by Tim Curran
The soldier stepped back, then shouted out something and clubbed me with his rifle. Under the circumstances, it was his only option. He couldn’t kill me, but on the other hand he couldn’t just walk away from such open disobedience. I mean, shit, what would the Army be if people stopped following orders and actually began thinking for themselves?
I pulled myself up, spit out some blood and grinned. “You raise that rifle to me again, sonny, and I’ll ram it so far up your ass it’ll tickle your tonsils.”
He brought it up again as I knew he would in a typical threat response. “You’re dead! You’re fucking dead! You hear me? You’re fucking dead!”
“So pull the trigger, you goddamn pussy.”
He hesitated. I stepped forward. He backed up.
The other soldiers were watching closely, very closely.
“You ain’t got the balls for it,” I told him.
And there the confrontation ended. After what I’d been through, that little bully boy was pathetic. He was terrified of taking my place. He knew it. I knew it. There was always the chance that he’d lose it and gun me down, but that was no real threat either. So what? Shoveling corpses for a living doesn’t exactly put you on the road to a brighter future. What I had done-and what my intention had been from the start-was to symbolically emasculate that little pushbutton jarhead in front of everyone. And I had. From that point on, as far as we were concerned, he wore a fucking skirt.
I had sown the seeds of open rebellion and the big one was coming.
The showdown.
I think all us shitheads were ready for it, hungry for it even. I knew it was coming because The Shape had already told me. Just like he/she/it had told me that it was going to work out in my favor.
12
When we weren’t out collecting corpses for the common good, Weeks and his bully boys were based out of the National Guard Armory over in Austintown. It had once housed elements of the 838^th Military Police Company. There was a bunkroom that looked like a hospital ward in an old movie. That’s where we shitheads slept. They locked us in at night and let us out in the morning. It was quite a life. We’d come in after a day of handling the cold cuts, just filthy and stinking of decay, and they’d stick us in that room, make us sleep in our own filth.
At night, Specs would have awful nightmares. He’d be crying out or sobbing in his sleep which pissed the other guys off because they needed their rest. He’d be in the bunk next to mine and I’d have to shake him awake.
“Specs, Specs,” I’d say. “Knock it off for chrissake.”
He’d lay there in the darkness, face shiny with sweat, just blinking. He was all messed-up from Doomsday and who wasn’t?
One night as I sat there sharing a smoke with him, he said, “You know what, Nash? I believe in omens and portents. I think the future’s already written if you can figure out how to read it.”
“No shit?” I said.
“Really, Nash, I’m not kidding.”
I pulled off my smoke. “Specs, what difference would it make? The future is fucking black. You don’t wanna know about it.”
“Oh yes you do. If you read the signs they can keep you alive, keep you safe. If I had some Tarot cards I could show you your life path. What’s gonna happen.”
“I don’t wanna know what’s gonna happen.”
Specs went on and on about all that whacky new age shit he was into. They could call it what they wanted, but it all sounded like fairground gypsy fortune telling to me. But Specs loved it, loved talking in great detail about everything from pyramid power to the energy of crystals.
After about twenty minutes of that, Paulson said, “Why don’t you girls go get a room? I’m trying to fucking sleep here.”
Specs was excited, though. “But, Nash, listen-”
“Go to sleep,” I told him. I shut my eyes, thinking about all that crazy shit and remembering my wife. That night I had my own nightmares. I dreamed that rats were eating Shelly.
13
The showdown, the endgame as it were, came not three days later.
We were making the rounds, collecting the dead, and Weeks got a call over the radio that there were a bunch of corpses dirtying up the parking lot over at the Southern Park Mall. Couldn’t have that. In a city inundated in the unburied dead, what remained of the civic authority wanted that goddamn mall parking lot cleaned up. Couldn’t have all the friendly tourists that came to American Eagle or Victoria’s Secret or Build-A-Bear Workshop seeing all the carrion out there. What would they think? Didn’t matter that the mall was in ruins now and what tourists usually showed up were either crazy or burning with fallout.
