4

Good thing was, save for the barking of dogs and the occasional sound of rats running in the streets, nothing at all happened. We found a storeroom in the back and crashed there for the night, sleeping in shifts.

And so the night passed.

When daylight finally came, sweeping the night terrors back into their holes, it turned out that the Army/Navy store was a real windfall. We found another locked storeroom in the basement and it was just full of goodies…once we popped the door with a crowbar. Cartons of military MREs and freeze-dried hiking food, cases of bottled water and packets of water purification tablets. Sleeping bags and flashlights, waterproof raingear and parkas and blankets and first aid equipment. Upstairs there was camo clothing in every size, some of it American and some of it British DPM.

While Janie and I took inventory, Texas Slim and Carl went out hunting a new vehicle. They bickered their way out the door, trying to decide whose mother had entertained more bikers in a single night. I was glad to get rid of them. That shit went on almost constantly, the nipping and arguing and insulting. It was what they did and they enjoyed it, but it got old after awhile.

“There’s a ton of stuff here, Nash,” Janie said, standing amongst heaps of blankets and clothing and green metal boxes.

“We’ll just take what we need.”

That was an unwritten rule these days. No sense being a glutton, no sense being a hog, just take what you needed and leave the rest for some other unfortunate soul. I believed in this completely. I knew others did, too. There were always plenty who didn’t, of course, but I truly believed that karma would sort their asses out in the end.

“What do you think the chances are they’ll get us a decent ride?”

Janie laughed. “Pretty good if they don’t kill each other first.”

“Ah, they’re pretty tight, I think. They just express their feelings for one another in a strange way.”

“Let’s go to the storeroom, Nash. I want to show you something.”

I followed her downstairs and when we were in there, she locked the door.

“What do you want to show me?”

“What do you think?” she said, something blazing just behind her eyes. “You’ve been thinking the same thing I have so quit playing innocent.”

The heat that burned inside her spread out and consumed me. She was beautiful…but still the image of my wife came to me unbidden and dominating as it often did. Shelly. Dear God, Shelly. I remembered the mole on her thigh and the way she laughed and the little notes she would stick inside my lunch pail and the way her hand felt in mine and how she had looked the day we were married and how lucky, how blessed, I had felt knowing that she was mine. And then I saw her, as I would always see her, dying in my arms that night from cholera, nothing but bones wrapped in yellow skin, her chest trembling with each shallow gasp of air, and my own voice saying again and again, this is Shelly, this is my wife, this is how I bleed.

But that was gone.

It was faded with age.

Janie looked at me and something crossed her eyes like a shadow and then was gone and I was with her, losing myself in her.

She came right up to me and grabbed my hands and put them up her shirt and on her breasts. They were hot to the touch. I could feel her heart pounding with a steady delicious rhythm. I kissed her with my lips and then with my tongue and that’s how it started. Later, thinking about it with a warm satisfaction, I thought I actually melted into her. It sounds like something from a cheap paperback romance, but that’s how it was. It was no gentle seduction, there was nothing subtle or soft about any of it…just a union born of absolute need, trembling fingers working buttons and zippers and then I was on top of her and inside her, pumping, and she was breathing hot and heavy in my ear. Moaning. Begging me never to stop. I think I told her I loved her. When we came, we both cried out. It didn’t last long, but what there was of it was completely molten.

Later, still wrapped together in a twine of hot flesh and cooling sweat, she balanced herself on one elbow and said, “You think about your wife a lot, don’t you?”

“I guess.”

“But you never speak of her.”

“No.”

“Why not, Nash? Don’t you think it would be better if you did?”

I pulled away, pain breaking loose inside me. “I can’t. I just can’t.”

Janie didn’t push it, it wasn’t in her to do so. She lay next to me, her skin golden and her limbs long. “Do you trust me, Nash?”

“I think you’re the only one I do trust.” I meant it.

“I want you to tell me about your wife. Not now. But some day. When you do that, when you share it with me and trust me with it, I know I’ll trust you, too.”

The idea that maybe she didn’t trust me, not completely, hurt. I knew the others were with me because they thought I could keep them safe. It was not devotion, really, it was need and maybe it was even fear. Fear of what I could do and what I would call up on the next night of the full moon. That made me somehow omnipotent in their eyes. They respected the power, feared how I wielded it.

They did not fear me.

They feared what I called: The Shape.

But Janie?

No, Janie did not fear me. The connection between us was different, deeper, hard to know or understand. But it was there. It was always there. Sometimes I feared that she would leave and I would be alone. Completely alone and when I woke in the night, shivering and sweating from nightmares, she would not be there to hold onto. Then it would be just me, the memories of Shelly coming in the dead of night and sucking the blood from my soul.

I reached out and touched Janie, loving the smoothness of her skin. And as I did so, that old voice said, Jesus Christ, she’s just a kid…she’s nineteen and you’ll be forty in three years. You could be her father for chrissake. Don’t you see that? And yet you cling to her and you sleep with her, and how do you feel about that? Do you feel dirty? Unclean? But I didn’t. Maybe once I would have but that once was so far gone, dropped into the deepest well imaginable, and I could no longer know what was right and what was wrong. I only knew that it felt right and that was enough.

It was all I had.

I thought I loved her.

And loving her, wished she were dead.

She was just too good to be thrown into the ashcan with the rest. She had morals and ethics. And those things just didn’t have a place now.

“I want you to trust me,” I said. “I need you to.”

“Do you trust me?”

“Yes.”

“I hope so.”

“I love you,” I said.

She laid her head on my chest. “Then I suppose I love you, too.”

“That’s pretty noncommittal.”

“It’s a noncommittal world now, Nash.”

I laid there, feeling her, feeling part of something and more alone than I’d ever felt in my life. There was pain inside for what I had done and what I had lost and what I would never find again. I could feel it in each heartbeat and in the steady flow of my blood. I opened my mouth to tell Janie about it, but I closed it again as I saw my wife’s face looking down at me from some window in my mind.

Yes, pain. Nothing but pain and it did not need to be given a name.

 

5

I think it was our first night in South Bend that I began having the nightmares. I, like you, have had my share of night frights, but this was like nothing I’ve ever had before. To call them dreams is like calling a 500-megaton thermonuclear weapon just a bomb. And the real scary part here, you see, is that I’m not really sure they were dreams. The experience was too…corporeal, too organic, if that makes any sense.

All I can tell you is we were in the storeroom. Janie was sleeping at my side and Texas Slim and Carl were across the room. In the dream, I opened my eyes and what I saw was the shadowy storeroom. I sat there, blinking, looking around, filled with a terror that was positively nameless. I wanted to get out, to do anything…but I could not move. Or maybe I was afraid to. There was no window in the room, but the entire far wall suddenly lit up like it was washed by pale moonlight. More than moonlight. Luminous, flickering, energized. That’s when I saw that the light wasn’t just light but some whirling vortex of phosphorescent matter that was alive, expanding, engulfing the entire wall until there was no wall. It made a hissing, boiling sort of noise that put my nerves right on edge.

I was filled with revulsion and horror. I wanted to scream and maybe I did.

It kept expanding, swirling, a great worming mass like thousands and thousands of corpse-white snakes squirming and roping and tangling, being born from their own serpentine lengths, pushing out from a central mass that looked almost like a face…it had a contorted, leering slash for a mouth and something like eyes, evil, upturned eyes pulsating with the formless blackness of the void. The rest of it kept changing form, compressing, elongating, mutating. The face of Medusa. That’s what I thought in the dream: I was staring at the face of Medusa. Except this Medusa was absolutely alien, absolutely obscene, a corpuscular entity with a grotesque blur for a face made of thousands of those reaching white tendrils. Like the face itself, they were not a solid mass, but composed of millions of squirming threads and filaments who themselves were made of millions of roping fibers braided together down unto infinity. As I watched, the entire thing began to unwind until it looked the entire far side of the room was a nest of billions of writhing, smooth white cobras made of plaited, conjoined worms.

But the face wasn’t gone…not entirely.

It was eroding, flaking apart, unwinding into viscid living threads, but still those malefic eyes stared out at me. They watched me. As I cowered with bunched fists, a pounding heart, and a sour sweat running from my pores, it took a wicked delight in my terror. You can run, but you can’t hide, Nash. I’m coming just as you’ve always suspected, born in the microscopic ether and into the real. East to west, that’s my path. I leave nothing but graveyards and gleaming white bones in my wake. As you go westward, so do I. And you better hurry because I’m right behind you. Youngstown is a cemetery now. Those streets you played in as a child…filled with bloating white corpses and strewn with well-picked bones, nothing but flies and rats and buzzards, nothing more. Just the rising hot stench of decay and the silent blackness of tombs. I’m entering Cleveland now. Soon I’ll be coming for all that you have left. Will you scream when I take Janie, your sweet little cherry away from you? Or will you barter for your own miserable life as her flesh blackens with the pox, as she drowns in a yellow sea of her own infected waste and diseased blood bursts from her pores and she vomits out the black slime of her own liquefied intestines? What will you do, Nash? What will you offer to me?

It was bad, that thing getting inside my head and tormenting me, but what was worse was that it touched me. All those coiling, unraveling threads came at me, covering me, sliding into me like slivers of ice, impaling me and filling my body with their pestilence and contamination. The agony of infestation was unbelievable. My body shook and gyrated with waves of agony as I was absorbed, assimilated, remade in the form of that monstrous Medusan parasite, my blood gone to cold clotted venom, my internals dissolving to a marrowy sauce, my brain rendered to a gray slopping jelly. My cells were polluted one by one, distended with waste, each finally exploding in a drainage of diseased cytoplasm. I was literally a living corpse, drowning in my own filth, poisoned bile, and putrescent blood.

My mind was gone, pulled into some sucking black hole of insanity…but still I could hear a voice, my voice, wild and screeching: Nash, Nash, Nash! Can’t you see what it is and what it will do? Look behind you, look to the east, it’s nothing but a great bird-picked bone pile now! No more sunshine, no more light, no more anything! That thing destroys everything in its path and leaves a spreading ink-black swath of darkness in its wake! And it’s coming, getting closer day by day, for the love of God or Janie or yourself, you better run, you better run as fast as you fucking can—

I came out of the dream at that point, if dream it was. Drenched with hot-cold sweat, I stumbled to the door and got out of the storeroom. My guts were flipping over themselves, rolling with a greasy peristaltic motion. My legs were so weak I could barely stand. I stumbled into walls and tripped over my own feet. My muscles were sore and throbbing. My back kinked. My hands trembling. White bolts of pain were trying to split my skull in two. Tears rolled down my face and my teeth chattered. I was filled with a sense of loathing as if I had been embraced by a wormy corpse.

But what had embraced me was far worse.

Not the corpse, but The Maker of Corpses.

Outside the Army/Navy store, I fell to my knees in the cool night air. I didn’t care about dog packs or the Children or rats or any of it. That shit was pedestrian in comparison with what I’d just been through. I did not know if it was sheer nightmare or reality or some feverish, fucked up brew of both, all I knew was that I could smell the hot green odor of rotting corpses in the cities to the east and taste something in my mouth like hot-sweet bile. I threw up and kept throwing up until it was all purged from me. And even then the raw, fetid stench of it on the sidewalk—far unlike any vomit I’d ever known—made me shake with dry heaves.

Somewhere during the process, Janie came out. “Are you all right, Nash?”

I looked up at her, my face warm and waxy, my eyes bloodshot and tearing. I swallowed. Swallowed again. I could not speak. We went inside and I drank some water, smoked a cigarette, and all the while she was staring at me, wanting answers. “Nash? Nash? God, Nash, speak to me…” Oh, but I couldn’t. Because if I opened my mouth and powered up the old voice box what was going to come out in a gushing flood of pure unbridled terror was the scream to end all screams. I was afraid I would start and never, ever stop.

So I said nothing. Absolutely nothing.

