She sat there looking at us with big dark eyes, lips pulled away from white teeth that wanted to snarl. Slowly, by degrees, she mellowed. She was still breathing hard, but she wasn’t as predatory.

Her T-shirt was ripped and I could see a fine expanse of flat belly and a pierced navel. I cleared my throat, dug a water bottle from my pack and gave her a drink. “They didn’t…ah…hurt you, did they?”

Janie smiled at her and Mickey relaxed almost instantly. No one could refuse Janie’s eyes, I knew, when she put them on you. There was such honesty and sincerity in them she could have melted a rock. “Are you sure these idiots didn’t hurt you?”

“True, very true, that’s our Carl,” Texas Slim said. “He’s a noble sort. And you all know I wouldn’t hear of such a thing. I would never assail a woman’s virtue unless she asked me to.”

“Comedians,” I said by way of explanation.

Mickey drank her water, kept an eye on us. Particularly me. The others she didn’t much care about, but she kept her eyes on me. I was very aware of it, but pretended I didn’t notice. She was eye candy. Or maybe, and more bluntly, hand candy. Unlike Janie who was petite and fair and porcelain doll-pretty, Mickey was tall and dark and long-limbed. She was pretty, too, but in a blatantly sexual sort of way. She had the curves and the legs, the high tits, the big dark eyes and full lips. The sort of girl who could talk about eating a salad and make it sound positively sensuous and carnal, make you want to dash out and fuck your hand. Here was a girl who’d gotten along on her looks her whole life. She knew what men liked and she knew she had it, knew how to use it.

“That’s kind of funny,” she said. “You see…I was moving west, too. I was in Philadelphia when New York was hit. Everything went to shit there.” She dismissed that with a wave of her hand. “A bunch of us got out, started heading west. I’m the only one left now. You know how it goes. There were six of us. Rats. Hatchet Clans. Fallout. My boyfriend…Mike…we lost him in Canton one night. Something attacked our car. They yanked him and another guy out, left us for some reason.”

Mickey nodded. “Yeah. For the last two or three weeks. They were nice, you know? Real nice. Real normal. They had a little community set up. All of it was run by a guy named Fisher. He’d been some kind of minister once. He was cool. They had some doctors and nurses, carpenters, teachers, all kinds of things. They were all working together. Lots of families were living with him. A few kids even, ones that hadn’t changed over yet…you know how that is.”

She told us Fisher was planning on getting out of the city. He had a bunch of buses stashed away on the south side over in Hammond. Trailers of supplies, military surplus, medical, everything. He had his sights on a fortified monastery down in Hebron County. They could have lived there in safety.

“What happened?” Carl asked her.

“Clans came, man. They must have been watching us awhile because they just came out of nowhere…we never had a chance.” But that was something she didn’t want to talk about and everyone saw it in her eyes. “So you guys are going west? Yeah…I can’t explain it, but ever since this started I’ve had the strongest urge to go west, too. Funny, huh?”

“It’s a funny world, dear,” Texas said.

I thought of my dream of The Medusa exterminating the human race city by city. Moving westward. I wondered if maybe Mickey was just one of many that would be trying to escape west, part of some exodus.

“Can I come?” she asked. “Can I come with you?”

“Sure.”

Carl was looking at me and I could feel those eyes. More so, I knew what he was thinking which was very much along the lines of, course you can come, sweet thing. Wouldn’t be a party without you. Next night of the full moon, we gonna get down, we gonna bust a move you’ll never forget. I guess I was thinking it, too, more or less. But maybe not as bluntly as Carl.

Mickey kept watching me. “I know where there’s a nice Jeep Cherokee just north of here across the river. It’s in a garage. Fisher had vehicles stashed everywhere. It might work out.”

 

17

I decided Mickey was going to come in handy because she was a resourceful girl. I just had the feeling that she was going to work out. We stood around talking more for a bit, ducking into a building nearby for a bite of MREs—freeze-dried spaghetti and meatballs, yum—and started swapping war stories while Gremlin drooled over Mickey and Texas Slim watched Gremlin and Carl watched everyone and Janie…Janie just kept her eye on the new girl.

There was something between them that was unspoken. At least on Janie’s side of things. What had been sympathy and understanding was blossoming into something along the lines of jealousy and you could plainly see it in her eyes. Women sometimes got territorial, I knew, without meaning to. And I was sensing that in Janie.

She had competition now. And she didn’t look like she cared for the idea.

Mickey was an interesting girl. There was no doubt about that. Not just easy on the eyes, but smart. Maybe she’d never be invited into Mensa or win the Nobel Prize for physics, but what she lacked in book smarts she more than made up for in practical schooling. And intuition. She had an almost sixth sense where danger was concerned. Something we all soon learned about.

After our impromptu luncheon, it was out into the streets again. It would be dark in a few hours and I wanted the Jeep before that happened. Mickey led the way, knowing exactly where we had to go. She barely made it to the end of the block before she stopped dead and started shaking her head back and forth.

“What is it?” I asked her.

“I don’t know…something’s wrong. I can feel it,” she said. “Something’s wrong.”

Texas Slim and Carl just looked at each other.

“She’s giving me the willies,” Carl said.

“That ain’t what she gives me,” Gremlin said.

Mickey shrugged. “Sometimes…sometimes I just sense things before they happen.”

Texas laughed nervously. “Had a grandmother on my mother’s side, a Taney from Terrabonne County. Swamp country. She had the gift, too. Oh…she was old, old, old, was old Mother Taney. Had but two or three working teeth and a narrow face, big old nose looked like a coat hook. One eye was bad…lost it when she was a child in an unpleasant spearfishing accident…but the other was just big and round, kind of yellow and staring. Made her look like that witch in the old comic book…you know the one I mean? Gave me the creepy-crawlies, it did, that staring yellow eye. One day she says, Whet yee looking fowa, booy? Cause that’s how she talked. I says, I lost my socks, Mother Tee…that’s what I called her. Mother Tee. She says, Thems socks bee out yondah the sweetgoom, hear? And they was. Right where I left them by the sweetgum. Couple weevils made a home in them, but that was all. She had the sight and she could find anything, anytime—”

“Quiet,” I told him. I knew Texas was just nervous and whenever he was nervous he started telling wild tales, but now was not the time. “What is it, Mickey?”

Everyone was waiting and Janie was getting perturbed, liking the new girl a little bit less all the time. The poison between them was thickening away on the back burner.

Mickey turned and looked at me. She was pale beneath her tan, her eyes huge and wet. “Clans. The Clans are coming.”

To which Carl immediately disagreed…but then he heard it. We all heard it.

Heard them coming.

Six or seven rose up from behind the hulks of smashed vehicles, screeching and wailing. It was an ambush. I was certain of that. A carefully staged ambush of the sort that the Clans were so very good at. But for some reason…they just couldn’t wait. Maybe it was that Mickey had somehow sensed them out there and stopped everyone in the street. Maybe they’d known the gig was up.

But now they were waiting no more. They charged from their hides, screaming and hissing. They ran in zig-zagging patterns through the street, just insane and bloodthirsty.

“Son…of…a…bitch,” Carl said.

I brought my Savage up and dropped two of them. When a third got in range, Carl opened up with his AK and stitched him…or her…or it, crotch to throat. They were merciless, these things. Remorseless, relentless. For even when they squirmed dying in the streets, riddled with bullets, they still fought and shrieked. Only a couple of them carried crude weapons…clubs and spears. Carl and I dropped all but two, but it wasn’t going to be enough. For these few had only been the spearhead. The others were coming now.

A beat-up pick-up truck came rambling down the street, glancing off dead vehicles and bouncing over drifts of sand. There were two Clansmen in the cab and a dozen more in the back. I saw them, swallowed, figured I knew what the Romans must have felt like when the Picts came at them.

Berserkers.

That’s what they were. Every one of them just psychotic and vicious.

They hopped from the truck while it was still moving and fanned out into the street. They looked much like the dead one we had found. They were all bald with warrior scalplocks, distorted faces hidden behind gas masks. They wore flapping overcoats and leather trenchcoats, jackets that were stitched patchworks of other coats, even what looked like ponchos made from tarps. They swarmed forward, brandishing homemade spears, spiked clubs, axes and pikes and, yes, hatchets.

We laid down a volley of fire and then got the hell out.

We ran for our dear lives like spooked rabbits. It was all confusing and there was no cohesion whatsoever. Should we make our stand in a building? On a rooftop? Behind a wrecked car? In the end we found ourselves back in the vicinity of Fisher’s little commune, which was now a commune of corpses. We spread out, armed, and got ready.

