Tim Curran - Biohazard

The sun was rising. The world had gone from black to indigo to light blue. It would be fully light in about fifteen minutes. What I didn’t like was the idea of playing cat-and-mouse all day long with those assholes. I went over to Carl, whispered something in his ear. He liked my idea. Janie waited behind me. Texas Slim was out in the hallway keeping an eye on the stairwell.

Twice in the next few minutes, the bad boys below tried to make it to their parked vehicles and twice Carl had put a round within inches of them. We had them boxed good. They were hiding behind the rear of the pick-up truck. The Bronco was over a bit and they didn’t dare make a mad dash for it. And that was good, because I’d already eyed that baby up. I wanted it. I didn’t care if I had to kill everyone of them to get it.

Carl lit a cigarette, blew out some smoke. “Nash?” he said.

“Go ahead.”

Janie looked at me, but I wasn’t saying. Carl, cigarette clenched in his teeth, sighted in on the pick-up truck. He started squeezing off rounds, working the bolt of the Ruger and squeezing the trigger in rapid succession. He put one through the windshield. Another through the front driver’s side tire. He kept them pinned down. Two more shots into the cab. And then the killshot. Leaning out the window, he scoped out the gas tank and pulled the trigger. Dead on target, too. Right away, gasoline started flooding out from under the truck.

The bad boys started shouting.

Carl fired into the tank again and it went up with a resounding explosion, the puddle of gas going up in flames. The three survivors-one of them beating his burning clothes with his hands-appeared from behind the truck. They were firing at the building, trying to make the safety of the Bronco about twenty feet away. I aimed and fired on the guy I’d already pegged in the leg, catching him in the side and pitching him to the pavement. He screamed like he was being roasted alive.

The smoke from the burning truck was thick in the air and it screened the others from us as it screened us from them. The two survivors were going to get the Bronco. I put two or three rounds where I thought they were, but I knew one of them would make it. And they would have.

But something else happened first.

Carl stopped shooting and backed away from the window. “Listen,” he said. “You hear it? They’re coming…”

“That smell,” Janie said.

I didn’t know what the hell either of them were talking about. I was smelling burning gasoline and scorched metal, melted rubber and plastic, the stink of burnt cordite in the room. My ears were ringing from the shooting. So I truly didn’t hear or smell anything for a moment. But then I did: a rising steady drone that seemed to be coming from every direction and a smell: sweet, almost gagging, like sugar liquefied in a pan. The droning got louder until it became a high, whining buzz and that stink…nauseating, like thrusting your head into the innards of a hive dripping with honey. Absolutely overwhelming.

“Close those fucking windows!” I cried out.

But Carl and Janie were already doing so and I joined in. None of us seemed to give a shit about the fact that we had exposed ourselves to gunfire from below. We knew what was coming and we knew very well what would happen if we didn’t get those damn windows closed up fast.

“They’re down in the lobby!” Texas Slim called out, rushing into the room and slamming the door behind him.

We got the windows closed and just in time-for something landed on the glass outside. An insect. It was about six-inches long, segmented, a pale cream in color like a larval termite with tiny spines rising up from the thorax. Looking like some weird mutant hybrid of a wasp, a fly, and a mosquito, it fluttered wide, transparent purple-hued wings, two sets of them that were intricately veined with a dark tracery. It had bulbous red-orange eyes the size of marbles and I swear it was looking at us, hungering for us. Carl thumped the window and three more landed followed by a fifth, sixth, and seventh. They knew we were in there and they wanted us. They crawled over the glass, buzzing their wings, each extending a fleshy proboscis to the window, investigating it. The most obscene thing about them was that proboscis. It was rubbery, pulsing, the tip flaring out like a set of moist pink lips, suckering on the glass, inflating and deflating like it was kissing.

The dread of insects, especially large ones, is instinctual and that instinct becomes manic when the insects arrive in numbers, swarm like these things did. I don’t know what they were. Nobody really did. Just horrors that rose from the ashes of nuclear saturation, the radiation mutating their genes, adapting them perfectly to the hunting grounds of the new lopsided world. We called them bloodsuckers and that was as good of a name as any because they were bloodsuckers. They flew in dense, buzzing clouds, descending on anything with red blood in them and draining them dry.

I’d seen it happen and it was a horrible thing.

Carl thumped the glass again and something shrank inside me as I feared it might break, but it didn’t break. The insects flew off. Out in the parking lot below there were hundreds of them gathered in a huge buzzing swarm like mayflies, rising and falling, darting in and out of the mass, dancing about each other.

But even with that shrill buzzing in my ears I could hear the bad boys below screaming.

It’s not a sound I think I’ll ever forget. They were covered in bloodsuckers, literally enveloped in them. They were on the ground, writhing, squishing bug bodies beneath them and more poured in to feed all the time. Those blubbery lips-I don’t know what else to call them-on the end of the proboscises were attached to the men, suctioning the blood from them and I could hear that, too. It sounded like a kid sucking pudding through a straw.

Janie backed away from the window, shaking violently, hugging herself, then covering her ears. She was crying, her mouth was open like it wanted to scream but all that came out was an airless whine.

Texas was shaking, too. They shared an absolute terror of insects and these things only multiplied that tenfold. He wrapped his arms around her and she held on tight and maybe I would have tried to pacify them with a calm reassuring word if my skin hadn’t been crawling.

Even Carl wasn’t doing too well and nothing scared him. Beads of sweat were rolling down his face and I bet they were ice-cold. Just like the sweat beading my forehead.

Down in the parking lot, the feeding continued. The swarm found the bodies of the two dead men and were feeding on them. The gasoline had long since burned off and the truck sat there smoldering, but not putting out enough smoke to drive the bugs away.

As I said, the bloodsuckers were a dull, pale cream in color, but as they fed, juicing their veins and capillaries with stolen blood, they bloated up and their flesh went a bright, vibrant red like the ass end of female mosquito after she has just drank her fill on your forearm. Some of them were so distended with blood they could barely get off the ground, they looked almost absurd with their bulging, brilliant red thoraxes. Like glistening scarlet softballs with wings. Several were scrambling along sluggishly on the ground, too fat to fly, dragging their wings behind them. Their fellows chipped in by landing on them and suctioning off the excess with their proboscises.

More bugs landed on the window and when Carl went to thump them, I stopped him. If that glass broke we were dead. It was safety glass and safety glass does not break easily like in the movies, but all we needed was for one of those windows to have an imperfection. If it broke, we’d be drained dry before we even made the door.