I could see it in her eyes, the concern, yes, but also the fear as she wondered if I was shot through with the Fevers. But what I couldn’t say, what I dared not frame into worms, was that I was not sickened with Fevers but had been embraced by the Mother of Fevers.

And it was coming.

Getting closer day by awful day.

An unnamable horror that had come to exterminate what remained of the human race.

 

6

Texas Slim and Carl found a vehicle for us and it was really something. They came back with it about an hour before the sandstorm hit, noticing with some discomfort the uneasy silence that lay between Janie and I. They did not ask about it. They took us out to show us what they had found.

I started laughing when I saw it.

So did Janie.

Of all the dinosaurs in the automotive jungle they had somehow come across a VW microbus that had been new when the Vietnam War had still been raging. The bus was worn and dented, painted up with ancient flowers, peace signs, and other psychedelic hieroglyphics that had faded with age. It was an ugly vehicle for an ugly world.

“Where in the hell did you find this?”

“Some guy’s garage,” Carl said, scratching his thick black beard. “We were checking out this neighborhood, just looking in garages for anything we could get. We found this. Looks like shit, sure, but it moves and it can get us out of here. Maybe Michigan City or Gary, wherever.”

“It’s been serviced some, Nash,” Texas Slim added. “We found the fellow what owned it. He was on the floor, still had an oily rag in his hand.”

“Fever?” I asked, almost breathlessly, remembering my dream.

Texas Slim shook his head. “No…looked like radiation. His hair had fallen out and that sort of thing.”

“Yeah, but we almost didn’t get it because of the dog in the yard,” Carl said.

“Oh, you’re going to go into that, are you?” Texas Slim said.

“Dog?”

“Sure,” Carl said. “Big black mutha. Probably chained out there for days, crazy and foaming at the mouth. Texas here, he tries to make friends with it. Tries to pet it.”

“I didn’t try to pet it.”

“Sure you did.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did, you idiot. You were talking all sweet and sassy to it like you wanted to bone that fucker. Not that I’d be surprised.”

Texas just laughed. “Now see, Nash, that’s sheer invention on the part of my friend here with the small penis. Carl gets confused sometimes. His head isn’t right. But, you know, what with his mother mixing it up out in the barnyard with anything willing, it’s no wonder he turned out this way.”

Carl took a step towards him. “What I tell you about my mother?”

“Nothing I hadn’t already read on the bathroom wall.”

“Keep it up, you peckerwood sonofabitch. One of these days you’re going to dip that wee little pee pee into something and it’s going to get bit off.”

“So I’ll keep it out of your mouth.”

I had to break them apart at this point because the last thing I needed were these assholes swinging on each other and busting out each other’s teeth. Like we didn’t have enough to worry about. And it was about that time that the sandstorm started kicking up. I told Carl to find a garage somewhere to store the bus and by the time he got back the sand was already blowing.

So we hid out in the Army/Navy store and just waited.

There was nothing else to do.

We spent another four days in South Bend because we could not leave.

Visibility was down to a few feet. We listened to the sand blow and blow. It was driven by high winds that howled through the town, burying the streets in drifts and swirling eddies, churning sand-devils whipping and lashing against the building. For days it was like that, the moaning wind and the sound of sand grating against the windows and walls in a fine granulated grit. It found hairline cracks and seams and blew into the store, dusting the floor and covering the displays and shelves in a powdery down.

We waited downstairs in the storeroom, listening to it rage.

Even down there we could feel the sand on our skin, clogging our pores, getting in our hair and dusting our faces. It went on and on.

We huddled together and paged through old magazines and nobody said much. We all wanted to be on the road. We wanted to ditch this desolate burg.

But Mother Nature had other ideas.

As we waited, Carl and Texas Slim tried to stare each other down almost constantly and Janie was pretty much ignoring them and giving me the cold shoulder. It was a long goddamn wait. I spent my time consulting the dog-eared map in my pocket, wondering what we might run into out on the interstate, the whole time my belly filled with needles because we were trapped there. Waiting. I couldn’t shake the dream. Maybe I was paranoid—definitely—but I was feeling that hideous something coming from the east as maybe I’d been feeling it for a long time. I did not doubt its reality. The bottom line was we had to keep moving west. That’s the way it had to be and nobody asked why.

They knew.

They knew, all right.

Just like they knew that the next full moon was less than a week away and it would soon be time for me to make a selection.

The time of The Shape was nearing…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

GARY, INDIANA

 

1

We came into the city on a day that was still, ominous, and hazy. Our VW hippie microbus was on its last legs. Like the wild free-loving days of Haight-Ashbury, the bus was past its prime. She seized up twice out on I-80 coming into Gary and Carl said her bearings were shot and her carb was gummed up. As it was, we pretty much coasted into the city, the love machine wheezing like an asthmatic old man. We needed new wheels because hoofing it across country just wasn’t an option.

We skirted Tolleston and cut through Ambridge until we reached downtown. Coughing out clouds of blue smoke, our VW microbus rolled to a stop before a row of tenements and died with a backfire.

Inside, Carl swore. And then swore again.

I stepped out, fanning my sweaty face with a Cleveland Indians baseball cap. I lit a stale cigarette with a cupped match and then looked around at the devastation…the overturned cars, the rubble, the garbage blowing in the gutters. Drifts of sand were pushed up against the buildings. A crow sat atop the traffic light ahead, cawing. The day was hot and hazy, picked dry as desert bones,

Other than that, there was nothing.

Just the deathly silence that was uniform to most cities since the bombs had come down. A pick-up truck was pulled up to the curb, a crusty yellow skeleton behind the wheel. Birds had built nests in the slats of the ribcage.

I was trying to get a feel for things. Where we should go and what we should do when we got there.

From inside the bus, Texas Slim called: “Nothing here, Nash. Let’s pack it in.”

I ignored him, stepping away from the bus and studying the ruined buildings around me. I saw no life, no movement, but I knew it was out there somewhere. Hidden eyes were watching me, gauging me. The days had long since vanished when you welcomed strangers with open arms.

That’s not how it worked now.

There were people here, I knew, and not all of them were thick with radiation and Fevers. I had to find one of them. Somehow. Some way. The full moon was coming fast now.

If I couldn’t find someone, it meant selecting one of my own and I didn’t like that idea.

There were five of us now―Janie and I, Carl and Texas Slim, and the new guy, Gremlin. We called him Gremlin because we’d picked him up in Michigan City, found him trapped in the trunk of an old AMC Gremlin. Scabs were out the night before, he said, looking for recruits and he jammed himself in the trunk and then couldn’t get out. He was so wedged in there it took all of us to yank his sorry ass free.

I hadn’t made my mind up about him yet. There were things I didn’t like about him―his perpetual bitching―and things I did like: he did what he was told without question. Janie was neutral on him. Carl and Texas Slim liked to pick on him a lot, which was their way of feeling him out and finding out what he was made of.

I scanned the streets, looking for a decent vehicle but all of them were wrecks. I turned my back on the VW and then I heard something. At first, I wasn’t sure what it was, only that it seemed to be coming from the alley across the way. I called out for the others to stay in the bus in case it was a trap and walked over there. Plugging my cigarette into the corner of my mouth, I pulled the Beretta out of my waistband. I worked the slide and jacked a round into the breech, got ready for what might come.

In the alley, shrouded in shadow from the buildings on either side, there was a man.

Barely a man, in fact. Just some emaciated stick figure pulling itself along like a worm. He had three riders on him―rats. They were huge, the size of cats, their bodies swollen and tumorous beneath pelts of greasy gray fur. They looked up with shining rabid eyes and then got back to work eating the man. This is what I had been hearing…the chewing sounds of rats feeding, moist and slobbering like dogs working juicy bones.

There wasn’t much meat on the man, but the rats were taking what they could get. One of them had its snout buried in his throat and was tugging at something in there. The other two were digging in his belly, yanking out his entrails and gnawing on them.

Bold bastards…and in the daytime yet.

The rat that was digging in the man’s throat pulled its gore-smeared snout free and made a low hissing sound. It was ready to defend against all and any poachers. It rose up on its haunches, ready to fight. Droplets of blood glistened on its whiskers. There were wriggling worm-like growths suspended from its belly that looked like teats…except that they moved, pulsed. I aimed, fired, knocking the rat free of the man and pulverizing its head into splashing meat. It rolled over once, legs kicking, and died.

The other two abandoned the man’s belly, leering at me with flat red eyes. They both opened their mouths, blood-stained teeth bared. Strips of tissue hung from their jaws. I shot first one and then the other. The first took a head-shot and died quick enough, the other, a hole punched through its belly, tried to crawl away, squealing and bleeding, dragging its viscera behind it over the dirty pavement. I shot it again and it did not move.

The dying man looked up, his face contorted in utter agony. He had crawled out from behind a dumpster, the rats eating him the entire time, no doubt. He left a smear of blood in his wake. I watched him, wishing there was something I could do. Times were hard, savage, yes, but I still felt compassion at times like these and I wanted nothing more than to help the poor guy.

But it was too late and I was no surgeon.

The rats had done irreparable damage, the trauma gruesome and unpleasant. The guy’s belly was open, his throat was open, his bowels had been pulled out and bitten. Bad enough, but he was obviously dying long before they attacked. Radiation poisoning. I had seen it plenty of times by then and I knew it when I saw it. Most of the guy’s hair had fallen out, his scalp and skin split open in jagged ruts. There were sores everywhere. Most of his teeth were gone and those that remained were rotting brown in the gums. He was bleeding from his ears, his nose, his mouth, even his eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

More rats.

Probably a colony near.

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

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

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

 

2

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

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

“West,” I’d say. “We’re going west.”

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

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

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

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

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

Jesus.

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

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

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

It would ask things.

I would do them.

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

I would not allow it.

I didn’t care how hungry it was…

 

3

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

Janie wasn’t real cool with that.

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

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

“She’s fucking whacko,” I said.

“Please.”

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

Carl pulled the duct tape from her mouth.

She watched us with beady, metallic eyes.

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

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

“So much for that,” I said.

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

Carl and I laughed our asses off.

 

4

Night.

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

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

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

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

It reminded me of when I was a kid.

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

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

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

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

There was someone out in the street.

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

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

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

She was one of the Children.

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

She saw me.

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

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

The girl out there had not come any closer.

She stood her ground and I stood mine.

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

But I hesitated.

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

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

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

Just do it, you idiot.

I sighted her in with the rifle, seeing her for what she really was: a monster. A seething, creeping horror from a pit of radioactive waste. Even at that distance, I could see those eyes perhaps too well and they seized something up inside me. Maybe they weren’t luminous exactly, but a shiny translucent silver-yellow staring from those depressions like shimmering opals planted in the sockets of a skull. There was nothing in those eyes. That were flat and dead, voids filled with a blankness, a blackness that existed, perhaps, beyond the rim of the universe.

I hesitated too long.

Her hands fell away and then one came right back up, pointing at me and her oval mouth opened like the maw of lamprey, moonlight winking off all those tiny hooked teeth. And she screamed. Made a shrill droning sound like a locust in a summer field, but loud enough to make my ears bleed.

And the others started coming.

I heard a commotion in the back room that I knew was Carl and Texas coming to do some killing.

I took aim again and put a round right into that little girl. It shattered the plate glass window and caught her right in the chest, throwing her back and down, spraying blood and meat twenty feet or more. It happened immediately to her as it always does with the Children: she began to burn up. It was like whatever was stored up inside her went at once, potential energy going kinetic. By the time she hit the pavement, about as dead as dead gets, she was already smoking like a bag of burning shit. Some crazy blue fire erupted inside her and her flesh liquefied like hot tallow, steaming and sputtering, her face sliding off the bone and her blackened skeleton trembling in the street for a moment, than crumbling away.

It happened that fast.

But by then there were other Children.

I never saw where they came from, maybe from under the rusting wrecks of cars or out of sewers and cellar windows, spilling from chimneys and skittering down the brick facades of buildings like spiders. No matter, they were in the street. A dozen of them and more on the way.

