by Tim Curran
“I do. And deep down, you do, too.” I went over to her and put my hands on her shoulders. “I have to make selections, Janie. You know it. I know it. If we don’t…if we don’t, The Shape will do its own selecting. Me, you, Carl, Texas, maybe all of us.”
Her arms loaded with clothes, she turned and walked away from me. Just like that. She was good at heart, she was true gold. But her morals were having trouble with how we lived. I wished to God there was another way. But there wasn’t. There just wasn’t. The germs floating around out there were unbelievably infectious and deadly. I didn’t want to go down with black plague or cholera, typhoid or the flu. And especially not with Ebola. If that meant sacrificing an innocent each full moon to protect me and my friends, I was going to do it.
At least, that’s what I told myself as I watched her walk away.
I felt very grand, very high and mighty, maybe even noble at that moment like I was some kind of fucking hero, some errant knight sacrificing all for God, country, and queen. But later, my delusions failed as they often do. I found a place where I could be alone, the very back aisle of Waldenbooks where I sat on the carpeted floor, surrounded by racks of kidlit-Junie B. Jones, Dr. Suess, Horrible Harry, the Boxcar Children, Henry Higgins, assorted Roald Dahl’s and Beatrix Potter’s-and I cried. Face in my hands, I cried my eyes out, remembering when I’d had a wife, a life, and, yes, some dignity.
Not like now.
When I opened my eyes again, I stared at the neat rows of books. At cardboard standees of Harry Potter and Max from Where the Wild Things Are. Surrounded by books that made me remember my secret childhood worlds, I had never felt so broken, so frayed, so fragmented. A post-apocalyptic Humpty Dumpty.
The sandstorm blew on and off for five days.
We were nearly ready to tear out each other’s throats by then. Any diversion would have done, even a pack of crazies and a firefight. When it ended we piled into the Bronco, barely speaking. Carl drove us out of the mall and into the world. Entire streets were blocked with sand dunes. The city looked completely different blown with sand and whitened with dust.
“Where to, Nash?” Carl finally said when we were rolling down South Main again like five days before.
“West,” I told him. “Get us to the highway, to U.S. Twenty. We have an appointment, I think, in South Bend.”
SOUTHBEND, INDIANA
1
We didn’t make it there for a week.
We had one problem after another. Suffice to say that when we did arrive, as luck would have it, the Bronco blew a tire soon as we rolled in and left us stranded there on the dirty backside of Indiana. And at night yet. Nothing worse than being on foot at night. Too many things out there. Too many predators haunting the ruined carcasses of the cities. Wild dog packs, mutant rats, swarms of bloodsucking insects, things much worse that it was hard to put a name to.
The radiation had done funny things.
We found a little ranch house in a devastated neighborhood at the edge of town and laid low. Nothing out there but wild dogs picking in the gutters, rats, lots of wrecked cars, sand blowing in the streets.
I thought we’d be safe for the night. I was wrong.
The house was empty. It was solid. And it appeared to be defensible. Of course, it wasn’t real easy to ascertain the latter, it being dark and all. And I didn’t want to be using any flashlights. Batteries were hard to come by and I didn’t exactly want to telegraph our position to whatever was waiting out there…because something was, you see. I could feel it right up my spine and I knew better than to dismiss such a feeling.
Ten minutes after we got there, we all heard it: a high, almost electronic piping that sounded oddly like a locust being imitated by a machine. And there was only one thing that made a sound like that.
We got ready.
Breathing in and breathing out, I waited with the. 30.06 Savage cradled in my arms. Because it was coming. It had been scenting us for the past hour and now it was closing in.
The others were back in the kitchen-Carl and Janie and Texas Slim-huddled up in the shadows, trying to keep quiet and failing at it. Whatever came through that door, I wanted first crack at it. Believe me, I was no hero, but the idea of whatever was out there flooding into the room in numbers and us being boxed in together…no, it was a recipe for disaster.
That feeling at my spine went electric.
“Get ready,” I called out.
The others were anxious to run, to fight, to bust caps or retreat, as long as it was something. The waiting was hard. Very hard.
“Anything?” Carl whispered from the kitchen.
“Nothing. Be quiet. We wait.”
“How long?”
“Always in a hurry, our friend Carl,” Texas said. “Notice how he’s always in a hurry?”
“Yeah…and who dropped a quarter in you, dipshit?”
“Knock it off!” Janie warned them.
I just shook my head. Those two were like a couple kids sometimes.
It was times like these, in the dark and the quiet, that I remembered the way things were before the war. How I’d been married. Had a life. Ancient History 101, I guess. Now I was just a scavenger trying to stay alive, killing and taking and running, always running, just hanging on by my fingertips, suspended uneasily over some yawning black pit filled with human bones. Thirty-seven years old, a chromed-up Beretta 9mm jammed in the waistband of my jeans and a knife with a seven-inch blade in my boot. That’s who I was now.
I lit a cigarette, sweat trickling down my spine.
