Tim Curran - Biohazard

But what had embraced me was far worse.

Not the corpse, but The Maker of Corpses.

Outside the Army/Navy store, I fell to my knees in the cool night air. I didn’t care about dog packs or the Children or rats or any of it. That shit was pedestrian in comparison with what I’d just been through. I did not know if it was sheer nightmare or reality or some feverish, fucked up brew of both, all I knew was that I could smell the hot green odor of rotting corpses in the cities to the east and taste something in my mouth like hot-sweet bile. I threw up and kept throwing up until it was all purged from me. And even then the raw, fetid stench of it on the sidewalk-far unlike any vomit I’d ever known-made me shake with dry heaves.

Somewhere during the process, Janie came out. “Are you all right, Nash?”

I looked up at her, my face warm and waxy, my eyes bloodshot and tearing. I swallowed. Swallowed again. I could not speak. We went inside and I drank some water, smoked a cigarette, and all the while she was staring at me, wanting answers. “Nash? Nash? God, Nash, speak to me…” Oh, but I couldn’t. Because if I opened my mouth and powered up the old voice box what was going to come out in a gushing flood of pure unbridled terror was the scream to end all screams. I was afraid I would start and never, ever stop.

So I said nothing. Absolutely nothing.

I could see it in her eyes, the concern, yes, but also the fear as she wondered if I was shot through with the Fevers. But what I couldn’t say, what I dared not frame into worms, was that I was not sickened with Fevers but had been embraced by the Mother of Fevers.

And it was coming.

Getting closer day by awful day.

An unnamable horror that had come to exterminate what remained of the human race.

Texas Slim and Carl found a vehicle for us and it was really something. They came back with it about an hour before the sandstorm hit, noticing with some discomfort the uneasy silence that lay between Janie and I. They did not ask about it. They took us out to show us what they had found.

I started laughing when I saw it.

So did Janie.

Of all the dinosaurs in the automotive jungle they had somehow come across a VW microbus that had been new when the Vietnam War had still been raging. The bus was worn and dented, painted up with ancient flowers, peace signs, and other psychedelic hieroglyphics that had faded with age. It was an ugly vehicle for an ugly world.

“Where in the hell did you find this?”

“Some guy’s garage,” Carl said, scratching his thick black beard. “We were checking out this neighborhood, just looking in garages for anything we could get. We found this. Looks like shit, sure, but it moves and it can get us out of here. Maybe Michigan City or Gary, wherever.”

“It’s been serviced some, Nash,” Texas Slim added. “We found the fellow what owned it. He was on the floor, still had an oily rag in his hand.”

“Fever?” I asked, almost breathlessly, remembering my dream.

Texas Slim shook his head. “No…looked like radiation. His hair had fallen out and that sort of thing.”

“Yeah, but we almost didn’t get it because of the dog in the yard,” Carl said.

“Oh, you’re going to go into that, are you?” Texas Slim said.

“Dog?”

“Sure,” Carl said. “Big black mutha. Probably chained out there for days, crazy and foaming at the mouth. Texas here, he tries to make friends with it. Tries to pet it.”

“I didn’t try to pet it.”

“Sure you did.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did, you idiot. You were talking all sweet and sassy to it like you wanted to bone that fucker. Not that I’d be surprised.”

Texas just laughed. “Now see, Nash, that’s sheer invention on the part of my friend here with the small penis. Carl gets confused sometimes. His head isn’t right. But, you know, what with his mother mixing it up out in the barnyard with anything willing, it’s no wonder he turned out this way.”

Carl took a step towards him. “What I tell you about my mother?”

“Nothing I hadn’t already read on the bathroom wall.”

“Keep it up, you peckerwood sonofabitch. One of these days you’re going to dip that wee little pee pee into something and it’s going to get bit off.”

“So I’ll keep it out of your mouth.”

I had to break them apart at this point because the last thing I needed were these assholes swinging on each other and busting out each other’s teeth. Like we didn’t have enough to worry about. And it was about that time that the sandstorm started kicking up. I told Carl to find a garage somewhere to store the bus and by the time he got back the sand was already blowing.

So we hid out in the Army/Navy store and just waited.

There was nothing else to do.

We spent another four days in South Bend because we could not leave.

Visibility was down to a few feet. We listened to the sand blow and blow. It was driven by high winds that howled through the town, burying the streets in drifts and swirling eddies, churning sand-devils whipping and lashing against the building. For days it was like that, the moaning wind and the sound of sand grating against the windows and walls in a fine granulated grit. It found hairline cracks and seams and blew into the store, dusting the floor and covering the displays and shelves in a powdery down.

We waited downstairs in the storeroom, listening to it rage.

Even down there we could feel the sand on our skin, clogging our pores, getting in our hair and dusting our faces. It went on and on.

We huddled together and paged through old magazines and nobody said much. We all wanted to be on the road. We wanted to ditch this desolate burg.

But Mother Nature had other ideas.

As we waited, Carl and Texas Slim tried to stare each other down almost constantly and Janie was pretty much ignoring them and giving me the cold shoulder. It was a long goddamn wait. I spent my time consulting the dog-eared map in my pocket, wondering what we might run into out on the interstate, the whole time my belly filled with needles because we were trapped there. Waiting. I couldn’t shake the dream. Maybe I was paranoid-definitely-but I was feeling that hideous something coming from the east as maybe I’d been feeling it for a long time. I did not doubt its reality. The bottom line was we had to keep moving west. That’s the way it had to be and nobody asked why.

They knew.

They knew, all right.

Just like they knew that the next full moon was less than a week away and it would soon be time for me to make a selection.

The time of The Shape was nearing…

We came into the city on a day that was still, ominous, and hazy. Our VW hippie microbus was on its last legs. Like the wild free-loving days of Haight-Ashbury, the bus was past its prime. She seized up twice out on I-80 coming into Gary and Carl said her bearings were shot and her carb was gummed up. As it was, we pretty much coasted into the city, the love machine wheezing like an asthmatic old man. We needed new wheels because hoofing it across country just wasn’t an option.

We skirted Tolleston and cut through Ambridge until we reached downtown. Coughing out clouds of blue smoke, our VW microbus rolled to a stop before a row of tenements and died with a backfire.

Inside, Carl swore. And then swore again.

I stepped out, fanning my sweaty face with a Cleveland Indians baseball cap. I lit a stale cigarette with a cupped match and then looked around at the devastation…the overturned cars, the rubble, the garbage blowing in the gutters. Drifts of sand were pushed up against the buildings. A crow sat atop the traffic light ahead, cawing. The day was hot and hazy, picked dry as desert bones,