could have been my imagination. My eyes were still crusty from sleep. The moon above the buildings had moved clear across the sky. I must have been out for hours.

I had just pulled my face from the window when the first shot rang out.

A bullet punched through the glass and I felt it pass by my cheek. Heavy caliber, too, because not only did it punch a neat hole in the window but it shattered it. Another round came through the glass face of the door. Carl brought up his AK and fired a few liberal three-shot bursts into the streets. And that brought the reports of at least three more rifles. The glass was blown out of the door and black bullet holes were punched into the walls behind us. Carl fired another burst and by then, on my hands and knees, I had everyone together. We rolled up our bags, gathered up our packs and made for the rear entrance.

Carl gave another three-round burst to keep our adversaries from making a rush at the building.

“Get going,” Sean told us. “I’ll hold off the Indians and catch up with you.”

I’ll never forget him standing there with his Ruger Mini-14 carbine, bopping and weaving as rounds peppered the tattoo parlor, telling us to get going as he worked the bolt and laid down suppressive fire. And I’ll also never forget that crooked, toothy smile he flashed me right before a bullet caught him in the head and blew his skull into mucilage that splashed against the walls.

Somebody screamed. In fact, two people screamed: Janie in horror and Carl in manic rage. I was too shocked to do anything but stare at Sean folded up on the floor, his legs kicking then going still, the top of his head just…gone. I crawled over there, pried the 14 from his hands and whispered something to him, something heartbroken and gushy, and followed the others out the back way. Sean. They’d killed Sean. Jesus Christ, fucking Sean.

The alley. Carl was already running and Janie was trying to wait for me, but Texas Slim wasn’t having any of that. He had hooked her by the arm and was propelling her along pretty much against her will. The alley zig-zagged, then opened up out into the street. I caught up to them and tossed Carl Sean’s Ruger which had much better range than his AK. One of our attackers came leaping out from behind a car and fired a round from what I thought was a .30-30. He got off that shot, but that was it. Carl fired with the 14 and dropped him screaming in the street with a perfect gut-shot.

We ran.

And as we ran, we were pursued. I told the others to scout ahead while I gave our attackers a little trouble and bought us some time. The others ran ahead and hid out. I waited. The silence was unbearable. I heard a breeze rattle the branches of an aspen across the way. A dog howled in the distance. That was it. Then, after maybe five minutes, running feet. They were just down the block. I counted three of them.

They dodged behind a car.

I caught the glint of a rifle barrel in the waning moonlight, raised my .30.06 Savage and fired. I didn’t hit anyone, but my round punched through the windshield of a Cadillac and gave them something to think about. A few more rounds came my way. I fired one more time and then took off down the sidewalk in a low run, hunched-over. More rounds punched into plate glass windows and I dodged behind a pick-up truck.

I had no idea where the others were by that point.

I waited for the bad boys to close in, but they were in no hurry. They’d fire a shot in my direction from time to time, but I didn’t return the fire. I was trying to draw them out and the longer I was quiet the more they’d want to find out why. If I’d have been smart, I would have cried out or something so they’d think I was hit. But I wasn’t that smart. And I didn’t want Janie and the others to come running to my rescue and get greased.

Footsteps were coming.

Light, agile. But they were coming from behind me which either meant that the bad boys had circled around me or that—

“Nash,” Carl said. “There’s a train station about two blocks down. Ground’s wide open around it, perfect killzone, we can waste anything that comes knocking. Texas and Janie are waiting down there. Let’s go.”

It was about that time that I heard vehicles start up. Two of them, racing their engines. We were on foot and the bad boys had wheels. Things were starting to look pretty bad. I ran off after Carl and about the time it seemed my lungs would burst, we caught up with Janie and Texas Slim. They were waiting behind an overturned Datsun. I followed them across Tyler Street, through the gates, and into the parking lot of the train station, which had been an Amtrak hub before the world ended. I saw signs for Michigan Southern and Conrail.