The truck came storming forward and I sighted on it, put a couple rounds right through the windshield. It blew into the cab in a spiderwebbed mass of candy glass. The passenger slumped over and the driver jammed on the gas.

I sighted again. I knew the only weapon that would work from this range was my .30.06. This was my baby. Maybe I could have passed the rifle to Carl but Carl was behind a station wagon on the other side of the street. There just wasn’t the time.

“Nash,” somebody said.

I breathed in and out. Sighted. Squeezed the trigger with a half-assed prayer brushing past my lips. I caught the driver in the throat, I thought. He snapped back in his seat, hands flying from the wheel trying to stem the flow of blood from his neck. The truck went out of control, bouncing off a minivan, and spinning up onto the sidewalk and ramming the remains of a police patrol car. And there she died.

The driver struggled out and Texas ran up on him and blew him away with the .50 cal Desert Eagle. But the others were coming.

As they got in closer, I saw it was true what they said about these animals. They did wear the scalps of their victims. They wore them in scarves and belts. And not just those things, but necklaces of blackened ears and teeth strung on wires, a wide and gruesome collection of mummified body parts.

Carl dropped two with his AK and it was just sheer pandemonium as we all cried out, firing, pouring everything we had at our attackers whose numbers were swelling as more of them came running down the street. Already, eight or ten of them were down and writhing and they’d been replaced by twice that many. Even Janie was shooting with the Browning .45. Mickey had Carl’s .22 Airweight.

One of them got with twenty feet of our position by crawling underneath some cars and I popped him right in the face. The slug went right in through one of the plexiglass eye ports and the Clansman was thrown up against a truck. But he did not go down. He took three or four shambling, zombie-like steps forward, bright red blood spouting from the entry wound and then went down, face-first.

Others closed in.

One jumped on top of a truck and threw his spear. It barely missed Janie. Carl blew him away. I ran out of rounds and had to switch to my Beretta 9mm. I shot one and then another and then something clubbed me in the back and I went down. I hit the ground and twisted away just as an axe bit into the pavement where I’d been. I jumped up and emptied the Beretta into my attacker and then another jumped me, tossed me against the car. He lashed out with a knife and I just avoided it, kicking him in the belly and hammering his scabby bald head with the butt of the Beretta until something gave in there with a wet snapping.

Carl emptied his AK and starting blasting away with his Mossberg. Texas Slim was hit with a spear in the side and went down. Gremlin was beaten down with a club. Mickey fired her Airweight, jumping around with great athletic grace and popping them one after the other and then she was out of ammo and two of them grabbed her. She fought and kicked and they slammed her face-down on the hood of a car. They were going to rape her then and there because that’s how the Clans operated…not with military precision or organization, but with sheer mania.

Carl blew one of them away with the Mossberg, scattering his guts for twenty feet and, dropping and turning, wasted another. Then three of them knocked him down and it was all over as they raised their hatchets.

But Janie grabbed an axe from one of the dying ones and buried it in the back of a Clansman. He spun around, axe sunk in his back and smashed her with his fist. She went down and he leaped on top of her, tearing away her shirt, her white breasts exposed. He grabbed them with his filthy, pocked hands.

“JANIE!” I cried out.

And then I was in the mix. I ran and punted the Clansman in the head like I was kicking the winning field goal and the Clansman rolled away, limp as a rag. Then I leaped, diving, and took out two more like bowling pins, jumping to my feet and kicking one of them until they were no longer moving. Then I took up Carl’s dropped Mossberg and cracked another in the face hard enough to rip the gasmask right off him. He stood there, his face like a fleshy, grinning skull covered in clots of oozing white jelly. Mickey hit him from behind with a club and his skull cracked with an audible snapping. I gave him the butt of the Mossberg full in the face and down he went. Four Clansman were left and they came on screaming and swinging chains and throwing hatchets.

And that’s when the birds came.

 

18

There was a sudden wild squawking and chirping and trilling and we all looked skyward. Even the Clansmen. Except there was no sky. Above the surrounding buildings it was black and the air was thrumming with the flapping of hundreds of thundering wings. Janie was on her feet, zipping her coat shut and covering herself when they came. I threw myself at her, knocking her down as two- or three-hundred birds came swooping down in a single shrilling mass. There was nothing to do but cover my face and roll into a ball, covering Janie’s body with my own.

The birds came down.

The world was a cacophonous storm of cawing and pounding wings. I felt them beating around me, feathers filling the air. Beaks pecked me, clawed feet tore my skin. There were so many I could not breathe. I was going to suffocate in feathers and bird shit. As I lay there with Janie, I thought I heard her scream and I was certain I did. I was gasping for breath. Crying out as beaks drilled into me again and again. With one hand I swatted at them and they pecked away at my palm, my fingers until they stung and bled. The air was thick with them, with that awful humming and fluttering and squawking.

And about the time my mind began to unreel from the crowding of birds, the feel of oily feathers and nipping beaks and the gagging stench of dander and rot…they lifted. They pulled away and were gone.

Then I looked finally. They weren’t gone at all.

They were attacking the Clansmen.

It was incredible but it was happening. Something about them had drawn the birds. I saw ravens and crows, buzzards and even a few huge vultures, as well as mutated forms with greasy green wings and scaly, knobbed heads, leering red eyes and hooked beaks that almost looked like sickles. They went right after the Clansmen and clawed them with their feet and pecked away at their gas masks, their mottled heads and yellowed hands. They hit them from every direction.

One of them tried to run with twenty or thirty birds on him, some circling and dipping in for attack, but most clinging tight and pecking away mercilessly. He looked like some kind of contorted, grotesque scarecrow that was finally getting his due from the birds he had frightened away for so long. He finally went down and the birds settled over him, pecking him until he was writhing red meat. I was astounded and I was pretty sure the others were, too.

Another Clansman who’d been making a pretty good show of himself by batting away birds with a swinging chain, their broken bodies littered at his feet, suddenly let out a piercing, guttural cry and…disappeared. He vanished as a flock of birds simply enveloped him. The crows and buzzards and the rest just kept cawing and squawking as their beaks rose and fell, coming away stained red, yanking out strings of tissue. It was an appalling sight. When he was down, crushing a few of his attackers beneath him, the birds kept at it, crowding in, fighting for space like piglets at their mother’s teats. The sound of the Clansman being stripped was simply awful…moist tearing sounds and crunching noises and pulpy hammering as beaks dug deeper for hot goodies.

It went on for about twenty minutes. We did not move. We didn’t dare.

After a time, many of the birds flew off, but most stayed and discovered the corpses and remains of Fisher’s people and began to feast. And that’s when I figured it out. Of course. What did vultures and buzzards, crows and ravens have in common? They were carrion-eaters. That’s probably why they had come in such numbers in the first place…to feed on all the corpses in the streets. But when they came—separate species flocking together for reasons I could not hope to guess at—they discovered the Hatchet Clans. They decided they looked tasty.

But why was that?

The Clansmen were hideously infected and disfigured by some creeping fungus, but they were certainly not dead, not soft and greening. But there was something that attracted the flock.

Something.

The birds were still everywhere, happily feeding, fighting amongst themselves for the tastiest bits, but they were paying no attention to my posse.

“All right,” I called out in a calm, cool, non-threatening tone of voice. “We’re going to leave now. Just everyone stand up and follow me out of here. I’ll get up first.”

Tensing, I slowly got to my feet, breathing nice and slow, trying not to gag on the stink of the carrion birds or what they were eating. A raven flew over my head, unconcerned. A huge buzzard pulled a stringy red flap of meat from a corpse’s neck, chewed it down, and made a sharp hissing sound at me. Its jaws yawned wide and it hissed again, then it got back down to its meal. I started breathing again.

The Clansman were nearly reduced to skeletons by this point. The one that had tried to run wasn’t much more than that. A raven was pecking through a gash in the gas mask, tearing out pink scraps while a pair of crows sat atop the bloody exposed ribcage, spreading their wings now and then, cawing, and digging out some juicy morsel overlooked.

Around me, the others began to get up. Very, very slowly. They were seeing that they were dead center of the feeding grounds now. The birds were everywhere. Lined up atop wrecked cars and trucks like soldiers in ranks. Flying though the air, circling high above and not very high above at all. Buzzards walked around with chunks of red, ragged meat hanging in their jaws. Vultures were pecking their entire heads into the body cavities of sprawled corpses, shaking their entire bodies as they ripped at something within. When they pulled their heads free, savagely gulping down morsels, they were red and dripping.

