Tim Curran - Biohazard

Standing there, looking at the stores and displays, I couldn’t help but feel nauseous at it all. And I couldn’t help but think that maybe, just maybe, if we’d all been less concerned with our wallets and more concerned with our brother man that the world might have still been green and sunny and filled with the laughter of children and not a radioactive wasteland haunted by mutants, crazies, and pandemic germs. I had to wonder, really, if maybe we had deserved this. That with the road we were on, becoming shallower by the day, if something like Doomsday hadn’t been inevitable.

But ultimately, in a way, we weren’t to blame. Nature had engineered us into what we were. Our ancestors were greedy by necessity. They had to be to survive. The more your tribe had the better chance you’d make it through the winter. And that greed, of course, became materialism. The human animal always wanted more and there were those that profited obscenely by exploiting this common, inbred need. And somewhere down the line, we destroyed ourselves.

I suppose if visitors from another star ever showed up, they’d look around, shake their heads, and go somewhere else.

After awhile, I got off my soapbox and found Janie looking around in Underground Attitude. “Do you ever wonder,” she said, “how long we can keep playing the odds like we do and survive?”

“Long as we have to.”

“Do you really believe that, Nash?” she said, her face very long. “Do you really believe we can keep fighting against the inevitable?”

“And what’s the inevitable, Janie? Death? Should we just lie down and not bother? Is that what you think?”

“I don’t know, Nash. Is it what I think?”

“Don’t talk in riddles. I’m too tired for that shit.”

Janie just stared at me. There were vast crystalline depths in the blue of her eyes. “What I’m saying is that we keep running and running, moving west. What are we running from? And better yet, what are we running to? What do you think is out there, Nash? Do you expect we’ll find paradise, some kind of oasis from all this or do you know better?”

“I don’t know shit, Janie.”

“You know more than you’re saying.”

I hated when she did things like this. It was all hard enough without over-analyzing why things were and why they weren’t. “Janie, all I know is that we’re being driven west-”

“Like cattle.”

“-it’s what The Shape wants and you know what? It’s what I want, too, because I’m just optimistic enough to believe there’s something better than this. There has to be.”

“But the germs…”

“I’m fully aware of the germs. I have nightmares about them.”

She sighed. “What I mean is that we can’t keep playing the odds. Sooner or later, we’re going to pick up one of these germs. One of us is going to get infected. And if one does, we all do.”

“Maybe we’re immune.”

“Specs wasn’t.”

“No, but the rest of us didn’t get what he had, now did we? Maybe there’s a reason for that.”

“The Shape? Do you really believe that, Nash?”

I honestly wasn’t sure what I believed anymore. “Listen to me, Janie. All I know is that since The Shape picked me I have skirted one danger after the other. That’s all I know. That’s my convoluted logic. We do what it wants and it keeps us alive. Maybe it even makes us immune…I just don’t know. We’ve got an edge that no one else does, we’d be goddamned stupid not to use it.”

“Even if it means taking a life every month?”

“Yes.”

“You really believe that?”

“I do. And deep down, you do, too.” I went over to her and put my hands on her shoulders. “I have to make selections, Janie. You know it. I know it. If we don’t…if we don’t, The Shape will do its own selecting. Me, you, Carl, Texas, maybe all of us.”

Her arms loaded with clothes, she turned and walked away from me. Just like that. She was good at heart, she was true gold. But her morals were having trouble with how we lived. I wished to God there was another way. But there wasn’t. There just wasn’t. The germs floating around out there were unbelievably infectious and deadly. I didn’t want to go down with black plague or cholera, typhoid or the flu. And especially not with Ebola. If that meant sacrificing an innocent each full moon to protect me and my friends, I was going to do it.

At least, that’s what I told myself as I watched her walk away.

I felt very grand, very high and mighty, maybe even noble at that moment like I was some kind of fucking hero, some errant knight sacrificing all for God, country, and queen. But later, my delusions failed as they often do. I found a place where I could be alone, the very back aisle of Waldenbooks where I sat on the carpeted floor, surrounded by racks of kidlit-Junie B. Jones, Dr. Suess, Horrible Harry, the Boxcar Children, Henry Higgins, assorted Roald Dahl’s and Beatrix Potter’s-and I cried. Face in my hands, I cried my eyes out, remembering when I’d had a wife, a life, and, yes, some dignity.

Not like now.

When I opened my eyes again, I stared at the neat rows of books. At cardboard standees of Harry Potter and Max from Where the Wild Things Are. Surrounded by books that made me remember my secret childhood worlds, I had never felt so broken, so frayed, so fragmented. A post-apocalyptic Humpty Dumpty.

The sandstorm blew on and off for five days.

We were nearly ready to tear out each other’s throats by then. Any diversion would have done, even a pack of crazies and a firefight. When it ended we piled into the Bronco, barely speaking. Carl drove us out of the mall and into the world. Entire streets were blocked with sand dunes. The city looked completely different blown with sand and whitened with dust.

“Where to, Nash?” Carl finally said when we were rolling down South Main again like five days before.

“West,” I told him. “Get us to the highway, to U.S. Twenty. We have an appointment, I think, in South Bend.”

We didn’t make it there for a week.

We had one problem after another. Suffice to say that when we did arrive, as luck would have it, the Bronco blew a tire soon as we rolled in and left us stranded there on the dirty backside of Indiana. And at night yet. Nothing worse than being on foot at night. Too many things out there. Too many predators haunting the ruined carcasses of the cities. Wild dog packs, mutant rats, swarms of bloodsucking insects, things much worse that it was hard to put a name to.

The radiation had done funny things.

We found a little ranch house in a devastated neighborhood at the edge of town and laid low. Nothing out there but wild dogs picking in the gutters, rats, lots of wrecked cars, sand blowing in the streets.

I thought we’d be safe for the night. I was wrong.

The house was empty. It was solid. And it appeared to be defensible. Of course, it wasn’t real easy to ascertain the latter, it being dark and all. And I didn’t want to be using any flashlights. Batteries were hard to come by and I didn’t exactly want to telegraph our position to whatever was waiting out there…because something was, you see. I could feel it right up my spine and I knew better than to dismiss such a feeling.

Ten minutes after we got there, we all heard it: a high, almost electronic piping that sounded oddly like a locust being imitated by a machine. And there was only one thing that made a sound like that.

We got ready.

Breathing in and breathing out, I waited with the. 30.06 Savage cradled in my arms. Because it was coming. It had been scenting us for the past hour and now it was closing in.

The others were back in the kitchen-Carl and Janie and Texas Slim-huddled up in the shadows, trying to keep quiet and failing at it. Whatever came through that door, I wanted first crack at it. Believe me, I was no hero, but the idea of whatever was out there flooding into the room in numbers and us being boxed in together…no, it was a recipe for disaster.