Carl was right: it was wide open in every direction, defensible, perfect killzone. Nothing could approach our position without us knowing it. The New York Central Museum was across the way and the Conrail Yards and the Conrail mainline just beyond. The yards were huge and went on forever. Nothing out there but trains lying dead and rusting on tracks. And in that moonlight, you could see for miles it seemed. The only problem was that it was a big, sprawling building and there was no way in hell the four of us could cover all sides.

I saw the headlights coming in our direction and knew we really didn’t have a choice. The horizon was getting blue and I knew the sun would be up in less than an hour. That was to our advantage. The station was open and we locked and barricaded the front door once we were inside. Carl checked the other doors, secured them, then we went upstairs into the offices. From the windows up there it would be like a duck hunt.

A pick-up truck and a Ford Bronco pulled into the lot. Two men stepped from the pick-up and three more from the Bronco. They looked normal. I didn’t know what they wanted with us and I knew I’d probably never know. Maybe just the ragtag remains of a militia out hunting. Maybe they wanted our weapons. Maybe they wanted Janie.

By the time they got out of their vehicles, the sun was making itself known in the east. They were chatting amongst themselves, pretty much at ease. They did not know we were there. Maybe they suspected it, but they didn’t know. I was hoping, really hoping, they’d just go away. I wanted to hurt them bad for killing Sean, but for the safety of the others I was willing to let it go. Carl had already killed one of them.

They started fanning out in the lot.

“Shit,” I said under my breath.

We already had the windows open. I raised my Savage, sighted in on a guy with a cowboy hat, squeezed the trigger and dropped him. Carl fired a split second after me and dropped another with a headshot. I caught another guy in the leg. The two dead ones lay flopping in the lot in their own blood. The one I’d shot was screaming. The others pulled back behind the pick-up truck, putting a few rounds in our direction.

“We’ve got ‘em boxed in, Nash,” Carl said. “When that sun comes up we’ll have ‘em.”

I nodded. “No shooting until it’s light. Unless they move. And they’re going to have to pretty soon.”

The sun was rising. The world had gone from black to indigo to light blue. It would be fully light in about fifteen minutes. What I didn’t like was the idea of playing cat-and-mouse all day long with those assholes. I went over to Carl, whispered something in his ear. He liked my idea. Janie waited behind me. Texas Slim was out in the hallway keeping an eye on the stairwell.

Twice in the next few minutes, the bad boys below tried to make it to their parked vehicles and twice Carl had put a round within inches of them. We had them boxed good. They were hiding behind the rear of the pick-up truck. The Bronco was over a bit and they didn’t dare make a mad dash for it. And that was good, because I’d already eyed that baby up. I wanted it. I didn’t care if I had to kill everyone of them to get it.

Carl lit a cigarette, blew out some smoke. “Nash?” he said.

“Go ahead.”

Janie looked at me, but I wasn’t saying. Carl, cigarette clenched in his teeth, sighted in on the pick-up truck. He started squeezing off rounds, working the bolt of the Ruger and squeezing the trigger in rapid succession. He put one through the windshield. Another through the front driver’s side tire. He kept them pinned down. Two more shots into the cab. And then the killshot. Leaning out the window, he scoped out the gas tank and pulled the trigger. Dead on target, too. Right away, gasoline started flooding out from under the truck.

The bad boys started shouting.

Carl fired into the tank again and it went up with a resounding explosion, the puddle of gas going up in flames. The three survivors—one of them beating his burning clothes with his hands—appeared from behind the truck. They were firing at the building, trying to make the safety of the Bronco about twenty feet away. I aimed and fired on the guy I’d already pegged in the leg, catching him in the side and pitching him to the pavement. He screamed like he was being roasted alive.

The smoke from the burning truck was thick in the air and it screened the others from us as it screened us from them. The two survivors were going to get the Bronco. I put two or three rounds where I thought they were, but I knew one of them would make it. And they would have.

But something else happened first.

 

3

Carl stopped shooting and backed away from the window. “Listen,” he said. “You hear it? They’re coming…”

“That smell,” Janie said.