I blew out smoke and walked over towards the window, staying in the shadows along the wall, keeping clear of the cool moonlight that flooded in. The windowpane was grimy, speckled with dust and soot. I wiped a clean spot and studied the streets out there. In the semi-darkness of a moonlit night, it could have been ten years ago. Cars at the curbs. Trees lining the boulevards. Houses lined up in neat little rows. It was only when the moonlight washed it all down that you could see the cars were all rusted and wrecked, the trees gnarled-looking, leaves and dead limbs scattered about, the houses weathered gray from the blowing sand, yards overgrown, windows broken.
Nothing else.
“Carl?” I whispered. “What’s the Geiger saying?”
“Pretty cool, Nash. Getting twenty to twenty-five.”
I thought it over, wondering if maybe the wind had made a lonesome howling sound and my imagination had channeled it into something else. But if it had, then we had all imagined it. And I didn’t believe in mass hallucination.
Outside, it was silent.
Nothing moved.
I leaned against the wall, finishing my cigarette. If nothing happened in another twenty minutes, I figured, then we’d relax, wait out the night, go scavenging in the morning. Had to be a decent ride in this town somewhere.
And it was as I was thinking this that I heard the Geiger Counter in the other room start to click.
“Carl?” I said, my breath barely coming.
“Yeah…going up. We got…forty, fifty, sixty…she’s climbing, man.”
The Geiger was clicking madly now, ticking like a bomb. My heart was pounding, trying to keep up with it.
“We spiked a hundred…it’s getting hot.”
The Geiger was clicking so fast now it sounded like one steady clicking roll.
“One-fifty and climbing, man…shit.”
Sweat running down my face, I looked out the window and there they were. The kids. The fucking Children. Just standing out there on the sidewalk like they were waiting for Susie or Jimmy to come out and play with them.
“They’re here. Get ready to bust.”
Out on the walk, the Children waited, just standing there. There were six of them. If you squinted your eyes real tight, you might mistake them for real kids, but they weren’t. Just wraithlike things that looked like they’d been blown from a tomb, clothes hanging in rags, faces gray and corrugated, eyes burning a hot noxious yellow like seething reactor cores.
Using the butt of the Savage, I broke the window, shattering it from its frame.
I took aim.
And as I did so, the six of them out there raised their fists, extending their first fingers, and pointed at me. Their oval puckered mouths opened and they emitted that high droning whine that rose in volume until it was nearly hypersonic, making my ears ring and then hurt, my brain filled with waves of agony.
I jerked the trigger, took out a girl in the middle.
The round caught her dead in the chest and the effect was instantaneous: she was tossed back, the entry wound spilling some black steaming fluid and right away she began to writhe and twitch like she’d just taken hold of a high power line. Black smoke boiled from her, something like blue fire erupting and consuming. She blazed up like one of those snakes you burn on the Fourth of July, just smoking and popping and going to black ash.
That’s how she died.
And before I could sight in on another, they all let loose with that discordant droning noise that was howling and lonesome. Like insects. Enraged insects droning in a desolate summer field. They converged on the house, not running or even walking, but gliding forward with some insane locomotion I couldn’t even guess at.
The rest of my posse were in the room by then, all with guns in their hands. Even Janie who hated guns. The Geiger was clicking away, registering the massive radioactivity coming from the Children.
They were at the door.
A flickering cold light licked around its edges. The door cracked and buckled, great jagged rents running down its face. It blackened, smoke rising from it. Then it blew in and the Children were filling the doorway, eyes lit with a terrible xanthic glow that reflected off their scabrid faces. Lamprey mouths were open to reveal rows and rows of tiny hooked teeth, radioactive steam blowing out in hissing clouds that crackled like static electricity.
A girl stepped in the room first.
Her bare feet sizzled on the dirty carpet, burning footprints right into the fibers she was cooking so hot with radionuclides.
Everyone fired before they cooked with her.
Carl had a Mossberg 500 12-gauge, Texas Slim had a. 50 cal Desert Eagle, and Janie had a. 30 Smith. We laid down a considerable volume of fire, cutting down the Children as they tried to ghost through the door with a glowing shroud of radioactive mist.
We kept shooting until there was nothing left to shoot.
The Children had fallen in a whining/screeching heap just inside the room, pissing that toxic black blood and going kinetic with their own nuclear saturation, burning and twisting, clouds of black oily smoke filling the room. Their flesh went to hot running tallow, then ash. Their superheated skeletons were phosphorescent and arcing with juice, rising up one last time like they were trying to escape the smoldering wreckage of their flesh…then they crashed back down into it, crumbling into fragments.
I saw a blackened skull roll free, smoke rising from it, jaws sprung open as if to scream. It made me think about how close those little fuckers had gotten and how hot they were with radioactivity. One of these days we’re gonna absorb too much and we’ll all be popping with tumors. Gotta happen.
Then Carl grabbed my arm. “Man, we better get the fuck out.” He was holding the Geiger up and it was clicking fiercely. “It’s pretty damn hot in here.”
I followed him out the back way, out into the shadows and consuming darkness of the night.
And whatever waited there.
2
The Children.
Who were they and, more importantly, what were they.
