by Tim Curran
What a wonderful world it indeed was. Empty cities and spawning mutants, bioplagues and Red Rains and fallout and…The Shape. I didn’t know what it was and I refused to speculate. Though when I had looked on it I was certain that it was the very stuff the universe was made of. The meat, as it were, of primary cosmic generation.
Sean did not come back that night.
We were worried. Around noon he showed up with an SUV and a full tank of gas. He had two men with him. One was tall and lanky, the other shorter and heavily muscled. Pretty as Janie was, they did not even give her a second glance. They stared at me and I was certain I saw something like fear and awe in their eyes. I wondered what Sean had told them and decided it really didn’t matter.
“This is Carl and Texas Slim,” Sean told me. “They want to go west, too.”
“Welcome,” I told them, wondering if one of them would have to burn some day to keep the rest of us safe. “Welcome.”
There were five of us then.
ELKHART, INDIANA
1
I was in league with The Shape.
If I’d doubted it before, there was no mistaking it after Cleveland.
I made sacrifices to it, I did the selecting and I did it not only to save my sorry ass but the asses of my little posse. We took care of The Shape and The Shape took care of us. We were healthy. We weren’t riddled with sores and radiation burns like the others. There was no disease in our bodies and our genes weren’t going crazy from fallout. The Shape led me on, always pointing me in the right direction and I always found a few treats for him and, in return, we were alive and we were strong, we always had full bellies, safe places to lay our heads at night. No, I don’t know how it worked. Not really. Only that being in league with that thing gave us all a sort of protective magic.
2
We stood around by the river watching the woman burn for maybe a half hour or so, the stink of cremated flesh hot in our faces. Long after it was done and she was nothing but a smoldering skeleton, we stared at the flames licking from her ribcage and the hollows of her skull. It was morbid, but we were fascinated, unable to look away as a child cannot look away from a roaring campfire. Something about the mystical call of the flames, I suppose, as transfixing and hypnotic now as they’d been to our ancestors huddled in an Ice Age cave.
The smell was sickening.
You would think after all the incinerated bodies we’d come across-and, yes, produced-the smell would be something we wouldn’t even notice anymore like a guard at Belzec feeding corpses into the ovens. But we did notice. All of us. The burnt scarecrow tied to the blackened tree was something we’d see in our minds for days. And smell. Because the smell of burnt hair, roasted flesh, and oxidized bones would stay with us, haunting us, coming into our dreams until we’d wake, sweating and terrified, certain that a charred and grinning skull would be on the pillow next to our own.
“I think she’s done,” Carl finally said, lighting a twig off the burning corpse and firing his cigarette with it.
Texas Slim chuckled. “A little honey sauce, some taters and beans, we got ourselves a barbecue.”
I laughed; so did Sean. It was funny. Even funnier the way the human mind works. In the worst of situations there is some kind of psychological trigger or safety valve in the brain that overrides all else, releasing stress by making us joke about the most horrible things. I suppose it’s the same thing that made soldiers in the trenches of World War I adopt human skulls as pets, giving them silly names like “Mr. Jingles” and “Lippy” and the same thing that made people burst out laughing at funerals.
“That’s enough,” Janie said, standing far and away and downwind from the burning woman. “I won’t listen to it.”
“Sure, Janie,” I said. “We were just kidding.”
Janie didn’t like that kind of shit. She saw nothing funny in the dead even though they were scattered everywhere now. The cities were graveyards and the streets were littered with remains. To her, a body was still a body. To the rest of us a body was of no more importance than a bag of leaves or a cardboard box. But that was Janie. The last of the bleeding hearts. An endangered species.
It had been nearly two months since we rolled out of Cleveland with Carl and Texas Slim in tow. And a hard two months they had been, fighting with the Hatchet Clans, hiding from radioactive dust storms, searching for vehicles and finding food. The days went by in a blur.
And now, there I was, staring at the remains of another offering for The Shape.
Janie stomped off.
Texas Slim and Sean kind of eyed me warily as friends will do when your girlfriend is in a mood. I bummed a cigarette from Carl and stood there, uncomfortably, smoking and watching the St. Joseph River roll on by.
“Hey, Nash,” Sean said. “I ever tell you about the time I sold my wife for a dollar?”
Texas Slim giggled. “This is a good one.”
Sean smiled in the moonlight, his teeth crooked and missing. “We were in Sturgis, man, you know, the biker rally? Well, sure as shit, me and the old lady were at each other’s throats. All day long. It was always like that with us. That’s why I got this scar on my forehead, you see. We was at this hop-and-grind joint and she passed out. So things being what they were, I started making out with her sister who was sitting next to me. She’d fuck anything with a third leg. Well, Trixie wakes up and I’m tongue-fucking her sister and she yells something and hits me in the face with a beer bottle. One mean bitch, that Trixie.” He laughed. “Anyway, there we was in Sturgis. We’d been drinking and smoking Cee all day long. We’re sitting at this bar putting back shots of Wild Turkey, just tearing into each other as was our way. This big dude, think he might have been with the Outlaws or the Pagans, he says, Hey, how much for your wife? I say, you want to buy that shit? He says, Sure I do. How much? A dollar, I tell him. He hands me a dollar and takes hold of Trixie and she screams something at me and that’s the last I saw of her.”