Outside Sears, there was a heap of bodies pretty much on the order of what I had seen at the 7-11. One big stinking ugly mess. When we pulled up in the truck, we could already hear the flies buzzing. A flock of gulls and crows took to the air.
We shitheads jumped off the back of the truck, looked at each other, and just shook our heads. The stink was bad enough to put a maggot off meat. Just a great, flyblown heap of corpses that had to number in the hundreds. The scavengers had been at them and had dragged bits and pieces off in every direction.
“Okay, Fuckhead,” Weeks said. “Take Shit-fer-Brains with you and wade in. Ain’t gonna smell any better ten minutes from now.”
“This is ridiculous,” Specs said. “They’re all soft…we’ll need shovels.”
“Shut the fuck up, Mama’s Boy. Get in there. You, too, Mr. Fucking Useless. Load that hopper. Let’s go!”
When we didn’t move fast enough, one of the soldiers cracked a few shots over our heads. But even that only made us drag ourselves forward. When we got to the perimeter of the heap, staring at all those rotting husks and bird-pecked faces and trailing limbs, the rest of the crew just looked at me. Lately, they’d been looking at me a lot. I guess I was the leader of the revolt that we all knew was coming. And I could feel it gathering momentum…electric with potential, just waiting to explode. I think they could, too. We were waiting for a catalyst to light the fuse and it was coming, God yes, it was certainly coming.
“Let’s do it,” I told them. “Let’s load that fucking hopper. Then we’ll see.”
We went at it.
It was revolting even by the standards set by other such jobs. The corpses were so ripe they pulled apart like boiled chicken. Arms came off, legs came off, moldering flesh pulled right off the bones beneath. We backed the truck up close as we could because this rank, evil-smelling mess had to be thrown in the hopper piecemeal. It took hours. We sweated in our filthy biosuits, enveloped in a gagging cloud of flies and grave-stench.
Somewhere during the process, Specs lost it.
He usually didn’t so much as clear his throat around the soldiers, but today was different. Maybe he, too, was feeding off that potential. He was all assholes and elbows, crouched over and digging into the cold cuts, just lost in his work. Sinking his gloved hands deep into that seething, crawling rot, firing it behind him, arms pinwheeling, letting it fly into the hopper. A corpse-worm slid out of the remains of a child and he stomped it to white mush before it could do so much as writhe in the sunlight.
“That’s it!” Weeks told him, keeping his distance, his carbine balanced over one shoulder. “That’s the way, Mama’s Boy! Get that shit in the hopper! Got to it, you sonofabitch!”
This spurred Specs into greater feats of corpse clearing. He dug into the mess, letting limbs and bones and globs of offal fly, almost knocking me on my ass with a stray femur. Then he happened upon a head. The head of a teenage girl. The face was nothing but fungus and corpse jelly oozing from the white skull beneath…but it stopped him dead.
He held up that head and it had long red hair hanging from the scalp. Hair that was greasy and clotted with filth, but red all the same.
“Fuck you doing, Mama’s Boy?” one of the soldiers asked.
And everyone was kind of wondering the same.
Specs stood there, trembling, holding that decayed
head up. Slime dripped from it and loathsome black beetles crawled over the backs of his hands and up his arms.
With a gagging, strangled cry, he dropped it.
It hit the pavement like a moist, soft pumpkin and broke right apart at his feet. Beetles poured from the shattered skull, a crawling flood of them.
Weeks stepped back even further, of course.
Specs kept making that gagging sound.
The head was the catalyst we were waiting for.
I stood up from the carrion pile. My white biosuit was smeared gray and black with corpse waste. I brushed some stray maggots off my sleeve. “Hey? You okay, Specs…Specs? You okay, man?”
“Get to work!” Weeks shouted.
But we were ignoring him. Specs was having an episode and maybe we were filthy with decaying flesh and corpse slime and maybe we spent our days juggling human remains at gunpoint, but all this bonded us together. Made us stronger. Made us care for each other and in the process, made us a little more human than the drones with the guns.
