Tim Curran - Biohazard

I tossed it to the floor.

Texas and Janie were on their feet, swatting the insects down.

“Cover that fucking vent!” Texas shouted.

Which was exactly what I was going to do, but Carl was way ahead of me. No gun? He had a better idea. He grabbed a can of silicone spray from the shelf on the wall, the kind used to lubricate machine parts and make leather upholstery gleam. He got down on his knees before the clean air vent, pressed the button on the can and held his Bic lighter to the spray. A foot long mushrooming tongue of flame shot out. He held it to the vent. He fried one of the bloodsuckers coming through and it curled up, making a shrill e-e-e-e-e-e-e sort of sound as it died. Others tried to come up but he cooked them and drove still more down the vent. When the lattices of the vent were glowing hot, he yanked one of the filing cabinets over it, sealing it shut.

As he did that, the rest of us killed bugs.

There were about a dozen of them. We smashed and stomped and hit them. One got tangled in Janie’s hair and Texas almost cold-cocked her when he hit it, knocking it free. One got on the back of my neck and I screamed. I tried to pull it off but I couldn’t get a grip on it. I felt those rubbery pulsing lips attach to my flesh. They were warm. There was a sudden piercing like an ice-cold pin.

Then Carl knocked me to the floor and tore the beasty free.

I saw it laying there, smashed, a long needle-like protrusion hanging from the lips. It was wire-thin and probably used to puncture veins and arteries.

The war we fought was horrendous and by the end we had bug guts smeared on our hands and bug blood on our faces and down our arms. But we won. And when we had, we stood there breathing hard, dozens of mangled insects and parts thereof at our feet.

Carl lit a cigarette. “Fuck of a way to fight a war,” he said.

Janie burst out laughing, only this laughter was high-pitched and near hysterical. I understood it: I had the mad desire to do the same. I clutched her to me, that honeyed bug stench so ripe on her my stomach rolled over. Texas kicked bugs into the corner and the rest of us just let the tension run from us.

About the time Carl finished his cigarette, we heard a creaking.

Then a snapping.

And that’s when the window exploded inward.

The eruption of glass had not even made it more than a few inches, I bet, before we were in motion. I suppose we were all pumped hard with adrenaline and just ready to jump. Later, I was impressed at how we reacted, how we moved as a single unit: fast, cohesively, and without question.

The window blew in and we moved.

Texas threw open the door to the closet and we piled in…along with four or five bugs which, considering that hundreds had just blown into the room, was not so bad. I was the last one in, shoving Janie before me, and as I slammed the door shut I saw the room fill with insects.

And I do mean fill.

They came in through the shattered window in a droning storm like autumn leaves blown by the wind, an absolute tempest of bloodsuckers that erupted in a single boiling mass of wings and thoraxes and bulbous red eyes, fanning out and inundating the room in their numbers. That’s what I saw in the second or two before I slammed the door shut, smashing three or four between the door and jamb that were trying to follow us in.

It was pretty hairy for a moment after we got in there and the room filled with that ominous cacophony of buzzing. First off, I wasn’t exactly accurate in calling the closet a walk-in closet. It was your basic coat closet with a rod to hang jackets and what not from. About three feet deep, maybe four wide. And all of us in there with rifles. It was like the proverbial sardine can. When you took into account that we were trapped in a confined space with four or five mutant bloodsucking insects, it was not a good thing.

It was pitch black in there, of course.

The only light coming in was from the lantern and candles outside and this filtered through a space at the bottom of the door that was maybe half an inch wide. There was a lot of screaming and shouting as we smashed the intruders. One of them latched itself to Janie’s throat and she went absolutely wild. Carl was the one that finally got it off her. When all was settled and done, dead insects at our feet, we were pretty banged up and bruised. My face was scratched from Janie’s nails. I think I had punched Texas…or maybe Carl. Janie had elbowed me in the belly and stomped on my toes. Carl had backhanded me or, more precisely, back-elbowed me. Texas was complaining that somebody had kneed him in the balls and Carl said his left shin had been laid raw.

I suppose if somebody had watched us in there with a hidden camera or something, they would have found it hilarious. Basically, four adults in a box beating the hell out of each other as they tried to kill the bugs. It reminded me of that Three Stooges episode where the boys get stuck in a phone booth together.

Anyway, it was your classic closet. No standing room, of course, with the coat rod there. It was hell being packed in like that and having to stoop over. Especially when we realized that it might be hours before the swarm got bored and moved on. They were buzzing loudly outside the door and being in the closet was like being tucked away in the cell of a bee honeycomb.

“Whose hand is on my ass?” Janie said. “Kindly remove it.”

“Where am I suppose to remove it to?” Texas Slim wanted to know. “I’m simply trying to make use of every available space for the comfort of the group, darling.”

“Leave that space alone.”

“This is bullshit,” Carl said. “We’re going to be fucking pretzels by the time we get out.”

Texas laughed. “Well, I’m betting you’ll make a really awful tasting pretzel, Carl.”

“Yeah? Well, fuck you.”

Carl shoved into me, knocking me and Janie against the wall. Texas shoved him and soon they were grappling and we were getting the worst of it. Go figure. I shoved back and Janie elbowed me and I made to push Texas and I cracked Janie alongside the head and she kicked me and Carl said we were all a bunch of fucking morons and brought his head back and nearly broke my nose.

“All right!” I finally shouted. “Knock this shit off!”

Everybody calmed a bit and we had three or four seconds of unbroken, cramped peace. Then Carl made a growling sound in his throat. “Texas? You’re jabbing me in the ass with your gun.”

“That ain’t my gun,” he said.

“You sonofabitch.”

More scuffling. I finally told them to knock it off and told Texas Slim to quit jabbing Carl with whatever he’d been jabbing him with-I didn’t want to know what-and we settled in and started waiting. The bloodsuckers were buzzing, bumping into the walls, crawling over the outside of the door and scratching at it, making those appalling sucking sounds that were terrible to hear. Carl switched on his flashlight and, sure enough, about a dozen of those proboscises had slipped through the aperture at the bottom of the door, the flared lips at the ends looking for something to attach to. We stomped them and the bloodsuckers made sharp trilling sounds, but after awhile they learned not to stick their beaks into the crack. That sweet scent they carried was so thick in the closet I thought we would asphyxiate.

We spent nearly three hours like that.

Three hours is a long time when you’re cramped and contorted. I defused a lot of fights between Carl and Texas Slim and prayed the insects would leave, but mostly I did a lot of thinking. And what I thought about most was not our predicament or the death that was held at bay by two inches of wood, but about Sean. Sean was dead. I had seen him get his brains blown out but I still couldn’t believe it. Sean who had pulled my ass out of the fryer again and again in places like Cleveland, Toledo, and Bowling Green. He was a good guy. Tough, loyal, smart, and very wise in his own way. A guy who had run guns, pushed meth and heroin, been a blood member and enforcer for the Warlocks motorcycle gang back east, and did time for armed robbery and aggravated assault…but when it was just he and I alone, I had gotten to know a side of the man no one would ever have suspected existed. A very wise and compassionate side.