“Well, what happened?” Texas Slim wanted to know. “He kill her?”
Sean pulled off his cigarette. “No, nothing like that. She shows up back at the hotel about three in the morning, all dirty, clothes torn, and I say, Hey babe, how was it? She near beat the shit out of me. Next day, that big biker comes up to me, says, I want that dollar back. I say, That bad, eh? He don’t think it’s funny, says, You ought to have a license to sell poisonous snakes, you asshole.” Sean sighed. “Yeah, that Trixie. She was something. She was doing a nickel at Utah State Penn for possession last I heard of her.”
We all laughed again. But not Janie. She did not like stories like that. Things had changed so much now. You had to stick tight to survive these days, not like the old days where you and the boys went out to the man-cave to swap the salt and talk tit. You had a woman these days, you had to keep her by your side and she had to keep you by her side.
Carl said, “We best be on our way, Nash. I don’t like being out here in the dark.”
“All right,” I said. “Let’s get gone.”
We crossed Island Park, guns in our hands and packs on our backs, keeping an eye on the shadows and the things that might be hiding there. We saw nothing. We got on Jackson Boulevard, went over the bridge and Waterfall Drive, cutting down South Main. We needed a place to sleep for the night. We were all dead tired. Usually, well before sunset, we had a place. But today had been busy.
“Start checking some doors,” I told Texas Slim as we walked. “We gotta lay up somewhere.”
He did so, but door after door after door was locked. We could have blasted our way in, but I didn’t want to make all that racket and draw attention to ourselves. Besides, what good is a door that’s been blown off its hinges? I wanted a place with some security against what was outside, hiding in the dark.
“Too bad none of us can fly a plane,” Sean said. “Lots of planes at the airport. Maybe I should give it a try, Nash.”
“Oh, shut up,” Janie told him.
The full moon above was very brig
ht. Main looked like a glowing ribbon of ether as it stretched away into the distance. Everything was silent and surreal. All those empty buildings and shops crowding each side of the street, the abandoned cars at the curbs. If it hadn’t been for the skeletons in the gutters and that unearthly quiet, you could have fooled yourself that there was still life here. Still people sleeping in beds and little kids dreaming little kid dreams, all charging up for another day in the life.
But it wasn’t that way anymore.
Those buildings were monuments to a way of life that had vanished now. Main Street, Elkhart, was like something kept under glass in a museum: carefully preserved but long dead and gone. As we walked, Carl out front with his rifle looking for trouble, I felt at ease with things. What we had done this night wasn’t something I was proud of, but we were alive, we were breathing. We would live to fight another day and another day after that.
I was wondering where we were going to hole up for the night and where in the hell we were going to get a vehicle come tomorrow. Most were either smashed-up or their batteries were dead, engine parts salvaged. But we needed a ride. We needed one bad. We had to get moving west.
“Open door,” Texas finally called out, standing in front of a tattoo parlor called INKED AND DANGEROUS.
It was good as any.
“C’mon, Carl,” I said, waiting for him as he scanned the streets with the barrel of his AK-47, looking for trouble, always looking for trouble.
We filed inside and I locked the door, pulled down the shade on the window. It was a tight little place, but it had a backdoor leading out into the alley in case we needed to make a quick escape. We rolled out our sleeping bags and the boys had a smoke while I tried to get Janie to act civil.
But after what had happened in the park she wasn’t speaking to me. She had retreated into herself, offended at every conceivable level by what we had done to the woman and what we had offered her up to. But I didn’t much care. All I knew was that it was done. It was over with. We’d made sacrifice and we were safe now. At least until the next cycle of the full moon.
Because that’s when The Shape would come knocking at the door again with an empty belly.
2
It seemed like my head had barely hit the pillow when Carl was shaking me awake. “Nash,” he said. “C’mon, Nash, wake the fuck up. We got activity here.”
“What?” I said.
“I think someone’s out there. In fact, I’m sure of it.”
I pulled myself out of my bag, looked out the window and saw absolutely nothing. Just the empty street, the rusting hulks of vehicles. Some at the curbs, others pulled right up onto the sidewalk. A few had been driven right through the plate glass windows of shops across the street.
“Looks pretty quiet,” I said.
“I think we were followed.”
I was still looking and not seeing anything.
“There was someone or something behind us, dogging us. I know it,” he said. “They’re out there right now.”
Carl’s intuition wasn’t always on target, but usually in situations of danger he was pretty damn perceptive. I watched the streets and though I did not see anything, I had the oddest feeling that as I watched, I was being watched. It made the flesh at the back of my neck creep.
Sean crawled out of his bag, stretched, said, “How the hell am I supposed to sleep with you two jabbering like this?”
“We’re being watched,” Carl said.
“You always think we’re being watched,” Sean told him. “Go lay the fuck down. Put a tampon in and get a few Z’s, for chrissake, you pussy.”
Carl almost hit him with the butt of his AK and it would not have been the first time. I stepped in-between them as I always stepped in-between them. Carl was always fighting with Sean or Texas. He had a short fuse and they knew it. He just couldn’t take a joke. One of those guys that walks around with a target on their backs.