I led my people forward, thinking the whole time, this is either gonna work or we’re all about to die in the worst way imaginable. But I did not hesitate. Years back, in Youngstown, I’d known a guy named Roger Sweed who worked at the zoo with the big cats. He claimed that when you had to deal with them you never showed fear. When you were in their areas you had to act like you belonged there. So that’s what I was doing now: just threading my way amongst the corpses and birds, being perfectly casual and disinterested in what they were doing. Which was not real easy when a raven plucked an eye out and stood there watching me, the eyeball dangling from its beak by the optic nerve.

I walked on, my empty Savage in one hand and Janie’s hand in the other.

There was bird shit and feathers everywhere, scattered bits of human, dead birds lying in tangled heaps and others dragging injured wings that scampered away as I approached.

Birds squawked at me, but I ignored them. I moved through breaks in their ranks, paying no attention to the ones that flew just over my head. Flies lit off corpses and scattered limbs and viscera, huge buzzing clouds of them. They droned at my ears and crawled over my neck but I did not swat at them. The entire time I thought the birds would attack at any moment.

But they never did.

 

19

“It’ll be dark in an hour,” I said, as we paused to reload our weapons, hiding out in a trashed pharmacy.

Carl looked around the devastated city. “So we better find somewhere to lay low for the night.”

“Shit, shit, shit,” Gremlin said. “I thought we were going to be out of here. Somewhere else. Fuck.”

Using the U.S. Army medical pack I’d gotten from Sean, I attended to Texas Slim’s spear wound. It was a nasty looking gash across his ribs, but hardly fatal. I disinfected it, closed it with a couple butterfly bandages, taped a sterile battlefield dressing over it, and gave him a shot of antibiotics just to be safe. He’d be sore for a few days but nothing more.

Janie was off looting through the store. She was gone quite awhile. When she got back there was a funny look in her eyes.

“Where you been?” I said.

“Just looking around,” she told me. She was lying and I knew it. But I wouldn’t realize how big of a lie it was until much, much later.

“Why don’t we keep going…we have guns,” Mickey said. “Within an hour, I think, we can be at the garage with the Jeep. Why wait until tomorrow?”

Texas Slim grinned. “Because when it gets dark, child, out come the oogies and the boogies and the things that go bump in the night.”

“Let’s risk it,” she said. “We get that Jeep we can be out of Gary in twenty minutes.”

“Why don’t you just do us all a favor and shut up?” Janie said.

“Take it easy, Janie,” I told her.

Her eyes were not just blue at that moment but glacial. “Jesus Christ, Nash. She’s been with us a few hours and she’s calling the shots? Who the hell asked for her advice anyway?”

Mickey shrugged. “I was just saying.”

“Oh, shut up.”

They stood there, staring at each other while I was getting annoyed and Texas Slim and Carl were silently amused and Gremlin was practically in heat. “Hey,” he said. “Just like Roller Derby. We’re gonna have us a cat fight. Out come the claws! Fur is gonna fly!”

“Why don’t you go fuck yourself?” Mickey told him.

“No, I wasn’t thinking about fucking myself. I was thinking about fucking somebody else.”

I got in there then. God knows I’d had enough of that fucking idiot by then. I shoved Gremlin and put him on his ass. “Knock it the hell off. What did I tell you about that shit?” I had a sudden desire to throw him another beating. The only time that asshole took a break from whining and complaining was to start panting over one of the girls. “Keep it in your fucking pants. Christ.”

I turned and saw that Mickey was smiling at me like I’d come to her rescue and I also saw that Janie was steaming. The green-eyed monster was out of its cage.

“Let’s all just settle down here, okay?” I said to them. “We’re not going to accomplish anything like this.”

Gremlin got up, brushing dust off himself. His face was still bruised from the last time we’d tangled. He touched his fingertips to a purple welt under his eye that was slowly fading. “Sure, Nash. I got ya. We got to keep our new girl nice and fresh, eh?” He winked. “Our friend don’t want damaged goods, do he?”

“Here we go again,” Carl said.

“What the hell is he talking about?” Mickey wanted to know.

Texas Slim hooked her by the arm and led her away. “Nothing to worry about, my dear. You see, many years ago, Gremlin’s mother took a large healthy shit and fell quite in love with one of the turds she saw in the bowl. So she nursed it and fed it and brought it up and the result of that you see standing over there.”

Carl burst out laughing.

We all did…except for Janie and Gremlin himself.

Sighing, I led them outside.

It was about that time that I noticed we had an audience. At first, I went for my gun…but then lowered it. There was a man standing not fifteen feet away on the sidewalk. He was naked except for an outrageous cranberry bathrobe that was hanging open, his business on full display. His fingernails and toenails were both painted purple.

“Boy howdy,” Texas said to him. “Join the party?”

The guy just stared at us. He had a brilliant, fluffy head of trailing blonde locks. He also had a beard that was more white than gray.

Texas Slim had no fear of crazy people. He went over to the guy and tied his bathrobe shut for him. “The ladies, you understand,” he said, pressing a hand to his wound.

The guy had a phonebook under his arm. He pointed down the street and said, “They came in silver buses. I saw ‘em. They had orange suits on. They took Reverend Bob and threw him in the bus. I saw it happen. I saw lots of things happen. I wrote all down in my book here.” He showed us the phonebook, shrugged. “I ate my dog because I was hungry.”

Carl laughed in his throat and turned away. “Who’s the fucking Gomer?”

“Pay no attention to Carl,” Texas Slim said. “He hasn’t had a serious romantic encounter since his dear mother passed.”

“Kiss my ass,” Carl said.

Bathrobe wandered away down the street. Texas called to him, but he kept going.

“Want me to grab him?” Carl whispered.

“Why?”

“You know why. It’s almost time.”

“Let him go. I’m tired of this shit.”

I started walking again, Mickey at my side.

“Where are we going?” Janie said.

“To find that Jeep.”

“Tonight?”

“Why not?”

She just shook her head and Mickey grinned. We walked in silence, Texas Slim and Carl out front with their guns keeping an eye on things. I was thinking about everything and trying hard not to. We trudged on, getting closer to the river. In the distance I could see the mills and refineries Gary was famous for. A few birds circled in the sky and sand blew over the roads in a fine spray. We went over a grassy hill, crossed railroad tracks, cut through some wilted thickets and then before us, stretching in all directions, a great blackened pit.

It was full of bodies.

 

20

Well, bodies was not exactly accurate, for the pit was actually filled with skeletons that had once been bodies. There was nothing fresh down there. Just what looked like thousands of skeletons heaped and broken, disjointed and blackened. There was ash everywhere. The pit stretched easily for three city blocks in either direction, as far as I could tell.

“Must’ve burned ‘em here,” Mickey said. “I saw a pit like this outside Allentown.”

Texas Slim nodded. “The germs and fallout must have been very bad here. Too close to Chicago. They must have dumped them here and torched them. Judging by the ashes everywhere, I’d say it went on for some time.”

I saw that it wasn’t just bones down there, but the wrecked hulks of cars and trucks. Lots of things had been dumped down there. It was a junkyard.

“You didn’t know this was here?” Janie asked Mickey.

“No…how would I?”

“Well, you led us right to it.”

“So what?”

“So, you’re leading us to that Jeep. You know where it is. You didn’t know this was here?”

“No, I didn’t. I came out here once. But not on foot. We were on the road north of here, on the other side of the river. I-ninety.”

Janie did not look satisfied and I knew I had to get the show rolling again here or another fight would break out. My little group was getting frustrated, tired. They needed something to set their sights on. That’s why I was going after the Jeep now rather than wait until tomorrow. At least, that was one of the reasons. The need to keep moving west was getting very strong, you see.

The sun was hovering just over the horizon now. I saw that there was a trail cut through the pit and up the other side. If we tried to go around, it would probably be dark by the time we hit the river.

“Let’s go,” I said.

“Down there?” Gremlin said. “I’m not going down into that cemetery.”

“Then you can stay behind.”

I started down, moving easy so I didn’t go sliding on the sand. Pebbles and loose rocks went rolling into the bone pit. The others fell in behind me without a word. Gremlin, too. It must have been a quarry or sandpit at one time that had been abandoned and then opened back up, enlarged, when thousands were dying by the day and infectious disease was burning hot through the city.

The hillsides were littered with stray skeletons wrapped in threadbare rags. They were rising from the sand, their bones so white they looked luminous. As we neared the bottom, I noticed there were great jagged slabs of slag everywhere along with sections of broken concrete that looked to have been part of sidewalks at one time. Ancient lengths of cement drainage conduits rose from the refuse along with rusted staffs of rebar and old porcelain sewer piping that must have been down there for decades and decades. Sure, first it had been a quarry, then a junk pit, then a body dump.