I didn’t know what the hell either of them were talking about. I was smelling burning gasoline and scorched metal, melted rubber and plastic, the stink of burnt cordite in the room. My ears were ringing from the shooting. So I truly didn’t hear or smell anything for a moment. But then I did: a rising steady drone that seemed to be coming from every direction and a smell: sweet, almost gagging, like sugar liquefied in a pan. The droning got louder until it became a high, whining buzz and that stink…nauseating, like thrusting your head into the innards of a hive dripping with honey. Absolutely overwhelming.

“Close those fucking windows!” I cried out.

But Carl and Janie were already doing so and I joined in. None of us seemed to give a shit about the fact that we had exposed ourselves to gunfire from below. We knew what was coming and we knew very well what would happen if we didn’t get those damn windows closed up fast.

“They’re down in the lobby!” Texas Slim called out, rushing into the room and slamming the door behind him.

We got the windows closed and just in time—for something landed on the glass outside. An insect. It was about six-inches long, segmented, a pale cream in color like a larval termite with tiny spines rising up from the thorax. Looking like some weird mutant hybrid of a wasp, a fly, and a mosquito, it fluttered wide, transparent purple-hued wings, two sets of them that were intricately veined with a dark tracery. It had bulbous red-orange eyes the size of marbles and I swear it was looking at us, hungering for us. Carl thumped the window and three more landed followed by a fifth, sixth, and seventh. They knew we were in there and they wanted us. They crawled over the glass, buzzing their wings, each extending a fleshy proboscis to the window, investigating it. The most obscene thing about them was that proboscis. It was rubbery, pulsing, the tip flaring out like a set of moist pink lips, suckering on the glass, inflating and deflating like it was kissing.

The dread of insects, especially large ones, is instinctual and that instinct becomes manic when the insects arrive in numbers, swarm like these things did. I don’t know what they were. Nobody really did. Just horrors that rose from the ashes of nuclear saturation, the radiation mutating their genes, adapting them perfectly to the hunting grounds of the new lopsided world. We called them bloodsuckers and that was as good of a name as any because they were bloodsuckers. They flew in dense, buzzing clouds, descending on anything with red blood in them and draining them dry.

I’d seen it happen and it was a horrible thing.

Carl thumped the glass again and something shrank inside me as I feared it might break, but it didn’t break. The insects flew off. Out in the parking lot below there were hundreds of them gathered in a huge buzzing swarm like mayflies, rising and falling, darting in and out of the mass, dancing about each other.

But even with that shrill buzzing in my ears I could hear the bad boys below screaming.

It’s not a sound I think I’ll ever forget. They were covered in bloodsuckers, literally enveloped in them. They were on the ground, writhing, squishing bug bodies beneath them and more poured in to feed all the time. Those blubbery lips—I don’t know what else to call them—on the end of the proboscises were attached to the men, suctioning the blood from them and I could hear that, too. It sounded like a kid sucking pudding through a straw.

Janie backed away from the window, shaking violently, hugging herself, then covering her ears. She was crying, her mouth was open like it wanted to scream but all that came out was an airless whine.

Texas was shaking, too. They shared an absolute terror of insects and these things only multiplied that tenfold. He wrapped his arms around her and she held on tight and maybe I would have tried to pacify them with a calm reassuring word if my skin hadn’t been crawling.

Even Carl wasn’t doing too well and nothing scared him. Beads of sweat were rolling down his face and I bet they were ice-cold. Just like the sweat beading my forehead.

Down in the parking lot, the feeding continued. The swarm found the bodies of the two dead men and were feeding on them. The gasoline had long since burned off and the truck sat there smoldering, but not putting out enough smoke to drive the bugs away.

As I said, the bloodsuckers were a dull, pale cream in color, but as they fed, juicing their veins and capillaries with stolen blood, they bloated up and their flesh went a bright, vibrant red like the ass end of female mosquito after she has just drank her fill on your forearm. Some of them were so distended with blood they could barely get off the ground, they looked almost absurd with their bulging, brilliant red thoraxes. Like glistening scarlet softballs with wings. Several were scrambling along sluggishly on the ground, too fat to fly, dragging their wings behind them. Their fellows chipped in by landing on them and suctioning off the excess with their proboscises.

