I dropped the knife first and then slid out of my chair like my bones were made of rubber. I was numb. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t even fucking breathe. I hit the floor, senseless and terrified, shaking so badly my teeth chattered. That voice, that awful voice—
“Do you want to live?”
“Yes,” I said when my breath came back. I wasn’t honestly sure if I wanted to or not, but I was so scared I was afraid to say anything else.
“Will you come unto me?” the voice said in a cool glacial hiss. “Through me there is deliverance, there is survival. Expiation. I demand atonement. Bring unto me the burnt offerings selected by thy hand. They shall be blessed by fire.
“Sacrifice…”
That was The Shape.
It never showed itself and maybe I was too unclean to look upon it. It told me how it had to happen, how it all had to come down. I had a benefactor. I didn’t know what it was or what it wanted at that point, but it kept talking to me, whispering in my head, always pointing me in the right direction, keeping me alive. It terrified me. It intrigued me. I felt special. I felt damned. Months later, I could not be sure I really heard it. Maybe it wasn’t a voice at all, maybe it was some warped subjective impression. And maybe I was just insane. But that’s how it began. That’s how I sold my soul to stay alive. That’s how I got into the business of condemning people to death.
But I didn’t know about that part. Not then.
10
After that, I lived like a spider.
After The Shape had whispered to me—alluding to things I must do but never naming them—I hunted the city, seeking out damp, dark corners and crevices where I could secrete myself, webby and lightless places where the roving gangs of scavengers and the packs of wild dogs couldn’t find me. I became good at hiding and stalking mainly because The Shape was always in my head, telling me where to find food and shelter, which damp and dripping cellars were safe and free of rabid rat colonies.
Then one day while out searching for weapons, I got drafted.
The Army or what was left of it found me.
I came out of an alley and I saw two men in white biosuits. They carried tactical carbines and were pointing them right in my face. There was no point in running; they would have cut me down in ten feet. So I just stood there, dumbly, the Browning Hi-Power at my waist and my scavenger bag thrown over one shoulder. I suppose by that point I looked like any other ragbag…unwashed, ragged, eyes crazy and desperate.
They kept their rifles on me.
“Listen,” I finally said, holding my hands up, “I don’t want any trouble. I was just trying to find something to eat. I’ll just back away and go my own way. Okay?”
The two men just looked at each other through the plexiglass shields of their white helmets.
I started backing away.
And as I did so, the one on the left sprayed the alley wall with his carbine. 9mm rounds chewed into the brick just above my head. I went down on my knees, hands still up. “Jesus…take it easy, guys…just…take…it…easy…”
“You ain’t going nowhere, fuckhead,” one of them said. He looked at his partner. “Check him.”
The guy charged over and knocked me on my ass. He stripped the Browning away and the scavenger bag, took my knife, everything but the clothes I wore. Then he made me lay spreadeagle in the alley, facedown in a dirty puddle. He ran a Geiger Counter over me, checked for sores, ulcers.
“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.
11
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.”
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.
12
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 838th 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.
13
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.
With a gagging, strangled cry, he dropped it.
It hit the pavement like a moist, soft pumpkin and broke right apart at his feet. Beetles poured from the shattered skull, a crawling flood of them.
Weeks stepped back even further, of course.
Specs kept making that gagging sound.
The head was the catalyst we were waiting for.
I stood up from the carrion pile. My white biosuit was smeared gray and black with corpse waste. I brushed some stray maggots off my sleeve. “Hey? You okay, Specs…Specs? You okay, man?”
“Get to work!” Weeks shouted.
But we were ignoring him. Specs was having an episode and maybe we were filthy with decaying flesh and corpse slime and maybe we spent our days juggling human remains at gunpoint, but all this bonded us together. Made us stronger. Made us care for each other and in the process, made us a little more human than the drones with the guns.
“I said, get to fucking work!” Weeks called out, popping a few rounds into the air.
“Go fuck yourself,” Paulson told him.
Weeks took two trembling steps forward, ejecting the magazine from his tactical carbine and slapping a fresh one in place. “Hell did he just say to me?” he asked his soldiers.
“Told you—” one of them began, suppressing a mad desire to giggle “―told you to go fuck yourself…sir.”
Weeks raged but we paid him no mind. We were clustered around Specs, touching him, reassuring him, while he went on in a whining voice about his sister, about Darlene. Darlene and her beautiful red hair and how she rotted away in her bed of typhoid fever.
About this time, we realized that Weeks was shouting at us. We turned and he had his weapon on us, his hands shaking on it. He was either scared to death or so pissed off he could’ve passed nails.
“Mr. Fucking Useless!” he cried. “Step away from those Shitheads! Do it! Do it! Do it! You better goddamn well do it right fucking now, you miserable ass-sucking squeeze of shit! I’ll drop you where you stand! Yer a fucking walking dead man!”
Paulson pulled off his helmet and threw it at Weeks who nearly jumped right out of his suit trying to avoid the filthy thing. It hit the ground and rolled across the parking lot.
“No,” he said. “I refuse.”
“No? No? No? Fuck you mean, you refuse?” Weeks said, his voice very dry like all the spit had just dried on his tongue. “You can’t refuse me! You can’t fucking well refuse me! Are you out of yer fucking mind? Are you? Well…ARE YOU?”
“Yes sir, believe so,” Paulson said.
Specs, Jakoby, and me stood tight with him, ringing him in so that Weeks would have to shoot through us to get at him.
“Step away from him!” Weeks ordered us. “Get away from him or I’ll cap every one of you!”
“Go ahead!” Specs shouted. “Go right ahead!”
Weeks moved in still closer and so did his soldiers and I was figuring this was it, this was how it ended and what a goddamn revolting way to go, standing there knee deep in human remains in filthy suits with flies buzzing all over us.
Weeks was going to shoot, there was no doubt of it, but then Specs reached into the hopper and grabbed an arm that was bloated white. “Hungry, asshole? How about a wing?” he threw the arm and it hit one of the soldiers with a moist thud that put him on his ass. He screamed.
We started laughing.
“How about a thigh?” Jakoby said and heaved a maggoty leg.
“Got me a breast here,” Paulson said, gathering up a withered trunk. “At least I think it’s a breast…” He let it fly.
Then all of us just went mad with the idea.
Limbs and bones, entrails and mucid clots of flesh started flying, raining down on the soldiers, making them jump and duck as they were spattered with carrion and maggots. Weeks tried to dart back, but I tossed a head that broke apart and splattered him with wormy gray matter.
He, of course, screamed.
Screamed and went right down on his ass.
One of the soldiers said, “Screw this,” and turned, jogging across the parking lot.
“Get back here!” Weeks called out to him. “You’re deserting your post!”
But the guy didn’t listen and Weeks shot him, dropped him right there.