The shadows grew long and I felt Janie slide her hand in mine and I was glad for the feel of it. I gripped it tightly. Things rustled in pockets of spreading dark. Birds winged from one wrecked vehicle to the next. A rat stood atop a rusting engine block, watching us pass. The trail wound through the wreckage and bones, zig-zagging this way and that. Somebody had beat the trail through so it was definitely in use.

But I bet they don’t go down here after dark.

I kept going as night settled in. There were things jutting from the shadows everywhere. I tripped over a curled piece of rebar and almost went down. I dug a flashlight from my back. Working batteries were getting scarce now, but I didn’t like the idea of gutting myself on jagged metal.

“Nice place,” Texas Slim said.

“Yeah, nice place to die,” Gremlin added.

I fanned my flashlight around, picking out old refrigerators and heaps of tires, the rusted and pitted remains of an old swingset rising from the sand. And bones, of course. They were everywhere. The light glanced off ribcages and femurs and spinal columns. And skulls. Dozens and dozens of jawless skulls that had been picked clean. Bones rose up in great ramparts through which rats scurried.

When we hit dead center of the pit there was really nothing but skeletons. Some still dressed in rags and articulated, but most blackened and broken and tossed around. I started seeing a lot of small bones and skulls which must have belonged to kids. As we cut around some termite-pitted dock pilings, there was a little baby buggy with weeds growing up through it. I put the light on it out of some ghoulish curiosity and saw that the carriage was all rusted and black, the bonnet burned to flaps. Inside there was a tiny skeleton with jaws wide in a scream.

“Oh God,” Mickey said.

More derelict cars and piping, bones and shattered hills of concrete. I was moving everyone along faster now, needing to get out of there. Maybe it was nerves and maybe it was something else but I was getting very apprehensive. It felt like there were needles in my belly. I was sweating. I could feel the beat of my heart at my temples. Rats squeaked and bats winged overhead.

But her words were cut right off…for somewhere out in the shivering darkness that filled the pit like the blackest oil, there rose up a roaring which sounded positively primeval.

“I’m guessing we’re fucked here,” Texas Slim said.

 

21

The roaring came again and this time it was closer.

And there was a smell on the night breeze: sharp and vile like rotting hides piled in heaps.

It became a matter then of making a run for it or standing and fighting. The beast was out there and I figured it was the same one we’d heard last night. I had the most unpleasant feeling that it had been following us, scenting us across the city. Maybe that was just my imagination working overtime, but I had the strangest feeling that it was right.

“What do you think, boss?” Carl said.

“Let’s go,” Janie said. “Please, Nash.”

There were a few other mutterings on the subject, but the one person who seemed to have no opinion was Gremlin. The first to complain, the first to bitch, the first to interject his opinion on any subject…but now he had nothing to say. Sure, maybe he was scared but I was not so sure.

“Let’s draw it in and fucking waste it,” Mickey said.

And that’s what I was leaning towards. I just didn’t like the idea of making a run for it with that thing…whatever it was…at our backs. It was stalking us. And only now had it announced its presence because it had us here in this pit and it knew we were not going to escape.

“C’mon, Nash, this is crazy,” Janie said, just riven with fear. “Let’s just—”

“Sshhh,” I told her.

Nobody spoke; they just listened now.

The beast was coming. We could all hear it picking its way towards us in the darkness. The crackling of leaves and sticks, the crunch of bones, the thudding footsteps of something very large like an ogre in a fairy story coming out of a dark wood to eat children.

Another sound now…a grunting, sniffing sound like a rooting hog.

I didn’t bother using the flashlight. Not yet. It knew where we were and it was coming. I’d wait until it got in close, close enough to shoot. I motioned the others forward to some concrete pilings. They got behind them and spread out, guns held in sweating, shaking fingers. And there we waited as that monstrosity out there edged in closer, stealthy like a jungle cat hunting its prey. There was so much junk and refuse in the pit that there were dark shapes rising all around us. Everyone watched, waiting for one that moved. I thought more than once that I saw some hunched-over shaggy form of immense proportions.

Maybe it was my imagination.

We waited for five minutes, then ten, sweating bullets. Everyone was tense. There was nothing but the sound of our breathing, the distant sound of wild dogs barking, tiny creatures rustling amongst the wreckage.

I kept my .30.06 up and ready. Janie was trembling next to me only I didn’t feel it so much because I was trembling myself.

“Anybody in the mood for a nice quiet ghost story?” Texas Slim said.

“Shut up.” I sighed. “I think someone should go have a look. How about you, Gremlin?”

“Fuck that. I ain’t going out there.”

“You afraid?” Texas Slim said. “You didn’t seem afraid of that thing last night.”

And it would have been interesting to hear Gremlin’s rebuttal to that, but a wild screeching noise came scraping out of the darkness and it sounded almost like laughter…shrill, hysterical laughter. The laughter of something that grew fat on fear and sharpened its teeth on human bones. The stink was overbearing…high and hot. I thought I saw two huge eyes shaped like crescent moons reflected out there.

“It’s coming and we’re going to kill it,” I said.

I tried to swallow but my throat was so dry that my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. Something moved out there. Something made a hoarse guttural noise that became a slobbering sound like the beast was drooling.

“Get ready,” I whispered.

I couldn’t have imagined a more tense, threatening situation. That ugly bastard out there, whatever in the Christ it was, had our number. It had been following our trail and now it had us right where it wanted us. Yet…it was hesitating out there. It could have jumped out at us at any time and started killing, but it didn’t. It was cautious. Careful. Predators were like that. They wanted the upper hand. Even a tiger in the jungle or a great white shark in the surf aren’t as gutsy as most people think. They want to take their prey, yes, but they want to do as easy as possible without harming themselves. And like them, this creature wanted a sure thing, a clean kill, the upper hand. I could almost sense its hesitation out there.

“Come on, you fucker,” Carl said under his breath.

The waiting was hell. We couldn’t go on like that. We had what I thought was a perfect killzone: sheltered by the concrete pilings, there was a sandy clearing right in front of us and wreckage piled up in a rampart behind. If that thing wanted us, it’d have to charge through the clearing. And I wanted it to do that. What I didn’t want was to play cat and mouse with that fucking horror. I didn’t want it sneaking in on our flank or getting ahead of us and lying in wait when we tried to make our escape. No, we had to draw it in.

“We have to bait it in,” I said. “Gremlin, take a walk out into that clearing.”

“Fuck you,” he said.

“Why not, Gremlin?” Texas Slim said. “He won’t hurt you, will he? You’re his friend.”

At the moment what Texas was getting at did not occur to me, but later I understood perfectly: we had been set up. Gremlin had set us up.

“Give me the AK,” I told Carl. I handed him the Savage. “I’m going out there.”

Janie’s hand on my arm was like an electrical wire juicing with current. I had to pry it loose.

“No, Nash,” she said. “Rick…”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Mickey said.

Nobody did except, of course, Gremlin. But it had to be done. “Carl? I’m going to draw it in. Aim for its head, its eyes. Killshot.”

Carl got ready with the Savage.

Texas said, “Still say we send Gremlin here.”

“No, not him,” I said. “We’re going to need him tomorrow night when the moon comes up.”

He made a whimpering sound in his throat because he thought I had just selected him. Maybe I had, but if so then I’d selected him many days before. I said it mainly to shake him and it worked just fine.

I stepped out into the clearing with the AK. My knees were shaking. Beads of sweat rolled down my face. Yet, despite the fact that I was ready to have kittens, I walked out there very casually. I did not even hold the AK up; I kept it at my side as if I didn’t have a care in the world. I reached into my breast pocket, took out a cigarette and lit it. I was shaking, but I was doing everything I could to give the impression that I was perfectly at ease. Then I waited. The holes in my plan were many. If that thing had sniffed us across the city, then like any other predator it might be able to smell the fear on me. If it was intelligent—and I suspected as much—then it might suspect the trap I had laid. All I had going for me, I thought, was the fact that it wanted us bad. And such animal desires often cancel out common sense.

I had almost finished my cigarette when I sensed, rather than heard, motion out there. A chill went up my spine and there was a sudden hot, reeking stench of putrescence that nearly put me to my knees. Then it charged, leaping out of the shadows. I had a momentary glimpse of something massive, muscular, and distorted. I threw myself backward and a split second after my ass hit the ground I opened up with the AK on full auto, just spraying rounds into the shadows.

I saw it clearly as it came at me in the moonlight.