They ringed the front of the machine shop, chattering and squealing with delight, eyes shining and mouths opening and closing like eels sucking air, skeletal fingers all pointing at me while each and everyone of them made that high, keening noise that I knew meant, there, there he is, one of the different ones, the alien in our midst, kill him, kill him, kill him…

They started to close in, a ragged and emaciated band, heads tangled with matted hair and faces contorted and vicious.

“Motherfucker,” I heard Carl say, “it’s the goddamn brats again.”

He kicked out what remained of the window and by then Texas was at my side, a Browning .45 in one hand and a Desert Eagle in the other like some death-crazy guerrilla that wanted to die hard with smoking pistols in both fists.

The Children, maybe twenty or thirty of them, swarmed at us like insects, hopping and jumping, screeching and droning. I dropped three of them and Texas four others. Carl cut two of them nearly in half. And it was sheer pandemonium, the dying ones sending up great clouds of ash and greasy smoke and the living ones pouring forth right over the tops of them.

But none of them made it through the volley of fire.

A few got within three or four feet of us and we blew them away, opening skulls and perforating chests. I put my last two rounds in the belly of a little boy and he actually stumbled and fell almost on top of me, impaling himself on a shelf of jagged glass, burning up right in front of me. Carl kicked his carcass back outside before we asphyxiated on the fumes.

And about the time the others started to pull away, the street out there blazing bright like the mouth of a crematorium, somebody hit us from behind. I heard Janie cry out and then somebody knocked me and Carl aside and the next thing I knew, the crazy lady we’d captured was diving through the missing window, rolling across the sidewalk and coming up on her feet, hands still tied behind her back. Carl reloaded and was about to put her down, but he didn’t get the chance.

A half dozen of the Children fell on her, taking her down effortlessly, putting their hands all over her and suctioning themselves to her with those lamprey mouths. The woman screamed and shook, but she couldn’t throw her riders. They clung on, incinerating her, reducing her to a smoldering, insane thing that vomited out loops of cremated entrails.

We shot through her to get the Children.

And then they were all blazing and smoking and writhing, curling up and sputtering like bacon on a hot skillet. One of them broke free in its death agonies and shambled maybe five or six feet in our direction, then collapsed to the sidewalk, shuddering and flaking away, finally puking out some black and bubbling mass before going still.

And that was it.

We’d survived another attack by the Children. We just stood there, gasping and shaking, twenty or more Children lying in the street, fused into some blackened, steaming mass of bones and bodies.

“Those are some mean little shits,” Carl said.

“We better get out of here,” Janie said, refusing to view the carnage. “Those bodies are burning hot.”

So we went down into the cellar and waited for dawn.

There wasn’t much else we could do.

 

 

5

 

It was on those glaring, overcast days where the world was sank in a saffron haze that you could never see danger until it was right upon you. Sometimes when the dust storms came we were caught out in the open. It always started the same way with a silence that was heavy and sullen, a stillness that would make your flesh crawl. Then the wind would come howling like banshees, screaming through the streets, engulfing the world in a whipping tempest of radioactive dust. If you couldn’t get to cover and fast, the wind would scrape your skin right off and the radiation would roast you from the inside out.

I had once seen a pack of ragbags out picking through the gutters get caught in a storm like that.

They didn’t make it ten feet before the wind nailed their coffins shut. When it lifted and the dust had dispersed, the roentgens dropping away to near-normal, there was nothing out there but six bodies laying in the street. They were blistered and baked, brown as old shoe leather, tendrils of smoke rising from them with a nauseating stench of burning flesh.

Regardless, Gary was desolate.

About what you’d expect a year after Doomsday. The Geiger was reading fifty micro-roentgens per hour, background radiation, which was warm but certainly not hot. Livable. Other than that, it was more of the same: deserted streets blown with rubbish, smashed vehicles, burned-out houses. Lots of rubble from the last days when Martial Law was declared and the Army tried to put down all the private militias.

Gary was no worse than any other city, of course, but I wasn’t for hanging around and either were the others. We needed a dependable set of wheels. We needed to be free and mobile. We needed something else, too, but we weren’t talking about it.

Carl, being military-minded, wanted a Hummer with a mounted fifty-cal. Texas Slim wanted a hearse. Janie didn’t care either way and I just wanted something dependable. Gremlin, of course, had no opinion. He’d bitch whatever we got.

With a third of the human population wiped out in thirty-six hours and millions more dying from fallout in the weeks and months following, you’d think autos would be easy to come by.

Not so.

“C’mon, you piece of shit,” Carl said, turning into a crowded avenue that was strewn with the hulks of rusting cars and trucks. All the tires had been stripped away for fires. Most of the windshields were shattered. He had to snake his way through them and it was no easy bit with that wheezing old bus jerking and stopping and flooding out all the time. “Cocksucker…fucking cocksucker.”

Texas Slim giggled. “I like that. I like how he does that. Swearing like a sailor.”

“Kiss my ass,” Carl told him.

“See? He keeps doing that. It’s hilarious.”

Texas Slim was a little odd. He wasn’t from Texas at all. Somewhere in Louisiana, he claimed, but Carl called always called him Texas and so did we. He was good with a gun, good with scavenging, good with doing what he was told without question. He was just a little off sometimes and it was often hard to tell whether he was serious or just laughing his ass off at everyone and everything.

“Hey, you suppose they have any willing ladies around here?” he wanted to know. “Or even a few that aren’t so willing?”

“You just keep fucking your hand and shut up,” Carl told him.

Janie sighed and I leaned back in the rear seat, thinking about what we would have to do once we got some wheels and who we might have to do it to.

“Hey,” Gremlin said. “Check it. We got some local action here.”

There were a couple old ragbags in their tattered salvation army coats picking up dead rats and dumping them into potato sacks. Once upon a time before the world went mad, they had been bums, homeless people, but in this brave new scary world there were no more bus stations to sleep in and no soft tourists to panhandle. Now they were scavengers and they’d eat just about anything.

Carl eyed them warily. “I got me a real funny feeling here.”

“So get your hand out of your pants,” Texas Slim told him.

I waited, not putting much on Carl’s feeling, but then Janie began to tense up next to me and I knew something was going on.

“Shit,” Carl said.

The ragbags had no sense of intuition. They just kept picking up their goods and dreaming of browned rat-stew and humbleberry rat-pie, happily ignorant in the fog of their own stench. Carl hit the brakes and everyone almost fell out of their seats. But nobody bitched, because by then we all saw what Carl was seeing.

Scabs.

Three of them were standing on top of an old rusted station wagon. They had metal pipes in their hands. They were paying no attention to anything but the ragbags. They jumped off the wagon, hit the dirty street running and, just like that, they fell on the ragbags and started piping them. The ragbags just went down, curling themselves into protective balls, and the Scabs just beat them until their pipes were red and crusted with hair and tissue and the ragbags were no longer moving.

Then they looked over at the us.

Just the three of them. They were naked, their faces a scabrous dead-white, burst open with sores.

“Get us out of here!” Gremlin said. “Why are we just fucking sitting here?”

Carl got the van moving. The flesh at the back of my neck was prickling, every muscle in my body standing taut and trembling. That’s when the other Scabs showed.

Not just two or three, but dozens. Most of them were naked.

They were coming from every direction. Leaping off cars and running from ruined buildings, crawling out of alleys and dropping from broken windows. They had knives and axes, pipes and broomsticks, hammers and meat cleavers. This was their turf and they were going to protect it. Up until then, I had never seen Scabs organized like that. It was not a good thing.

There was no going back and everyone knew it.

Time to go hunting.

More of them were pouring into the streets now, streaming out of their coverts and hides, all carrying axes and pikes and hammers. But no guns. I looked real closely and saw no guns. And at that point, it was all we had going for us. I didn’t need to tell anyone what had to come down. Their hands were already filled with guns. We were going to cowboy our way out, Wild West it.

Janie looked at me with raw panic in her eyes, but there was no time for reassuring words. Carl had his Mossberg 500 across his lap. The beauty of the Mossberg was that it was no longer than your arm but it had real killing power. Texas Slim had his big bluesteel Desert Eagle .50 cal ready to bust and Gremlin was holding a chromed-up Smith .357. I jacked a fresh magazine into my Beretta.

Janie wouldn’t take a weapon.

“Put your head down and keep it there,” I told her. “Okay, Carl. Roll.”

Carl eased the bus into motion, got it rolling to ten and then twenty miles an hour. Windows were rolled up, doors locked.

The Scabs converged.

“Come on, you ugly pricks,” Texas Slim said. “Come get you some lovely fifty-cal.”

They went after our hippie bus like it was a living thing that needed to be brought down, a primal beast in need of slaying. Like stone-age hunters attacking a mammoth, they charged right in. Hatchets and axes flew, pipes rose and fell, hammers banged and knives gouged. The rearview mirrors were knocked free, the windshield feathering out with cracks as rocks and bricks glanced off it. The front passenger side window collapsed inward in a spider-webbed tangle as Texas Slim fired three rounds from his Eagle point-blank at the screaming Scabs. A cluster of them fell away. Nothing speaks quite as loud as .50 cal. Carl didn’t wait for them to get his window. When they crowded in, jabbing and pounding and scratching with their long white fingers, he brought the Mossberg up and fired. The window disappeared and a couple Scabs had buckshot sprayed in their faces.

There were too many.

Gremlin looked at me and I nodded.

We brought our weapons up and fired simultaneously right through the windows. The .357 shattered the glass and it dropped away, but it took two or three rounds from my 9mm to do the same. Everyone was shooting then, knocking the Scabs down and watching more swarm in, bodies dropping and faces splashed off skulls, the bus lurching as it smashed into one after the other, jerking as it rolled over their writhing bodies.

A Scab with the craziest, glassiest eyes I had ever seen knocked two or three of his brothers away, holding a long-handled axe up for the swinging. I put a round in his left eye socket and he fell back, twisting around in a circle, screeching, hands pressed over his face, blood gushing from between his fingers.

“KILL ‘EM!” Carl shouted with a sort of manic glee as he steered and fired his Mossberg. “GREASE THESE MOTHERFUCKERS! PUT ‘EM DOWN!”

The bus was taking a beating and there was only so much ammo. Already the inside was filled with smoke and glass and blood from the Scabs, everyone’s ears ringing from the close-quarter firing.

We made it through the first gauntlet of Scabs and most fell away as the bus rounded the next block, but others still chased on foot and there was just not enough room to get up any speed out of the old VW. I drilled three more before my Beretta was empty and then I started smashing faces with it. But the Scabs, juiced to the gills on hate and rage, didn’t give in easily. They kept coming, leaping right over the bodies of their comrades. I caught a fist in the jaw, another in the temple, nails scraped across my face. Then hands had me, yanking me right out of my seat. Janie was pulling on me, shouting, screaming, but she was losing the tug-of-war.

I fought the best I could, clawing and punching, but there was only so much I could do. In my brain, defeat already echoed: I’m done, I’m fucking done in! Them sonsofbitches have me!

Then Carl swiveled around in his seat, driving with his knees, bringing out a .38 Airweight and putting a round right into the face of the guy who was trying to drag me out. The bullet passed so close to my left ear I could feel the heat. But it was right on target. The Scab took it right in the nose and he fell away like he was kicked. Carl fired two more times and cored two more Scabs just like that.

Texas Slim knocked one more away then he was out of ammo, too.

So was Gremlin.

There were more guns and ammo in the back, but there was no time to get at them. Carl stomped on the accelerator and the bus jerked, coughed, sounded like it was going to stall out, then it found some speed and flattened two Scabs that ran at it. Another was hanging on the driver’s side and Carl shot him with the Airweight, but he wouldn’t let go. So he shot him again and again. Another tried to dive through Texas Slim’s window and Texas Slim drove a lockblade right into his throat and still he hung on, blood bubbling from the wound.

“You need to die, friend! Let me show you!” Texas Slim cried out and started stabbing him in the face, the neck, the head, and finally he dropped away.

Janie was holding me so tight I thought she was going to break my arm, but we made it through.