After that, it was sheer pandemonium.
One of the soldiers shot Jakoby as he tossed handfuls of grave matter at him. And about the time he went down—staggering, bullet-ridden, but managing to crash into the guy who had shot him—I threw a loop of bowels at Weeks and they struck him right in the chest leaving a gray, snaking stain on his white biosuit. He screamed and tossed his rifle.
“I’m contaminated! I’m unclean! I’m filthy! Dirty! Dirty! Dirty!” he shrieked out from inside his helmet, rolling around on the pavement, maybe trying to wipe the putrescence off himself.
The other soldier had gotten tangled up in Jakoby and finally succeeded in shoving him aside. He brought up his rifle as Paulson rushed him with a rotting body in his arms. He shot him. Gave him two three-round volleys and Paulson fell at his feet, hitting the pavement with the corpse that just simply exploded on impact.
The soldier would have had us, too, had fate not intervened at that moment.
Temporarily blinded from a spray of rancid flesh, his plexiglass helmet bubble was black and dripping with juice and bits of meat. He stripped his helmet off and threw it aside. And at that precise moment, one of the corpse-worms slid out of the belly of the cadaver that Paulson had dropped.
It was one of the biggest I had ever seen.
At first, I thought it was a section of swollen bowel spilling out from the corpse’s belly, but then it moved, it coiled over the pavement, threading in and out of the stiff like rubbery white yarn. It was huge, flattened-out and segmented, shining with slime and drainage. It was making an almost angry humming sound that was high and strident.
The soldier saw it about the time it rose up from the corpse’s belly with a juicy, succulent noise. It didn’t have eyes that anyone could see, but it seemed to know where he was. That humming grew positively ear-shattering in its intensity. The worm’s body swelled-up, thickening, growing bulbous like some impossibly fleshy penis. The bulb or head inflated, too.
The soldier brought his carbine to bear.
But the worm struck first: it shot an inky stream of juice into his face and the effect was instantaneous. He screamed and fell to his knees, his hands clutching his face…only his face was no longer a face as such, but something soft and pulpy that was squirting out between his fingers.
As the worm retreated, me and Specs went over to Weeks.
He was still whining and crying out in a high girlish voice about being unclean, crawling about on all fours. We just looked down on him, then we started kicking him. And we kept kicking him until he went limp.
Then we dragged his inert form over to the hopper.
We stripped his suit off.
And threw his ass in.
Then we started tossing bodies and body parts on top of him, everything we could find until he was buried in entrails and torsos and limbs, shivering beneath a blanket of carrion and graveworms. Somewhere during the process, he came awake, fighting and screaming, trying to free himself from the putrefying flesh and greening meat. He screamed and clawed.
And Specs, giggling, pulled the lever and the blades came scooping down.
Before Weeks disappeared, we saw him in there tangled in bowels and husks, his arm wedged into a slimy ribcage. And we also saw a fat white corpse-worm slide from a body and investigate his face.
Then the blades pushed him into the bin with the rest and the ram compacted it all with a crunching, pulping noise and fetid juice ran from the drain holes at the bottom of the truck.
That was it.
Specs and I tossed aside our suits, lit cigarettes like workmen after a hard day on the job, and walked away from it all. We went looking for a car. We were going to Cleveland.
CLEVELAND, OHIO
1
Cleveland had a real bad rat problem, even worse than Youngstown. At night, hordes of them would come up out of the sewers and cellars and take to the streets in massive swarms like driver ants, devouring anything in their path. They were all rabid and incredibly vicious. By moonlight, you could see them down there, so many greasy gray bodies that you could have crossed the street walking on their backs and never once touched pavement. I saw them take down dog packs and street gangs, leave nothing but bones behind.
Cleveland, as it turned out, also had Red Rains.
2
I woke that first night in the city to the sound of Specs screaming. We were crashed out in a big Cadillac El Dorado we found parked in an empty lot over in Fairfax, just off Cedar Avenue on East 86th. Looked like it had been a pimp’s car once…leopard seats with hot-red plush carpeting and tinted windows. Specs slept in the back; I took the front. Next morning, he woke up screaming.
I panicked and pulled my gun, wiping sleep from my eyes. All I had was a little five-shot snub-nosed .38 belly gun I’d taken off the mangled corpse of a cop in Ravenna a few days before. “What? What? What?” I said, looking for a target, anything.
Specs was breathing hard in the backseat. “Just had a dream…did I cry out?”
“Yeah, you fucking cried out, asshole. I thought you were being murdered.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, Nash. Sometimes I get these bad dreams. Just corpses everywhere, you know? Sometimes I dream about my sister, about Darlene.”
Poor Specs. I didn’t want to get him going on his dead sister again. In those days I still had a watch on my wrist—a nice Indiglo Timex that Shelly had given me for my birthday—and I hadn’t gone native yet and started clocking the time by the position of the sun. Watch said it was ten in the morning…but inside the car it was pretty dark. I thought maybe it was the tinted windows, but it wasn’t that at all.
The windows, all the windows, of the Cadillac were covered in something dark. I didn’t get it. I pulled off some tepid water I had in a bottle, tried to clear my head.
“What’s all over the windows?” Specs asked me and I could already hear the paranoia creeping into his voice. Poor guy. Specs was a good person in most ways, but he was paranoid as hell. He saw the boogeyman around every corner and who could really blame him?
“I don’t know,” I said.
The Caddy had old-style crank windows. A huge vehicle back when they’d rolled them off the assembly lines in Detroit with plenty of leg room. I tried the windows and so did Specs, but they were jammed up. So I did what I didn’t really want to do: I opened my door.
The world was red.
The streets, the buildings, even the trees and stoplight were fucking red like they’d been dipped in red ink. It was insane. Specs and I got out and walked around. Everything was covered in that crusty red film. I had never seen anything like it. It looked like the sky had rained blood during the night. I walked over to a spreading oak tree and, sure enough, a few drops of red were still dripping from the branches.
“It’s blood, Nash. Jesus Christ, it’s blood,” Specs said, clinging so close to me I thought he was going to kiss me.
I shoved him away. “It ain’t blood. It was some weird rain. Like an acid rain or something.”
But I wasn’t even sure that I believed it. Something inside me clenched tight as we walked those blood red streets. There was no life or movement anywhere. Just that hazy sky above and the graveyard stillness and all that red. It was like some kind of expressionistic painting or something and it made me go cold inside.
“You know what this is, don’t you?” Specs said.
“No, I don’t. But you’re gonna tell me, I’m sure.”
“It’s an omen,” Specs said. “It’s a bad omen, Nash. Real bad.”
And on that point, I believed him.