I saw my rounds pepper its chest, saw it flinch and draw back. It was much larger than a man and I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say it stood eight feet in height. A hulking thing with skin like oily leather, threadbare with twisted tufts of gray hair or bristles. Its misshapen hide was split open in a dozen places with knobs and rungs of bone protruding out. A mutant. One arm was longer than the other, the right shoulder high and ridged, the left almost flat, the chest a rack of bones. It lacked any sort of body symmetry.

And it had claws, huge curving claws.

It moved with incredible speed. Carl fired and missed and in that split second, it jumped at me, standing over me. I could feel the acrid, pungent heat rolling off it in waves. Smell the rank decay of its hide. Tiny crawling things fell off it and skittered over my face and bare arms.

I heard Janie scream, Mickey cry out, Texas shout.

It looked down at me and why I didn’t fire the AK again I did not know. I guess I froze. Its face was an obscenity: gray and seamed, almost like some demonic version of a wild boar with a flattened snout and huge maw filled with gnarled yellow teeth and what might have been tusks. One eye was huge and staring and the other drawn into a slit, everything out of sync.

The way it stared at me with those glistening red eyes, I got the sense that, yes, it was going to kill me, but it would not be a quick, merciful affair. My death would be sport. Amusement. Like a cat torturing a mouse. No more, no less.

I remember wondering why Carl didn’t shoot again, thinking that this had been going on for minutes. But later they told me that it was probably less than five seconds from the time I went on my ass to when it stood over me.

Then Carl did fire.

He caught the beast right in the head, his round right on target despite the shadows. It punched through that slit eye and exited with a spray of meat and blood. It was a killshot. A perfect fucking killshot. That thing should have fallen over dead as a stump. But it didn’t. The impact of the bullet tossed it backwards and it stumbled for a few feet, but instead of dying it raised its taloned hands to the sky, threw back its head and let out a shrieking cry that nearly deafened me. It wasn’t a roar or a baying, nothing like that. Not the sort of thing you’d expect from a monster like that. No, it was a high, piercing wail that sounded very much like a woman in utter anguish. Inhuman, yet definitely female.

Then it darted into the shadows.

By that time I was crawling madly towards the concrete pillars and hands found me and yanked me to my feet. I was nearly delirious with terror. It took me a moment to screw my head on straight.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” I finally said.

Mickey instantly took charge. With a flashlight borrowed from Carl she found the trail and led us out of there. Texas Slim was at her side with his Desert Eagle. They got us through that maze of bones and junk and found the trail leading up the hillside. Carl and I took up the back door, Janie and Gremlin sandwiched in-between.

Out in the enshrouding darkness of the pit we could hear the thing.

It was wailing with that shrill unearthly sound, its voice echoing out all around us. It seemed to come from behind us, then off to the left, then the right. We stopped dead twice in our climb because it sounded like it was right in front of us. It must have been the echo. Once, when we paused, I swore that I heard it sobbing out there pitifully. Then, seconds later, there came a maniacal screeching that went right up my spine and that, too, dissolved into a cold, dry, hysterical laughter like the braying of a hyena.

We kept moving up the sheer face of the hill, Mickey’s light picking out skulls and ribcages, a few fully articulated skeletons in rags rising from the sand. Half way up we heard more of that grisly, fragmented laughter and it was directly behind us. There was no doubt of it. We froze again, weapons drawn.

It was there, but we couldn’t see it.

The moonlight in the pit was uneven with all that heaped refuse down there casting jagged shadows in every direction. Every time we heard a noise, our flashlights revealed nothing.

But it was coming. Getting closer, tightening the noose around us.

We came to a halt, bunching together in a circle, weapons pointing in all directions. But on whose flank it would attack, we did not know. My mouth was dry as sawdust. I couldn’t even summon the spit to swallow. It felt like every muscle and tendon in my body had drawn tight like wires.

We heard it, seemingly in several different directions.

It was casting around out there, cat and mouse. I heard things crunching like it had stepped on skulls and crushed them flat. Something huge fell over and the ground shook. I felt the stomping of its feet. A section of cement pipe came flying out of the darkness, whooshing right over our heads and impaling itself in the hillside.

“This is fucking bullshit,” Carl said, his voice weak with a sort of manic desperation I’d never heard in it before.

“Quiet,” Texas told him

The pit was silent as a crypt suddenly. I could hear the others breathing but nothing else. Sweat rolled down my neck. I could feel the heat rising from the others. It was close, the beast was close. I knew that much. It had been playing games with us, trying to drive us into a state of absolute fear and it had succeeded quite well. Now the end game was at hand. Mickey scanned her light around with a trembling hand and picked out nothing but bones, broken slabs of pavement, the rusting hulk of an old stove. Suddenly, the air was thick with a sickening stench like spoiled meat.

The beast came leaping out of the shadows, roaring with primeval appetite.

We shot at it, but it was like trying to kill a ghost. It was there. And then it was not. Panic set in and we just scrambled madly up the hillside. Mickey led the way, Texas right behind her. Gremlin knocked me aside and then grabbed Janie and tossed her back. She lost her balance and rolled ten or fifteen feet down the hillside.

“Take her!” Gremlin cried. “Take her and leave us alone! She’s the one you want!”

I went after Janie and Carl went after Gremlin. I heard them tussling. Heard screams and cries. I pulled Janie up and fired into the darkness where I heard the beast. As I led Janie back up, I saw that Carl had Gremlin on the ground. Gremlin was screaming and crying and Carl was drilling him in the face. By the time I reached him, he had yanked Gremlin to his feet. Then, grabbing him by the hair and the back of his jacket, he lifted him right up and threw him. Gremlin went airborne about five feet, hit the ground rolling. He rolled right down to the bottom and when he finally stopped he let out a demented scream that was about as close to raw insanity as I’ve ever heard.

We saw him in the moonlight.

Just as we saw the grotesque figure standing over him. The beast picked him up with very little effort, hoisting him over its head and shaking him like an offering to the cold moon above. He was squirming, crying, screaming. If I hadn’t have hated that bastard so much at that point, I might have felt sorry for him. The beast brought him down on a sawtoothed plate of exposed metal. His scream ended instantly with a wet, shearing sound.

We ran up the hillside and out of the pit in record time.

Behind us, we could hear the sounds of Gremlin being battered to a pulp.

 

22

Thirty minutes later we saw the bridge. It stretched about half a mile over the Calumet River and the railroad tracks below. It was a steel bridge with two high arches near the center, sagging and twisted like it had withstood an airstrike. Maybe it had. I estimated that it was probably a good hundred foot drop to the river below. The closer we got to it the more we all saw the wreckage: mangled girders, blackened uprights, overhead beams sheared and hanging, the whole thing crowded with debris, smashed cars and trucks. Everything from big semis to minivans. It almost looked like they had been driven up on the bridge to form some kind of barricade. Many of them were charred.

As we neared it, Janie said, “Are you sure this thing is stable?’

Mickey nodded. “It doesn’t look like much, but it’s safe.”

I don’t think any of us were very reassured. It looked like some kind of war had been fought up there and not that long ago. In my mind, the bridge was the monstrous exoskeleton of some gigantic insect, shattered and broken and rawboned, just waiting to fall into the polluted depths of the river below.

I checked Texas Slim’s wound by flashlight, just to see if all the commotion had torn it open but it was okay. So on we went.

Mickey led the way, seeming to know it quite well as she slipped around the burnt hulks of cars, trucks, and nameless machinery. We saw quite a few skeletons, some cremated behind the wheels of vehicles and others scattered underfoot, birdpicked and disjointed. It was like a graveyard. My flashlight picked out more than one skeleton that was punctured with bullet holes and that made me certain that a war was fought up here, or at the very least dozens of small skirmishes. Several trucks had burst through the railing and hung precariously on the edge, their noses pointed out into the misting blackness. A sluggish, gray-green fog with the consistency of ectoplasm drifted over the river below. Now and then there was an opening in it and I could see the wrecks of vehicles rising from the murky, stinking water.

Mickey continued to lead us on, threading us through the wreckage. Five minutes into it, both Carl and I lit cigarettes to calm our nerves. “You know she could be leading us into a trap, don’t you?” he whispered to me as he cupped a match to light my smoke.

It had occurred to me, of course.

A sleek, attractive woman like her. How easy it would have been for her to draw in men and then use their own raging hormones and that very male need to protect women—especially sexy ones—against them. But I didn’t really doubt her. I had a good feeling about her. Maybe her motives weren’t entirely altruistic, but then again whose were? I did not get the sort of bad feeling from her I’d gotten from Gremlin after he hooked back up with us. And that had probably not been any sixth sense on my part, but maybe an intuition planted in my head by The Shape.

