Tim Curran - Biohazard

Your own kids or the kids next door, the charming little girls playing dress-up in the backyard or the rambunctious little boys playing sandlot baseball…they were not human anymore.

They were monsters.

The radiation had gotten hold of them, turned them into deranged night stalkers with yellow luminous eyes and fingers that would actually burn you to a cinder if they got a hold of you. They hunted by night in packs like wolves or vampires, killing anything they could catch. Somehow, some way, maybe because they were young and still growing, their cells had absorbed the fallout, made it part of their natural rhythms. Nobody really knew and most were too scared to find out.

There were survivors out there that thought the Children were ghosts or ghouls, supernatural things that crept out by night to feed. That wasn’t true, of course, but you could hardly blame anyone for thinking it. For it was really hard to imagine anything as scary as the Children. Radioactive fallout was part of life here in the new spooky world. You had to live with it and learn how to detect it, what places were hot and how to avoid them.

But the Children made that difficult.

Because they were, essentially, fallout and fallout that was cunning and evil. Fallout that hunted its victims.

I figured they did it for a reason. Maybe they absorbed something from people, something they needed. It was hard to say, but it had to be something. I knew they were not supernatural even though sometimes they acted that way and they did only come out at night. They were not flesh and blood as we understood flesh and blood, but a different sort of flesh and blood. Something completely alien right down to their blazing hot subatomics.

But they could be killed.

If you put a bullet in them, they’d literally burn up like atomic piles right in front of you. I suppose if you stuck a spear in them the same thing would happen, but if you got that close you’d fry.

So bullets worked best.

The smart thing was to avoid them, to hide out by night and stay off the streets. That was your best bet. I had no idea where they laired themselves for the daylight hours and I honestly didn’t want to know. In the back of my mind, I always envisioned them stretched out like the undead in reactor cores. Nobody really knew.

These days, everyone was afraid of kids because all kids became Children. It was rumored that they were coming right out of the womb like that and pregnant women were being killed on sight by gangs to avoid any more Children being born.

It didn’t bode well for humanity’s future given that the next generation were hideous mutations.

Extinction was only a matter of time.

We took time to reload when we were an easy block away, darting beneath an old oak and planting ourselves in its shadows. We caught our breath. Had a drink of water from our bottles. The Geiger was reading forty micro-roentgens which was strictly background radiation. That was pretty normal. Before the war, background rad was something like ten to fifteen micro-roents in your average American city. Now twenty was the low end and fifty to sixty being the high end…of course, that didn’t take into account places like LA that had taken direct hits and were still cooking hot.

“We gotta find us a place to hide out for the night,” Carl said.

Texas Slim chuckled. “It amazes me, Carl, how you get to the root of the problem every time.”

“I got a root for you, asshole.”

“If that’s your root, sonny, then it must’ve been a real bad growing season.”

“Fuck off.”

I sighed. “Zip it, both of you.”

“Another house?” Janie suggested.

But I didn’t like that. The Children were out there, they would find us again. I had hoped that they wouldn’t be in this town, but they were here like everywhere else. No, another house wasn’t an option. It had to be something different.

“Hear that?” Texas Slim said. “That’s not coyotes.”

I heard it all right: the telltale baying of dogs echoing out through the shadow-carved town. Children. Dog packs. Jesus. South Bend was no different than every other town. I supposed they were all like that now, maybe some even worse.

We needed to get downtown. But that meant getting farther away from the Bronco with its flat tire.

“Let’s go,” I said.

“What way?” Texas Slim wanted to know. “All ways being the same, I suppose.”

“Towards the center of town. We’ll scout back for the Bronco come first light. Right now, let’s get off the streets.” . 30.06 in hand, I led them away.

The night was warm, but not unpleasantly so. Just the sort of night you might have spent out on the front porch with a cold beer in your hand in the old days. I led them down alleys and streets, through a maze of avenues, and across an empty field.

Downtown.

Main Street. It was a graveyard like every other main street in the world now. Windows broken, buildings half-burned out, the corpses of cars and trucks clogging up the streets. Drifts of sand pushed into doorways. Desolation and nothing but.

The sidewalks were choked with leaves from the past autumn. Nobody was there to sweep them up now. There were things beneath the leaves, probably skeletons, but nobody bothered to look. The windows were all dirty from sandstorms.

We moved past storefronts draped in shadow.

A video store. An insurance office. A cafe. Several stores with soaped out windows and badly faded going-out-of-business signs. We passed a department store with dusty, cobwebbed Halloween costumes behind the dirty windows, saw yellowed and curled Halloween decorations in the windows of several others. A theater with the lofty title of The Grande Ballroom still had an all-night horror show up on its marquee. Many of the letters were missing, but it looked like it was really going to be some kind of All Hallows hoot with four movies and a couple stage acts.

“See that, Texas?” Carl said. “Halloween horror show. Be like a fucking family reunion for a peckerwood like you.”

“Quiet,” Janie said.

As I saw the marquee, the decorations, the memories weighed down on me. Good God, Halloween. I’d forgotten about that being that every day was fucking Halloween now. The bombs had come down a week or so before Halloween and that was almost a year ago now.

Shit.

We kept going, waiting for something to show its ugly face, but so far nothing had. Janie was right behind me, Texas Slim behind her, and Carl taking up the backdoor with his shotgun.

So many shadows…spilling, pooling, spreading over the streets in tar-like lagoons of night. A light breeze was blowing, leaves skittering about, sand trickling against windows. I led them around a car stalled on the sidewalk, a Chevy. It looked like it had popped the curb and been abandoned there, two of the doors still thrown open. Moonlight flooded it. There was sand and leaves inside. The browned skeleton of a child was curled up on the back seat nearly buried in sand. It still had blonde curls. A girl. Looked like she had gone to sleep, gone peacefully, probably waiting for her mother to come back.

Radiation. Plague. Who could say?

We skirted more wrecks, refusing to look inside them, but always wary of anything moving in them. Nothing did. We came around a dead minivan and there was movement. People.

“Stay back,” I told them, keeping my rifle on them. “Just stay back and we won’t have any trouble.”

But these people were not going to try anything.

We all saw what they were. Four or five of them…a man and a woman and a few kids, a family maybe. They were crouched there, holding onto one another. The stench coming off them was nauseating, like hospital dressings rank with gangrene and drainage. And there was a good reason for that: their faces were lumpy with rising sores, splitting and bleeding. It looked like one of the kids had some kind of growth coming out of his eye. They all breathed with rasping, phlegmy sounds. The man reached out a hand, broke into a fit of coughing, and vomited a dark slick of blood onto the walk.