Tim Curran - Biohazard

I smelled gas.

“Okay,” Texas said, tapping me on the shoulder. “Time for a very hasty retreat…”

We pulled back and I had him take the girls and get moving while I stood off to the side. Carl looked at me. Gas was dripping from the discharge valve. It smelled very sharp, very pungent. I gave him the thumbs up and he opened the valve. The gas didn’t just run from the outlet, it sprayed. It came out in a gushing, high-pressure stream that shot forward a good five feet before striking the bridge. It hit with such force that it washed away the corpses of the dead Clansmen, catching them in a rolling stream and pushing them beneath cars. The smell of raw gasoline was so overwhelming, I started to get dizzy from the fumes.

“Let’s go,” Carl said.

We retreated with the others. I told them to keep going until they were off the other end of the bridge. They didn’t like it, but it had to be. I didn’t know what was going to happen when Carl put a bullet in the spilled river of gas. His plan was fairly simple: he’d shoot into the gas. The bridge was metal. The slug from my Savage would kick up some sparks when it hit and that’s all it would take. The gas should ignite, but the truck would, too, and when that happened it might be like ground zero on the bridge.

Carl and I climbed up atop the cab of a flatbed truck loaded with lumber. We had a good view of the tanker and the gas flooding down through the vehicles. The Clansmen stopped when it hit them, several were washed right off their feet, more falling as the gas rushed past them. Some retreated. Others came forward. Most were just confused, mulling around, wondering maybe what it all meant.

The gas had been running for over five minutes at that point.

It had flooded right down the bridge and I could see the swirling lake of it on the road where you drove up. Carl raised the Savage. His face was glistening with sweat. He sighted in and fired. Nothing. Swearing, he did it again, aiming down farther in-between two cars right into the gas. He squeezed the trigger. The shot rang out and this time I saw the sparks fly as the round chewed into the steel plating. I saw the spark and then a wall of flames was rushing towards the truck and right through the legions of the Hatchet Clans. They screamed and threw themselves around as the fire enveloped them. There was no escape from it.

We jumped off the cab, landed on the hood, found the bridge and started running. We made it maybe twenty feet when the world exploded into daylight and the aftershock threw us to the bridge. Behind us, it was an absolute inferno. The explosion had tossed the tanker into the air about forty feet and then it came back down, a flaming mass that erupted on impact in an ocean of fire that engulfed the bridge, ran right up the farthest arch, and flooded everything in a blinding blaze. Twin fire balls about the size of two-story houses went rolling up into the sky. A wave of heat hit Carl and I, singing our eyebrows. The Hatchet Clans were incinerated, I was guessing, because nothing could have lived through that cremating firestorm. From the first arch right down to the road below was nothing but a rampart of fire that rose twenty feet into the air. I saw burning Clansman leaping off the bridge or blown right off it. I heard their death cries as they roasted in hell.

We were quite a distance from it, yet the consuming heat was like standing before an open oven door. We got to our feet and ran, gasping for breath. The air was foul with smoke and fumes and it was hard to breathe as if the explosion itself had sucked all the oxygen from the air.

When we reached the others, we were dizzy, out of breath. We fell to our knees and they pulled us to our feet, got us off the bridge.

Lying on the grassy riverbank, I watched the bridge burn. It was so bright you could have seen it for miles, just blazing away as Dresden must have after it was fire-bombed. As we sat there, watching the pyrotechnics, all those cars and trucks started going up as their gas tanks caught fire. I saw a propane truck shoot straight up like a burning missile before coming down into the river below, a huge puddle of flames spreading over the surface of the water. It expanded right to the far bank and started the grass and trees on fire.

It was quite a show.

I came awake to the sound of a horn blaring. It tore me out of some crazy, almost hallucinogenic dream about The Medusa. I jumped up and nearly elbowed Texas in the face. I didn’t know where the hell I was or what was going on.

“It’s okay,” Janie told me.

“Must’ve been quite a dream,” Texas Slim said.

I wiped the sleep from my eyes. Slowly, it all came back to me and I slid back down in the seat of the Jeep, relaxing a bit. We had found the Jeep in the garage just like Mickey said. It was a good vehicle. Well-maintained. Battery charged. Full tank of gas. We’d driven out of Gary last night, crossing the Indiana state line into Illinois and, cutting well south of Chicago, got onto to Route 80 which was our ticket west. The highway was a mess with stalled cars and trucks, overturned buses and you name it. We’d been on it all day, creeping along, and now it was night again.

Mickey was driving. Carl was snoring in the passenger seat.

“Hell we at?” I asked.

“Signs say we’re outside some little dive called Utica,” Mickey told me. “Road’s been clear the last twenty miles or so. How long you want to keep going?”

That was a good question. All I knew is we had to hit Des Moines on our way west. That’s what The Shape had said inside my head. Then again, maybe I’d imagined it, but I didn’t think so because the need to reach Des Moines as fast as we could was overpowering. It’s hard to explain. But when that voice whispered in my head-and I can’t honestly be sure it really was a voice as such-and pointed me in the right direction, it became an obsession to get there. It was almost a physical need. Like getting to a toilet when your bladder is full to bursting, if you can dig that.

“Why’d you hit the horn?” I asked.

“Your girlfriend thought a giant bird was attacking us,” Janie said.

“I didn’t say it was a bird,” Mickey told her, practicing great patience, I thought. “Something swooped us. It was big and it was dark. It came out of the air, hence, I’m assuming it had wings.”

“I’d say that’s a good assumption,” Texas said. “And blaring horns are known to frighten off giant birds.”

I looked out my window, watching the moonlit countryside passing by. There was mist or smoke hanging in the sky as if something nearby was burning. I could see streaks of color that were pink and almost luminous. I don’t know what they were or what could have caused them. Then I saw the moon. It was full. Everything inside me dried up at the sight of it. Full moon and no offering for big bad Brother Shape. A selection would have to be made some way and somehow. It filled my belly with poison just thinking about it. I saw a flock of winged creatures pass over the face of the moon. They looked kind of like giant bats, but maybe they were witches out on a lark. Nothing would have surprised me. Mickey definitely wasn’t seeing things.

“We need to stop sooner or later,” Janie said at my side. “These people need to rest, Nash.”

Sure, rest. Like food, one of those things the human body just had to have sometimes. Janie was not stupid. She knew it was the night of the moon, she knew what that entailed. I got the feeling from her that she was nursing a secret joy inside her that I had nothing to offer up. That my feelings for the others would prevent me from choosing from their ranks. This is what she wanted. To tell Big Brother Shape to fuck himself or herself or itself. No more free lunches. No more offerings. We’re better than that, we will no longer sink to the dehumanizing, uncivilized depths of offering one of our own to some malignant horror from the pit.