“I said, get to fucking work!” Weeks called out, popping a few rounds into the air.
“Go fuck yourself,” Paulson told him.
Weeks took two trembling steps forward, ejecting the magazine from his tactical carbine and slapping a fresh one in place. “Hell did he just say to me?” he asked his soldiers.
“Told you-” one of them began, suppressing a mad desire to giggle “?told you to go fuck yourself…sir.”
Weeks raged but we paid him no mind. We were clustered around Specs, touching him, reassuring him, while he went on in a whining voice about his sister, about Darlene. Darlene and her beautiful red hair and how she rotted away in her bed of typhoid fever.
About this time, we realized that Weeks was shouting at us. We turned and he had his weapon on us, his hands shaking on it. He was either scared to death or so pissed off he could’ve passed nails.
“Mr. Fucking Useless!” he cried. “Step away from those Shitheads! Do it! Do it! Do it! You better goddamn well do it right fucking now, you miserable ass-sucking squeeze of shit! I’ll drop you where you stand! Yer a fucking walking dead man!”
Paulson pulled off his helmet and threw it at Weeks who nearly jumped right out of his suit trying to avoid the filthy thing. It hit the ground and rolled across the parking lot.
“No,” he said. “I refuse.”
“No? No? No? Fuck you mean, you refuse?” Weeks said, his voice very dry like all the spit had just dried on his tongue. “You can’t refuse me! You can’t fucking well refuse me! Are you out of yer fucking mind? Are you? Well…ARE YOU?”
“Yes sir, believe so,” Paulson said.
Specs, Jakoby, and me stood tight with him, ringing him in so that Weeks would have to shoot through us to get at him.
“Step away from him!” Weeks ordered us. “Get away from him or I’ll cap every one of you!”
“Go ahead!” Specs shouted. “Go right ahead!”
Weeks moved in still closer and so did his soldiers and I was figuring this was it, this was how it ended and what a goddamn revolting way to go, standing there knee deep in human remains in filthy suits with flies buzzing all over us.
Weeks was going to shoot, there was no doubt of it, but then Specs reached into the hopper and grabbed an arm that was bloated white. “Hungry, asshole? How about a wing?” he threw the arm and it hit one of the soldiers with a moist thud that put him on his ass. He screamed.
We started laughing.
“How about a thigh?” Jakoby said and heaved a maggoty leg.
“Got me a breast here,” Paulson said, gathering up a withered trunk. “At least I think it’s a breast…” He let it fly.
Then all of us just went mad with the idea.
Limbs and bones, entrails and mucid clots of flesh started flying, raining down on the soldiers, making them jump and duck as they were spattered with carrion and maggots. Weeks tried to dart back, but I tossed a head that broke apart and splattered him with wormy gray matter.
He, of course, screamed.
Screamed and went right down on his ass.
One of the soldiers said, “Screw this,” and turned, jogging across the parking lot.
“Get back here!” Weeks called out to him. “You’re deserting your post!”
But the guy didn’t listen and Weeks shot him, dropped him right there.
After that, it was sheer pandemonium.
One of the soldiers shot Jakoby as he tossed handfuls of grave matter at him. And about the time he went down-staggering, bullet-ridden, but managing to crash into the guy who had shot him-I threw a loop of bowels at Weeks and they struck him right in the chest leaving a gray, snaking stain on his white biosuit. He screamed and tossed his rifle.
“I’m contaminated! I’m unclean! I’m filthy! Dirty! Dirty! Dirty!” he shrieked out from inside his helmet, rolling around on the pavement, maybe trying to wipe the putrescence off himself.
The other soldier had gotten tangled up in Jakoby and finally succeeded in shoving him aside. He brought up his rifle as Paulson rushed him with a rotting body in his arms. He shot him. Gave him two three-round volleys and Paulson fell at his feet, hitting the pavement with the corpse that just simply exploded on impact.
The soldier would have had us, too, had fate not intervened at that moment.