“Well, that was a fucking trip,” Carl said.

And we all started laughing. Just laughing like crazy, everyone cut and bleeding and dirty.

But in the confusion and haze, Carl never saw the little overturned Ford Focus until it was too late. He jammed the brakes and spun the wheel and the bus glanced off it, jumped the curb and smashed through the plate glass window of an old video store.

And there it died.

 

6

“Everybody out!” I said.

We were unharmed for the most part, just bruised and cut. We grabbed the guns from the back, the Geiger and medical kit, a few nylon bags of odds and ends. Carl had his AK-47 and I had my .30.06. Texas Slim reloaded his Eagle and Gremlin had done the same now with his .357. I made Janie take the .45 Browning, but she wasn’t too happy about it. She held onto it like I’d given her a moist brown turd to call her own.

Outside, I saw no more Scabs.

We were lucky, real lucky.

Radiation had made the Scabs. Who they were before did not matter. The radiation stewed their chromosomes, made their hair fall out, made their faces go white and, yes, scabby. Most of them had black glistening eyes, but some had pink eyes like albinos. Dosed with radioactivity or not, they were mean and violent as hell. And insane. Just crazy mad. They’d come at you with weapons, with their bare hands, with their teeth. All anyone knew was that they were dangerous like rabid dogs and you had to put them down the same way.

Anyway, things were real quiet in the streets.

A dirty, glaring haze hung in the sky, glancing off the buildings and the cracked windshields of cars. You had to squint to see anything. And that’s probably why we didn’t see the three Scabs waiting for us.

One of them was drooling, his body twitching with spasms like he was amped up on Meth. The one next to him was doing the same, his eyes rolling in their sockets, his entire body jerking around like he was a marionette hooked up to strings. There was some kind of bubbling gray slime coming out of his left nostril. Both of them were grunting like rooting hogs. They all had knives and they wanted to use them.

Knives against guns…didn’t make much sense, but nothing about these guys made sense.

The third one was semi-coherent. “The cunt,” he said. “We want your cunt. Give us that cunt. We want her.”

“Only cunt here is you,” Carl said.

Texas Slim giggled. “I don’t think the lady cares for the term.”

“Shut up,” I told him.

“We want that cunt,” the Scab said again.

I kept Janie behind me. “Come and get her. She’s yours.”

Their brains were so melted, they just didn’t get it.

They stepped forward and I dropped two of them with the .30.06, both gut-shot, and Carl put two rounds in the other guy. He fell over dead. The other two were squirming around, bleeding and moaning, making weird squealing noises. They were in pain and death would be a long time in coming.

“Let’s go,” I said.

“Nash,” Janie said. “You can’t let them suffer.”

“Fuck I can’t.”

“Rick.”

“C’mon, Janie. Enough already. Save the Pollyanna shit for another time.”

“Rick, you can’t.”

“Sure he can, Janie,” Texas Slim said, pulling out his knife. “In fact, if one were to employ a bit of creativity, they could die that much slower.”

He bent over to have a little carefree fun mutilating the dying Scabs and I told him to knock it off. Goddamn Texas Slim. He’d spawned in the shallow end of the gene pool. Maybe he had tortured puppies as a boy and had moved on to bigger things since. You had to keep your eye on him. He claimed to have studied mortuary science in Baton Rouge and had an unhealthy interest in corpses and those about to become so. I had seen him do some things with the dead that were not only unpleasant, but obscene.

“You’re going to let them die like that?” Janie said.

“They’re not even human,” I told her.

I pulled her away and she wrenched free and I knew we were about to have a fight and make the others uncomfortable, but suddenly then and there, out in the middle of that hazy dead street, we all just stopped. The only sound was the dying Scabs rolling in their own blood. Just silence. A silence that was so heavy it seemed to have physical weight.

Nothing moved.

No breeze stirred.

The air suddenly grew very dry, charged with static electricity. And hot. Sweat popped on Janie’s face. It rolled down my brow and dripped off my nose.

“Oh shit,” Texas Slim said. “Here comes the blow.”

Dust storm.

The ground started to shake and there was a distant rumbling. I looked around, wondering where we were going to make shelter. My throat was dry. The world began to thrum as the storm grew nearer.

Gremlin looked desperate. “Nash! C’mon, fucking Nash! Are we just going to stand here and wait for it or what?”

I wanted to backhand that bastard, put him to the ground and leave him there until that storm cycled in and fried his shit. The need to do that was very strong.

“Look,” Carl said.

There it was. It was coming out of the east in a raging tempest, gathering up dust and dirt and refuse and anything that wasn’t tied down. It was huge and hungry and roaring like a primeval monster. Everything was shaking now: the streets, the buildings. As the storm came—and it came really fast—it cast a murky shadow before it. That shadow engulfed block after block and―

“Run!” I said. “Over there!”

There was a building across the way that looked pretty sturdy and pretty solid. We made for it, but the door was locked. Carl blew it open and everyone jumped in, clambering around in the darkness. Texas Slim found an old desk and used it to secure the door shut.

“Okay,” I told them. “Let’s find those stairs.”

Through a grime-streaked window, I watched the street out there darken as the storm moved in. And by then, the whole building was shaking.

 

7

Ever since Doomsday, germs terrify me.

No, I’m not talking OCD here or anything so trifling, I’m talking about the horror that I feel when I think of all the really nasty germs floating around out there and what they can do. The radiation, as I said, did something to those germs, made bigger, badder, more virulent bugs out of them, creating deadly strains and mutated life forms of the sort I didn’t even want to think about. I suppose some are the same old bugs, but many I know for a fact are much deadlier than they once were. Case in point, it was rumored that some exotic form of hemorrhagic fever similar to Ebola was burning its way through Akron and had already devastated what was left of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

Except, as it turned out, it was no rumor.

The form of hemorrhagic fever we’re talking about here is, like I said, very much like Ebola. You remember good old Ebola, don’t you? It laid waste to quite a few villages in Zaire, the Sudan, and the Ivory Coast back when the wheels of the world were still turning and not completely flat. It was big news. Scary news. A deadly, communicable “hot” virus that was filling graveyards with no end in sight. But it did end. It came and then left, ostensibly of its own choosing.

Now this lethal strain of hemorrhagic fever—let’s call it Ebola-X, that sounds suitably frightening—is like Ebola squared, Ebola to the tenth power, Ebola with a seriously pissy disposition, Ebola jacked-up on Meth and feeling extremely virile and kill-happy. I know these things because, at the very end, after Doomsday and right before our government collapsed, this new virulent Ebola-X was already laying siege to places like Washington D.C., Baltimore, and Boston.

And it’s still out there, mutating, generating, taking what godawful form I can only guess at.

Let’s say for the hell of it that you have contacted Ebola-X. From what I understand, communicability is roughly 98% and fatality 100%. This is death row, people, with no governor’s last minute reprieve. It begins with muscle aches, the sweats, and a spiking fever. Next comes agonizing abdominal pains, pinpoint hemorrhages in your brain. Your eyes go a bright, glistening blood-red. Your skin goes yellow and cracks open with sores. By this point your brain is pretty much jelly and blood gushes from any and all orifices while you vomit out black goo, infected blood, and macerated sections of your stomach and intestines. Death is within sixteen hours of first contact and those sixteen hours are the longest sixteen hours imaginable. I personally am not religious. I don’t believe there’s a little invisible deity in the sky who watches over us. It’s a nice, comforting thought, but I don’t believe in spiritual fairy tales and I’m pretty sure neither do the millions who’ve died in concentration camps, from mass murder, witch hunts, race crimes, and disease outbreaks. So while I don’t believe in God—though I would like to—I do believe in the Devil and the Devil is Ebola-X.

So, you get the picture, Ebola-X to human beings is pretty much like direct sunlight to a vampire…except that crumbling to dust would probably be far less painful (and messy).

Now let me tell you about Texas Slim. I haven’t said much about him; I’ve let you form your own opinions from my, hopefully, objective impressions and memories. Now Texas has an unusual past. He’s a bit quirky, offbeat, possibly borderline sociopathic. He laughs at things that make others cringe, tells very unpleasant stories that like piss in the punch don’t go down well in mixed company. Enough said. But I think beyond all that, he’s okay. He’s tough, he’s disciplined, he’s loyal, and unusually compassionate. Maybe that’s how they breed ‘em down there in Dixieland Louisiana. Regardless, I like him. He stands by me and I stand by him.

Now it would be easy enough to dismiss him as a weirdo, but don’t make that mistake. Let me tell you what happened to him before he joined up with my posse, which we could call the Loyal Order of The Shape or the Fraternal Order of the Esoteric Shape. Neither of which is very funny.

Anyway, Texas was living in Morgantown, West Virginia when the bombs fell. Being that he had a second cousin in Pittsburgh, he went there. His cousin—a large, pear-shaped woman named Jemmy Kilpatrick, who sported more tattoos than teeth—was holed-up in her apartment building with a posse of twenty others. Texas joined the posse. He was warmly welcomed…even if he did not find the romantic attentions of Jemmy so welcoming, that is. Things at the “commune,” as he called it, went well. Everyone pitched in. Everyone scavenged for food, weapons, fresh water. They did a high, fine job of it.

Then Jemmy came down with a fever.

Her symptoms pretty much followed those I mentioned above. Within six hours, her eyes were bright red—“Dracula eyes” as Texas Slim himself put it—and blood was literally gushing from her nose, her vagina, ass, bubbling out of her pores and dripping from her ears. She was like a ticking bomb for several hours, then she exploded. Burning with fevers, smelling of dank rot and drainage, she could no longer sit up and just stared off into space as the blood welled out and her skin went the waxy yellow of a transparent apple. Her flesh cracked open and bled. She became a seething mass of fevers and running blood and then…she “crashed and bled out” as the biohazard specialists say. She began shuddering with spasms. She vomited out great gouts of black-red arterial blood, spraying it liberally around and spattering those, Texas included, who were trying to care for her. She heaved out a great quantity of some greasy black substance as well. Texas said the room smelled like “a bag of hot vomit.” I don’t doubt it. But the most horrible thing of all, he told me, was the ripping sound of her anus as it opened to vent blood and tissue, which was probably what was left of her bowels. She died very quickly after that, submerging in a pool of her own blood and waste.

Now most people would have run off long before and most of the commune had.

But not Texas Slim. He stayed right to the end, drenched in Jemmy’s blood and drainage. He said the idea that he was infected by a lethal organism did not occur to him. I think he’s bullshitting. He knew, but he was not the sort to abandon those in need even at the risk of his own life.

Of the twelve people who stayed behind, all of them—save Texas himself—were infected within twenty-four hours.

For the next two days Texas was busy taking care of them as they crashed and bled out. It was as close to hell as he’d ever want to go, he told me. All those infected people stuck in that tight room stinking of rancid blood and sour vomit, convulsing and shitting out their insides, their bright red watery eyes staring at him as they fell into terminal shock and vomited out everything that was inside.

He buried all of them in a vacant lot next door.

When he told this story, it was just him and me with a bottle of Jack Daniels. He would not share it with anyone else. And as I listened, it was like the poison was being squeezed from his soul. It scared me. Scared me because I wondered if he still carried the virus and scared me because I finally had a first person account of exactly the sort of shit that was making the rounds out there. What he had been through made my own experiences with my wife wasting away of cholera sound like pink party cake and balloons.

But he survived. Both the bug and the experience.

But you can see now why I’m terrified of those germs. What they were and what they are even now becoming. Because they’re constantly changing, mutating. It’s their nature. But the very worst thing is that germs make me think of that dream I had in the Army/Navy storeroom in South Bend. For what were they now mutating into? What sort of twisted, hideous evolution had spawned that thing I saw or dreamed of? What sort of pathogenic viral horror had the moldering plague graveyards finally given birth to?

I didn’t know.

But I could feel it out there, getting closer and closer, spreading a tenebrous shroud over the ruined cities of men as it came creeping ever westward.