3
We walked for a good hour. After a time the red was just gone. Either the sun dried it up or it had only rained like that in particular parts of the city. I didn’t know and I really didn’t want to know. So we walked and Specs jabbered on non-stop as was his way. We didn’t see anyone on Cedar Avenue, just desertion and devastation. Why I thought Cleveland would be any better than Youngstown, I did not know.
“Too bad we couldn’t have kept the Caddy,” Specs said. “That was one sweet ride.”
“Sure,” I said, scoping out the streets ahead of us, “one sweet ride with two flat tires and a dead engine.”
“Well, it was sweet. You know it was. Would have been cool to tool around the city in that.”
“Sure, we could’ve picked up some chicks,” I said.
The city was dead. At least what we’d seen of it. Another graveyard. The rusted hulks of abandoned cars were everywhere: at the curbs, pulled up onto sidewalks, flipped over in the roads, smashed-up. I figured someone was around—or had been—because a lot of tires had been scavenged. Most likely for fires. Nothing burned like a tire.
What I saw of Cleveland was intact. I saw some neighborhoods that had burned or were fire-scarred, but not like in Youngstown. Entire sections of the city had been fire bombed to wipe out the infections and those that carried them. This did not look so systematic. Just ordinary fires, I thought.
Still, there was destruction. Buildings had collapsed into heaps of rubble that blocked thoroughfares. Houses had been burned flat. There were open cellars everywhere flooded with water and leaves, the homes and buildings that had once sat upon them nowhere to be seen. Weeds were growing up in the sidewalks. Telephone poles had fallen, some only standing because their wires held them up. Storefronts were fire damaged, plate glass windows shattered, brick facades riddled with bullet holes.
There were skeletons everywhere. Sprawled in yards, tossed in gutters, some still sitting behind the wheels of cars fully articulated. But all of them bird-pecked and gleaming white. Not just human skeletons either, but those of dogs and cats and rats and more than a few that were so unnatural looking I couldn’t be sure what they were from. Bones were the only true raw material of the brave new world and they were in abundance.
After awhile, Specs and I took a break.
We pushed a heap of remains from a peeling bench and took a break. I had an olive drab Army knapsack that I used for scavenging. We each had a can of cold Dinty Moore Beef Stew and washed it down with warm Mountain Dew Code Red. That was our lunch.
I pulled off my Dew. “We gotta get us some wheels, Specs,” I told him, because The Shape had whispered in my head that we had to keep moving west. And I wasn’t about to walk.
“Yeah, too bad about that Caddy.”
“We don’t need a pimpmobile,” I told him. “We need something rugged. A four-wheel drive or something. Roads are going to be bad now.”
We’d driven motorcycles into Cleveland from Youngstown. Then we’d abandoned them in Garfield Heights after some big birds swooped down on us and stole Specs’ hat. I don’t know what they were. Looked like ravens. But huge, mutated. We decided after that we needed something with a roof over our heads.
“You ever wonder where we’re going to be in a year from now, Nash?”
“No, I don’t. I got enough problems here and now.”
“I think about it sometimes. I wonder if maybe out there somewhere there’s still cities with real people in ‘em.”
I didn’t even bother speculating on that. I finished my stew and threw the can in the street. We survivors were terrible litterbugs. I smoked and sipped off my Dew. We’d looted the Dew from a deli in Garfield Heights. Everything was long rotten in there, but the canned stuff and soda was still good. Civilization may fall, but the Dew goes on forever.
“Why do you figure west, Nash? Why not south?”
He’d been thinking about asking me that for a long time. So I told him about The Shape. I didn’t want to because he was too wrapped up in all that occult shit and I knew he’d make it into something supernatural. And he did, of course. But I had to tell him and I did.
After that, all he thought about was The Shape.
4
It was getting on dark and we still hadn’t found a ride and I was getting sick to death of Specs speculating about The Shape—he was convinced it was an old pagan god that had resurfaced now that Christianity had bottomed out—and asking me fifty questions about it.
“Listen,” I finally said. “What I told you was a secret and we’re not going to talk about it, okay? Just let it lay.”
We had other things to worry about.
I knew well enough from Youngtown that you didn’t want to be caught out in the open after dark. We had to find a place to lay low. We were down along the Cuyahoga River. There wasn’t much but a lot of industrial sites, many of which looked long abandoned, and the usual assortment of neighborhoods and storefronts that spring up around places like that. Lots of bars and lunch counters and not much else. We needed the right place. Something defensible.
As I looked around, Specs tugged on my elbow. “Nash,” he said. “Oh boy, Nash. Look.”
Shit. Scabs. About five or six of them just up the street sitting atop a pile of rubble, half-naked and moon-fleshed and filthy, like birds of prey on their high perches looking for tasty rodents. I wasn’t entirely convinced that they’d even seen us. One of them, a woman in a black motorcycle jacket and nothing else, was staring intently in the direction we’d just come from. The others were staring dumbly at their own feet.
I carefully slipped the .38 from my jacket pocket.
Specs and I moved very slowly towards a run of ruined buildings about twenty feet away. I was very aware of how debris crunched under our boots. I think I held my breath the entire way. It was the longest twenty feet of my life. We ducked through a massive hole in the brick façade of a bar. It looked like it had been hit by an anti-tank round and it probably had been.
We made it.
“Hey, not bad—” Specs started to say.
“Shut up,” I told him. “They’re not fucking deaf.”
I peaked around the corner. They hadn’t moved. Holding my finger to my lips, I led Specs farther into the bar room. Whatever had blasted through that wall had kept going and blew out a good portion of the rear wall, taking out most of the bathroom. We climbed free of the building into a little alley paved in bricks. The shadows were starting to get long. The alley was a cul-de-sac whose entry was blocked by more rubble. We climbed through a missing window into another building and we soon saw that it was gutted inside. The upper floors were nearly gone. You could see the sky through a jagged chasm in the roof.
“What the hell happened here?” Specs asked.
“Must’ve been some kind of battle. Looks like this place took an airstrike or an artillery barrage.”
A great section of the floor was missing, having fallen into the cellar below. We moved around this carefully, found a door, and on the other side, it was even worse. What we were looking at was like London after the blitz: heaps of rubble, buildings that were entirely gutted and reduced to debris. Roofs were gone, windows blasted out, entire walls missing. And floors? There were no floors. Just huge pits that looked down into the cellars below that were dark and ominous, choked with debris and flooded with black water. There was only a skeletal framework of joists to walk on. It would be risky.
“Oh, I don’t know about this, Nash,” Specs said. “I don’t like this at all.”
But we really didn’t have a choice. Behind us, I could hear a lot of shouting and screaming. More Scabs had shown up. Going back that way wasn’t an option.
“You can do it,” I told him. “The joists are an easy foot across. Just don’t look down.”