More bugs landed on the window and when Carl went to thump them, I stopped him. If that glass broke we were dead. It was safety glass and safety glass does not break easily like in the movies, but all we needed was for one of those windows to have an imperfection. If it broke, we’d be drained dry before we even made the door.

And at that point, running from the room was no longer an option: I could hear them on the door, thumping and scratching about, their suckers attached to the wood.

I looked out the window. The bloodsuckers had abandoned the bad boys. They were bled white, every drop of blood vacuumed from them. They were curled up on the pavement like dead, dehydrated spiders. They were contorted, limbs drawn up, faces corded and withered, looking like mummies that had dried out for 2,000 years in a tomb beneath the sands.

“Why don’t they leave?” Janie said. “What the hell do they want?”

“They want us,” Carl said under his breath.

It wasn’t the right thing to say, of course. It was like telling somebody who was terrified of snakes that the snake in the backyard won’t leave until it crawls up your pantleg and bites you. But Carl was never known for his sensitivity.

The noise outside the door was growing. The buzzing was getting very loud, the thumping, scraping and sucking sounds going right up my spine.

I looked outside.

The bugs were still out there, flying around, covering the pick-up and the Bronco, so thick on the ground you couldn’t see the pavement. More of them were settling onto the windows all the time. Drunken and distended with blood, the fat ones flew around in crazy circles, crashing into the others and hitting the ground. And then one, just intoxicated, flew right at the window at full speed. I jumped just as it hit the glass with enough force to make the glass rattle in its frame. The bug was so swollen with blood it literally exploded on impact like a water balloon. Blood and bits of tissue, a few assorted limbs, ran down the window in a vivid crimson smear.

Janie screamed.

I think I did, too.

The spilled blood drove the swarm wild and they pressed into the glass to lick it up, dozens and dozens of them. The buzzing outside the windows was then louder than that outside the door. More of them flew in, covering the glass and each other, more all the time, until the light was shut out and the room went dark.

Carl fumbled in his pack and lit a couple candles. Texas Slim pulled out his Coleman lantern and lit it. We didn’t need to be waiting in the darkness, listening to those things buzzing and sucking, wondering if one might land on our necks. That would have been too much. It would have been living on the edge of panic and we were already there.

“Just wait it out people,” Carl said, sounding somewhat calm. “When they realize the pickings are all picked, they’ll move on. They always do.”

That was sensible. And as the little leader of our little group, I probably should have said it but my mouth was so dry I think anything I might have said would have come out in a broken squeak.

Carl walked over to the door and studied it with the beam of his flashlight. He lit a cigarette. “Too bad we couldn’t pump some smoke out there, Nash, it would drive them off.”

“Just…get away from the door,” Janie told him.

“Had to make sure it was secure,” Carl said.

Texas Slim chuckled. “And is it secure?”

“Seems to be.”

“That’s good news, Carl,” Texas said. “You make me feel all warm and cozy like I was in my mother’s arms.”

“Kiss my ass, peckerwood.”

“All right,” I said. “Let’s shitcan the fighting, okay?”

Texas was still holding Janie to him—and liking it, I’m sure—over on the couch against the wall. “Well, you know it ain’t me, Nash. It’s Carl. He just likes to pick and the more picking you do the better chance you have of making the blood run.”

“Shut up about blood,” Janie said.

“Yes, darling,” he said. “Whatever you want, my dove. I’m here to comfort you.”

“And watch your hands. My tits don’t need comforting and neither does my ass.”

We all shared a brief laugh at that.

But it didn’t last. This time, I heard it: a scratching sound. In that room of shadows, it was hard to say where it was coming from, only that it was there and it was growing more insistent by the moment. I looked around. The couch. The desk. A few leather chairs. The radiator. A potted plant long since wilted. File cabinets. A walk-in closet, door closed. A few stray chairs pushed up to the desk.