 

8

In the building, after a meal of Spam and crackers, I sat by the window listening to the radioactive dust blow through the streets below. We were up on the fourth floor in a locked room. It was good to get up as high as you could because the truly lethal supercharged dust was near ground-level. It was saturated with fissile waste materials such as Strontium-90, Cesium-137, and Plutonium. The higher dust was really just plain old dust and debris caught in the cyclone. So the higher you were, the safer you were.

But down on the streets it was deadly.

I sat there, body aching, eyes crusty from lack of sleep. The storm had died down somewhat and the building was no longer shaking, plaster falling from the walls, but it was still blowing. Every now and then a good gust would grab the building and shake it like a fist and we’d cling to each other and cover our heads, blessing the people who had built that pile of bricks to last.

Janie was leaning up against me with her head on my shoulder. Her eyes were closed, but she wasn’t really sleeping. Just shutting out the world, the moan of the wind, the stink of the apartment that smelled like cat piss and woodrot. The boys―Texas Slim, Carl, and Gremlin―were trading tales as they did, each trying to outdo the other like old men discussing who had the most miserable childhood or teenage boys boasting of sexual excesses.

“We’re going to have to spend the night, aren’t we, Nash?” Janie whispered.

“Yeah. It’s too hot out there right now.”

The wind had died down some, but not enough for my liking. Once the wind blew itself out and the dust dispersed, the roentgens would die out. But not until.

So we were staying.

“What’s the Geiger saying?”

Carl took a reading. “Were getting sixty up here. It’s dropping.”

Two hours before it was pegging nearly a hundred micro-roentgens and that was getting a little warm. Still not too bad, not like down below where the dust was probably putting out at least 400 or in places like Chicago, which had taken a direct hit from a 500-megaton device and had a lingering radioactivity so high it could only be measured in rem. There were a million micro-roents in one rem and, before civilization passed, rumor had it that Chicago was cooking at something like 5,000 rem. If anything was still alive there, I didn’t want to know what it was.

Gremlin’s voice was droning on and on about some black chick named Homegirl he had known in Fort Wayne. Hatchet Clans got her one day, just outside the city, he claimed. They gang-raped her in the street, scalped her with a butcher knife. Then, while she was still breathing and the last Clan-boy was still pumping on her, the others started cutting off her fingers and pulling her teeth and slicing off her ears for souvenirs as the Clans were wont to do.

“What did you do?” Carl said. “Just fucking watch?”

“What was I supposed to do? There was ten of them and one of me.”

Texas Slim thought that was funny. “Thought you said you loved her?”

“I did. Every chance I got.”

That sent Texas Slim into gales of laughter. “Ain’t that something? Ain’t that just something?” he said. “I loved a girl like that once. She was colored, too…no, maybe she was Indian. I use to bone her in the ass every chance I got. She only had one tit, though. But that was okay.”

“One tit,” Gremlin said. “You ain’t real picky are you?”

Carl laughed. “Oh, he’s picky, all right. He only fucks his left hand. Got himself a thing for it.”

“I fuck them both. You know that,” Texas Slim admitted. “And when I do, I only think of your mother.”

“There you go again.”

“That’s sick,” Gremlin said. “Real sick shit talking about somebody’s mother like that. When I jack off, I think only of hot, young stuff.”

He cast an eye on Janie when he said that and nobody missed it. I saw it. I think he wanted me to see it.

Texas Slim said, “Hey, Gremlin? Are you aware they have a romantic day for couples, Valentine’s Day?”

“Yeah. I heard that.”

“Well, they have a romantic day for single fellows like you, too. It’s called Palm Sunday.”

“No shit?”

Janie was trying not to laugh, but she couldn’t help herself. Either could I. This was my bunch, my posse. Like kids in a locker room. Christ.

Gremlin laughed for a bit, too, then got right down to doing what he did best: complaining.

“I’m so sick of this waiting I could puke,” he said. “We gonna have to stay in this shithole all damn day, Nash?”

“Yeah, and probably the night, too.”

“Shit. I ain’t got nothing to drink and nothing to fuck. I can’t stand this waiting around.” He stood up and paced back and forth while Texas Slim and Carl talked about radioactive women they’d known. “I mean, shit, Nash, what we need is some wheels. Get our ass out of this city.”

“Sure. And if you want to go out and look for one in that dust, you go right ahead. Me? I’m staying. Too hot out there for my ass. My dick is already glowing in the dark.”

Janie punched me and Texas Slim laughed.

“Yeah, quit your fucking whining, man,” Carl said.

“Yeah,” Gremlin said. “But it stinks in here.”

“So do you, man, but you don’t hear me complaining.”

Gremlin didn’t even laugh at that. “I’m sick of this shit. We left our food in the van, nothing to eat. This fucking bites it.”

“You had Spam like the rest of us,” Janie said.

“I don’t want Spam, woman. I want a steak and a baked potato with sour cream. I want some bread and butter. I want a piece of pie and some ice cream and―”

“That all?” Carl said.

“No, that ain’t all. I want some decent grub. I want some booze. I want some cigarettes that aren’t stale and I want a blowjob.”

Carl just shook his head. “Texas, suck his dick, will ya?”

Texas Slim smiled, shook his head “No sir, doctor told me to go easy on the sausage and gravy. I follow his orders.”

“This is fucked up,” Gremlin said. “You guys just joke and laugh and where the hell’s any of it getting us?”

He was starting to get on everyone’s nerves. We were getting sick of listening to him. At first, it had been kind of humorous the way he’d complain about anything, from sleeping bags to canned beans to the lint in his belly button. Always bitching about something and complaining about something else. But it was not humorous anymore, it was just plain bullshit. Way things were these days, you just had to take what you could get. Wasn’t anybody’s fault that the Scabs attacked and the storm came. Shit happened. You lived through it, that’s all. Armageddon taught a body patience if nothing else.

Carl said, “Hey, Nash, wanna get high? Wanna get reeeeaaal high?”

I declined as a joint was lit.

We were always finding dope. There was no shortage of it. There was just a shortage of people to smoke it, was all.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the world and what it had been and what it was now and what it might be in ten years or a hundred. How do you live through something like Doomsday and not become as shattered as the cities around you? And how do you find the plaster to patch up all those jagged cracks and crevices that have split open your mind and your soul and made you maybe something less than human? How do you hold yourself together and find any sort of optimism again? God knew, I wanted to be like Janie. Wanted to be kind and caring and tolerant like I once was. Part of me wanted that very badly. But it was fantasy. And another part of me knew that only too well and that part was the dogged, grim realism that cemented me to this new fucked-up world.

The world was shit.

To survive you had to be an animal.

The end had brought things into being that had no right to exist and it had changed others to absolute nightmares. That was the world these days. Like something Roger Corman had envisioned back in the fifties…mutants and roving gangs, religious crazies and nature run wild. Like in one of those old movies that I used to watch on the late show when I worked three to eleven at the shoe factory in Youngstown, The Day the World Ended or Panic in the Year Zero or World Without End. Just laying there on the couch, chewing takeout pizza and drinking beer, never once thinking I would be living through some kind of fucked-up horror movie.

But I was.

We all were.

Things had changed. The fallout had killed hundreds and hundreds of millions. There were resulting mutations and degeneration and savagery on the part of those that did survive. I had seen my share, but I knew there were worse things out there. Things I could not or would not want to imagine and one of them had come to me in a dream. Regardless, I knew very little about radiation or nuclear physics or genetics or any of it. Yes, I had a solar-powered Geiger Counter. But I didn’t really know how it worked or how radiation affected things like atoms or biology.

Back in Youngstown, after it happened and everyone was just kind of wandering around in shock, the germs started sweeping the cities. There was a guy in my building named Mike Pallenberg. He taught physical sciences at East Palestine High. A real smart guy. He was an assistant football coach for the Bulldogs and when I was in high school I was a running back for the Lisbon Blue Devils. So we had a little rivalry going. A friendly one. When he was dying from radiation sickness, on his deathbed, he said, You just wait, my friend, you just fucking wait. There’s things gonna happen now I’m glad I won’t be around to see. All that nuclear energy released at once…it’ll affect the weather, living things, everything. You wait. See, it’s the molecules. They’ve changed just as cells have mutated and physics as we understand it has been bent on its ear. This world is mutating, organically and physically, microscopically, matter and energy and subatomics going haywire. Nothing will ever be the same. Not for a hundred-thousand years.

If ever.

Mike was absolutely right.

I had seen mutations. They were real. The radiation wrought evolutionary changes that would never have to come to be in a sane, sunlit world beneath the eye of a loving god. And it wasn’t always the changes you could see. Much of it was, as Mike hinted, microscopic. Diseases that men had beaten off years ago mutated and spread like wildfire after the bombings. And that’s what worried me now. The germs. What they were becoming. Because I had seen cities where plagues, super-plagues, the Fevers, had turned them into leper colonies.

And those germs were still out there.

Mutating, waiting to burn through what was left of the human race.

Like David Bowie said, this ain’t rock and roll, this is genocide.

 

9

If you’re reading this, then no doubt you know how the world ended. Feel free to skip this part. I’m putting this down just to clarify things in my mind and maybe leave some kind of record.

Okay.

It started with an exchange of nuclear weapons in the Middle East. Iran launched one against the Israelis and the Israelis responded in part. Maybe it could have stopped there, but the fuse had been burning a long time and by then it was just too late. Nukes were used in Africa, Asia and Europe. About thirty such weapons were used worldwide. Mutual assured destruction, just like they’d always said. Four of them were detonated in the continental United States—one in New York, one in Chicago, another in Atlanta, and the last in LA. The initial strikes killed fifty million people, the news said…when the stations were still broadcasting, that is. Resultant contamination killed another three million and fallout tripled that within six months. All of the weapons used against the U.S. came from North Korea. The U.S. responded by turning North—and much of South—Korea into a radioactive dead zone. We hit it with some eight nukes. The Russians hit it three times, the Chinese twice.

Just goes to show, we should have taken out that crazy little dictator when we had the chance.

Nukes were being fired by just about everybody in the wake of mass nuclear destruction. Africa and the Middle East were particularly hard hit by a variety of tactical nukes that killed millions as armies attempted to destroy armies and succeeded mainly in thinning the already teetering civilian populations. By the time it all came to an end, there was no more civilization as such. Just billions of people dying from fallout and rampant infectious disease. Firestorms raged and cities cooked hot with fallout and nuclear winter descended.

And that is how the world ended.

The Doomsday scenario.

Not with a bang, but with big motherfucking BOOM!

 

10

I dozed for an hour or so and when I woke, Gremlin and Texas Slim were giggling. I had been dreaming of my wife. What a waste to open my eyes to this fucking nightmare. I drank some water and smoked a cigarette, watched Janie’s long legs cross over one another and wished we were alone so I could screw the hell out of her. Typical male thoughts. Even Doomsday couldn’t change the male animal.

Carl was cleaning weapons. Texas Slim was humming some old John Cougar song and laughing as he did so. Gremlin was staring at me. He had a funny look in his eyes.

“What is it?” I asked him, already suspecting it would be trouble.

Gremlin smiled. “Just wondering when it’s gonna be and who it’s gonna be. That’s all.”

“Hell are you talking about?”

“You know.”

“No, maybe you ought to elaborate.”

He kept smiling and I wanted to slap that grin off his face. “When you gonna do it, Nash? When you gonna call The Shape? When you gonna call it up?”

That snapped my eyes open.

Yes, it was time to make a selection, to offer someone up, but I didn’t need this sonofabitch to remind me of the fact, to rub my nose in it. Now and then I liked to forget. Pretend my soul wasn’t dirty. The wind out there was still blowing, dust and grit scraping against the building. I listened to it, felt a different sort of wind blowing through my heart. A wind that was hot and ugly and searing.

Janie saw it coming, said something, but I wasn’t hearing her.