We moved over to the edge of the pit, kicking up clouds of brick dust. I started out on one of the joists and it wasn’t so bad. Plenty of room to walk. The trick was not to look down. It wasn’t that it was a deep drop…probably eight feet or so, but eight feet into rubble and twisted metal, that rank-smelling water and who knew what kind of things lay right beneath the surface that would impale you?
“Come on,” I told him. “Don’t look down.”
Hesitantly, he started across. He moved like a turtle at first, but once he got his feet under him it was no problem. We crossed the joists, ducked through a jagged archway and found ourselves in another building lacking a floor. I noticed that a cobwebbed rocking chair hung from the floor above by a section of electrical wiring. It swayed back and forth. The water below us was caked with leaves. A few plastic bottles bobbed.
I was about two-thirds of the way across on the center joist when I heard a muted splashing. Maybe not a splashing exactly, but sort of a slopping sound. I looked back and Specs was still coming, offering me a goofy smile. He hadn’t heard it.
“This ain’t so bad,” he said. “Like walking curbs when you’re a kid.”
I nodded, smiling thinly. I heard that slopping again and looked back. This time I saw something. Something that froze me up and made my heart start hammering. Cool sweat ran down my face. Near to where Specs was I saw…thought I saw…a puckered white face pull down beneath the leaves and water.
I made it across.
“Something wrong, Nash?” Specs asked me.
“No, it’s cool,” I told him, just waiting for a pair of white, mottled hands to reach up and pull him into the flooded stygian depths. But it didn’t happen. He made it across and we darted through a missing wall. Before us was a solid expanse of brick with no egress. Instead of going forward, I feared, we had somehow gotten turned sideways and were moving lengthwise through the buildings. We’d have been at it quite a while at that rate. I compensated, led us around some huge heaps of shattered brick, through a near-collapsed doorway, and into the utter darkness. In the distance I could see a patch of light.
We were in some kind of warehouse, I thought.
Boxes and barrels were stacked around us. It was very gloomy in there. There were roughly a million places for unfriendlies to hide and about the same amount of ways to die. The floor was concrete and unbroken.
I led Specs forward and he clung to me, pulling at the back of my jacket, bumping into me, grabbing me by the arm. It was like going through a carnival spookhouse with your badly frightened kid brother. The .38 in hand, I moved us along, trying not to trip over anything. We were not alone in there. I heard a scratching once and a dragging sound another time.
When the patch of light—a missing door—was about fifteen feet away, Specs pulled me to a stop.
“Listen,” he said.
I heard it right away: a sort of low, coarse breathing in the darkness. Behind us, I could swear I saw grotesque forms threading through the shadows. Whatever was in there was closing in on us. I grabbed Specs and raced him to the door and out into the blinding light.
Nothing followed us.
The sky above looked odd, I thought. Kind of roiling with bloated pinkish clouds that started to look less and less pink and more brilliantly red by the moment. A drop of rain splatted at my foot. Another ran down the windshield of a wrecked pickup truck. Except it wasn’t rain…it wasn’t water. It was red. Like blood.
“Shit,” I heard Specs say.
I turned to find the nearest shelter and there was a big guy with a pump shotgun in his hands. He looked mean. “Where do you assholes want it?” he said. “In the belly or in the head?”
5
I had my .38 out, but I honestly felt impotent with it next to that killing iron in the big man’s hands. He was about 6’3, had to go in at an easy 250 if not more. His hair was short and choppy, but his beard was long and tangled. It reached right down to his chest. He wore a tattered jean vest with lots of patches on it. He was a biker. This guy was a fucking biker.
“We’re not Scabs,” Specs told him. “We’re not infected.”
“I know that, little man. You were Scabs, you wouldn’t be alive right now. I was looking for some normal people and I suppose you two scrubs’ll do.” He was standing under the wide awning outside a shoe store, one eye cocked to the sky. A few more drops of blood fell. “You boys better get over here. You don’t wanna get caught in a red rain.”
We got under the awning with him. I lit a cigarette, explained who we were, where we had come from, how we were looking for some wheels to head west with. He nodded, didn’t seem like he gave a shit. His bare arms were massive, set with tattoos and I could see right away that those tattoos symbolized something, all those snakes and deathheads and names and places. He wasn’t just some wannabe punk or yuppy that thought some inking would make him into a real man. He was the genuine article: an outlaw biker.
“Name’s McKree, Sean McKree. Friends call me ‘Chang’,” he told us, watching the sky. He did not look happy. “Fucking weather.”
“Nice to meet you, Chang,” Specs said.
“You can call me, Sean, little man,” he said. “My friends are all dead.”
More drops of red fell out in the streets, plopping onto the hoods of cars. Then the downpour began, an absolute curtain of what looked like blood. But not just liquid, but unidentifiable chunks of matter that thudded and splattered everywhere. It lasted about ten minutes and the stink of it was acrid. It reamed your nose right out. But that, too, faded in time. Out in the streets the liquid was drying up, leaving that sticky red film I had seen that morning. I looked closer and there was no mistaking it: there were bones in the street. Not human bones, I didn’t think, but animal bones. Most of them quite small. They had not been there before.
“It is blood!” Specs said. “Bones, too!”
“Can’t be blood,” I told him. “That doesn’t make any sense. It’s acid rain or something.”
“You’re both right.”
We looked at Sean. “You heard me,” he said. “There’s acid in that shit and it’ll burn the soles off your boots and sting your skin if you get caught out in it. But it’s mostly blood and run-off. See, there was a slaughterhouse on the Cuyahoga. Back in the day they used to release their by-products straight into the river and the river would turn red in the summer. But the EPA made ‘em clean up their act,” he explained to us. “So what they did is they built two gigantic steel rendering tanks that were like fifty feet deep and sixty feet across. They pumped all their by-products in there: blood, bones, fat, you name it. The tanks were full of acid…”
He told us that the tanks were open air so that evaporation would remove the liquid. Then the world puked out and those two full tanks of remains, acid, and run-off were just sitting there. He couldn’t be sure, but now and again something like a wind-spout brewed up off the big lake and traveled down river, sucking up just about anything that wasn’t tied down. For some reason, it sucked up what was in those tanks nearly every time. The tanks never dried out because the rain filled them up and the wind-spouts stirred them like cauldrons, scraping all the goodies from the bottom.
“I’ve seen the tanks,” he said. “You can smell ‘em for a mile. My guess is that in the plant there are other storage vats full of blood and slime, probably gravity-fed. Sooner or later, the rendering tanks’ll dry up and run out of remains. But it hasn’t happened yet.”
We stood under the awning, smoking and chatting. Sean said we had to wait until the rain had completely dried or it would eat holes in our boots. So we waited and he told us about his life as an outlaw biker. He’d been a sergeant-at-arms for the Warlocks motorcycle gang out of New Jersey, which meant he was an enforcer that knocked heads together and killed people when the club ordered it. On the back of his vest there was a flaming skull. Above it, a rocker read: WARLOCKS MC. Below it, BAYONNE, NJ.
