Biohazard

by Tim Curran

  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 lik
e 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.