by Tim Curran
After awhile, you got used to anything.
So given that the city was inundated with the unburied dead in every possible stage of decomposition, it really was no surprise that nature in her endless creativity had now spawned mutants that took advantage of all the carrion.
A few blocks from my apartment house there was a 7-11. Back in the day I used to stop there for Slurpies and chili dogs, but within two months of Shelly’s death it had been converted into a body dump for some insane reason. There were hundreds of bodies there broiling in the sun, exhaling clouds of flies and a hot, gaseous stench that would put you right down to your knees.
Word had it that even the incinerators and burning pits couldn’t handle all the dead, so they were stored in alternate locations throughout the city. So the corpse wagons just dumped them in the parking lot.
I passed by it almost daily, paid little mind to the piled dead. The entire city stank like a sunwashed cadaver by that point, but it was particularly concentrated at the 7-11 so I always wore a neckerchief over my mouth. The only thing that intrigued me was the idea that there might be food in the 7-11 that nobody had scavenged. But even the idea of that couldn’t get me to brave the carrion field. The flies were so thick in the air that it looked like a churning cloud of soot rising above the corpses which were heaped in dozens of mounds that had decayed into rank, oozing masses.
One day I found a box of untouched canned food at another Salvation Army depot and I had to pass the body dump on my way home. As I did, I saw that the bodies were moving.
They were actually moving.
I thought at first it was the gas making them writhe and shudder, but that’s not what it was at all. Curious, I stood there with my box of goodies, the hot stink blowing over me, the flies buzzing madly.
And that’s when I saw my first corpse-worm.
It burst from the mouth of a stiff…thick as a man’s wrist, segmented, slick with something slimy like snot. It was flattened out like a tapeworm. It rose right up and hovered there like a cobra preparing to strike. Now it didn’t have any eyes that I could see, but I was almost certain with a rising aversion that it was looking right at me. There was sort of a bulb where its mouth should have been and it kept opening and closing like it was breathing, the whole time dripping a black fluid like India ink.
I just stared, perplexed, revolted.
I dropped my box of food, cans of beans and Spaghettios rolling around the sidewalk.
That worm just hovered there like it was daring me to intervene. Then another worm slid out of a dead woman’s green belly and another forced itself free from the eye socket of a fleshy skull. Pretty soon they were all coming out like they needed to sun themselves, like nightcrawlers drawn out by the rain. Some of them were no bigger around than fingers, but others were as thick as a human leg. They came out of nostrils and eye sockets and assholes, slithering forth and rising up, all of them slimy and corpse-belly white.
I had seen things by that point, things created by fallout that would have driven me mad a year before, but nothing like those worms.
They soon tired of me, however, having no interest whatsoever in living flesh, and went back to work. They started to eat, tunneling through that heaped carrion, sucking and slurping and chewing. Once they burrowed their way into a body, the buffet was open. That bulb or mouth or whatever in the Christ it was, would squirt some of that black juice into the corpse and the innards would liquefy. That juice was some sort of digestive enzyme, like what spiders inject into their prey?they’d squirt it in and then suck up the dissolved liquid.
It was sickening.
But what was even worse was that I saw a dozen worms slide up out of bodies and wrap themselves together in a fleshy helix. They coiled together like that, making some weird trilling sound, vibrating, a watery mucus enveloping them.
This is what made me run.
For I knew, you see, that they were breeding. And that horrible trilling sounded positively orgasmic, pleasurable…like the worms were getting off.
And this was but another component of the world I inherited.
9
By the time May rolled around it had reached the point where I simply had had enough. I was tired of scratching out my meager existence. Tired of the bullshit and the stress and the gnawing anxiety of survival. For after all: what exactly was I surviving for?
Depressed, weary, broken, I thought it over and came to what I thought was the only reasonable solution: I would kill myself. So one dreary night I got a knife and made ready to lay my wrists open.
Believe me, I didn’t do this lightly. But I was exhausted. I just couldn’t go on. You had to be an animal to survive and it just wasn’t in me to do it day after fucking day. The world was dying one day at a time and my wife was gone. What was the point of trying to go on, trying to survive? Warmongers and politicians had torn the guts right out of everything and now it was all over. The American dream had become a global nightmare and gone was the green perfection of high summer and the cool white kiss of low winter and all the Saturdays and baseball games and Fourth of July’s and crisp Autumn days and children’s voices singing Christmas carols. All fucking gone. All wadded up like a piss-stained newspaper and thrown into the trash.
What was left was a lunatic asylum without boundaries.
Weather patterns went to hell. Freak storms swept the globe.
The water was contaminated.
Crops left rotting in the fields.
What remained of the human race was rioting, insane, or dying.
Diseases we had thought very little of in our enlightened age of antibiotics, and had long since been kicked to the curb, came knocking on the door with a fresh bloom of death in their cheeks: cholera, typhoid fever, bubonic plague, diphtheria, infectious influenza. A dozen mutated forms that were never even properly categorized.
Fallout came down in deadly clouds, in sweeping dust storms, in the rain that fell from the sky.