We walked on.

The bridge canted slowly upward and leveled out beneath the arches where it ran flat for about two city blocks before canting back down to the other bank. The closer we got to the arches, the more wrecked vehicles I saw. The entire thing was nothing but a vast junkyard. It made me nervous. With all that scrap metal lying around, we could have walked right into an ambush at any moment. It would have been tricky in full daylight, but at night…just death waiting to happen.

So when Janie stopped walking and said, “I think there’s something out there,” I was not really surprised. Maybe I’d been feeling it for awhile, too, telling myself that it was nothing but shellshock, post-traumatic stress from our encounter with the beast. But as I stopped, yes, I was feeling it, too.

Carl and Texas looked around, then looked at each other. They were not convinced.

“I don’t see anything,” I said. “Maybe you got the jitters.”

“Sure,” Texas Slim said.

“No, it’s not that,” Janie assured us.

Mickey was hugging herself, looking troubled. “She’s right, Nash. I feel it, too. Like a hundred eyes are staring at me.”

Well, by that point I had learned to trust Mickey’s intuition. Janie’s was pretty well developed, too, but Mickey’s was practically a sixth sense. I decided we’d wait a moment. We got up by the arches, sidled around a fuel tanker, and then kept an eye on what was beneath us, that strip of bridge running back towards the bank we’d just left. The moon had abandoned us. It was rafting through clouds high above. The tension inside me was like hot metal. I was waiting for the moon to come back out. Without it, all those cars stretching out below were just shadows heaped upon shadows.

“Let’s move,” Carl said.

“Wait,” I told him. “Just a few more minutes.”

A few more minutes became five and then ten before the moon broke free of the clouds up there and illuminated the bridge. I saw the wrecked vehicles, but I also saw other shapes down there in-between. I thought one of them moved.

I handed Carl my Savage. “You see that minivan with the crushed-in side? Right there by the Land Rover? There’s a shadow on its right side that don’t belong. Put a round in it if you can.”

Carl was more than happy to. He stepped away from us, balanced the rifle on the roof of a Mazda, sighted, and squeezed off a shot. The report was booming, echoing out across the silent river. But a split-second after I heard it, I heard somebody down there scream.

“Shit,” Texas said.

There were lots of moving shadows down there, all mulling about like worms on tasty roadkill. And there was no doubt who and what they were: Hatchet Clans. And they were coming.

We all spread out and got ready to start shooting. The Clansmen were moving up through the wreckage and I had to wonder how long they’d been dogging us. In the moonlight, I could see the masks they wore, the shine of the eye pieces. They were no longer practicing stealth. They were shouting and screeching, letting out that wailing war cry I knew so well. Down at the foot of the bridge I saw what looked like hundreds of them. Maybe it wasn’t that many, but it was more than enough to overrun us even with the guns.

I told the others to hold their fire until they had something closer to fire at.

Carl was firing at them indiscriminately, trying to kill a few, but mostly trying to drive them back. My plan was to have Carl hold them off while I got the others away. Maybe it would have worked…but we never got the chance to find out.

“They’re here!” Mickey screamed. “They’re here!”

And they were. About a dozen of them had slipped up on us, probably crawling amongst the smashed cars on their bellies. They waited until they were in range and then leaped up, brandishing spears and axes and clubs with spikes driven into the ends. Strictly Stone Age shit, but lethal at close range.

They charged.

We started shooting with wild abandon, putting rounds in them, over their heads, to all sides. We put up a manic defense and our firepower was enough that they didn’t make it within ten feet of us. A wounded one dragged itself off. And another with no less than six smoking bullet holes in it dragged itself at our position and Texas killed it with a headshot.

“We won’t stop the next wave,” Carl said.

And I knew he was right: I could see them advancing on us, ducking low and slipping amongst the cars and trucks, staying low so we couldn’t draw a good bead on them. I was guessing there were thirty or forty of them. And behind them, at least three times that many.

“We have to run for it,” I told the others.

But Texas Slim had other ideas. “What we need here is something that will tip the odds in our favor. Something like a down-home barbecue, if you catch my meaning.” He was staring up at the tanker truck just behind us. He was smiling. “That is…if you catch my meaning.”

“Carl?” I said. He had driven trucks for a living once upon a time.

The tanker had stalled out or been stopped just as it had reached the first bridge arch, which meant that its hind end was not perfectly level, but sort of hanging down on the canting road way. The cant was slight, maybe 12º at most, just a gently sloping incline you had to drive up until you reached the arches and the perfectly vertical plane of the bridge itself. I had some crazy idea of popping the emergency brake on the tanker…but it would only have rolled twenty feet before crashing into more wreckage.

We needed something better and Carl had it.

 

23

“There’s a discharge valve at the rear of the tank,” he said. “It’s where you hook up the hose for unloading. Manual. Strictly gravity feed.”

As the girls and I watched the Clansmen picking their way toward us, our hands sweaty on our guns, Carl and Texas went at it. I didn’t watch what they did. I heard the doors to the truck cab open and shut a few times. I heard them argue. I heard the clanking of a dropped wrench. I couldn’t seem to take my eyes off what I was seeing below: the Hatchet Clans. I wondered how many there were in Gary. What I was seeing was not only horrendous but amazing. They were literally everywhere—creeping amongst the vehicles, crawling over the tops, massing like a swarm of hornets. There were so many that it was absolutely ridiculous to pick a target. It reminded me of when I was a kid and I stomped an ant hill and the ants, black and angry, literally boiled out.

There were that many.

Mickey was next to me and she was trembling. “C’mon, Nash…Jesus Christ, we have to get out of here!”

Janie didn’t say a word. Oh, she was scared, too, but she wasn’t saying a thing. She was just waiting as death moved towards us, either with absolute faith in what the boys were doing or maybe accepting her end. You could never be sure with her.

I smelled gas.

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

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

“Let’s go,” Carl said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was quite a show.

 

24

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

“It’s okay,” Janie told me.

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

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

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

“Hell we at?” I asked.

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

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

“Why’d you hit the horn?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But, once again, sweet and kind as she was, she was also naïve.

The Shape would come.

I would have to make a selection.

We drove on for another hour. We saw a few wrecked vehicles but no more giant birds or much of anything else, unless you wanted to count the pack of wolves or coyotes or whatever the hell they were that cut across the road in front of us. We had to slow down so we didn’t hit them. They watched us as they passed. Their eyes glowed green in the darkness.

Finally, Mickey said, “There’s a turnoff for Utica. Something about a campground, Nash.”

“So what?” Janie said.

“You think that’s the place to crash for awhile?”

I nodded. “Yeah, I think so.”

“Then pull us in there.”

Janie was boiling next to me in the dark but I didn’t really have time to assuage her ego. She was feeling very threatened by Mickey. I understood that. I sympathized with it. Unfortunately, Mickey’s intuition was so well-developed that it was nearly prophetic. I would have been a fool not to use a tool like that to safeguard us.

The place was dead. No fires burning. No vehicles. The campground had gone wild, most of the sites grown over. There were lots of rock formations and a big river. I figured it was a pretty nice place back in the day, the perfect getaway from Chicago. Mickey scouted us out a spot on a hill that overlooked most of the park and we stopped there. We found some wood at a ranger station down the way and started a blaze in the firepit. It was nice. All we needed were some marshmallows and hot dogs.

No such luck.

We ate Chef Boyardee ravioli and canned mandarin oranges. But outside like that by the fire, it tasted pretty damn good. Nobody was saying much of anything. They were all tired. Nobody had slept much in the past few days. Carl was just staring into the flames. Texas Slim did not regale us with crude stories. Janie kept her eye on Mickey who kept her eye on me. Meanwhile, I watched the moon and it watched me.

I could feel The Shape out there like some malefic dark star orbiting around us, each pass bringing it a little closer. I sat there and chain-smoked. I had no idea what I was going to do. It was the night of the full moon. There was a possibility The Shape might wait until tomorrow night before making an appearance, but there was no guarantee of that.

“What’re you going to do, Rick?” Janie said to me, reading my mind.

“About what?”

“You know what.”

All eyes were on me then. Mickey was watching me especially close. I knew then that Texas or Carl had told her, tipped her off about the whole business. That was okay. She knew now. We all knew. We all understood. We were thick as thieves, coveting our dirty little secret.

“Nash,” Carl said.

I looked over at him.

He had his AK up. “Somebody out there. Out in those trees.”

“He’s right,” Mickey said.