“I’m not liking that,” Texas Slim said.

Carl and I started looking around with our flashlights. At first we thought it was coming from the walls. But that wasn’t it. I walked around the desk, shining my light around. My beam fell on the clean air vent in the floor. It gleamed off two bulging red eyes.

I shrieked and stumbled back.

A bloodsucker came up out of the vent and circled the room lazily like a moth around a streetlight. It was in no hurry. Texas and Janie ducked, crying out. Carl made ready to put a round in it with his carbine. I grabbed up the wastebasket and tried to swat it. The glow of the candles and flickering lantern light cast a mammoth, leggy shadow of the thing against the wall. It flew like a wasp you see in slow mo on one of those nature documentaries on the Discovery Channel: back hunched, legs dangling beneath, just drifting around.

Carl jumped at it, swung his carbine like a bat and struck it. It bounced off the wall, slid across the desk and landed on the floor about three inches from my boot. I instinctively stomped on it and then almost wished I hadn’t: the sound of its exoskeleton crunching beneath my boot made me shiver. It made a pained trilling sound right before my weight smashed it to paste.

“Oh God,” Janie said.

That cloying stench of hot, seething honey was getting stronger in the room and it wasn’t from what I was wiping off my boot onto the area rug under the desk. Because that scratching came again, only there was more of it. They were coming from the clean air vent.

I saw two of them flying around, bumping into the ceiling. Another settled onto a lampshade and Carl swore, brought up his carbine, and fired. He split it into two sections that skittered about on the floor for a moment or two before going still.

“No guns!” I said, looking over at the black, breathing mass covering the windows. “You break that window, we’re fucked.”

Texas and Janie were clinging tighter than ever. Texas had a throw pillow in one hand and was wildly swatting with it. It was probably the most ridiculous, effeminate defense I’d ever seen.

Carl was chasing the other bugs around. They flew in directionless spirals, bumping the walls, one of them knocking a vase off the desk that shattered on the floor. He knocked one down and smashed it with his boot and I cold-cocked the other with the wastebasket and it nose-dived to the floor. Its wing was damaged only it was too stupid to realize it and kept propelling itself in a buzzing circle on the floor. I killed it with the wastebasket.

But by then there were others.

One of them dove right at Janie and she punched it, knocking it aside and I stomped it. Texas beat another down with his pillow and crushed it under his boot. The sound of it smashing made him wince, say, “Oh Lord.”

One of them dove at my head and I swatted it away with the can. Two others went at Carl, one of them attached itself to his fist as he made to punch it and another latched onto the back of his arm. He smashed the one on his fist by punching the wall, but the other got a good grip and its proboscis suckered to his skin. He let out a wild cry and I took hold of him. I reached out and grabbed the bug in my fist. It was hot and greasy under my fingers, its body pulsating rapidly like the beat of a newborn’s heart. I squeezed it with everything I had. Its wings crackled like dry cellophane and its bony skeleton crunched like an egg shell, brown goo squirting between my fingers. With a swell of nausea in my belly, I yanked it free, the proboscis refusing to let go. As I pulled the mangled body free, the proboscis stretched like a rubber band, then the lips came free with popping, smacking sound and a ribbon of Carl’s blood sprayed against my cheek.

I tossed it to the floor.

Texas and Janie were on their feet, swatting the insects down.

“Cover that fucking vent!” Texas shouted.

Which was exactly what I was going to do, but Carl was way ahead of me. No gun? He had a better idea. He grabbed a can of silicone spray from the shelf on the wall, the kind used to lubricate machine parts and make leather upholstery gleam. He got down on his knees before the clean air vent, pressed the button on the can and held his Bic lighter to the spray. A foot long mushrooming tongue of flame shot out. He held it to the vent. He fried one of the bloodsuckers coming through and it curled up, making a shrill e-e-e-e-e-e-e sort of sound as it died. Others tried to come up but he cooked them and drove still more down the vent. When the lattices of the vent were glowing hot, he yanked one of the filing cabinets over it, sealing it shut.

