Tim Curran - Biohazard

Which was directed at me, of course.

“Yup,” Texas said. “Sure would suck the old willy wonka if something prevented you from reaching your sister.”

Carl giggled.

Janie glared at him. I glared at Janie. What had to happen now was for the good of all of us, but try and make her get off her soapbox and realize it. Mickey, on the other hand, was a totally different sort of woman. She saw the way things were and knew how they would never be again. I’m not saying that she was a better person-because she sure as hell was not-but she was more like the rest of us: desensitized, desperate, willing to do whatever it took to see another day.

“Well, maybe you should be on your way,” Janie said, starting to get nervous. She knew she couldn’t guilt me out of this one.

“Was hoping I could sleep the night by your fire,” the woman said.

“Well, of course, darling,” Texas Slim told her. “Our fire is your fire.”

Carl giggled again.

“Nash,” Janie said and her voice was pleading. “Rick…”

“Why don’t you go take a walk?” I told her, beginning to lose my patience with the Pollyanna shit. “Texas’ll go with you.”

“Stay the fuck away from me,” Janie said. “All of you.”

She stomped away into the darkness. I didn’t like it because there were too many things out there.

In the distance you could see a faint greenish glow at the horizon that I thought was Chicago. There were weird pale blue auroras licking over the city, just pulsating like electrical fields. I saw occasional flashes of something like cloud-to-ground lightening that were a brilliant orange. I couldn’t even imagine what that hellzone was like at ground zero.

“Okay, Carl,” I finally said. “Let’s get this done.”

Marilynn put her bovine eyes on me. I’ll never forget the way she looked at me as if she knew, as if she sensed the horror that was coming. One human being trying to make a connection with another, looking for mercy, for compassion, for understanding. What she got instead was the butt of Carl’s rifle to the back of her head. Her eyes shut and she fell over.

Ten minutes later, we had her tied to a fence with some bailing wire from our heaps of firewood.

Then Carl and Texas Slim backed well away. They knew what was coming.

I just stood there, sweat rolling down my face. The self-loathing and hatred filled me, hatred of who I was and what I had let myself become. And guilt. Oh God, the guilt of it all, knowing that once I had been an ordinary guy with an ordinary life and I wouldn’t have hurt a fly.

Mickey stood next to me. Her eyes were huge, dark, liquid. She was breathing hard, her long limbs tensed with excitement. She was getting off on it. Really getting off. I could feel the heat coming off her, the musk that made my cock unfurl itself and go hard. As crazy and twisted as it sounds, I wanted nothing better than to throw her to the ground and fuck the hell out of her.

That’s testament to the bizarre workings of the human mind.

“Do it, Nash,” she breathed in my ear. “Call The Shape.”

So I did.

It was coming.

The Shape was coming.

It was cycling itself into being, burning through the ether.

Gutting the fabric of this world.

I had called it and now it was coming. Right away I felt something in the air around me change…break open…twist in upon itself as if the very atoms were being realigned or shattered, turned inside out. The air was heavy. Heavy and thrumming and I could not move. Some yawning, pulsing electromagnetic field had seized me and squashed me flat, pushing me down to my knees at the altar of my god.

Expiation.

Sacrifice.

Burnt offerings.

I tried to forget that the woman tied to the fence had a name. I turned my face away, the air crawling with static electricity. The woman moaned, thrashed, cried out. But I did not hear her. I refused to hear her. All around, a humming and a crackling. A raw, cutting stench of ozone. And then the heat, the burning cremating heat of the living thermonuclear oven as it took on physical form.

Hungry.

Starving.

The heat…the blazing energy…the sound of a million, billion hornets buzzing…sawblades ripping into steel…a screeching…a whirring…the world shrieking out as it was disemboweled at the subatomic level. Then the woman-Marilynn, God yes, Marilynn-screamed. A single economical scream that lasted only seconds.

The Shape took her, consumed her.

I did not look.

But Mickey did. You could not have pried her eyes from it. She stared in rapt, almost erotic fascination at what was happening.

Marilynn…

I heard her melt with a crackling sound like burning cellophane. And then it was over and the world was just the world again. I opened my eyes. I made myself look as I made myself look every month on the night of the full moon.

Marilynn was a blackened scarecrow, still smoldering.

A pall of greasy black smoke hung in the air.

Burnt offerings.

She had been melted, reduced to a fused clot of bone and meat and marrow. A bubbling black slime that liquefied, smoking and popping, oozing down the fence into a pool of superhot irradiated refuse. The dry grass blazed where it made contact.

The stench of her burning flesh was still in the air.

I vomited.

And later, still feeling The Shape and knowing that it owned me, I looked up at the night sky, the pale moon brooding high above like a skull.

I opened my mouth.

And screamed.

Did I like it?

Did I get off making offerings to that monstrosity?

No, I did not. The guilt was thick on me like an infection, it was rotting me from the inside out. My dreams were sweaty, disturbing, goddamned ugly if you want to know the truth…people lined up, people I knew and didn’t know, people I’d admired and, yes, even loved, all waiting for me to decide who lived and who died. I’d wake up seeing their eyes, accusing and hating. I felt like a guard in Birkenau or Treblinka, deciding who went to the gas chamber and who didn’t. You think that was easy to live with? That it didn’t eat my guts out? You can’t do what I did without losing part of yourself and after I’d been doing it for a year, I couldn’t honestly remember the sort of person I’d been before.

But I didn’t do it alone.

My posse did it with me. A communal guilt. We were like soldiers doing a really terrible job…we just didn’t talk much about it. It made things go down easier that way. I had a lot of graves out there on my conscience, a lot of ghosts trying to claw their way out, and, Jesus, I had to keep them down. Some how, I had to.

The city was a cesspool of standing water, rubble, and unburied bodies. It looked like the mother of all battles had been fought here and maybe it had been. The buildings were shattered, blackened like charcoal, trees standing up like solitary masts, entirely devoid of limbs. Skyscrapers had been reduced to heaps of slag. No birds sang. Nothing grew. Nothing moved. There was only the stench of old death on the faint breeze, pungent and pervasive and secret. The way a tomb might smell.

“This place is dead,” Carl said. “Absolutely dead. Can’t you smell it?”

I could, but I didn’t mention the fact. Nobody else did either. They could feel it, all right, and they did not like it. The silence in the Jeep was heavy, almost crushing. They were waiting for me to tell them what this was all about or at least point them in the right direction. But I was clueless, absolutely clueless. Like every other city, every rawboned urban graveyard, we rolled in with no clear reason of why we had to go there other than the fact that I said so. I doubted if it was enough for my people because it sure as hell was not enough for me.