“You’re a long way from Bayonne,” I said.
“Yeah, I am, brother. Came here to straighten out some shit. It’s what I do,” he told me. “See…just before they dropped them fucking bombs, I was sent here to straighten out some business. It was club business. Private. But since there ain’t no more law, no more feds, and no more clubs, I’ll tell you. Here in Cleveland, there was a Hell’s Angels charter, a clubhouse. One of their people—Ray Coombs, called him ‘Ratbait’—got hisself killed. A couple hitters from the Blood Brothers did him in Newark. Blood Brothers were a bunch of kill-happy maggots that were trying hard to impress the Outlaws out of Detroit, so they started offing Angels. Hell’s Angels and Outlaws were the big two in bike gangs then, you see, and they hated each other. Lots of killing on both sides, lots of retiliation and turf wars. I rode with the Warlocks. We were tight with the Angels. Word came out of Oakland, C-A, that they wanted these Blood Brothers done. They were hiding out in Cleveland, over in Stockyards. I got the job.”
Specs was wide-eyed. “You mean you’re a hit man? You mean you came to kill those bikers?”
“No, I came to fucking dance with ‘em,” Sean said. He looked over at me. “Something wrong with this guy?”
“No, he’s just been through a lot.”
Sean shrugged. “I got one of those dirt bags, then the bombs fell and I been here since. I was shacked up with an Angel called Dirty Sanchez and his old lady, Long Tall Sally. A couple weeks ago the Trogs got ‘em. I been hunting Trogs since.” He told us the Trogs lived underground, were real bad news, barely human. “When I’m not killing Trogs, I waste Scabs. But they’re like shooting ducks. Easy. Trogs takes skill. There’s sport involved.”
Out in the streets, the rain had dried up, leaving a world that was stained red. Night was coming on fast. We needed a place to crash for the night where we didn’t have to worry about getting our throats slit.
I heard a squeaking sound and saw a rat. I made to shoot it and Sean stayed my hand. Pretty soon there were seven or eight of them, big, ugly things with red eyes and those weird growths popping through their threadbare hides. They paid no attention to us. They went after the bones and within minutes there were no bones left. The rats were gone.
“You know where there’s any good rides?” I asked.
Sean nodded. “Sure. I can get you anything you want. But not tonight. Heard a rumor from a ragbag this morning that the Hatchet Clans are pushing in from the north. You don’t want to be out in the streets tonight.”
“Hell are the Hatchet Clans?” I asked.
He laughed. “Brother, you don’t wanna know.”
6
“I puked out my last year of high school and stole a couple cars,” Sean told us later in his heavily-fortified basement apartment while we ate pork and beans and drank warm beer. “They sent me to Juvie. I got out and stole another car, led the State Police on a merry chase. Judge said join the Army or do time. I joined the Army. I was a scout with the 4th Cavalry. I did my bit over in Iraq during Desert Storm, first one. Soon as I got out, I hooked up with my old friends and we started a bike club called the Dirty Dozen. Problem was, man, there were only four of us. Then we got six and the other clubs called us the Dirty Half-Dozen. They gave us lots of shit. By the time there were thirty of us and we backed down from no one, they stopped giving us shit. The Pagans and the Warlocks wanted to charter us, bring us in with them. Even the Outlaws and Angels were looking at us. We liked the Warlocks because they were fucking crazy like the Mongols out in California. That’s how I got where I am. I’m leaving out the time I did and the drugs I pushed, the mothers I beat and all the bodies I got out there, but what’s it matter now?”
“We’re going west,” Specs told him. “You should go with us.”
“Fuck I wanna go west for?”
“Because that’s where it’s at. That’s where it’s gonna happen.”
I caught Specs eye and let him know that we weren’t going to be discussing The Shape. Not at this time. And maybe not ever again and sure as hell not with this thug. Sean seemed okay, but he was a very bad boy and I wasn’t exactly comfortable with turning my back on him.
Sean stretched out on the couch. We were on the floor in sleeping bags. There was a locked green metal gun cabinet that I wanted badly to loot. There were all kinds of Army surplus around: food, clothing, tools, medical equipment, you name it. I figured Sean had been real busy at the local Army base or National Guard Armory. I stared at the flickering flame of a Primus stove, listening to him talk.
“Yeah, I got me some good prospects for tomorrow, my brothers,” he said, staring up into the darkness. “There’s a nest of Trogs not two blocks from here, over near where I found you boys. There’s gotta be a sewer grating or manhole cover around there that I haven’t found. They’re down there somewhere, brothers. I’ll get ‘em. Fuck yes, I’ll get ‘em. Nothing finer than Trog-hunting. You boys oughta pitch in with me. I’ll show you how it’s done.”
“We need a car,” Specs said.
“Maybe I can help you with that tomorrow. First you gotta help me kill some Trogs.” He laughed. “We better get some sleep. Trog-hunting is hard work. Nash, kill that stove. Let’s rack out.”
7
The next morning we ate good. Better than I had in many, many weeks. Sean’s larder was far superior to our usual fair of cold Spaghettios and tins of deviled ham. He had lots of Army MREs and we ate scrambled eggs and bacon, crackers and jelly, and had some peach cobbler for dessert.
“Fill yourselves, my brothers,” Sean told us. “You’ll need your strength.”
As it turned out, he was right. And that was something I learned to remember later: Sean was very often right.
Well, he armed us and led us out on a Trog hunt. He gave me a Beretta 9mm handgun and a 30.06 Savage. He gave Specs a bluesteel .357 Smith and told him not to blow his fucking foot off with it. He also made us wear yellow miner’s hardhats with lights on them. Batteries being scarce, we weren’t allowed to turn them on without his say so.
He showed me two white phosphorus grenades he had.
“For Trogs?” I said.
“If you get a pack of ‘em, these’ll sort ‘em out. Hope I get to use them.”
Christ.
Why did we go along with him? I don’t know. There was no threat intended or implied. We could have walked—sans the guns—anytime we wanted, but we really didn’t want to. I was amazed by Sean. He was a cool head that never lost his temper. Deadly as they came, but honest and loyal in his own way. And resourceful. Jesus, he was resourceful. Wasn’t much he didn’t know about guns and ammunition and fighting. He knew how to stay alive, that was for sure.
A few hours after breakfast—which was served at the crack of noon—we were back in the same vicinity where Sean had found us. He led us into a collapsing building down near the river. Most of the windows were boarded up and there was graffiti all over it. I figured it had been derelict long before Doomsday. Inside, it was dusty and dirty, cobwebs hanging down like party streamers. There were offices, storage rooms, and a big garage in the back. It looked kind of like an old fire hall. Light came in through missing boards in the windows and holes in the walls, but not a lot of it.