As he did that, the rest of us killed bugs.

There were about a dozen of them. We smashed and stomped and hit them. One got tangled in Janie’s hair and Texas almost cold-cocked her when he hit it, knocking it free. One got on the back of my neck and I screamed. I tried to pull it off but I couldn’t get a grip on it. I felt those rubbery pulsing lips attach to my flesh. They were warm. There was a sudden piercing like an ice-cold pin.

Then Carl knocked me to the floor and tore the beasty free.

I saw it laying there, smashed, a long needle-like protrusion hanging from the lips. It was wire-thin and probably used to puncture veins and arteries.

The war we fought was horrendous and by the end we had bug guts smeared on our hands and bug blood on our faces and down our arms. But we won. And when we had, we stood there breathing hard, dozens of mangled insects and parts thereof at our feet.

Carl lit a cigarette. “Fuck of a way to fight a war,” he said.

Janie burst out laughing, only this laughter was high-pitched and near hysterical. I understood it: I had the mad desire to do the same. I clutched her to me, that honeyed bug stench so ripe on her my stomach rolled over. Texas kicked bugs into the corner and the rest of us just let the tension run from us.

About the time Carl finished his cigarette, we heard a creaking.

Then a snapping.

And that’s when the window exploded inward.

 

4

The eruption of glass had not even made it more than a few inches, I bet, before we were in motion. I suppose we were all pumped hard with adrenaline and just ready to jump. Later, I was impressed at how we reacted, how we moved as a single unit: fast, cohesively, and without question.

The window blew in and we moved.

Texas threw open the door to the closet and we piled in…along with four or five bugs which, considering that hundreds had just blown into the room, was not so bad. I was the last one in, shoving Janie before me, and as I slammed the door shut I saw the room fill with insects.

And I do mean fill.

They came in through the shattered window in a droning storm like autumn leaves blown by the wind, an absolute tempest of bloodsuckers that erupted in a single boiling mass of wings and thoraxes and bulbous red eyes, fanning out and inundating the room in their numbers. That’s what I saw in the second or two before I slammed the door shut, smashing three or four between the door and jamb that were trying to follow us in.

It was pretty hairy for a moment after we got in there and the room filled with that ominous cacophony of buzzing. First off, I wasn’t exactly accurate in calling the closet a walk-in closet. It was your basic coat closet with a rod to hang jackets and what not from. About three feet deep, maybe four wide. And all of us in there with rifles. It was like the proverbial sardine can. When you took into account that we were trapped in a confined space with four or five mutant bloodsucking insects, it was not a good thing.

It was pitch black in there, of course.

The only light coming in was from the lantern and candles outside and this filtered through a space at the bottom of the door that was maybe half an inch wide. There was a lot of screaming and shouting as we smashed the intruders. One of them latched itself to Janie’s throat and she went absolutely wild. Carl was the one that finally got it off her. When all was settled and done, dead insects at our feet, we were pretty banged up and bruised. My face was scratched from Janie’s nails. I think I had punched Texas…or maybe Carl. Janie had elbowed me in the belly and stomped on my toes. Carl had backhanded me or, more precisely, back-elbowed me. Texas was complaining that somebody had kneed him in the balls and Carl said his left shin had been laid raw.

I suppose if somebody had watched us in there with a hidden camera or something, they would have found it hilarious. Basically, four adults in a box beating the hell out of each other as they tried to kill the bugs. It reminded me of that Three Stooges episode where the boys get stuck in a phone booth together.

Anyway, it was your classic closet. No standing room, of course, with the coat rod there. It was hell being packed in like that and having to stoop over. Especially when we realized that it might be hours before the swarm got bored and moved on. They were buzzing loudly outside the door and being in the closet was like being tucked away in the cell of a bee honeycomb.

“Whose hand is on my ass?” Janie said. “Kindly remove it.”

“Where am I suppose to remove it to?” Texas Slim wanted to know. “I’m simply trying to make use of every available space for the comfort of the group, darling.”