Gremlin saw then that he’d crossed the line. “Listen, I just mean―”

I don’t know what came over me. I balled my hand into a fist and punched him in the mouth. Gremlin’s head jerked back and his lips mashed against his teeth and then the blood was flowing. I hadn’t really even thought about it; it was a reflexive kind of thing.

“You stupid motherfucker!” I shouted at Gremlin’s cringing, bleeding face. “We don’t talk about that! We never fucking talk about that!”

Gremlin babbled out some silly excuse, his lips and teeth all stained red, and he was so pathetic, so ridiculous that the anger rose in me like lava up the cone of a volcano. It burned bright and hot. I lost all reason and just started swinging. Gremlin warded off a few with his upraised arms, but most of them landed and I had the satisfaction of hearing him beg and bleed and hurt. Gremlin’s left eye was blackened, his nose bloodied, lip split. There were some nice eggs on his head. I would have kept going, lost in the idiotic violent splendor of the thing, but then Carl pulled me off and Janie shouted at me with such utter disappointment and hopeless resignation that I just curdled inside.

Carl finally let go and by then there was no fight left. “It’s cool, Nash,” he said and you could tell by the sound of his voice that he didn’t think it was cool at all. “You got him good. Taught him a lesson and all. Got it out of your system. Chill now. Step away.”

“Well, you certainly whomped his cookies, Nash,” Texas Slim said. “You worked him like three miles of dirty road.”

They were all staring at me and I didn’t like it one bit.

But I guess I would have stared, too. Irrational, violent outbursts have a way of attracting attention just like they have a way of shaking your trust in people. I felt foolish, guilty, angry with myself. I’d always prided myself on my cool head. Patient, understanding. This wasn’t me. I didn’t hit people. Not unless they were a threat. And what threat had Gremlin been? He was just an annoying little windbag that never knew when to shut up.

“Nice job,” Janie said. “Jesus Christ, Rick.”

The others just kind of turned away. All of them except for Gremlin. He kept eyeballing me with an accusatory stare. There was blood all over his face, purple welts. His lower lip was swollen like a sausage and his right eye was nearly closed. It hurt just looking at him.

“Feel better now, Nash?” Gremlin, said spitting blood onto the floor. He chuckled. “I’ve been beat worse. A lot worse. That’s okay. I got out of hand and you showed me my place. I know better now. I know how I rank.”

I reached out to him, to put a hand on his shoulder, and Gremlin slapped it away, almost putting me on my ass in the process. “Don’t you fucking touch me, you goddamn asshole.”

Nobody disagreed with what he said.

I went and sat by myself, smoked, brooded, listened to the storm. Pouted. I was angry and at the same time I was beside myself with guilt. I kept thinking: You could kick them all to the curb right now. Get rid of ‘em and in a week you’d have a new posse. Who are they to fucking judge you? Who the hell do they think they are?

Crazy thinking, I know. I couldn’t kick Janie to the curb without kicking a big part of myself there, too.

Shit.

Ultimately, I had just shaken their confidence in me and I knew it. I didn’t really know why it happened, only it had been coming for a long time. It just happened as such things will. Partly it was the damn depression that ate me open most days, made it feel like there was a black hole south of my belly that wanted to suck me into the darkness alive and kicking. And another part was probably general frustration, unhappiness, and the very real fact that Gremlin was really, really getting on my nerves. Add to that that the waiting was killing me. We had to move. We had to get west before…well before something caught up with us.

Nobody spoke and I kept my mouth shut.

Gremlin hadn’t bothered washing the blood off his face. He wore it like warpaint. He sat on the floor, legs drawn up, arms wrapped around them, head cradled between his knees. His eyes were crazy and wild and full of pain and they were on me. Only on me.

Staring.

Hating.

I had the most ugly feeling that as soon as my eyes were closed Gremlin would slit my throat. So I watched him. Watched him close. And as I did so, feeling that my little posse was fragmenting, I felt more alone and vulnerable than ever. I started thinking about Shelly. I started thinking about Youngstown.

I remembered standing on the roof of our building the night the bombs came down. Lots of people were up there. New York City had taken a direct hit. Though it was a long way from Youngstown, if you looked to the east you could see where it was…or had been…because the horizon was glowing blue.

 

11

Beneath the bleached eye of the moon, the rats came out.

They came out of gutters and cellars, ruined buildings and ditches, places of dark and dampness where corpses rotted to foul ooze. They became a great black squealing river that flooded the streets and sank them in greasy, skittering bodies. Nothing with blood in its veins stood a chance. The rats were swarming, infesting, pressing forward like driver ants in some steaming jungle, driven to frenzy by a relentless hunger, living only to feed and breed and sink the world in their numbers.

The crazies in the streets never stood a chance.

Five minutes before, the dust storm finally having blown itself out, they were still shouting out psalms and raising their hands skyward to the Lord God above, shouting about salvation and deliverance…and now they were inundated.

Buried alive.

The rats hit them from every direction and you could hear flesh tearing and bones crunching and distant screams extinguished by plump, ravenous bodies. It became a feeding frenzy as the rats devoured the crazies, devoured each other, and even themselves in their mania. And it was quick. Just three minutes from the time the first wave hit to when the black river evaporated into the shadows, leaving nothing behind but stripped rat carcasses and five sets of well-picked bones that gleamed white as ivory in the moonlight.

There was not a drop of blood to be found on those bones.

Janie refused to watch, of course. She wasn’t squeamish by that point, but with her there was always a line of common decency that she refused to cross. The rest of us watched the action from the windows. Carl and Texas Slim had a bet going and that made it all a little more exciting for them. Carl said it would take the rats at least five minutes to strip the crazies; Texas Slim said three minutes, tops.

And he was right.

“You’re one cool hand, Carl,” he said. “That’s six joints you owe me. Feel free to pony up right now, dear friend.”

“Shit,” Carl said, pulling off his cigarette. “Feel like I been suckered.”

“You have,” Janie told him.

Texas Slim shook his head. “No, Janie, that’s not so. See, I know rats and I understand rats. I’ve made a study of them. It’s quite scientific. See, rats are different now. They’ve changed. They’re fiercer than they once were. There are some real big mutants out there now the size of cats and dogs. Now, these new rats…it’ll take a pack of thirty of them about thirty minutes to strip five bodies, right? So it stands to reason that three-hundred of them can strip five bodies in three minutes. What you do is you take the number of people and divide it by the number of rats and thereby arrive at your sum, which in this case you round off to three minutes, give or take.”

It was insane how his mind worked. “You’ve got the most fucked up head I’ve ever seen,” I told him.

Texas Slim smiled. “Thanks. I appreciate that.”

“Don’t encourage him, Nash,” Carl said. “He’s got enough problems.”

I figured that was probably true.

Carl butted his cigarette, looked around. “Hell is Gremlin? He’s been gone a long time.”

“He’s out pouting since Nash cocked his block,” Texas said. “He said he was going to scavenge around in the building here, but I know better.”

He had that one pegged pretty damn good. That’s exactly what Gremlin was doing…licking his wounds, feeling sorry for himself, and pouting. I didn’t doubt it a bit. Since I lost control on him, cocked his block, he had not stopped staring at me with that vicious gleam in his eye. It did no good to apologize. He just wasn’t having it. Even Janie had tried to talk sense to him. The bottom line was that I had lost it and pounded on him for no good reason other than the fact that I was probably externalizing some inner turmoil. That’s how Janie explained it. Maybe that was bullshit, but it sure sounded good.

“He’s been gone awhile,” Janie said. “Do you think you should go look for him?”

I shook my head. “He’ll come back when he’s ready.”

“I will then.”

She started to rise from the sofa but I yanked her back down again. “Janie, no. He’s just being a pain in the ass. Give him some time, he’ll come back. Besides, I don’t need anyone else risking their necks out there. It’s dark out.”

She didn’t need any more convincing after that. Truly, though, I didn’t want to go look for him because I was almost afraid to, afraid of stumbling around in the dark with him out there…waiting. He had an axe to grind and I didn’t want him grinding it against my head. And I sure as hell didn’t want Janie doing it, either. I had seen how Gremlin looked at her…like she was a piece of meat and he was hungry. There was five miles of hell in that look.

“What if he goes outside?”

“I hope to hell he doesn’t. Not in the dark. The rats’ll be bad. Who knows what else?”

“The Children,” Carl said.

It was possible. And if Gremlin was crazy enough to go up against them, then he was asking to die a hard, ugly death.

So we sat around as night came on, just bored silly. Carl got a few candles out of his pack and lit them. It made everything nice and Medieval, stuck up in that stinking apartment by candlelight while rats and worse things prowled the streets below. It was like living during the 14^th century.

Texas Slim started chatting away about the good old days in college studying mortuary science. How you’d shoot Permaglo into cadavers through the carotid artery after you’d drained them to firm up muscles and organs.

“I used to like to wash them,” he told us. “You have to soap and lather them up and then knead them like bread dough to work the Permaglo through. Gives the skin a nice, natural tint. You can see it happen right before your eyes. You shoot it in the mouth to keep it toned. That way, Uncle Joe or Aunt Tillie doesn’t get all gray, mouth sagging, lips shriveled back from the teeth. People don’t care for that. Don’t like that death-grin. They like them fresh-looking so they can say, looks like he’s just sleeping, ain’t he sweet?”

“That’s it,” Carl said. “You sick goddamn fuck. I’m not going to sit here and listen to you talk about that shit. You’re creeping me out.”

Texas Slim chuckled. “Just telling you how these things work. Might come in handy someday, you knowing this.”

“How the hell could it be handy?”

“Well, hell, son…it’s a mean world out there…am I right? Sure. All manner of nasty things out there. Germs and Fevers and plague and nasty microbes. Could be someday we’ll be dead and you’ll be alone. Say that happens. There you are, so lonely you could fuck a fence. Then you happen upon some attractive lady, only she’s dead—”

“Knock it off, you fucking ghoul.”

“―so you take this knowledge of mine and you whisk her off to your friendly neighborhood mortuary and fix her up. Paint her, polish her, firm up her attributes, spray her female parts down good with disinfectant―”

“I’m warning you.”

“―get her all prettied up, crack yourself a bottle of wine, and see what happens. Let nature take its course. But don’t forget the eye caps, my friend. Slip ‘em under the lids…otherwise they get that sunken look. And that’s a turn off, trust me.”

“I’m going to kill him, Nash. I swear to God I am,” Carl said.

And it looked like Janie might just join him in that particular endeavor.

I just sighed. I truly dreaded these down times because it always went this way. Texas Slim went out of his way to annoy Carl and he rarely failed at it.

“Change the subject, will ya?” I said.

Texas Slim shrugged, didn’t have a problem with that. And for maybe five minutes we had blessed silence. But it didn’t last. Of course it didn’t last.

“In Morgantown, before the germs got out of hand,” Texas Slim said, launching into another tale, “we had some big rats. I saw them. I was bopping and hopping with this Chinese guy they called Ray Dong. We got along good, Ray and I. He had once been in the time-honored business of embalming like yours truly, so we had all kinds of things in common—”

“This isn’t about fucking corpses, is it?” Carl said.

Texas Slim laughed, but laughed in a secretive, conspiratorial sort of way as if maybe he did have a few amusing anecdotes about corpse-fucking but he wasn’t about to share them in mixed company. “No, this is about rats. Big rats and a fellow I knew named Ray Dong. He was Chinese. This happened in Morgantown, which is in West Virginia.”

“We gathered that,” Janie said.

Texas Slim went on: “Ray was one of these guys who could eat anything. Dogs, cats, green crawly things. A rare stomach had he. He just liked to be eating all the time. So one day he says to me, he says, Hey, let’s go rat hunting. I say, Rat hunting? What for? To eat ‘em, he says. Some of ‘em are pretty big now. We get one, cook it over a fire, be like roast pork. Only I get the heart. I like the hearts best. I say, I don’t want to eat rats. But he talks me into it. It’s dangerous stuff, rat hunting, but Ray…well I simply couldn’t say no to him. Eating something that’s been dosed isn’t a good idea as you all know and those big black rats, oh boy, they’ve all been dosed for certain. You know what happens when you start eating mutants.”