Rats and flies and mosquitoes and every form of vermin imaginable-and some unimaginable-were breeding in numbers that were unthinkable.
Gangs ran wild in the streets looting and raping and murdering.
There were bloody encounters between private militias and the army.
Bodies were piled on the sidewalks.
Entire neighborhoods were being “sterilized” to slow the spread of disease.
Corpses were burned in black smoldering pits.
This was the final inheritance of the nation and the world. While the TV and radio stations were still broadcasting and the internet was still active, I saw it all and was sickened and horrified like everyone else, pushed down into some dark quarter of my mind where I could scream in silence. And when all mass communication and mass media failed…I saw it out my window, in the streets below. There was no point in surviving. No point in seeing what a year would bring or ten of them. It had all been wiped clean. Just like they had always said about nuclear war: five minutes from the rocket age to the Stone Age.
I did not want to see what would come next.
So, alone and beaten, completely hollow inside, I pressed a knife to my wrist. And as I did so I heard a hissing sound like a gas valve left open. And a voice, a clear and authoritative voice, said in my ear, “Do you want to live?”
I dropped the knife first and then slid out of my chair like my bones were made of rubber. I was numb. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t even fucking breathe. I hit the floor, senseless and terrified, shaking so badly my teeth chattered. That voice, that awful voice-
“Do you want to live?”
“Yes,” I said when my breath came back. I wasn’t honestly sure if I wanted to or not, but I was so scared I was afraid to say anything else.
“Will you come unto me?” the voice said in a cool glacial hiss. “Through me there is deliverance, there is survival. Expiation. I demand atonement. Bring unto me the burnt offerings selected by thy hand. They shall be blessed by fire.
�
�Sacrifice…”
That was The Shape.
It never showed itself and maybe I was too unclean to look upon it. It told me how it had to happen, how it all had to come down. I had a benefactor. I didn’t know what it was or what it wanted at that point, but it kept talking to me, whispering in my head, always pointing me in the right direction, keeping me alive. It terrified me. It intrigued me. I felt special. I felt damned. Months later, I could not be sure I really heard it. Maybe it wasn’t a voice at all, maybe it was some warped subjective impression. And maybe I was just insane. But that’s how it began. That’s how I sold my soul to stay alive. That’s how I got into the business of condemning people to death.
But I didn’t know about that part. Not then.
10
After that, I lived like a spider.
After The Shape had whispered to me-alluding to things I must do but never naming them-I hunted the city, seeking out damp, dark corners and crevices where I could secrete myself, webby and lightless places where the roving gangs of scavengers and the packs of wild dogs couldn’t find me. I became good at hiding and stalking mainly because The Shape was always in my head, telling me where to find food and shelter, which damp and dripping cellars were safe and free of rabid rat colonies.
Then one day while out searching for weapons, I got drafted.
The Army or what was left of it found me.
I came out of an alley and I saw two men in white biosuits. They carried tactical carbines and were pointing them right in my face. There was no point in running; they would have cut me down in ten feet. So I just stood there, dumbly, the Browning Hi-Power at my waist and my scavenger bag thrown over one shoulder. I suppose by that point I looked like any other ragbag…unwashed, ragged, eyes crazy and desperate.
They kept their rifles on me.
“Listen,” I finally said, holding my hands up, “I don’t want any trouble. I was just trying to find something to eat. I’ll just back away and go my own way. Okay?”
The two men just looked at each other through the plexiglass shields of their white helmets.
I started backing away.
And as I did so, the one on the left sprayed the alley wall with his carbine. 9mm rounds chewed into the brick just above my head. I went down on my knees, hands still up. “Jesus…take it easy, guys…just…take…it…easy…”
“You ain’t going nowhere, fuckhead,” one of them said. He looked at his partner. “Check him.”
The guy charged over and knocked me on my ass. He stripped the Browning away and the scavenger bag, took my knife, everything but the clothes I wore. Then he made me lay spreadeagle in the alley, facedown in a dirty puddle. He ran a Geiger Counter over me, checked for sores, ulcers.
“Looks clean,” the soldier said.
“Get up, fuckhead,” the other guy said. “Congratulations, you’ve been drafted.”
I looked up at him. “Hell are you talking about?”
But the guy just laughed as I was handcuffed and led to an olive drab tactical van down the street. They shoved and kicked me all the way. And when they asked me how I liked the Army, I told them to go fuck their mothers. Which got me a rifle butt to the back of the head and a ticket to la-la land.
Drafted.
That’s what those assholes called it.
I was part of a clean-up crew, me and a bunch of other idiots that had been likewise “drafted.”
There was nothing remotely military about the job. We simply had to pick up bodies. Decked out in white biosuits, we tooled around in garbage trucks collecting the dead which were a serious health threat.
That was how I met Specs, this skinny little guy with oversized glasses that the soldiers liked to pick on. Me, Specs, two others guys named Paulson and Jackoby made up the collection crew. Of course, the sergeant in charge?some hardballed lifer named Weeks?collectively called us his “Shitheads.” He also had pet names for us: I was “Fuckhead,” Specs was “Mama’s Boy,” Jackoby was “Shit-fer-Brains,” and Paulson was “Mr. Fucking Useless.”