“Leave that space alone.”

“This is bullshit,” Carl said. “We’re going to be fucking pretzels by the time we get out.”

Texas laughed. “Well, I’m betting you’ll make a really awful tasting pretzel, Carl.”

“Yeah? Well, fuck you.”

Carl shoved into me, knocking me and Janie against the wall. Texas shoved him and soon they were grappling and we were getting the worst of it. Go figure. I shoved back and Janie elbowed me and I made to push Texas and I cracked Janie alongside the head and she kicked me and Carl said we were all a bunch of fucking morons and brought his head back and nearly broke my nose.

“All right!” I finally shouted. “Knock this shit off!”

Everybody calmed a bit and we had three or four seconds of unbroken, cramped peace. Then Carl made a growling sound in his throat. “Texas? You’re jabbing me in the ass with your gun.”

“That ain’t my gun,” he said.

“You sonofabitch.”

More scuffling. I finally told them to knock it off and told Texas Slim to quit jabbing Carl with whatever he’d been jabbing him with—I didn’t want to know what—and we settled in and started waiting. The bloodsuckers were buzzing, bumping into the walls, crawling over the outside of the door and scratching at it, making those appalling sucking sounds that were terrible to hear. Carl switched on his flashlight and, sure enough, about a dozen of those proboscises had slipped through the aperture at the bottom of the door, the flared lips at the ends looking for something to attach to. We stomped them and the bloodsuckers made sharp trilling sounds, but after awhile they learned not to stick their beaks into the crack. That sweet scent they carried was so thick in the closet I thought we would asphyxiate.

We spent nearly three hours like that.

Three hours is a long time when you’re cramped and contorted. I defused a lot of fights between Carl and Texas Slim and prayed the insects would leave, but mostly I did a lot of thinking. And what I thought about most was not our predicament or the death that was held at bay by two inches of wood, but about Sean. Sean was dead. I had seen him get his brains blown out but I still couldn’t believe it. Sean who had pulled my ass out of the fryer again and again in places like Cleveland, Toledo, and Bowling Green. He was a good guy. Tough, loyal, smart, and very wise in his own way. A guy who had run guns, pushed meth and heroin, been a blood member and enforcer for the Warlocks motorcycle gang back east, and did time for armed robbery and aggravated assault…but when it was just he and I alone, I had gotten to know a side of the man no one would ever have suspected existed. A very wise and compassionate side.

“Nash,” he said one night as we sat on the shores of Lake Eerie in this little town called Vermilion. “Nash…what we gotta start doing here in this big crazy fucked up world of ours is forgetting about what we were and concentrating on what we are. The cavalry’s not coming over the hill and the U.S. Marines are just another piss-stain. The only luck we got is the luck we make and the only hope we got is the hope we carry. You dig this shit?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s gonna be up to guys like me and you. Especially you.”

“Me?”

Sean nodded. “That’s right. You’re special. We all know it. We can all feel it when we’re with you. You’re leading us somewhere and into something. Something important.” Before I could disagree, he said, “And it ain’t because The Shape let’s you pick out sacrifices for it. It could have chosen anyone to do that. It picked you because you’re on the road to something big. Might not be a good thing, might be real fucking ugly when you get there, but that’s where you’re going. That’s why The Shape is pushing you along. Because it’s out there. Your destiny. And I just got this freaky feeling that whatever it is, it’s important to the race, to all of us.”

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.

Not like now.

When I opened my eyes again, I stared at the neat rows of books. At cardboard standees of Harry Potter and Max from Where the Wild Things Are. Surrounded by books that made me remember my secret childhood worlds, I had never felt so broken, so frayed, so fragmented. A post-apocalyptic Humpty Dumpty.

The sandstorm blew on and off for five days.

We were nearly ready to tear out each other’s throats by then. Any diversion would have done, even a pack of crazies and a firefight. When it ended we piled into the Bronco, barely speaking. Carl drove us out of the mall and into the world. Entire streets were blocked with sand dunes. The city looked completely different blown with sand and whitened with dust.