Radiation changed a lot of things. There was a rumor going around that if you ate mutated things, you absorbed what was in them and it became you. Something to do with the DNA. Essentially, you are what you eat. You start eating a lot of rats with their chromosomes all wigged out from radiation saturation…it fucks up your genes and pretty soon, well, you start becoming something else, something rat-like.

But it was a rumor. That’s all.

“So we go rat hunting,” Texas Slim said. “We go out at night and I don’t like it. We have to hide from night things. Lots of night things in Morgantown, you know. As luck would have it, we find rats. Hard not to. But they’re in packs, so we lay low. Finally we see one big ugly thing about the size of a pig. It’s chewing on a corpse, gnawing on an arm like a chicken leg. Never seen anything like it before. Big, like I say. All kind of gray and wrinkly, no hair just a lot of black bristles like a hog. It saw us right away, made a squealing sound like a mama boar. Ray put the flashlight beam right in its face and…ho, Jesus and his holy mother, it sure was ugly. Hairless and flabby, big slobbering mouth dripping juice and black eyes, real black shiny eyes. Had a nub growing out of the side of its neck like a second head that never took.

“Ray…oh hell, he was crazy, crazy. He ran right out there, hooting and hollering while I was filling my pants. He had a .45 and he pumped three rounds into that ugly mother-raper. The rat made a squealing sort of noise and came right at Ray, took him down right in front of my eyes. Poor Ray. It took him right by the face and started chewing and slurping. That’s when I saw that there were a dozen rat pups clinging to its back, all kind of bald and wormy-looking, all of them screeching with those little pink sucker mouths. I ran. Last thing I heard of old Ray Dong, the best Chinese man I ever knew, was the crunching sound when mama rat bit through his skull.”

There was silence for a moment after that one. Then I said, “And what was the point of that story?”

“Just passing time.”

Goddamn Texas. He never quit. We had enough troubles without him giving us worse nightmares than we already had. I knew about the rats. So did the others…we just didn’t like to spend a lot of time thinking about them was all. I could have told him about the rat that Sean, Specs, and I saw in the Cleveland sewers, but I didn’t like to think about it.

Janie wasn’t much on horror stories and especially since these days most of them were true. She just sat there staring at Texas Slim and I was feeling the heat coming off her, knowing she was about to read him out.

But she never did.

For down below, out there in the world of crawling shadows, there came a sound which sealed her lips.

 

12

It was a great resounding roaring/howling sound.

It rose up and up until it took on the shrill baying of an air raid siren and I could feel it thrumming through my bones and scraping right up my spine. The windows practically rattled. It was hollow and primeval in tone. We had all heard things at night before, but never anything like this. It stirred some instinctual terror in us. At least it did in me.

Janie was gripping my arm so hard her nails actually broke the skin.

When it had echoed away finally into the night, Carl swallowed and said, “What in the hell was that?”

But there were no answers. I was picturing some mammoth horror rising from the ooze of a Mesozoic swamp and howling at the misty moon high above.

Nobody said anything for a moment or two.

We were all waiting for someone else to break the silence, but no one did. And the reason for that was very simple: we were waiting. Just waiting. Waiting for something else to happen, for that howling to rip open the night again. Only this time it would be a little bit closer.

I opened my mouth to say something ridiculous and reassuring, but I never got that far. For there was a thud. A sudden, immense thud that shook the whole building. It came again. And then again. Plaster fell from the walls, dust trickled from the ceiling. Downstairs somewhere, something crashed, something else made a high-pitched splintering sound. There was lots of noise suddenly down there: things falling and banging and then only silence.

Everyone waited quietly after that.

But whatever it was, it never came back.

But, then, neither did Gremlin.

“Should we go look for him?” Janie said after a long time. “I mean, all of us?”

I shook my head. “No. It’s too dangerous out there. We’ll have a look in the morning.”

“He’ll probably be dead by then.”

“He’s probably already dead, darling,” Texas Slim said.

There was no more to be said on the subject. I set up watches for the night and that was it. The others got what sleep they could, trying not to think about what had been rooting around downstairs.

My dreams were far from pleasant. They started out with nightmares about being stalked through a wrecked city by some kind of horrible beast I could not see and ended with a real doozy about Youngstown. I dreamed the city split wide open like a rotting pumpkin and millions of hungry graveyard rats began pouring out.

 

13

Morning.

Just after first light, I got them moving. We ate something quick out of our packs and went downstairs. Soon as we made the lobby, we stopped dead.

“Will you look at this,” Carl said.

The lobby had been ransacked.

All that racket from the night before, the banging and crashing, well here was its source. Plaster was gouged right down to the lathes, holes punched in the walls, doors torn off hinges. Everything was broken and shattered. And for about six or seven feet up the stairs, the railing balusters had been smashed like somebody had taken an axe after them. A goddamn big axe.

“What happened here?” Janie dearly wanted to know.

But I had no idea. Something had come into the building last night, that same thing that had been howling, and it went on a real bender down here. But what that might be I could not even guess.

“Look,” Carl said.

The front door was missing. Texas Slim found it outside, cast into the street. Its surface was cut with triple ruts like it had been worked with a scythe. A sturdy, century-old hardwood door…it must have taken something damn nasty with big claws to do work like that.

“Fucking monster,” Carl said.

“Guess I’d be inclined to agree with you,” Texas Slim said, though it was obvious he didn’t care for the idea.

We stood around in silence and I knew I had to get them going, get them doing something constructive before the significance of this made them want to hide under the beds. And I was just about to do that when somebody walked up.

“About time you people got up.”

Gremlin was standing there.

His olive drab fatigue coat was dusty, a ribbon of cobwebs hanging from one sleeve, but other than that he looked no worse for wear…that is, if you discounted his bruised face, split lip, and blackened eye.

Nobody said a word for a moment.

I went over to him. “Where the hell have you been?”

Gremlin offered me a grin that was downright creepy. “That’s some nice welcome,” he said. “I was hiding out. Some kind of thing down here last night. I hid out in an old coal bin in the basement.”

For some crazy reason, I just did not believe him. His eyes were glazed, shell-shocked almost. And that grin…it was dopey and strange, seemed to be saying, I know something you don’t, oh yes.

“We figured you were dead,” Carl said. “Too bad.”

I said, “Did you see what did this?”

“No, I heard it, but I wasn’t getting close enough for a look. Fucking thing was sniffing around…I think it was looking for me.”

Janie, who was usually the most sympathetic person in the world, did not say a word.

I was getting a bad feeling, but I couldn’t be sure what it meant.

If the others had misgivings about Gremlin’s story, they tried to hide it, but not Texas Slim.

He stood there looking at the destruction, the .50 cal. Eagle in his hand. I was watching him. Watching him real close because I knew two things about Texas: he was fucking weird and he had a very good head on his shoulders. So I watched him run it all through his brain, see what he came up with. Texas stood there, holding his gun and wrinkling his brow as he did when he was vexed. Then slowly, he turned his gaze on Gremlin. Kept it there.

Gremlin looked to me for support and got nothing but a cool blank stare. “I heard it, same as you did. But I hid out. You think I was going to come out and face that fucking thing with the way it was howling and tearing this place apart?”

“You were armed, weren’t you? You had a three-fifty-seven. Why didn’t you try and pop our visitor?”

I stood there, waiting, as did the others.

Texas Slim was interrogating the guy, but someone had to. Something just didn’t wash about Gremlin’s story and it didn’t wash so much that it just plain stank rotten.

“What is this? What are you insinuating?”

“Yeah,” Carl finally put in. “Fuck are you insinuating, asshole?”

But Texas, being Texas, just shrugged and smiled thinly, let it all go. He’d made his point and he knew it. He’d cast doubt on Gremlin and a doubt that was tangible enough so that even thick heads like Carl picked up on it.

After all that, I got them organized, got everyone loaded up with their duffels and sacks and on the road. There was only so much daylight and I didn’t want to waste a second of it.

 

14

By late afternoon the next day, we still had no wheels.

We wandered for hours, searched as far west as the Tri-City Plaza on 5^th, but the Geiger started beeping because we were getting too close to Chicago. So we cut back to Midtown, then down as far as Glen Park, searching Gleason Park and the University lots and still came up with nothing. Then back downtown to Union Station to check parking garages. Just about everything had been stripped of tires or was smashed-up or had a dead battery. It seemed pretty hopeless.

We were marooned in Gary.

Trapped in that cemetery.

We had to get out. That was the bottom line. The background radiation was a little high, not too bad, but we were practically on Chicago’s doorstep and if a good gust came blowing east from the Windy City we would be in trouble.

As we walked, I thought about all the things I missed. Fresh food, TV, and motorcycles came to mind right away. There were bikes around, but most of them were either wrecked or in pretty bad shape. All the dealerships had been looted after society and law and order had collapsed. People being people had helped themselves to all those little extras they’d never been able to afford. It was tough finding good vehicles, too. Most cars and trucks were either smashed up out on the roads, abandoned and rusting, or had been stripped of useable parts. You’d see a lot of that. Really nice pick-ups, SUVs, sports cars sitting around on flat tires with shattered windshields, engines stripped or destroyed. Oh, there were plenty of drivable rides out there, but the people who had them also had guns. Lot of times you’d just find cars with skeletons in them.

Nobody was in a real good mood. We were tense, expectant, waiting for something truly horrible and truly dangerous to come around every corner. Because it was there. We all felt that. It was watching us, waiting for us, we just didn’t know what form it would take. And after those sounds we’d heard last night, we expected only the worse.

But that was night.

This was day: a misty, damp sort of day that carried an unpleasant chill to it. I didn’t like us being this vulnerable. In a vehicle we had the luxury of protection, of shooting and driving off…but not on foot. Any pack of crazies could chase us, corner us, and we only had so much ammo.

As we walked down yet another street, scoping out the rusted hulks of vehicles, the rubble and refuse, the bones heaped in the gutters, I was thinking about Gremlin.

Gremlin in general annoyed me in ways I could not exactly put a finger on…but after that weird howling last night, he had popped back up this morning and something had been very off about him. I was not sure what. There was something there and my gut-sense told me it was trouble, but of what variety I could not imagine. The howling. Gremlin coming back. That fucked-up, creepy grin on his face. Maybe I was just tired and wigged, but I was also certain I was not wrong in my assessment of him.

We kept going. Another street, plodding along. More wrecks, more staring empty buildings. Drifts of sand in the street. A light breeze that smelled dirty and low. I watched Texas Slim watch Gremlin and wondered what was going through his mind.

“Years ago,” Texas was saying, “I worked at a quaint little establishment called the Horas Brothers Family Mortuary in Lafayette. That’s in Louisiana, Carl, case you were wondering.”

“Yeah, I know where the hell it is.”

“I had…well, gotten myself into some difficulties with a young lady in New Iberia and it necessitated that I seek gainful employment to pay my child support, you understand,” he said, chuckling to himself. “Well, one day we received the body of a criminal named Tommy Carbone. He was known in underworld circles as Tommy the Tripod and the reason for that should be quite obvious. Anyhow, this poor soul died in prison. Apparently…and you’ll excuse me, Janie…all this poor man did was masturbate three, four, five times a day, I learned. And then it became worse and it was every hour on the hour. In his cell, the prison workshop, the dining hall. Finally, the prison authorities took him to the infirmary and strapped him down. Poor Tommy. He laid there hour after hour with that quite mammoth penis of his standing straight up.

“Finally, he went into convulsions and died and then he came to us. The problem was, you see, that his large and particularly ungainly member was still quite hard. Death will do that, you see. Even after we suctioned the blood from him, it would not lay down like a good dog. Well…we had a sheet thrown over him and it looked like a tent. As it was, his manhood being so long, we simply couldn’t close the lid on the casket so, necessity being the mother of invention—”

“Do we have to hear this?” Janie said, slapping at a fly.