“If they were bad boys, they would have attacked,” I said. “Let’s assume they’re friendly. Let’s assume they’re in need of company.”

We waited. A few insects buzzed and a coyote howled low and mournful in the distance. I could hear our friend moving around out there. Carl slipped away from the fire and took up a shooting position by the Jeep. The rest of us stayed put.

I heard a stick crack, saw a dark shadow slip behind a tree.

“You out there,” I called. “Come on in. We’re friendly. We got food and coffee. You’re welcome to it.”

Silence.

Then the shadow came around the tree and walked almost sheepishly towards the fire. It was a woman, fortyish, but so ragged and dirty that she looked like a ragbag. I wondered who she was before the bombs fell.

“Your welcome to what we have,” I said.

She came in closer.

Mickey knew exactly what I was doing. She smiled at me in the firelight.

 

25

The woman enjoyed our coffee, our meager food. She ate with her fingers like an animal while she watched us warily like we might steal her dinner away from her. About the time I was pretty sure she was a deaf mute or something, she said, “Ronny got the pox, had the Fevers something terrible. Blood came out of his eyes. It squirted out. I think he threw up part of his intestines. Looked like intestines.” She shook her head, very matter-of-fact about it as if the true horror of the situation had lost its power to shock. “Ronny didn’t want to get burned. He was always saying, Marilynn, don’t you let them burn me. But I didn’t have a choice. Army said so. We put him in the pyre. They made us put him in the pyre with the rest. They burned him. Thousands of ‘em burning in the pit. You could smell it all the way to Beloit. It stank.”

“Where are you from, Marilynn?” Janie asked her.

“Janesville, Wisconsin. Lived there my whole life. Army started clearing us out block by block. Put us in a camp. Like one of them German camps you hear about it the war, kind with the Jews in ‘em. Little huts we lived in. Barbwire all around. We couldn’t leave. They wouldn’t let us,” she told us, the firelight reflected in her eyes. “Lot of us fought. Didn’t want to go. Shiela Reed fought, too. She was hiding her husband’s body. Shiela was manager at the Rite-Aid, started as a checker but she blew her boss in the storeroom every day, they said, so she got manager. She was crazy. Hiding that body. Army came in and she shot at them. They gunned her down. Threw her in the street and left her there.” She looked around at us as if realizing for the first time that we were there. “Where you going in that Jeep?”

“West,” Carl told her.

Marilynn’s eyes got wide, filled with light. “West, you say? Hear lots of people are going west. Funny. Where west you going?”

“Des Moines.”

“That’s an awful place. I was there two months ago. I ain’t going back.”

“What’s going on there, darling?” Texas Slim asked her.

“Ain’t you heard? Half the town is burned down, rest of its wreckage. It was bombed by the Air Force to clean out the militias. Nothing there now but rats and corpses and big craters from the bombs, lots of fallen down buildings. I been there. I know. Yes sir, I know. Bones everywhere. Lots of cars with skeletons in ‘em. Not much else.”

“No people?” Mickey said.

Marilynn was sucking tomato sauce from her fingers. “Oh, sure. There’s people. Wild people. They run around in animal skins or go naked. They’re all crazy. They drool. You don’t wanna go there in broad daylight, let alone the dark. Don’t get there after sundown. That’s when the bad ones come out.”

But that’s where we were going. I don’t know why, but the need was very strong and I wasn’t about to ignore it. I kept watching our guest. I didn’t speak to her. If I spoke to her, I would feel connected to her and I didn’t want that kind of connection. I had to look at her like a farmer looks at a pig he’s going to slaughter. That’s what it had come to.

I felt like shit. This woman…Marilynn…was dirty and smelly and probably crazy, but she was harmless. Very pathetic, really. I felt sorry for her and I knew that I couldn’t and the guilt of what was coming was eating a hole straight through me. Carl and Mickey kept watching me, amused by what was coming. Texas Slim did not look at me. I dared not look at Janie because I knew what was in her eyes and I didn’t want to see it.

“Where are you going now?” Janie asked her.

Marilynn considered it as she licked at a sore on her thumb. “Got a sister in Streator. She was alive last I heard. I’ll go look her up. Maybe I’ll live with her. Maybe together we can make it. All I want is just to make it.”

I looked away from her.

Janie said, “Well, I hope you make it to Streator. I really hope nothing gets in your way.”

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.

 

26

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DES MOINES, IOWA

 

1

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.

 

2

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.

As we drove in up 94, I was thinking about Marilynn. She was the last thing I wanted to be thinking about, but I couldn’t forget what she had said.

Nothing there now but rats and corpses and big craters from the bombs, lots of fallen down buildings.

How right she was. But there was something else here, something important and I could feel it in my guts.

The city lay around us like some crumbled, exhumed corpse. Entire neighborhoods had been bombed to rubble while others were relatively unscathed. It made no sense really, but even those still standing were desolate and eerie, silent and forlorn like monoliths erected over the grave of mankind. Some buildings had walls blasted free and you could see the tiny cubicles within…offices, apartments, like cross-sections of a doll’s house. Many were nothing but twisted and mangled skeletal frames of girders waiting to fall and still others were marked by but a single standing chimney or façade. Roads were often cut by jagged crevices like fault lines, sewer piping thrust up through the pavement like the bones of compound fractures.

It was no easy bit navigating our way through.

Entire thoroughfares were blocked by rubble and mountainous debris or had fallen into the sewers below. I saw the huge bomb craters that Marilynn had talked about. They pocked the landscape like the craters on the dark side of the moon. They were filled with pools of foul-smelling water, caked with leaves and garbage and the occasional rotting hulk of a half-submerged SUV. Other streets were blocked by buses and trucks and overturned cars, the burnt husks of military vehicles.

There were bones everywhere, scattered in the streets, rotting in the slimy gutters. Some were still dressed in rags, pushed up beneath the overhangs of standing buildings or huddled in cars that were perforated with bullet holes.

Carl was playing with the Geiger Counter. “Rad’s a little high…about fifty. Not too bad. Net yet.”

We passed a cathedral that was nothing but heaped stones spread out for nearly a city block. All that was left standing was the steeple and it was leaning hard. Neighborhoods of homes were reduced to kindling or blackened from raging fires long since burned out.

“Well,” Texas said, pulling off a cigarette, “this is lovely country. Looks like Berlin in ’45. But despite its scenic charm, I’m all for heading out. Getting a funny tickle at the base of my balls and I’m pretty sure it ain’t Carl’s middle finger.”

“Kiss my ass,” Carl said.

I giggled…a high, nervous, frantic sort of giggle. I couldn’t help myself. Something was very wrong here. Des Moines felt like a cemetery and the comparison was applicable…yet, I knew there was life out there in those blasted ruins. I could feel it watching us.

“He’s right,” Mickey said. “There’s something out there. I can feel it.”

“What are we after here, Nash? You got any idea what it is we’re looking for?” Carl wanted to know.

But I could only shake my head. “I’ll know it when I see it. Keep driving.”

Janie was sitting next to me, but she hadn’t said a word to me since I gave Marilynn to The Shape. I loved Janie. I would never pretend otherwise. But I was starting to get tired of her moody bullshit. I think we all were. It was getting to the point that her high blown ethics and morals were getting the best of her. Time was when we did what we had to do, she disapproved, but she moved on, let it go. Now she kept sinking into these deep blue funks and would refuse to even speak to anyone. It was immature and whiny. Like dealing with a bratty five-year old. I didn’t have the patience for it and I was pretty sure the others didn’t either.

“We need to start getting some gas here, Nash,” Mickey said. “We got about a quarter tank…but it won’t last long.”

Fuel was never a problem in the brave new world. If you had a running vehicle it was very easy to siphon all the gas you wanted from the armies of dead vehicles. Carl always carried his little siphon pump with him.

“All right, we better get that done. Let’s look for a parking lot or something, a car dealer.”

Mickey drove on, steering the Jeep through those devastated, war-torn streets. She was a good driver, steering us around heaped rubble and squeezing in-between wrecked cars. I watched the desolation around us, looking for anything that moved and saw nothing. Not even a stray dog drinking from a puddle. Street signs were missing, stoplights laying in the streets. Telephone poles had fallen right over and those that still stood were leaning badly, their lines strung like limp spaghetti.

“Here we go,” Mickey said.

She pulled into the parking lot of a huge white building that went on for about a city block. In huge blue plastic letters it said: CHEVROLET, HUMMER. There were lot after lot of cars, many of which were damaged or rusting, tires stripped away and windshields shattered. But many were untouched.

We piled out.

