Tim Curran - Biohazard

I went down on my knees, absolutely senseless.

Janie and Sean pulled me back to safety.

I smelled a sharp stink of ozone and something like burning flesh, hot blood boiled to steam. Then an awful, acrid stench like melting wires and blown fuses. The warehouse seemed to tremble. The concrete floor vibrated. There was a searing hot flash of something like chain lightening that blinded me momentarily and then the Shape was coming: a boiling black mass like thunderheads getting ready to shoot lightening at the earth. It was a spinning, roaring, unstable irradiated elemental force that came with the heat of coke ovens and the toxic glow of nuclear reactors. Looking at it was like looking into the primeval fires of cosmic creation.

Janie screamed.

Sean fell on his ass trying to get away from it.

The Shape was pulsing, revolving on an axis of pure atomic force that was frightening to behold, a storm of fallout and dust and particulated matter with a heart of superhot plasma. It made a buzzing sound like a million angry hornets.

I stood there, feeling its heat burning the fine hairs on the back of my hands. It was matter and force and pulsating energy, but it was not mindless. It was sentient and directed. Absolute nuclear chaos that was living and evil and hungry. At the very center of the whirlwind itself, there was a zone of blackness darker than anything I had ever seen before, the blackness that must exist beyond time and space. And flickering luminously within that shrieking void of antimatter were two red eyes that looked hot enough to melt steel.

Without further ado, it took Specs.

Dear God, it took him.

The mass of The Shape was constantly changing and reinventing itself, but I suppose if you had to give it spatial dimensions I would have said it was probably something like twelve feet in height, maybe six in width. It hovered over Specs for a moment or two and that’s when he realized exactly what he had given himself to.

He screamed.

Probably with his last reservoir of air he screamed like I’ve never heard a man scream before with a wild, cutting, hysterical sound that echoed through the warehouse. Sean made to go to his aid and I held him back. Specs was beyond our help. If Sean had gotten close to that radioactive furnace, he would have been vaporized.

Because that’s what happened to Specs.

He was sucked into it and I saw him spinning in that godless void, I saw him bulge up and then literally explode into particles that were vacuumed into the central mass, made part of it, every atom leeched of its energy in the whirling subatomic storm. And then he came back out again. He hit the floor and he was a blackened, smoldering heap of refuse that sparked and popped.

The buzzing sound faded, seemed to come from a great distance. There was a resounding hollow explosion that sounded much like a sonic boom when the air collapses back into the void left by a supersonic fighter.

That was it.

It was gone and so was Specs. What was left was a smoking heap of debris that had been supercharged, disassembled at the molecular level and then, reassembled, and vomited back into this time/space.

Janie and Sean practically had to carry me out of there. They did not speak for some time and I didn’t blame them. For I had shown them something no sane, reasoning mind should ever look upon.

The face of the Devil.

For weeks afterwards, I had nightmares about that night. I kept seeing The Shape take Specs and what had become of him. I kept seeing the blackened, burning heap of refuse he had been reduced to. He had been my friend. A very loyal, very kind-hearted guy. And I had given him to that fucking nightmare and how in God’s name could I ever get it out of my mind or learn to live with myself?

It was that night as Sean went off by himself to brood and drink, that Janie and I made love for the first time. She was so much younger than me that I felt like some kind of deviant, but I did it anyway. I lost myself in her and her hot body against mine was the finest thing I’d ever known. At least, that’s what I told myself.

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.

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.

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.