Tim Curran: Biohazard

“Looks clean,” the soldier said.

“Get up, fuckhead,” the other guy said. “Congratulations, you’ve been drafted.”

I looked up at him. “Hell are you talking about?”

But the guy just laughed as I was handcuffed and led to an olive drab tactical van down the street. They shoved and kicked me all the way. And when they asked me how I liked the Army, I told them to go fuck their mothers. Which got me a rifle butt to the back of the head and a ticket to la-la land.

Drafted.

That’s what those assholes called it.

I was part of a clean-up crew, me and a bunch of other idiots that had been likewise “drafted.”

There was nothing remotely military about the job. We simply had to pick up bodies. Decked out in white biosuits, we tooled around in garbage trucks collecting the dead which were a serious health threat.

That was how I met Specs, this skinny little guy with oversized glasses that the soldiers liked to pick on. Me, Specs, two others guys named Paulson and Jackoby made up the collection crew. Of course, the sergeant in charge?some hardballed lifer named Weeks?collectively called us his “Shitheads.” He also had pet names for us: I was “Fuckhead,” Specs was “Mama’s Boy,” Jackoby was “Shit-fer-Brains,” and Paulson was “Mr. Fucking Useless.”

It was quite a scene.

The corpses were gathered, then tossed into the hoppers like Monday’s trash. The first time I saw Paulson pull the lever and cycle the bodies through, the hydraulic ram crushing and compacting the bodies, I threw up. Right in the street. My stomach was already bad from handling all that green meat, but the sound of it, those blades scooping the bodies into the main bin and smashing them to a pulp…it was just too much. I went down on my knees and stripped my mask off, blowing my guts right on the pavement.

The soldiers burst out laughing.

Weeks said, “You don’t like that shit, Fuckhead? Maybe next I’ll throw your ass in there, you fucking pussy.”

Specs helped me to my feet. “You get used to it, man. It’s fucked up, but you do.”

No draftee in any war went through worse shit than we did.

You stood there in those hot suits, flies buzzing around you and maggots dropping from your gloves, just filthy with all the revolting shit that oozed from the bodies. And that was bad enough, but what was worse was hearing those cadavers compact. Even our helmets couldn’t muffle the sound of dozens of putrefying corpses being crushed, bones snapping and flesh being squished to mush. Every time a load was cycled through, black muddy ooze would run from the bottom of the hopper and rain to the street, squeezed from the corpses like pulp from tomatoes.

And the smell of it…dear God, it was unspeakable.

But we had no choice.

While I and the other poor bastards tossed bodies in the hopper, the soldiers would keep their guns on us. If you tried to break out, tried to run, they’d cut you right down, throw you in the back with the stiffs.

When the honeybuckets were full, we drove them outside the city to the dump, emptying the hoppers into the immense body pits where the corpses were burned. A mile from the dump, you could see clouds of black smoke rising into the sky, smell the cremated flesh and burning hair. It was like standing downwind from the ovens at Treblinka.

If there was truly a hell on earth, then this was it.

Weeks was not only a psychotic who shot anything that moved, he was deluded and paranoid and should have been in a loony bin somewhere. I never learned what his deal was, whether he was born nuts or if Doomsday had totally unhinged him, but he did not believe that the United States had been decimated by nuclear weapons. At least, not the kind fired by people. He was certain that aliens from outer space were responsible and that even now, they were spreading disease and pestilence and were hiding out in human form.

“Tell me where you came from,” he said to me one day.

“Youngstown.”

“Oh, you think you’re funny? You think this is a fucking joke?”

“You asked me, I told you.”

He put his carbine on me. “And how am I supposed to know you ain’t one of them? You ain’t an Outsider?”

That’s what Weeks called them: Outsiders. He never once used the word “alien” but then he did not have to. Everyone knew.

I didn’t even know what the guy looked like. He never, ever took off his biosuit. He even slept in it. Even back at the barracks he wore it religiously because he had no intention of any Outsider bugs getting him and changing him into some thing. He liked to toy with us, his Shitheads, trying to scare us by threatening to throw us into the hoppers. That worked at first. But after handling the cold cuts day in and day out, it took a lot to ruffle our feathers.

The truth was, Weeks was terrified.

He was afraid of everybody and everything.

He was particularly scared of Paulson because he thought Paulson was an Outsider and he hadn’t made his mind up about Specs just yet. So whenever he talked to them, he kept his distance and when he wanted to throw them a beating, he always made his bullyboy soldiers do it. I found out just how afraid he was one day when he slipped on some corpse slime leaking out of the back of the truck and I grabbed him before he fell down.

He screamed.

Screamed bloody murder.

He was so petrified that he brought up his carbine, fully intending to waste me right then and there, only he was hyperventilating so bad and his hands were shaking so wildly that he couldn’t even hold onto the gun. He finally dropped it and crawled away.

“Unclean! Filthy! Dirty!” he cried out. “You put those dirty filthy rotten hands on me! You’re infested like all the rest!”

He finally got to his feet and jumped in the cab where, no doubt, he was spraying himself down with antiseptics.

One of soldiers came over and put the barrel of his carbine right into my face. “I oughta fucking kill you right now, you stupid asshole!”

I felt no fear. Death was hardly a threat by that point. “Go ahead.”

“What?”

“I said, go ahead.”

The soldier looked to his comrades and didn’t know exactly how to handle this. The other soldiers just stood there, feeling awkward and no doubt stupid in their white biosuits. I did not back down. For after being on the collection team for over a month I knew the score. Lately, Weeks hadn’t been able to draft anyone. Word had gotten around about what the Army was up to and people hid out when the vans came around. Only the diseased, the crazy, and the Scabs came out, but they were of no use.

Weeks needed me. He needed all of us.

That’s why the soldier didn’t kill me.

That’s why he was afraid to kill me. Because the way things were, we were short-handed and if I died it meant one of the soldiers would take my place. Weeks would insist upon it. He threatened his boys with it all the time. And whoever pulled the trigger and killed his Shithead would get the job.

“I’m not kidding,” the soldier said.

I stepped forward until the barrel of the carbine was so close I could smell the burnt cordite in the barrel. “So kill me, asshole. Do it. Go ahead. Then you can take your turn handling the meat.”

The soldier stepped back, then shouted out something and clubbed me with his rifle. Under the circumstances, it was his only option. He couldn’t kill me, but on the other hand he couldn’t just walk away from such open disobedience. I mean, shit, what would the Army be if people stopped following orders and actually began thinking for themselves?

I pulled myself up, spit out some blood and grinned. “You raise that rifle to me again, sonny, and I’ll ram it so far up your ass it’ll tickle your tonsils.”