We moved through the dimness, past rotting cardboard boxes of ancient ledgers and file folders, water-damaged crates of rusting machine parts.
“What was this place?” Specs asked.
“Hell if I know,” Sean told him. “Come on.”
He directed us through the heaped wreckage, pawing through cobwebbed corridors. The masonry was crumbling around us. There were rat droppings everywhere. Sean found a human skull, kicked it, and laughed when it bounced off the wall and dropped neatly into a garbage can.
“Two points,” he said.
A few bats were disturbed from their daytime sleep and winged angrily over our heads.
“Gah,” Specs said. “I really hate bats.”
“Least they’re normal bats,” Sean said. “Ain’t the size of condors and got teeth like jaguars, laugh like hyenas. Seen a colony of ‘em like that over in Detroit-Shoreway. Enough to give you fucking nightmares for a month.”
He brought us through the garage and into a smaller room just off it. The ceiling was arched, fallen masonry on the floor. It not only smelled damp and fusty, but like warm decay and the reason for that soon became apparent.
There was the corpse of a woman in there.
“Oh God,” Specs said.
The corpse was hung by the feet with rope, tied off to a beam above. It was just as white as boiled bone, looked like the blood had been drained from it drop by drop. It had been opened from belly to crotch and what had been inside was scooped free, leaving a great hollow. It looked like a side of beef in a slaughterhouse.
Sean waved the flies away from it with the barrel of his shotgun.
He stood there, nodding, intrigued by what he was seeing. He had a .44 magnum in a green Army-style web belt at his waist. There was a big Marine K-bar knife on the other hip, as well as a big hatchet and an empty white potato sack. I didn’t want to know what that was for and he wasn’t saying.
“See here?” he said. “She’s been eaten on. Here and here. See the teeth marks?”
I saw them. The corpse was riddled with gouges and scratches. It looked like something had taken a bite out of her shoulder. Her vagina was missing.
“They like private parts, them Trogs,” Sean explained. “Don’t ask me why. Guts first, then the privates. I hung her up here yesterday morning and they must’ve went at her last night.”
“You did this?” Specs said.
“She was dead already, little man. I just used her as bait.”
It was sickening. He was obsessed with those things. The world had ground to a halt and he was carefree and happy hunting mutants. There was something very disturbing about that.
“They’re not still around, are they?” I said.
Sean told me we had nothing to worry about. He had a theory that the underdwellers only came out at night like B-movie vampires because they had been living under the streets for so long, hiding in cellars and drainage ditches and sewers, that their eyes couldn’t take the sunlight anymore. Like burrowing worms or moles or bats. It was a good theory, I thought, and it made sense. For the underdwellers—or Trogs as we called them—were essentially nocturnal like cave-dwellers, troglodytes. The radiation had started it; the darkness took care of the rest.
“They only come out at night,” he said and I had absolutely no reason to dispute what he said.
I went over closer to the body. It was as revolting as any corpse and by that point I’d seen so many—especially after working on that clean-up crew—that it took quite a bit to gross me out. It smelled pretty bad, but it wasn’t the decay I was smelling but something sharp and acrid, almost like cat pee mixed with ammonia if you can imagine that.
“Smell it, don’t ya?” Sean said. “You know what that is, brother?”
I told him I didn’t.
“That’s Trog piss. Once you get a smell of it, you never forget it. See, Trogs like eating dead things. They ain’t against taking you or me down and eating our ‘nads on a stick, but what they like is something kind of soft, rotten…seasoned up, so to speak. They mark their goodies by pissing on ‘em kind of like dogs marking territory.” He showed me his wrist. There was old scar tissue there. “See that burn? Trog piss. Had one of ‘em piss on me once. Shit burns.”
Specs wouldn’t come by the corpse. Even with working the clean-up crew, he was looking a little green. And that was mostly Sean’s talk more than anything.
“I can smell it, too,” he said. “But it’s over here.”
He was standing by a doorway. A set of steps led down into the darkness. Sean went over there right away. As ridiculous as it sounds, he went down on his hands and knees sniffing like a bluetick hound. “Yup. Trog piss. One of ‘em must have marked this spot. Bet you ten to one we got us a Trog down there in the basement. Who’s for taking a look?” He stood up. “How about you, little man?”
“Me?” Specs said.
Sean laughed. “You ain’t got the balls. I’ll go down.”
Specs stepped in front of him. “I’ll do it.”
Sean smiled. “Listen for ‘em. They breathe real loud.”
I didn’t like it. Specs was one of those guys that must have been a toilet in another life because he always took shit. But he didn’t like to be challenged. He felt the need to prove himself.
“I’ll go with,” I said.
Specs gave me a look. “I don’t need you.”
He turned on his helmet light, took out his .357, and down he went. I told him to be careful. I didn’t like any of this. I had a cigarette and I was nervous as hell. I always looked after Specs. I didn’t like Sean pulling this macho shit on him, goading him like that.
“He’ll be all right,” Sean told me.
“He fucking better be,” I said.
Sean gave me a hard look and I gave it right back. If anything happened to Specs, I was going to kill him and I think he knew it. We watched each other.
The minutes ticked by.
8
It wasn’t long before Specs let out a scream and came jogging up the steps, his eyes wide behind his glasses, his brow beaded with sweat. There were cobwebs on his coat.
“OH GOD! OH MY FUCKING GOD!” he cried out, absolutely hysterical. “IT’S DOWN THERE! I SAW IT! IT LOOKED RIGHT FUCKING AT ME! DON’T GO DOWN THERE! JESUS, DON’T GO DOWN THERE!”
He was ready to jump out of his skin. He was shaking and gasping for breath and I held onto him until he calmed down. Sean was smiling; he thought it was funny as hell.
“They ain’t too active in the day, little man,” he said.
“Bullshit,” Specs said. “This one looked pretty fucking active.”
“I’ll take a look.”
“You better not go down there,” Specs warned him.
Sean went anyway. He clicked on his helmet lamp, racked his shotgun, and started down. He made it maybe three steps and came right back up, backing all the way. “I’ll be goddamned,” he said.
“What?” I said.
“We got one coming up into the light.”
I felt a clammy chill run up my spine and there was good reason for it: that piss smell suddenly got stronger. Ammoniated urine and enough to ream the hairs right out of your nose.
“Let’s get the hell out of here!” Specs suggested.
“Not on your life, brother,” Sean told him. “I been waiting for this.”
Specs and I pulled back along the far wall, right near to the door so we could run the hell out of there if we had to. I could hear the slapping sound of bare feet coming up the steps and my mouth was so dry I could not swallow. I could hear the Trog breathing with a hollow hissing sort of sound. That urine stench grew stronger, a low and mean smell that made my eyes water.
“Get ready,” Sean whispered.