“Where to, Nash?” Carl finally said when we were rolling down South Main again like five days before.

“West,” I told him. “Get us to the highway, to U.S. Twenty. We have an appointment, I think, in South Bend.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SOUTHBEND, INDIANA

 

1

We didn’t make it there for a week.

We had one problem after another. Suffice to say that when we did arrive, as luck would have it, the Bronco blew a tire soon as we rolled in and left us stranded there on the dirty backside of Indiana. And at night yet. Nothing worse than being on foot at night. Too many things out there. Too many predators haunting the ruined carcasses of the cities. Wild dog packs, mutant rats, swarms of bloodsucking insects, things much worse that it was hard to put a name to.

The radiation had done funny things.

We found a little ranch house in a devastated neighborhood at the edge of town and laid low. Nothing out there but wild dogs picking in the gutters, rats, lots of wrecked cars, sand blowing in the streets.

I thought we’d be safe for the night. I was wrong.

The house was empty. It was solid. And it appeared to be defensible. Of course, it wasn’t real easy to ascertain the latter, it being dark and all. And I didn’t want to be using any flashlights. Batteries were hard to come by and I didn’t exactly want to telegraph our position to whatever was waiting out there…because something was, you see. I could feel it right up my spine and I knew better than to dismiss such a feeling.

Ten minutes after we got there, we all heard it: a high, almost electronic piping that sounded oddly like a locust being imitated by a machine. And there was only one thing that made a sound like that.

We got ready.

Breathing in and breathing out, I waited with the .30.06 Savage cradled in my arms. Because it was coming. It had been scenting us for the past hour and now it was closing in.

The others were back in the kitchen—Carl and Janie and Texas Slim—huddled up in the shadows, trying to keep quiet and failing at it. Whatever came through that door, I wanted first crack at it. Believe me, I was no hero, but the idea of whatever was out there flooding into the room in numbers and us being boxed in together…no, it was a recipe for disaster.

That feeling at my spine went electric.

“Get ready,” I called out.

The others were anxious to run, to fight, to bust caps or retreat, as long as it was something. The waiting was hard. Very hard.

“Anything?” Carl whispered from the kitchen.

“Nothing. Be quiet. We wait.”

“How long?”

“Always in a hurry, our friend Carl,” Texas said. “Notice how he’s always in a hurry?”

“Yeah…and who dropped a quarter in you, dipshit?”

“Knock it off!” Janie warned them.

I just shook my head. Those two were like a couple kids sometimes.

It was times like these, in the dark and the quiet, that I remembered the way things were before the war. How I’d been married. Had a life. Ancient History 101, I guess. Now I was just a scavenger trying to stay alive, killing and taking and running, always running, just hanging on by my fingertips, suspended uneasily over some yawning black pit filled with human bones. Thirty-seven years old, a chromed-up Beretta 9mm jammed in the waistband of my jeans and a knife with a seven-inch blade in my boot. That’s who I was now.

I lit a cigarette, sweat trickling down my spine.

I blew out smoke and walked over towards the window, staying in the shadows along the wall, keeping clear of the cool moonlight that flooded in. The windowpane was grimy, speckled with dust and soot. I wiped a clean spot and studied the streets out there. In the semi-darkness of a moonlit night, it could have been ten years ago. Cars at the curbs. Trees lining the boulevards. Houses lined up in neat little rows. It was only when the moonlight washed it all down that you could see the cars were all rusted and wrecked, the trees gnarled-looking, leaves and dead limbs scattered about, the houses weathered gray from the blowing sand, yards overgrown, windows broken.

I thought it over, wondering if maybe the wind had made a lonesome howling sound and my imagination had channeled it into something else. But if it had, then we had all imagined it. And I didn’t believe in mass hallucination.

Outside, it was silent.

Nothing moved.

I leaned against the wall, finishing my cigarette. If nothing happened in another twenty minutes, I figured, then we’d relax, wait out the night, go scavenging in the morning. Had to be a decent ride in this town somewhere.