 

2

Inside, the dealership was dusty and messy, offices ransacked, computers shattered, file cabinets tipped over, their contents strewn about. We walked over a floor covered in papers, dealer’s brochures. The plate glass windows were either broken, entirely gone, or so dusty you couldn’t see out of them. It was dim in there, shadows everywhere. It would have been the perfect place to spring an ambush and I think we all knew it.

We went down into the garages and collected up a dozen plastic five-gallon gas cans. Carl had his siphon and we were ready to go. Mickey was there by my side. As was Carl and Texas. But I didn’t see Janie. Shit, I thought, there were only five of us for chrissake! It wasn’t like I had to be accountable for a hundred fucking survivors. Yet, Janie had slipped through my fingers.

And it probably wasn’t by accident.

The mechanic’s bays were huge. You could have parked twenty cars in there and had enough room for a couple trucks. Add to that the metal cages of automotive parts, the dusty red tool cribs, the cars parked on dead hydraulic jacks, and she could have been anywhere.

Immature, Nash, just like you thought. She’s got a size-D bug up her ass and she’s been feeding and mothering that fucker so that it’s now the size of a B-movie monster insect. Ain’t that sweet? Little Miss fucking Princess-Prom Queen-cheerleading-blue-eyed-blonde-haired-Nordic-uberbitch is pissed off at your lack of sympathy for all the shitballs and dirtbags in the world, so she just fucking wandered off and endangered you all.

Maybe she’s just pouting back in the showroom.

But maybe she walked away from it all.

In which case, somebody’s gotta go get her and that somebody might die a hard fucking death out in the ruins.

I was pissed. I was guilty. I was speechless. My mind was going a million miles a minute, exploding with star-shot, and I hated myself for making her feel so poorly and I hated her for standing up on her soapbox and espousing her old world, dead-and-fucking-gone bleeding heart values.

Jesus H. Christ, this was survival.

“Where’s Janie?” I said.

“Who cares?” Mickey said, giving me a molten look that said all that needed saying about how I no longer needed Janie, that she was expendable, that my dick was in finer hands now and would soon die and go to pussy heaven. Christ.

“I care,” I said.

Texas Slim came over with a calendar. He shoved it in my face. There was a naked redhead with her fine, pointy tits on display. They looked almost as good as Mickey’s.

“Look at this fine display,” he said to me, clucking his tongue. “Now therein lies the deepest pits of black sin and the voluptuous joys of carnal godhood.”

“Fuck are you talking about, dumbass?” Carl said to him.

“I’m saying, my small-minded friend, that this here sweet lick of cherry-red devil’s food is the sort of meal a man don’t need no spoon nor fork for. No sir, this is a feast best fit for bare hands and slavering mouths.”

“Janie’s gone,” I said, walking across the bay. “Find here. Right now, goddammit. Find her.”

I could almost feel Mickey rolling her eyes behind my back.

I didn’t give a shit. I had to find Janie. Beretta in hand, I went off looking for her and Mickey tagged along. Carl started searching the bays and Texas went out into the offices. We were all calling for her and I wasn’t too happy about that. I didn’t particularly relish the idea of making a lot of goddamn noise and drawing unfriendlies in. Because, believe me, they were out there, circling like vultures looking for some tasty red meat to pick at.

The dealership was huge. Unbelievably huge. Mickey and I started going through the showrooms, searching around the Corvettes and Aveos, Silverados and Hummer H3s.

“Janie!” I called. “Janie!”

My voice echoed out and died, affirming the dead and empty voluminous spaces around me. I could hear Texas in the distance doing the same. We were all split apart now. Armed, but split and that was just plain dangerous. I was starting to sweat. My stomach was filled with sharp nettles. Part of me was seriously pissed at Janie for putting us in this position and another part was just plain scared. For what if she hadn’t disappeared of her own free will?

What if she had been snatched?

Hell, while we circled around like chickens looking for feed, something might be peeling the flesh from her bones in some dark, webby place. I moved faster, looking, searching, calling out. Mickey did the same, but with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm. I started imagining us, hours from then, still looking and not finding a damn thing and me having to admit that Janie was gone, gone, gone. It made me feel empty inside. And every time I didn’t hear Texas or Carl shouting out her name for a few moments, I was sure that whatever had gotten her had gotten them. Something vicious and stealthy, something so terrible it could take them silently without so much as a cry or a busted cap.

I felt like I was in one of those old haunted house movies where people disappear one by one. A couple times I looked back at Mickey just to make sure she was there. And I knew at that moment if I hadn’t before what my true Achilles heel was: I was absolutely petrified of being alone. That was my ultimate nightmare, that was the form my private hell would take.

Just me alone in a dead world. It reminded me of a story I read in high school, the opening lines of which had stayed in the back of my mind all these years, boiling away like a vat of poison:

The last man on earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door.

I came around a Chevy Avalanche, keeping watch on those dusty windows, thinking more than once I had seen a shape slide past them…but not upright and human, but low and twisted like a troll from a dark enchanted forest.

“Nash,” Mickey finally said, hooking me by the elbow. “Nash. I know you’ve got a thing for Janie. That’s cool. And I know she’s one of us and we don’t want to lose her. But I got a bad feeling, man. I got a bad feeling right up my spine and I don’t think this is the right time for us to be separated like this.”

I wanted to tell her to go to hell…but I knew she was right. My stomach was filled with fluttering wings; I was sensing something, too. And more than once I had wondered if some bad boys or nameless things had orchestrated the entire thing, snatching Janie so we’d separate and they could take us down that much quicker.

I put a hand on Mickey’s shoulder. “Listen to me. Go out into the offices. Find Texas and stay with him, link up with Carl. I’m going to find her.”

“Nash—”

“Fuck that. Get going.”

She did, giving me one last look of longing or pity and taking off, her long black hair swishing from side to side. I didn’t want to be alone as you full well know, but on the other hand I always favor fighting alone so I don’t have to worry about anyone else. I waited there, everything inside of me wired full of electricity. But I waited, fumbling a cigarette into my mouth and lighting it. The smoke was acrid, unpleasantly so. Its smell was almost gagging. The heat of the filter against my lips was burning. I didn’t get it at first—thought for sure I was going to have a panic attack or something—but then I did.

I was in battle mode.

Every muscle was taut, my nerves jangling, my brain pushing its sensory network to the limits so that all five senses were amplified. Nothing would get by me. Nothing would throw down on me or take me by surprise. When I heard Mickey calling out for Janie with Texas, I tossed the cigarette and ran charging through the showrooms, my heart pounding like a kettle drum. I found a double doorway that led down into the body shop. Other doorways led to other departments but this is the one I wanted.

I rushed into the body shop which was quite large and echoing.

A few dust-laden cars still waited for new fenders, doors, or sidewalls. I could smell the ancient odor of primer and putty. I looked around the tool cribs, darted into the electrostatic paint booth, snooped in a parts cage. Then I went into an office and rubbed some of the grime off the window.

I saw someone across the street.

 

3

It was Janie.

I circled around in frenetic rage until I found a door, unlocked it, and ran across the street. Janie turned and saw me, kept right on going. I held my gun high, watching every heap of refuse, every shadowy alley, every overturned dumpster and cracked window. Eyes. God, I could feel the eyes watching me, cutting into me like drill bits.

I caught up with her, grabbed her shoulder and swung her around. “What in the fuck do you think you’re doing, you little idiot?” I cried in her face.

And that face…oh boy. Pinched with grief, eyes swollen from tears. She was absolutely stunning even like that. I wanted to sweep her into my arms and hug her because I could see what she looked like as a little girl, so beautiful she would make your heart sliver, your breath catch in your throat, so vulnerable you only wanted to protect her and make the bad things go away.

“Janie…please,” I said.

The stubborn pissiness was gone from her. She was a shell that was cracking apart from the inside out. I could feel the waves of pain coming from her. “Rick…just let me go. I can’t do this anymore,” she told me and there was no drama in her voice, just a hollowness. “I can’t go on murdering people. It’s not what I am or what I’m about. I turned a blind eye to it long as I could…but it won’t work anymore. I’m sorry.”

“Janie…c’mon, don’t do this.”

She reached out and touched her fingers to my face, smiled very thinly. “I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want to be a burden to these others. But I can’t go on like this. Just go back to the others. They need you. I’m going to walk away and I don’t want you to follow me.”

I was speechless. Totally speechless.

“I’m sorry, Rick. I know you think I’m weak and you’re right: I am. But I can’t justify what we’re doing. I’m going to walk away and let fate take its course. I don’t have the strength to kill myself, so this is the only alternative. Goodbye, Rick.”