I saw a shadow emerge from the gloom…it was distorted, semi-human. It was making a low growling sound in its throat. It came up into the light, a grotesque caricature of a human being. It was woman, I thought. Broken, bent at the waist, one shoulder pulled up higher than that other. The left arm reached down near the knee and the other only to the waist. She was naked, her flesh a greasy yellow like leprosy, horribly corrugated, the fissures and clefts in her skin so deep you could have lost a penny in them. Her breasts looked like deflated, fleshy balloons.
“Jesus,” Specs said.
Her head was misshapen, long cobweb gray hair hanging from the raw scalp. She looked around with glossy pink eyes that were set with a fine tracery of purple veins like unfertilized eggs. Each set with a tiny black dot that must have been a pupil. Her puckered mouth pulled back from teeth that were black and overlapping, triangular in shape. They looked serrated. A watery brown juice ran from the corners of her lips.
She held a hand up before her face to block the light and I saw that the palm was set with ring-shaped protrusions that looked like the sucker scars of squids you see on whales.
“I’m over here, you bitch,” Sean said.
The Trog looked at him and I wondered at that moment if she did not recognize him. She let out a shrill, piercing scream that grew in volume, an unearthly wailing that went right through me, scraping along the inside of my skull like a fork. I thought my bladder would let go. I almost fell over Specs. The scream echoed through that deserted building and came right back at us: it was an agonized sound like an animal being put to death.
Then she spoke…or made sounds like speech. I’m not sure. But this is what I heard: “Yyyyyyoooooouuuuu,” she hissed with a timber that made everything inside me pull up tight. “Yyyyyyooooouuuuuu…”
If Sean hadn’t had that shotgun, she would have torn out his throat and washed herself in his blood. She stumbled towards him, blinded, hissing, and very pissed off.
Sean let her get within four feet and then he gave her a round right in the belly. 12-gauge shot at close quarters, it nearly torn her in half. She went down screaming and thrashing. He gave her another right in the chest and she flopped, screeched, and then went still. The stink of her blood was just as bad as her urine.
“That’s how it’s done,” Sean said.
My legs went out from under me and I sat down hard next to Specs who’d already folded up. We sat there, speechless. We thought killing that thing would be enough. But it wasn’t. Not for Sean. He set aside his shotgun, kneeled down by the Trog. He wrapped her hair in his fist and pulled it tight. Then out came his hatchet. With a couple quick strokes, he decapitated her.
He stood up, holding that vile grimacing head by the hair. Blood dripped from the severed neck. “Either you boys want this for your trophy cases?” We just looked dumbly at him. “Didn’t think so.” He opened his potato sack and dropped the head in, tied the sack off at his belt.
I finally found my voice. “What the hell do you want that for?”
“I got my reasons, brother,” he said. “See, Trogs are superstitious, I think. Maybe they believe in ghosts or something. I don’t know. But they don’t care for their own dead or parts of ‘em, for that matter. I was in a pinch one time with three of the fuckers bearing down on me. I only had one round in my gun. What to do? I threw a trophy Trog head at the others and they ran off like the Devil was coming down to fucking Georgia. You should have seen it!”
I was very happy that I hadn’t.
9
There was no way in hell I wanted any part of Trog-hunting. You couldn’t have paid me to go after those monsters. They lived down in the sewers mostly, Sean told me, and I was content to let them stay there. But something happened that changed my mind.
We left the building, got out into the sunshine—Sean had promised us he had an unopened bottle of Jack Daniels back at his apartment and I was all for that—and right away we saw carnage. Scabs. About a dozen of them were lying dead in the streets. Their blood was very bright, very red spilled over the rubble. They had been dismembered, hacked and slit, disemboweled. Their entrails were strewn everywhere. One particular set was hung from a STOP sign. They had all been decapitated, the heads set neatly next to one another on the curb.
“Hell’s going on?” I said.
Sean went down to a low crouch right away like he was back in the Army, a recon scout sneaking through enemy territory. I didn’t know what the hell was going on.
“Who killed ‘em?” Specs wanted to know.
“Shut the hell up, both of you,” Sean told us and meant it.
He moved towards the bodies, eyes scanning the terrain in all directions. He went over to one and pulled something free of an abdomen. It looked like a broken stick. But when he brought it over, I saw it was a spearhead of all things.
“Hatchet Clans,” he said. “Must’ve swept through while we were inside. Get back in the building.”
“I’m not going back in there,” Specs said.
“Then you can die out here, little man,” Sean said. “Because you will die. The Clans leave nothing alive when they sweep an area.”
I went back into the building. I decided to err on the side of caution. It was the second time Sean had mentioned these Hatchet Clans. I didn’t know what they were, but if they scared Sean they must have been some real bad boys.
We got inside and Sean told us to stay away from the windows. He stayed by them, watching the streets.
“What are these clans?” Specs asked.
Sean let out a long, low sigh. “They’re fucking dangerous, that’s what,” he said. “Scabs are psychotic, but they’re disorganized. Half the time when there’s no game—people, I mean—they’re killing each other. But the Hatchet Clans are organized into large units. They kill anything they see. Those they don’t kill, they rape, torture, or enslave. You don’t want to fuck with ‘em. They’re…savage, primeval. That’s the best I can do. They don’t use guns. They use axes, spears, hammers…whatever. Let’s put it this way: you ever seen those shows on TV…when there was TV…about army ants marching through the jungle and fucking devastating everything in their path? That’s what the Hatchet Clans do. They’re raiders for the most part. They like to scalp people, cut trophies off ‘em.”
I had a lot of questions, but I didn’t ask them. I was scared. Specs was, too. Sean was a badass. I didn’t think there was anything he couldn’t handle, but the Clans had him spooked and that was enough for me.
After about ten minutes of silence, he motioned us over. “Look,” he said.
I saw two or three men come over a heap of rubble. They wore filthy old Army overcoats. One of them had a machete. One was carrying a length of chain in his hand. The other had a fireman’s axe balanced atop one shoulder. They were looking around. The most amazing thing was that they had gas masks on like soldiers from the trenches of World War I.
“What are those masks for?” Specs whispered.
Sean shook his head. “Fuck if I know. But they all wear ‘em. Must’ve looted ‘em from an Army depot or a National Guard Armory, Army-Navy surplus or something. I’ve never seen what’s under the masks, but I heard their faces are eaten by some kind of fungi.”
I’d seen and heard enough.
Sean kept watching them. “You see two or three like this, you can bet there’s thirty more. These are scouts. Hate to tell you, brothers, but we’re in some real shit here. They swept through before. Now they’ll start hunting building to building.”
Specs looked at me. His eyes were bulging. “Oh, that’s fucking great. Now what?”
“Calm down,” Sean said. “We best get down in the cellar.”
