Tim Curran - Biohazard

He brought it up again as I knew he would in a typical threat response. “You’re dead! You’re fucking dead! You hear me? You’re fucking dead!”

“So pull the trigger, you goddamn pussy.”

He hesitated. I stepped forward. He backed up.

The other soldiers were watching closely, very closely.

“You ain’t got the balls for it,” I told him.

And there the confrontation ended. After what I’d been through, that little bully boy was pathetic. He was terrified of taking my place. He knew it. I knew it. There was always the chance that he’d lose it and gun me down, but that was no real threat either. So what? Shoveling corpses for a living doesn’t exactly put you on the road to a brighter future. What I had done-and what my intention had been from the start-was to symbolically emasculate that little pushbutton jarhead in front of everyone. And I had. From that point on, as far as we were concerned, he wore a fucking skirt.

I had sown the seeds of open rebellion and the big one was coming.

The showdown.

I think all us shitheads were ready for it, hungry for it even. I knew it was coming because The Shape had already told me. Just like he/she/it had told me that it was going to work out in my favor.

When we weren’t out collecting corpses for the common good, Weeks and his bully boys were based out of the National Guard Armory over in Austintown. It had once housed elements of the 838^th Military Police Company. There was a bunkroom that looked like a hospital ward in an old movie. That’s where we shitheads slept. They locked us in at night and let us out in the morning. It was quite a life. We’d come in after a day of handling the cold cuts, just filthy and stinking of decay, and they’d stick us in that room, make us sleep in our own filth.

At night, Specs would have awful nightmares. He’d be crying out or sobbing in his sleep which pissed the other guys off because they needed their rest. He’d be in the bunk next to mine and I’d have to shake him awake.

“Specs, Specs,” I’d say. “Knock it off for chrissake.”

He’d lay there in the darkness, face shiny with sweat, just blinking. He was all messed-up from Doomsday and who wasn’t?

One night as I sat there sharing a smoke with him, he said, “You know what, Nash? I believe in omens and portents. I think the future’s already written if you can figure out how to read it.”

“No shit?” I said.

“Really, Nash, I’m not kidding.”

I pulled off my smoke. “Specs, what difference would it make? The future is fucking black. You don’t wanna know about it.”

“Oh yes you do. If you read the signs they can keep you alive, keep you safe. If I had some Tarot cards I could show you your life path. What’s gonna happen.”

“I don’t wanna know what’s gonna happen.”

Specs went on and on about all that whacky new age shit he was into. They could call it what they wanted, but it all sounded like fairground gypsy fortune telling to me. But Specs loved it, loved talking in great detail about everything from pyramid power to the energy of crystals.

After about twenty minutes of that, Paulson said, “Why don’t you girls go get a room? I’m trying to fucking sleep here.”

Specs was excited, though. “But, Nash, listen-”

“Go to sleep,” I told him. I shut my eyes, thinking about all that crazy shit and remembering my wife. That night I had my own nightmares. I dreamed that rats were eating Shelly.

The showdown, the endgame as it were, came not three days later.

We were making the rounds, collecting the dead, and Weeks got a call over the radio that there were a bunch of corpses dirtying up the parking lot over at the Southern Park Mall. Couldn’t have that. In a city inundated in the unburied dead, what remained of the civic authority wanted that goddamn mall parking lot cleaned up. Couldn’t have all the friendly tourists that came to American Eagle or Victoria’s Secret or Build-A-Bear Workshop seeing all the carrion out there. What would they think? Didn’t matter that the mall was in ruins now and what tourists usually showed up were either crazy or burning with fallout.

Outside Sears, there was a heap of bodies pretty much on the order of what I had seen at the 7-11. One big stinking ugly mess. When we pulled up in the truck, we could already hear the flies buzzing. A flock of gulls and crows took to the air.

We shitheads jumped off the back of the truck, looked at each other, and just shook our heads. The stink was bad enough to put a maggot off meat. Just a great, flyblown heap of corpses that had to number in the hundreds. The scavengers had been at them and had dragged bits and pieces off in every direction.

“Okay, Fuckhead,” Weeks said. “Take Shit-fer-Brains with you and wade in. Ain’t gonna smell any better ten minutes from now.”

“This is ridiculous,” Specs said. “They’re all soft…we’ll need shovels.”

“Shut the fuck up, Mama’s Boy. Get in there. You, too, Mr. Fucking Useless. Load that hopper. Let’s go!”

When we didn’t move fast enough, one of the soldiers cracked a few shots over our heads. But even that only made us drag ourselves forward. When we got to the perimeter of the heap, staring at all those rotting husks and bird-pecked faces and trailing limbs, the rest of the crew just looked at me. Lately, they’d been looking at me a lot. I guess I was the leader of the revolt that we all knew was coming. And I could feel it gathering momentum…electric with potential, just waiting to explode. I think they could, too. We were waiting for a catalyst to light the fuse and it was coming, God yes, it was certainly coming.

“Let’s do it,” I told them. “Let’s load that fucking hopper. Then we’ll see.”

We went at it.

It was revolting even by the standards set by other such jobs. The corpses were so ripe they pulled apart like boiled chicken. Arms came off, legs came off, moldering flesh pulled right off the bones beneath. We backed the truck up close as we could because this rank, evil-smelling mess had to be thrown in the hopper piecemeal. It took hours. We sweated in our filthy biosuits, enveloped in a gagging cloud of flies and grave-stench.

Somewhere during the process, Specs lost it.

He usually didn’t so much as clear his throat around the soldiers, but today was different. Maybe he, too, was feeding off that potential. He was all assholes and elbows, crouched over and digging into the cold cuts, just lost in his work. Sinking his gloved hands deep into that seething, crawling rot, firing it behind him, arms pinwheeling, letting it fly into the hopper. A corpse-worm slid out of the remains of a child and he stomped it to white mush before it could do so much as writhe in the sunlight.

“That’s it!” Weeks told him, keeping his distance, his carbine balanced over one shoulder. “That’s the way, Mama’s Boy! Get that shit in the hopper! Got to it, you sonofabitch!”

This spurred Specs into greater feats of corpse clearing. He dug into the mess, letting limbs and bones and globs of offal fly, almost knocking me on my ass with a stray femur. Then he happened upon a head. The head of a teenage girl. The face was nothing but fungus and corpse jelly oozing from the white skull beneath…but it stopped him dead.

He held up that head and it had long red hair hanging from the scalp. Hair that was greasy and clotted with filth, but red all the same.

“Fuck you doing, Mama’s Boy?” one of the soldiers asked.

And everyone was kind of wondering the same.

Specs stood there, trembling, holding that decayed head up. Slime dripped from it and loathsome black beetles crawled over the backs of his hands and up his arms.