“—we used a rotary saw to cut it off. I’ll never forget that day as long as I lived when I felled that high timber. I felt just like a lumberjack. Timber! I cried when it came crashing to earth. Of course, the director, Archie Horas, being a man of the most morbid imagination, had that gargantuan member stuffed, shellacked, and made into a fine walking stick.”

“All right,” I said, a headache beginning to thread its way through my skull. “Let’s shitcan the talking for awhile. Everybody keep their eyes open. We gotta find something here.”

And we did as we reached the western edge of the city, skirting what had once been Tolleston and moving north towards Westbrook across West 6^th and Taft. The stink of smoke grew very heavy.

 

15

I took point, ready for just about anything.

In the overcast sky above, I saw birds circling: crows, buzzards.

I led my posse down an alley and around the collapsed remains of a building which had fallen into its own gaping cellar. There was water down there, black and clogged with leaves.

Scanning what lay ahead with my rifle, I said, “C’mon. Move slow. Move quiet.”

There was rubble in the streets, of course, the fire-scarred facades of buildings, buses and cars and trucks scattered about, some smashed, other overturned, many just rusted to hulks of iron in which birds and rats nested. But it wasn’t just this or the bullet-pocked storefronts, the broken glass, and rivers of sand blown over everything.

There were bodies. Fresh ones.

At least a dozen bodies in the street in every imaginable state of mutilation. Some were missing arms or legs, one woman looked like she had been partially skinned. Another had apparently been trying to crawl beneath an overturned truck and somebody had pinned her to the ground with a homemade spear shaft.

I led the way in with my .30.06 and the others fell in behind, Carl and Texas Slim flanking them, ready to start busting.

“You know what happened here, don’t you?” Texas Slim said.

And I did, all right. But I had other things on my mind and I wasn’t spending any effort thinking about it, doing anything that might divert my attention from what might be waiting out there in the wreckage and the shadowy ruins of buildings. The stench of recent death was in the air. Flies were buzzing in clouds, carrion crows circling high overhead. Three of four cars were burning and I was guessing that they had been running before this happened.

We came upon a young couple spread-eagle in the street. There was blood all over their naked, pale bodies. They had been decapitated, the heads nowhere in sight. Flies swarmed over the stumps of their necks. With a sickening lurch in my stomach, I figured that some of that blood was from what had happened to them before their heads were chopped off.

I was not only sick to my stomach now, I was pissed off. And getting more pissed off by the minute. We moved around a pickup truck that was still blazing with a sharp stink of burning rubber, plastic, and oil. Smoke twisted in the air, ground mist blowing around in damp sheets.

“Oh, God,” Janie said.

There was a heap of bodies on the sidewalk. All of them were naked. They had been slashed and hacked and disemboweled, dumped here in a bloody heap of limbs and staring, sightless faces. Their eyes had been carved out, noses slit free, and the bleeding ovals of their mouths bore witness to the fact that their teeth had been yanked. And every one of them had been crudely scalped.

“Fucking Clans,” Carl said.

Yeah, it was true. The Hatchet Clans always scalped their victims. People said they wore belts and sashes of scalps. Nobody but them came through an area and butchered like this. The Scabs and the other gangs of crazies were violent and bloodthirsty, but they were not this methodical, this viciously creative. The Hatchet Clans were—as Sean had pointed out—like army ants on the march, killing and destroying everything in their path. I knew little about them other than that they were brutal and deranged beyond belief. And that they came in numbers, in huge mobs like swarms of locusts come to devour a field. I didn’t know what held them together, whether it was some social or religious grouping or just a shared bond of insanity.

One thing was for sure: they were tribal and they had gone native. I had heard they were all infected by some kind of morbid fungus. Maybe that was it. Beyond that, they were sinister and smart. They liked to set up ambushes, draw you in by sacrificing a few of their own. Make you think you had the upper hand and then storm in by the hundreds and overrun you.

Everyone was very tense. Other than the Children or the risk of Fevers, nothing could inspire terror like these guys.

We found seven heads, mostly women’s, that had been arranged in some kind of spiraling circle on the hood of a sedan. Symbols were painted in blood on their foreheads. Two men were laying in front of an apartment building. They had been dismembered completely…then with a wicked sense of humor, their torsos and attendant limbs had been arranged in proper anatomical order…just no longer connected.

From a street sign a woman had been hanged by the feet, her fingertips just brushing the pavement. She had been eviscerated, her body cavity hollowed right out. Her breasts had been cut off, her scalp and deathmask peeled free. On her back were more bloody symbols of the sort we were beginning to see everywhere…on dusty windows, car hoods, sidewalks not covered in sand. They looked almost runic and there was something especially frightening about that.

“Goddamn Gary,” Carl said. “This place has always been nothing but a shithole. I told you that when we came in. Fucking sewer. It wasn’t much before the bombs and it ain’t much now.”

“Over here,” Texas Slim said.

There was a Greyhound bus parked at the curb. I saw curtains in the windows. I moved around towards the bifold door. It was open. The safety bars you pulled yourself up the steps with were dark with sticky blood. There was a bloody handprint on one of the windows.

Even outside, I could smell the death cooking in there.

“Carl,” I said. “You and me.”

I went in, Carl at my back. The bus had been converted into a dormitory of sorts with the seats removed and cots lined up in orderly rows…at least they had been. Now they were flipped over, tossed aside, everything painted a shocking red. Blood was sprayed in wild loops and whorls. The floor was sticky with it. Bits of flesh and clumps of hair were stuck in it.

And bodies, of course.

I figured at least a dozen or more, all cut and slit and hacked. And scalped. Limbs and entrails were scattered around, dangling from the shelves on the walls and tangled in old army blankets. It was hot in there, hot and closed-up and revolting with the smell of blood and meat and bowels. Several spear shafts were still sunk in torsos. They had been painted up with symbols that were unreadable because of the dirty handprints and bloodstains.

I got outside before I threw up. And then, to my surprise, I did anyway.

“Don’t go in there,” I told the white, drawn faces of my friends. “Don’t go in there.”

When I felt better, I drank some water from my bottle, had a cigarette with Carl. I felt hopeless and helpless, outnumbered and just beside myself. The carnage. Dear God, the carnage. There must have been a somewhat thriving community of people here before last night. Before the Clans marched in and slaughtered them. I thought they had been normal, too. In the bus, I had seen baskets of clothes, books, tools. These people had not been crazies, they had not been animals.

Texas Slim had been sweeping the area, finding nothing but more bodies. But he had found something else, too. “Got one,” he said. “Over here.”

We followed him. He stopped and there, lying in a twisted heap just inside the display window of a store, was one of them.

A dead Clansman.

He was perforated with bullet holes and must have taken quite a volume of fire before he went down. He wore a filthy green army overcoat and heavy scuffed boots. His hands were curled up like dying spiders. They were yellow, bony, mottled with open sores. His head was shaved bald, but he wore a greasy scalplock like an old time Pawnee warrior. And he had a gas mask on. They all wore them like some kind of fetish mask. Strictly war surplus, as Sean had said, it was made of leather with an oval breathing filter and two glaring buglike eyepieces. It was strapped on.

Finding a dead Clansman was rare because they always carted off their dead with them.

“Let’s see what this fuck looks like,” Carl said. He shouldered his AK and pulled out a K-Bar fighting knife. Being careful not to touch the corpse, he slit the straps and peeled the mask back with the tip of his knife. And then recoiled in horror.

“Shit,” he said.

The face was an atrocity. The flesh was yellow and spongy, grotesquely distorted like the skull beneath was swollen. There was only one eye which was glazed white and staring. The other was gone, a bubbly white mass of fungus growing from the socket and engulfing the entire left hemisphere of the face and head. It seemed to be dissolving the tissue. Tiny rootlets had grown from it in a wiry mass, feeding right into the flesh and up the nostrils. The growth had contorted the muscles, pulling up one side of the face in a hideous toothy grin. The blind eye that had once been powered by a diseased brain watched impassively.

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

We turned away, turning a blind eye to the slaughterhouse around us. Even Janie, who was helplessly sympathetic, just turned away because there was simply too much of it to take inside and hold there. She was drained. We were all drained. The first normal people we’d seen in months and they had been butchered.

I pushed on farther down the street, getting us away from the carnage and the smell, wondering if we should have searched the buildings for survivors and knowing that it was pointless. I rounded the corner ahead and that’s when the first shot rang out.

 

16

I hit the ground with the others, crawling towards the safety of an overturned car. Bullets zipped around me, thudding into storefronts and street signs. Whoever was doing the shooting was not real precise. Another shot rang out and punched through a plate glass window, knocking a dusty cobwebbed mannequin over.

“Hole in one,” Texas Slim said.

“Coming from that building over there, Nash,” Carl said, pointing to a brick walk-up across the street. “See the glint of the barrel? Second story window?”

We were effectively pinned down. Other than a few wrecked cars the street was wide open. A perfect kill zone. The only thing we had going for us, way I saw it, was that the sniper out there wasn’t much of a shot. The bullets came intermittently and always pretty wide of our position as if the shooter was just trying to scare us off or keep us contained.

I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea or not. Carl had a way of stirring up the hornet’s nest and particularly when he had a gun. And then another shot rang out and punched into the hood of the car and I handed Carl the rifle.

Carl jumped up, sighting as he did so. He fired, ejected a shell, and repeated the process twice in quick succession. I couldn’t have done it in a matter of seconds like that and even if I did, I wouldn’t have had any accuracy. But Carl did. His first two rounds punched into the face of the building mere feet from the window and the third went right through it.

And then a figure—a woman, I thought—leaped in front of the window and fired twice, the slugs hitting the street in front of the car. She kept trying to fire, but she was out of rounds and that was obvious by the temper tantrum she threw at that moment before crying out and jumping away from the window.

I just nodded and Carl raced off. I felt the guilt cut into me as it always did and I could feel Janie next to me, disapproving. She just didn’t get it.

Texas Slim said, “Well, I’d better go accompany him. Boys do get into trouble when unsupervised.”

I sighed and leaned up against the car. Sometimes I felt like I was leading and sometimes I knew I was being led. Janie was looking at me. Her face was unreadable.

“If nothing else, they get her she might know where a car is.”

“Oh, is that what you want her for?”

I lit a cigarette to keep my nerves in check and probably so I didn’t slap her right across the face. “Listen to me, Janie. Do me a favor and pack away your fucking morals and ethics, okay? In case you haven’t noticed we’re at war here. We’re fighting for our lives. Do you think I care about some crazy bitch who’s trying to kill us? Well, I don’t. I care about Texas and Carl. You, me. Gremlin. If she dies so that we live, fuck it. That’s how it has to be. You think she cares about us?”

Janie was ready to answer that, of course, but in the building across the way there was the distinctive staccato of Carl’s AK-47 doing some talking over there. He wasn’t cowboying it…just two rapid three-shot bursts and that was it.

“Well, he either got her or she got him,” Gremlin said.

Then we waited. The silence was heavy, almost crushing as we watched the building, listened to the wind make things creak and groan in the deserted street. Dust devils whipped around. Birds cawed in the sky.

I crushed my butt. “Hell are they?”

And then they appeared, pushing a woman before them. Carl shoved her out the doorway and Texas took her by the arm and guided her down the stairs and out into the street. I figured she was probably in her twenties, tall and long-limbed, very attractive. She was tanned and fit, swearing and bitching and fighting the whole way. Texas Slim and Carl, being quite resourceful, had torn up some bedsheets and tied her arms behind her back.

And she didn’t care for it much.

They brought her over and Carl shoved her to the ground. She twisted and squirmed, struggling up to her knees. “You fucking asshole! I said I’d go with you! Quit fucking pushing me, you prick!”

“Quite a mouth on her,” Texas Slim said.

“We caught her in the corridor. She was making a run for it. I convinced her otherwise.”

She was wearing a pair of cut-off jeans and a yellow shirt with a picture of Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster on it extending his middle finger. EAT SHIT, was printed above this. And that pretty much summed up her feelings concerning her captors.