It was quite a scene.
The corpses were gathered, then tossed into the hoppers like Monday’s trash. The first time I saw Paulson pull the lever and cycle the bodies through, the hydraulic ram crushing and compacting the bodies, I threw up. Right in the street. My stomach was already bad from handling all that green meat, but the sound of it, those blades scooping the bodies into the main bin and smashing them to a pulp…it was just too much. I went down on my knees and stripped my mask off, blowing my guts right on the pavement.
The soldiers burst out laughing.
Weeks said, “You don’t like that shit, Fuckhead? Maybe next I’ll throw your ass in there, you fucking pussy.”
Specs helped me to my feet. “You get used to it, man. It’s fucked up, but you do.”
No draftee in any war went through worse shit than we did.
You stood there in those hot suits, flies buzzing around you and maggots dropping from your gloves, just filthy with all the revolting shit that oozed from the bodies. And that was bad enough, but what was worse was hearing those cadavers compact. Even our helmets couldn’t muffle the sound of dozens of putrefying corpses being crushed, bones snapping and flesh being squished to mush. Every time a load was cycled through, black muddy ooze would run from the bottom of the hopper and rain to the street, squeezed from the corpses like pulp from tomatoes.
And the smell of it…dear God, it was unspeakable.
But we had no choice.
While I and the other poor bastards tossed bodies in the hopper, the soldiers would keep their guns on us. If you tried to break out, tried to run, they’d cut you right down, throw you in the back with the stiffs.
When the honeybuckets were full, we drove them outside the city to the dump, emptying the hoppers into the immense body pits where the corpses were burned. A mile from the dump, you could see clouds of black smoke rising into the sky, smell the cremated flesh and burning hair. It was like standing downwind from the ovens at Treblinka.
If there was truly a hell on earth, then this was it.
11
Weeks was not only a psychotic who shot anything that moved, he was deluded and paranoid and should have been in a loony bin somewhere. I never learned what his deal was, whether he was born nuts or if Doomsday had totally unhinged him, but he did not believe that the United States had been decimated by nuclear weapons. At least, not the kind fired by people. He was certain that aliens from outer space were responsible and that even now, they were spreading disease and pestilence and were hiding out in human form.
“Tell me where you came from,” he said to me one day.
“Youngstown.”
“Oh, you think you’re funny? You think this is a fucking joke?”
“You asked me, I told you.”
He put his carbine on me. “And how am I supposed to know you ain’t one of them? You ain’t an Outsider?”
That’s what Weeks called them: Outsiders. He never once used the word “alien” but then he did not have to. Everyone knew.
I didn’t even know what the guy looked like. He never, ever took off his biosuit. He even slept in it. Even back at the barracks he wore it religiously because he had no intention of any Outsider bugs getting him and changing him into some thing. He liked to toy with us, his Shitheads, trying to scare us by threatening to throw us into the hoppers. That worked at first. But after handling the cold cuts day in and day out, it took a lot to ruffle our feathers.
The truth was, Weeks was terrified.
He was afraid of everybody and everything.
He was particularly scared of Paulson because he thought Paulson was an Outsider and he hadn’t made his mind up about Specs just yet. So whenever he talked to them, he kept his distance and when he wanted to throw them a beating, he always made his bullyboy soldiers do it. I found out just how afraid he was one day when he slipped on some corpse slime leaking out of the back of the truck and I grabbed him before he fell down.
/> He screamed.
Screamed bloody murder.
He was so petrified that he brought up his carbine, fully intending to waste me right then and there, only he was hyperventilating so bad and his hands were shaking so wildly that he couldn’t even hold onto the gun. He finally dropped it and crawled away.
“Unclean! Filthy! Dirty!” he cried out. “You put those dirty filthy rotten hands on me! You’re infested like all the rest!”
He finally got to his feet and jumped in the cab where, no doubt, he was spraying himself down with antiseptics.
One of soldiers came over and put the barrel of his carbine right into my face. “I oughta fucking kill you right now, you stupid asshole!”
I felt no fear. Death was hardly a threat by that point. “Go ahead.”
“What?”
“I said, go ahead.”
The soldier looked to his comrades and didn’t know exactly how to handle this. The other soldiers just stood there, feeling awkward and no doubt stupid in their white biosuits. I did not back down. For after being on the collection team for over a month I knew the score. Lately, Weeks hadn’t been able to draft anyone. Word had gotten around about what the Army was up to and people hid out when the vans came around. Only the diseased, the crazy, and the Scabs came out, but they were of no use.
Weeks needed me. He needed all of us.
That’s why the soldier didn’t kill me.
That’s why he was afraid to kill me. Because the way things were, we were short-handed and if I died it meant one of the soldiers would take my place. Weeks would insist upon it. He threatened his boys with it all the time. And whoever pulled the trigger and killed his Shithead would get the job.
“I’m not kidding,” the soldier said.
I stepped forward until the barrel of the carbine was so close I could smell the burnt cordite in the barrel. “So kill me, asshole. Do it. Go ahead. Then you can take your turn handling the meat.”