Nobody I had ever talked to had any real good answers. But the same radiation saturation that killed adults by the hundreds of thousands and millions did something else to the kids. And not just certain ones, but all kids, anyone under ten years of age for whatever reason…but none older than that. Maybe the onset of puberty made them biochemically infertile for the change. But under ten, well, it mutated something in them.
Your own kids or the kids next door, the charming little girls playing dress-up in the backyard or the rambunctious little boys playing sandlot baseball…they were not human anymore.
They were monsters.
The radiation had gotten hold of them, turned them into deranged night stalkers with yellow luminous eyes and fingers that would actually burn you to a cinder if they got a hold of you. They hunted by night in packs like wolves or vampires, killing anything they could catch. Somehow, some way, maybe because they were young and still growing, their cells had absorbed the fallout, made it part of their natural rhythms. Nobody really knew and most were too scared to find out.
There were survivors out there that thought the Children were ghosts or ghouls, supernatural things that crept out by night to feed. That wasn’t true, of course, but you could hardly blame anyone for thinking it. For it was really hard to imagine anything as scary as the Children. Radioactive fallout was part of life here in the new spooky world. You had to live with it and learn how to detect it, what places were hot and how to avoid them.
But the Children made that difficult.
Because they were, essentially, fallout and fallout that was cunning and evil. Fallout that hunted its victims.
I figured they did it for a reason. Maybe they absorbed something from people, something they needed. It was hard to say, but it had to be something. I knew they were not supernatural even though sometimes they acted that way and they did only come out at night. They were not flesh and blood as we understood flesh and blood, but a different sort of flesh and blood. Something completely alien right down to their blazing hot subatomics.
But they could be killed.
If you put a bullet in them, they’d literally burn up like atomic piles right in front of you. I suppose if you stuck a spear in them the same thing would happen, but if you got that close you’d fry.
So bullets worked best.
The smart thing was to avoid them, to hide out by night and stay off the streets. That was your best bet. I had no idea where they laired themselves for the daylight hours and I honestly didn’t want to know. In the back of my mind, I always envisioned them stretched out like the undead in reactor cores. Nobody really knew.
These days, everyone was afraid of kids because all kids became Children. It was rumored that they were coming right out of the womb like that and pregnant women were being killed on sight by gangs to avoid any more Children being born.
It didn’t bode well for humanity’s future given that the next generation were hideous mutations.
Extinction was only a matter of time.
3
We took time to reload when we were an easy block away, darting beneath an old oak and planting ourselves in its shadows. We caught our breath. Had a drink of water from our bottles. The Geiger was reading forty micro-roentgens which was strictly background radiation. That was pretty normal. Before the war, background rad was something like ten to fifteen micro-roents in your average American city. Now twenty was the low end and fifty to sixty being the high end…of course, that didn’t take into account places like LA that had taken direct hits and were still cooking hot.
“We gotta find us a place to hide out for the night,” Carl said.
Texas Slim chuckled. “It amazes me, Carl, how you get to the root of the problem every time.”
“I got a root for you, asshole.”
“If that’s your root, sonny, then it must’ve been a real bad growing season.”
“Fuck off.”
I sighed. “Zip it, both of you.”
“Another house?” Janie suggested.
But I didn’t like that. The Children were out there, they would find us again. I had hoped that they wouldn’t be in this town, but they were here like everywhere else. No, another house wasn’t an option. It had to be something different.
“H
ear that?” Texas Slim said. “That’s not coyotes.”
I heard it all right: the telltale baying of dogs echoing out through the shadow-carved town. Children. Dog packs. Jesus. South Bend was no different than every other town. I supposed they were all like that now, maybe some even worse.
We needed to get downtown. But that meant getting farther away from the Bronco with its flat tire.
“Let’s go,” I said.
“What way?” Texas Slim wanted to know. “All ways being the same, I suppose.”
“Towards the center of town. We’ll scout back for the Bronco come first light. Right now, let’s get off the streets.” . 30.06 in hand, I led them away.
The night was warm, but not unpleasantly so. Just the sort of night you might have spent out on the front porch with a cold beer in your hand in the old days. I led them down alleys and streets, through a maze of avenues, and across an empty field.
Downtown.
Main Street. It was a graveyard like every other main street in the world now. Windows broken, buildings half-burned out, the corpses of cars and trucks clogging up the streets. Drifts of sand pushed into doorways. Desolation and nothing but.
The sidewalks were choked with leaves from the past autumn. Nobody was there to sweep them up now. There were things beneath the leaves, probably skeletons, but nobody bothered to look. The windows were all dirty from sandstorms.
We moved past storefronts draped in shadow.
A video store. An insurance office. A cafe. Several stores with soaped out windows and badly faded going-out-of-business signs. We passed a department store with dusty, cobwebbed Halloween costumes behind the dirty windows, saw yellowed and curled Halloween decorations in the windows of several others. A theater with the lofty title of The Grande Ballroom still had an all-night horror show up on its marquee. Many of the letters were missing, but it looked like it was really going to be some kind of All Hallows hoot with four movies and a couple stage acts.