Specs looked close to a panic attack. “With the Trogs? Are you nuts? I been down there. There’s a hole in the wall. That’s where that Trog came from.”
Sean grinned. “Damn right there’s a hole in the wall. It leads into the sewers. And that’s where we’re going.”
10
Under the circumstances, we didn’t have a choice.
Our helmet lights on, we entered the jagged hole in the wall. I didn’t know if the Trogs tunneled their way out or if it had been hit by a bomb. Regardless, we went into it and emerged in the shadowy labyrinth of the sewers. As far as our lights could see, nothing but a brick tunnel that looked to be crumbling in spots. It was about seven feet in diameter. It was roomy enough, but it was still a sewer. A foot of water washed past us, carrying debris and occasional rat corpses.
“This is nice,” Specs said.
Sean stepped down into the water and we did the same. It was warm. Almost unpleasantly so like standing in a stream of urine.
“This is a main rainwater drain,” he told us. “It cuts for miles under the city. There’s hundreds of lines branching off it. Some like this and some you gotta crawl through on your hands and knees. Okay, let’s go.”
I didn’t even ask him where we were going.
We splashed along, our lights bouncing with each step, huge sliding shadows moving over the tunnel walls. The smell down there was awful. Just dank and polluted, the stink of moist rot and stagnant water, other things I didn’t want to contemplate. Water dripped and bits of masonry fell now and again. We saw huge colonies of corpse-white toadstools that grew from cracks in the tunnel. I swear they were pulsing almost like they were breathing. A fetid mist came off the water.
“How far do we have to go?” Specs asked.
“Quite a bit. At the very least I want to get a good five, six blocks away from here.”
“And how are we gonna know when we’re that far?”
“I’ll know.”
“But—”
“Just shut the fuck up for awhile,” Sean said.
I suppressed a smile. Specs was like that. He got nervous and he’d talk your head right off. It was his way. Pouting, he walked along at my side, casting sidelong looks at me, maybe waiting for me to rise to his defense. I had no intention; what we needed now was quiet.
We came to places where the tunnel was nearly blocked by fallen rubble. Many times it was because of a collapsed building whose blasted cellar had opened right up into the tunnels below. There was moss growing everywhere, some kind of green mildew that was luminous.
We’d gone about a block when we saw our first living rats. They were immense and filthy, eyes lit like red Christmas bulbs. They let us pass, but they kept a tight eye on us.
I kept hearing things behind us. Subtle sounds like scratching. It might have been our echo because everything echoed down there, even our voices. But the farther we went the more certain I was it was no echo.
Finally, Sean stopped. “You hear something?” he said.
“Yeah.”
We all heard it plainly: a scratching and squeaking as of many, many rats. The sound was getting louder. I had dealt with the rats before. They were bad enough when there was only a few, but when they came in numbers you were in trouble.
“Move it,” Sean said.
We hurried down the tunnel which sounds easy in the telling, but splashing through a foot of water gets hard going after awhile. Sean knew his way—or I hoped he did—leading us down side tunnels and then into the mainline again, back and forth until I had no idea where we were. We came to a cave-in and stepped around it into a flooded cellar. There was no building above it; it had been blasted away. The sun sure looked inviting. But there was no way to get up to it. Back into the tunnels, this way and that.
We charged into another offshoot and Sean stopped. “Trog,” he said, then relaxed. “Shit, it’s a dead one.”
It was stuck in a little ell, standing up. It was gray and withered looking, near-mummified. Even its hands were folded over its bosom. A fine plaiting of green mildew grew over it like a caul.
We came into another cellar. It was black in there, the water up to our knees by this point. Dead things were floating in the leaves. Broken beams and shattered sections of concrete rose around us like dock pilings. I saw human bones sticking up out of the water. A ribcage here, a yellowing femur there. The air smelled like blood and meat. I didn’t like it in the least.
We came around a rubble pile and right into a nest of rats.
11
“Shit,” Sean said, his light playing over them.
We all had our lights on them and our guns. Behind us, I could hear the squeaking and scratching of the rat pack that was tailing us. I started thinking the Hatchet Clans didn’t sound so bad.
“Kill ‘em!” Specs said.
“No,” I told him. “Not unless we don’t have a choice. No sense riling them if we don’t have to. You shoot them, they’ll be forced to fight.”
“Good thinking, brother,” Sean said.
There were eight or ten of them sitting on a section of collapsed wall, huge, fat-bellied rats with glistening red eyes. Several of them were chewing on something white and bloated. It was a human arm. There were maggots on it. One of them looked right at me, wormy growths coming out of its belly making obscene slithering sounds. Its teeth were bared, claws splayed out like it was ready to jump. Its greasy black fur seemed to flutter and bristle as if it was infested with lice. And as I watched in disgust and amazement, a grub-white parasite the size of a jelly bean hopped off the rat’s back.
“Good ratties,” Sean said, moving around them. “We’re just passing on by. No harm in us.”
We moved around a pile of wreckage and the cellar opened up into a cavernous hollow. I could see tree roots dangling from the ceiling. All sorts of junk was rising from the water, even several badly rusted metal beams. There were bones everywhere, human bones. All polished white and licked clean. I saw several skulls that were riddled with teeth marks.
“Nash,” Specs. “Nash…”
I saw.
There were literally hundreds of mutant rats. Armies of hump-backed things waiting with sharp teeth and shining scarlet eyes. I saw one that was blubbery and shapeless, almost hairless. There were several stubby, blind fetal heads rising from it. The mouths were opening and closing. And the stink…dear God. Where before it had been a high, hot smell of rot and blood and dampness, now it was a seething, noisome envelope of putrid decay.
Nothing nature had birthed could smell like that.
The rats began to inch closer, crowding us. They were behind us now and in front of us, to all sides. Wherever our lights played, we could see rows of shining, hungry eyes.
Sean took a green cylinder from the pouch around his shoulder. It was one of the white phosphorus grenades. He kept it ready.
Some of the rats were the size of beagles and terriers. Big, mutated things, some almost completely hairless, others lost in a storm of writhing, twitching growths. Many did not have the usual compliment of limbs, but three or sometimes two gigantic clawed appendages. They were so large you could hear them breathing. Many were covered with tumorous, jutting humps and open sores. Some had too many eyes, others not enough, a few were blind, squeaking things.
The rats were clustered around us, mutants, abominations of every sort, pushing in closer and closer. Hosts in this black, stinking nightmare world. Closing in, pushing us forward, leading us towards something, it seemed.
We splashed on, ready to fire our guns at any moment…but to what end? The rats would have buried us alive in seconds. There were that many.
Specs came around a section of floor fallen from above and he screamed. I’ll never forget the caliber of that scream. It sounded like his mind was venting itself, blowing everything clear so it could look upon this new thing and make room for the immensity of its horror.