I peered out the window again. I thought for just a second I saw someone dart behind a car. It could have been my imagination. My eyes were still crusty from sleep. The moon above the buildings had moved clear across the sky. I must have been out for hours.
I had just pulled my face from the window when the first shot rang out.
A bullet punched through the glass and I felt it pass by my cheek. Heavy caliber, too, because not only did it punch a neat hole in the window but it shattered it. Another round came through the glass face of the door. Carl brought up his AK and fired a few liberal three-shot bursts into the streets. And that brought the reports of at least three more rifles. The glass was blown out of the door and black bullet holes were punched into the walls behind us. Carl fired another burst and by then, on my hands and knees, I had everyone together. We rolled up our bags, gathered up our packs and made for the rear entrance.
Carl gave another three-round burst to keep our adversaries from making a rush at the building.
“Get going,” Sean told us. “I’ll hold off the Indians and catch up with you.”
I’ll never forget him standing there with his Ruger Mini-14 carbine, bopping and weaving as rounds peppered the tattoo parlor, telling us to get going as he worked the bolt and laid down suppressive fire. And I’ll also never forget that crooked, toothy smile he flashed me right before a bullet caught him in the head and blew his skull into mucilage that splashed against the walls.
Somebody screamed. In fact, two people screamed: Janie in horror and Carl in manic rage. I was too shocked to do anything but stare at Sean folded up on the floor, his legs kicking then going still, the top of his head just…gone. I crawled over there, pried the 14 from his hands and whispered something to him, something heartbroken and gushy, and followed the others out the back way. Sean. They’d killed Sean. Jesus Christ, fucking Sean.
The alley. Carl was already running and Janie was trying to wait for me, but Texas Slim wasn’t having any of that. He had hooked her by the arm and was propelling her along pretty much against her will. The alley zig-zagged, then opened up out into the street. I caught up to them and tossed Carl Sean’s Ruger which had much better range than his AK. One of our attackers came leaping out from behind a car and fired a round from what I thought was a. 30-30. He got off that shot, but that was it. Carl fired with the 14 and dropped him screaming in the street with a perfect gut-shot.
We ran.
And as we ran, we were pursued. I told the others to scout ahead while I gave our attackers a little trouble and bought us some time. The others ran ahead and hid out. I waited. The silence was unbearable. I heard a breeze rattle the branches of an aspen across the way. A dog howled in the distance. That was it. Then, after maybe five minutes, running feet. They were just down the block. I counted three of them.
They dodged behind a car.
I caught the glint of a rifle barrel in the waning moonlight, raised my. 30.06 Savage and fired. I didn’t hit anyone, but my round punched through the windshield of a Cadillac and gave them something to think about. A few more rounds came my way. I fired one more time and then took off down the sidewalk in a low run, hunched-over. More rounds punched into plate glass windows and I dodged behind a pick-up truck.
I had no idea where the others were by that point.
I waited for the bad boys to close in, but they were in no hurry. They’d fire a shot in my direction from time to time, but I didn’t return the fire. I was trying to draw them out and the longer I was quiet the more they’d want to find out why. If I’d have been smart, I would have cried out or something so they’d think I was hit. But I wasn’t that smart. And I didn’t want Janie and the others to come running to my rescue and get greased.
Footsteps were coming.
Light, agile. But they were coming from behind me which either meant that the bad boys had circled around me or that-
“Nash,” Carl said. “There’s a train station about two blocks down. Ground’s wide open around it, perfect killzone, we can waste anything that comes knocking. Texas and Janie are waiting do
wn there. Let’s go.”
It was about that time that I heard vehicles start up. Two of them, racing their engines. We were on foot and the bad boys had wheels. Things were starting to look pretty bad. I ran off after Carl and about the time it seemed my lungs would burst, we caught up with Janie and Texas Slim. They were waiting behind an overturned Datsun. I followed them across Tyler Street, through the gates, and into the parking lot of the train station, which had been an Amtrak hub before the world ended. I saw signs for Michigan Southern and Conrail.
Carl was right: it was wide open in every direction, defensible, perfect killzone. Nothing could approach our position without us knowing it. The New York Central Museum was across the way and the Conrail Yards and the Conrail mainline just beyond. The yards were huge and went on forever. Nothing out there but trains lying dead and rusting on tracks. And in that moonlight, you could see for miles it seemed. The only problem was that it was a big, sprawling building and there was no way in hell the four of us could cover all sides.
I saw the headlights coming in our direction and knew we really didn’t have a choice. The horizon was getting blue and I knew the sun would be up in less than an hour. That was to our advantage. The station was open and we locked and barricaded the front door once we were inside. Carl checked the other doors, secured them, then we went upstairs into the offices. From the windows up there it would be like a duck hunt.
A pick-up truck and a Ford Bronco pulled into the lot. Two men stepped from the pick-up and three more from the Bronco. They looked normal. I didn’t know what they wanted with us and I knew I’d probably never know. Maybe just the ragtag remains of a militia out hunting. Maybe they wanted our weapons. Maybe they wanted Janie.
