Tim Curran - Biohazard

Specs wouldn’t come by the corpse. Even with working the clean-up crew, he was looking a little green. And that was mostly Sean’s talk more than anything.

“I can smell it, too,” he said. “But it’s over here.”

He was standing by a doorway. A set of steps led down into the darkness. Sean went over there right away. As ridiculous as it sounds, he went down on his hands and knees sniffing like a bluetick hound. “Yup. Trog piss. One of ‘em must have marked this spot. Bet you ten to one we got us a Trog down there in the basement. Who’s for taking a look?” He stood up. “How about you, little man?”

“Me?” Specs said.

Sean laughed. “You ain’t got the balls. I’ll go down.”

Specs stepped in front of him. “I’ll do it.”

Sean smiled. “Listen for ‘em. They breathe real loud.”

I didn’t like it. Specs was one of those guys that must have been a toilet in another life because he always took shit. But he didn’t like to be challenged. He felt the need to prove himself.

“I’ll go with,” I said.

Specs gave me a look. “I don’t need you.”

He turned on his helmet light, took out his. 357, and down he went. I told him to be careful. I didn’t like any of this. I had a cigarette and I was nervous as hell. I always looked after Specs. I didn’t like Sean pulling this macho shit on him, goading him like that.

“He’ll be all right,” Sean told me.

“He fucking better be,” I said.

Sean gave me a hard look and I gave it right back. If anything happened to Specs, I was going to kill him and I think he knew it. We watched each other.

The minutes ticked by.

It wasn’t long before Specs let out a scream and came jogging up the steps, his eyes wide behind his glasses, his brow beaded with sweat. There were cobwebs on his coat.

“OH GOD! OH MY FUCKING GOD!” he cried out, absolutely hysterical. “IT’S DOWN THERE! I SAW IT! IT LOOKED RIGHT FUCKING AT ME! DON’T GO

He was ready to jump out of his skin. He was shaking and gasping for breath and I held onto him until he calmed down. Sean was smiling; he thought it was funny as hell.

“They ain’t too active in the day, little man,” he said.

“Bullshit,” Specs said. “This one looked pretty fucking active.”

“I’ll take a look.”

“You better not go down there,” Specs warned him.

Sean went anyway. He clicked on his helmet lamp, racked his shotgun, and started down. He made it maybe three steps and came right back up, backing all the way. “I’ll be goddamned,” he said.

“What?” I said.

“We got one coming up into the light.”

I felt a clammy chill run up my spine and there was good reason for it: that piss smell suddenly got stronger. Ammoniated urine and enough to ream the hairs right out of your nose.

“Let’s get the hell out of here!” Specs suggested.

“Not on your life, brother,” Sean told him. “I been waiting for this.”

Specs and I pulled back along the far wall, right near to the door so we could run the hell out of there if we had to. I could hear the slapping sound of bare feet coming up the steps and my mouth was so dry I could not swallow. I could hear the Trog breathing with a hollow hissing sort of sound. That urine stench grew stronger, a low and mean smell that made my eyes water.

“Get ready,” Sean whispered.

I saw a shadow emerge from the gloom…it was distorted, semi-human. It was making a low growling sound in its throat. It came up into the light, a grotesque caricature of a human being. It was woman, I thought. Broken, bent at the waist, one shoulder pulled up higher than that other. The left arm reached down near the knee and the other only to the waist. She was naked, her flesh a greasy yellow like leprosy, horribly corrugated, the fissures and clefts in her skin so deep you could have lost a penny in them. Her breasts looked like deflated, fleshy balloons.

“Jesus,” Specs said.

Her head was misshapen, long cobweb gray hair hanging from the raw scalp. She looked around with glossy pink eyes that were set with a fine tracery of purple veins like unfertilized eggs. Each set with a tiny black dot that must have been a pupil. Her puckered mouth pulled back from teeth that were black and overlapping, triangular in shape. They looked serrated. A watery brown juice ran from the corners of her lips.

She held a hand up before her face to block the light and I saw that the palm was set with ring-shaped protrusions that looked like the sucker scars of squids you see on whales.

“I’m over here, you bitch,” Sean said.

The Trog looked at him and I wondered at that moment if she did not recognize him. She let out a shrill, piercing scream that grew in volume, an unearthly wailing that went right through me, scraping along the inside of my skull like a fork. I thought my bladder would let go. I almost fell over Specs. The scream echoed through that deserted building and came right back at us: it was an agonized sound like an animal being put to death.

Then she spoke…or made sounds like speech. I’m not sure. But this is what I heard: “Yyyyyyoooooouuuuu,” she hissed with a timber that made everything inside me pull up tight. “Yyyyyyooooouuuuuu…”

If Sean hadn’t had that shotgun, she would have torn out his throat and washed herself in his blood. She stumbled towards him, blinded, hissing, and very pissed off.

Sean let her get within four feet and then he gave her a round right in the belly. 12-gauge shot at close quarters, it nearly torn her in half. She went down screaming and thrashing. He gave her another right in the chest and she flopped, screeched, and then went still. The stink of her blood was just as bad as her urine.

“That’s how it’s done,” Sean said.

My legs went out from under me and I sat down hard next to Specs who’d already folded up. We sat there, speechless. We thought killing that thing would be enough. But it wasn’t. Not for Sean. He set aside his shotgun, kneeled down by the Trog. He wrapped her hair in his fist and pulled it tight. Then out came his hatchet. With a couple quick strokes, he decapitated her.

He stood up, holding that vile grimacing head by the hair. Blood dripped from the severed neck. “Either you boys want this for your trophy cases?” We just looked dumbly at him. “Didn’t think so.” He opened his potato sack and dropped the head in, tied the sack off at his belt.

I finally found my voice. “What the hell do you want that for?”

“I got my reasons, brother,” he said. “See, Trogs are superstitious, I think. Maybe they believe in ghosts or something. I don’t know. But they don’t care for their own dead or parts of ‘em, for that matter. I was in a pinch one time with three of the fuckers bearing down on me. I only had one round in my gun. What to do? I threw a trophy Trog head at the others and they ran off like the Devil was coming down to fucking Georgia. You should have seen it!”

I was very happy that I hadn’t.

There was no way in hell I wanted any part of Trog-hunting. You couldn’t have paid me to go after those monsters. They lived down in the sewers mostly, Sean told me, and I was content to let them stay there. But something happened that changed my mind.

We left the building, got out into the sunshine-Sean had promised us he had an unopened bottle of Jack Daniels back at his apartment and I was all for that-and right away we saw carnage. Scabs. About a dozen of them were lying dead in the streets. Their blood was very bright, very red spilled over the rubble. They had been dismembered, hacked and slit, disemboweled. Their entrails were strewn everywhere. One particular set was hung from a STOP sign. They had all been decapitated, the heads set neatly next to one another on the curb.