Temporarily blinded from a spray of rancid flesh, his plexiglass helmet bubble was black and dripping with juice and bits of meat. He stripped his helmet off and threw it aside. And at that precise moment, one of the corpse-worms slid out of the belly of the cadaver that Paulson had dropped.
It was one of the biggest I had ever seen.
At first, I thought it was a section of swollen bowel spilling out from the corpse’s belly, but then it moved, it coiled over the pavement, threading in and out of the stiff like rubbery white yarn. It was huge, flattened-out and segmented, shining with slime and drainage. It was making an almost angry humming sound that was high and strident.
The soldier saw it about the time it rose up from the corpse’s belly with a juicy, succulent noise. It didn’t have eyes that anyone could see, but it seemed to know where he was. That humming grew positively ear-shattering in its intensity. The worm’s body swelled-up, thickening, growing bulbous like some impossibly fleshy penis. The bulb or head inflated, too.
The soldier brought his carbine to bear.
But the worm struck first: it shot an inky stream of juice into his face and the effect was instantaneous. He screamed and fell to his knees, his hands clutching his face…only his face was no longer a face as such, but something soft and pulpy that was squirting out between his fingers.
As the worm retreated, me and Specs went over to Weeks.
He was still whining and crying out in a high girlish voice about being unclean, crawling about on all fours. We just looked down on him, then we started kicking him. And we kept kicking him until he went limp.
Then we dragged his inert form over to the hopper.
We stripped his suit off.
And threw his ass in.
Then we started tossing bodies and body parts on top of him, everything we could find until he was buried in entrails and torsos and limbs, shivering beneath a blanket of carrion and graveworms. Somewhere during the process, he came awake, fighting and screaming, trying to free himself from the putrefying flesh and greening meat. He screamed and clawed.
And Specs, giggling, pulled the lever and the blades came scooping down.
Before Weeks disappeared, we saw him in there tangled in bowels and husks, his arm wedged into a slimy ribcage. And we also saw a fat white corpse-worm slide from a body and investigate his face.
Then the blades pushed him into the bin with the rest and the ram compacted it all with a crunching, pulping noise and fetid juice ran from the drain holes at the bottom of the truck.
That was it.
Specs and I tossed aside our suits, lit cigarettes like workmen after a hard day on the job, and walked away from i
t all. We went looking for a car. We were going to Cleveland.
CLEVELAND, OHIO
1
Cleveland had a real bad rat problem, even worse than Youngstown. At night, hordes of them would come up out of the sewers and cellars and take to the streets in massive swarms like driver ants, devouring anything in their path. They were all rabid and incredibly vicious. By moonlight, you could see them down there, so many greasy gray bodies that you could have crossed the street walking on their backs and never once touched pavement. I saw them take down dog packs and street gangs, leave nothing but bones behind.
Cleveland, as it turned out, also had Red Rains.
2
I woke that first night in the city to the sound of Specs screaming. We were crashed out in a big Cadillac El Dorado we found parked in an empty lot over in Fairfax, just off Cedar Avenue on East 86^th. Looked like it had been a pimp’s car once…leopard seats with hot-red plush carpeting and tinted windows. Specs slept in the back; I took the front. Next morning, he woke up screaming.
I panicked and pulled my gun, wiping sleep from my eyes. All I had was a little five-shot snub-nosed. 38 belly gun I’d taken off the mangled corpse of a cop in Ravenna a few days before. “What? What? What?” I said, looking for a target, anything.
Specs was breathing hard in the backseat. “Just had a dream…did I cry out?”
“Yeah, you fucking cried out, asshole. I thought you were being murdered.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, Nash. Sometimes I get these bad dreams. Just corpses everywhere, you know? Sometimes I dream about my sister, about Darlene.”
Poor Specs. I didn’t want to get him going on his dead sister again. In those days I still had a watch on my wrist-a nice Indiglo Timex that Shelly had given me for my birthday-and I hadn’t gone native yet and started clocking the time by the position of the sun. Watch said it was ten in the morning…but inside the car it was pretty dark. I thought maybe it was the tinted windows, but it wasn’t that at all.
