Tim Curran: Biohazard

I was going to bury my wife, have a little service over her grave.

That’s what I was going to do and I coldly planned on murdering any asshole that got in my way. So, that godawful church bell gonging in my ears, I got my shit together, smoothed out the rough spots, and got down to it. For the first time in weeks I smiled, taking a secret, warped joy in the fact that I would bury my wife illegally. It was my way of raising my middle finger to the state. Fuck them. Fuck authority. Fuck those that had created this nightmare in the first place. Those evil, fucked-up minds, all part of the same corrupt bureaucracy that had killed the world.

I took a white satin coverlet that Shelly had loved and wrapped her up in it, kissed her cold dead lips once last time and stitched it shut. Outside, the trucks were getting closer. I could hear them rumbling, see their flashing lights arcing in the dark sky. Out on the streets there were voices.

They were coming.

Bring out yer dead.

Following nuclear winter, there was one nasty epidemic after another. People were dying in droves and the traditional mortuaries simply could not deal with it.

So the church bells rang.

They rang throughout the day and night and it wasn’t because somebody was going to get married in the chapel of love. No, they rang because the corpse wagons were coming to collect the dead. Dumptrucks, flatbeds, it didn’t matter. If it had a hopper it was converted to a corpse-collector. And given that radio, TV, and the internet had broken down, the city fathers decided to go with the oldest form of communication in cities and villages: the church bell. Churches were spread across Youngstown and most neighborhoods had one or two so when the wagons were rolling, the bells rang.

All you had to do was throw your loved ones’ body out on the curb with your recycling and they’d grab it for you.

Civic action. Made a guy feel good.

Bong-bong-bong-BONG! The wagons are a rolling, brothers and sisters, so let’s forget about care and decency and respect and get completely fucking Medieval on your ass. Uncle Joe vomited his guts out in bloody coils last night? Mom has drowned in a sea of her own collected waste? Little Cathy burst open with black, pustulating sores? The little missus got the spores and ulcers ate her down to a flux of cool, white jelly? No problem, my friend. Wrap him or her or it in a tarp or put what’s left in a Hefty bag, box it, bag it, but please don’t tag it, and we’ll take care of the rest! Not quite dead but damn near? Cash ‘em in anyway, no sense infecting the entire neighborhood. And while we’re on the subject, you got some ugly dig-dogged looking boils on yer face, son, better jump up in the wagon before you start shitting out the red worms and pissing yellow slime and yer eyes fill with blood and explode out of yer head and stain the new sofa.

It was ugly.

It was degrading.

It was inhuman.

But it was also quite necessary, you see.

There were corpses everywhere in the city, rotting in the gutters and piled up on the sidewalks like garbage. There was radiation sickness, of course, from the clouds of fallout drifting west from New York and east from Chicago, but poor sanitation had led to rampant outbreaks of cholera, typhoid, diphtheria, and the plague. New forms of influenza and pneumonia were making the rounds as well as a mutant strain of hemorrhagic fever that was devastating what was left of certain eastern cities like Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and, according to survivor rumor, eating its way through Akron.

In Youngstown the bodies were burned, but after awhile there were just so many that people started throwing them out into yards and dumping them on sidewalks. And all those rotting stiffs, well, they became disease vectors bringing in the rats and the flies which further spread the pestilence. The pathogens were in the water, blown on the air, and people continued to die.

It was insane.

It was hopeless.

And it had only just begun.

As I plotted the secret burial of my wife, there was a knock at the door.

I wasn’t going to answer it…but I knew if I didn’t, the men from the corpse wagons would kick it down, come thundering forth in their white decon suits and take Shelly away before I could sneak off with her.

“Who is it?”

“It’s me,” a voice whispered. “It’s Bill.”

Bill Hermes lived down the hall. He was okay. An old railroad man and widower, we’d had him over for dinner dozens of time. Shelly was always fussing over him, making him cookies and bars and all that. A nice old guy.

I sighed. “What do you want?”

“Rick…need to talk to you.”

I opened the door a crack. “What is it, Bill?”

He swallowed. “Rick, I’m here about Shelly. Nobody’s seen her in weeks. People are starting to talk.”

“Fuck ‘em.”

“Son…the wagons are coming.”

“I don’t have anything for ‘em.”

Bill wiped his teary eyes with a hankie. “Not saying you do. I’m hoping you don’t. But…but I overheard a couple boys downstairs. They’re saying that Shelly’s on the list. On that fucking list. You know what that means.”

That meant somebody had ratted us out, told the health department that Shelly was dying. Probably the hospital. Radiation sickness coupled with cholera…it was only a matter of time. The clean-up workers would come for her or at least demand proof that she was still breathing.

The trucks were getting closer.

“Thanks, Bill,” I said, shutting the door.

Time to move.

Cradling Shelly in my arms and making sure the corridor was empty, I slipped downstairs using the back steps. Out in the alley, I carried her around the rear of the building and cut through the little field back there. I was sweating, shaking, feeling like some convict who had just gone over the wall at Sing Sing. Shelly hardly weighed anything. I could have run for miles with her. I was almost across the field when somebody shouted: “There! There he is!”

They were coming and I was running.

Men with flashlights were entering the field. I cut through a little thicket, snagging Shelly’s shroud on blackberry thorns. I fought my way through, hands and face scratched. I fell only once but got right up again, kept going. When I made it out of the thicket, white-suited men were converging and trucks with spotlights were coming up the street.

I was trapped.

I started this way and that, but it was no good. The trucks were bearing down and the men with flashlights were closing in through the thicket. They were everywhere. Nowhere to run. It was perfectly surreal and completely unreal. The men chasing me. The flashlights. The trucks. The stink of death from the gutters. The stagnant mist creeping in off the river. The stars overhead blotted out by a dirty smudge of black smoke rising from the body pits outside the city where they burned the corpses.

I made a mad dash out into the street and one of the trucks nearly ran me down. Warning shots were fired, bullets zipping around. Spotlights found me and held me, blinding me there on the wet pavement.

A truck rolled to a stop and four men in white containment suits that were not so white anymore took hold of me while I fought and clawed and screamed. They stank of corpse-slime. I shouted at them and took a rifle butt to the temple that sent me sprawling. I was out for a moment or two after that, then I got back up again, fought my way through a tangle of men, hitting and being hit, knocking them aside in my wild flight. When I got around the back of the truck, I saw Shelly up there atop a moldering heap of corpses. Her shroud had burst, one chalk-white arm hanging out. I could smell the putrescence and hear the buzzing meat flies. Some of the corpses were rotten and green, writhing with worms.