She started walking again and all the fight had dried up in me. I didn’t know what to say or what to do. I was helpless. She was right and I knew it. Janie had lost focus and saw no reason to prolong the inevitable. The rest of us were deluding ourselves. I didn’t know why I was bothering. I knew there wasn’t any pot of gold at the end of the fucking rainbow; just misery. I wasn’t racing towards the light at the end of the tunnel, I was fleeing the darkness that was getting closer day by day, moving west as we were moving west.

I’m not really sure what I would have done if something hadn’t happened that gave me a good square kick in the ass. A naked man stepped out of a doorway. He was pale as a bleached corpse, hairless, and there were great holes eaten into his skin like something had taken bites out of him. His face beneath his eyes was just…gone. It had been eaten away right to the pink muscle beneath. He grinned at us like a half-dissected anatomy specimen. His eyes were like depthless black catacombs.

A Scab.

One chewed up by some flesh-eating virus or fungus. He saw me, saw Janie. He walked right over to her and she did not shriek, did not draw back, but stood there with eyes filled with hurt and just waited for it. I brought up the Beretta and fired a round at him point-blank. He jerked with the impact, folding up and pressing his hands to the red jelly frothing from the bullet hole. He made an anguished growling sound.

And it was answered.

I swung around and there was another Scab. Naked and bald, a teenage boy. He was down on his knees like a dog, growling at us, yellow foam coming out of his mouth. I shot him in the head and he flipped around, trembling, a perfect stream of dark blood gushing from the wound.

I grabbed Janie by the arm, pulling her away with me, and as I turned I saw that retreat to the dealership was impossible: we were in as nest of them. Scabs came pouring out of every hole and hide and shadowy crevice, they came out like slugs boiling from salted earth. All naked, all full of sores and morbid disfigurements, and all eaten up with those yawning ulcers.

They had all worked themselves up into some kill-happy rapture, some deranged and bloodthirsty mania. It was just unbelievable. They were crawling on their hands and knees, running around in circles, jumping up and down on the hoods of cars in one of the lots. Some were hopping in frantic circles like monkeys. Others fornicating. Some dry humping each others legs. But they all had one thing in common: they were watching us.

And they were gradually moving in our direction.

Janie and I ran down the sidewalk and I heard the thunder of dozens of bare feet following in pursuit. I came to one locked door after another, rounded a corner and a Scab jumped out at me. He knocked Janie to the pavement and I brought the butt of the Beretta down on the crown of his skull. He went to his knees and I kicked him in the head, gathered up Janie, and off we went.

We lucked out and found an old department store. It was open, the plate glass door shattered. We ducked in there. It had been broken up into countless trendy little shops selling everything from gourmet dog foods to golf clubs to designer fashions. We hopped behind the counter of a leather goods shop and held onto each other, not daring to so much as breathe.

Right away, one of them sought us out.

I didn’t have to hear or see them: the fetid stink was enough.

As we crouched under the counter, I saw the reflection of a large fleshy man in a diamond-cut mirror. He was breathing heavily with a clotted, gurgling sound like his lungs were filled with some semi-viscous fluid. Under his breath he kept talking, muttering mostly unintelligible things, but I heard this: “Oh, oh, oh, oh. Here? Not here. Over here? Not over here. Somewhere. Oh, oh, oh.” He passed on by, stumbling into some mannequins and stomping on them. A plastic arm went sailing over the counter.

More of them now.

From the footfalls, I was guessing a dozen or more. Now was the time for Carl to come bursting in with his AK on full auto, but I knew that wouldn’t happen. We were on our own. We either thought our way out of this, fought our way out, or we died. That’s all there was to it. I had thirteen rounds left in the clip for my Beretta. I was mentally counting them as I always did. And in the back of my mind, I knew I was saving a bullet for Janie. I would not admit it even to myself, but I knew, I knew. I wouldn’t let them get their diseased paws on her.

More of them were in the building now, grunting and puffing and making those gurgling noises. I heard the slapping of skin against skin, heard some obscene female moaning and I knew a few of them were fucking. Because that’s all they liked to do: kill and fuck.

We could only stay hidden so long.

Then I saw the reflection of a man in the mirror again. He was paused right in front of the counter, cocking his head to the side like he was listening. There was some kind of phlegmy snot all over his mouth. He slapped his hands on the counter and brought his head over to look behind it.

He saw us, grinned.

I splashed his face right off the bone with two rounds. Janie and I broke from cover and I shot two more. Ten rounds left. We rushed through the store, dashing around displays and hopping over tables. The Scabs were converging from every direction. I kicked one out of the way and shot another and then another. Eight bullets. A set of stairs led upwards but more Scabs were coming down. They were in no hurry. Like afternoon shoppers sluggish with the day, they came down the steps in twos and threes, holding hands, ulcerated faces grinning. It was insane.

Another door. A fire door. Reinforced steel with a tiny square of glass you couldn’t have squeezed a greased puppy through. It was open and we went in. It opened outwards and I saw a set of steps leading below. The idea of going into a cellar was not too appealing, but we had no choice. I slammed the door shut, but there was no lock on the other side. But there was a hydraulic door closer up near the top, the sort that store the pressure of the opening door and then release it to seal the door shut. All fire doors have them. Handing Janie my gun, I jumped up, grabbed hold of the arm with both fists and yanked down with all my weight and strength. I succeeded in bending it and then bending it again until its crook nearly touched the door. It was mangled good.

Then the scabs hit the other side of the door.

They got it open maybe an inch, but the bent opener would move no more. It would keep them at bay for awhile. I took my gun back and took Janie by the hand. Her hand was limp. She could have cared less whether we lived or died. But I didn’t have time for that. I led us below and it was pitch black. We came to another door and on the other side…light. There was a modular sky light above. It was nearly buried in filth, debris, and fallen leaves but there was plenty of daylight to see by. We must have been along the back of the building, some sort of atrium that had been designed to enhance the natural lighting.

“We’re going to make it,” I told Janie.

She barely lifted an eyebrow.

We went through another door and into some kind of long, narrow storeroom with stacked skids of boxes piled along one wall and crates of bulging file folders along the other. There was light because we had a few panels of the skylight. I breathed a sigh of relief because there was a lock on the door. I had almost exhaled that breath when I realized we weren’t alone.

 

4

There was a boy standing there.

He couldn’t have been much more than ten or eleven, but the last year had been real hell on him. His skin was bleached white, pocked with sores and mats of fungal growth, his eyes a shining translucent yellow. Ulcers had eaten great infected holes in him that oozed a green bile that almost looked fluorescent against his greasy, pallid flesh. I saw him. I saw the death he brought. But he was fast. He charged out and went after my eyes with hooked fingers. I backed away, terrified of coming into contact with any of the infectious, evil germs that had colonized him.

I fell over a box and promptly went on my ass. The gun fell from my fingers and he could have had me right there. But he didn’t want me. He wanted Janie. So when I pitched on my ass he quickly lost interest. He targeted Janie and went right after her. She ran towards the door and he tackled her, brought her down like a lion with a tasty gazelle.

As I scrambled to my feet and grabbed my gun, he had Janie face down. She fought and squirmed, but he was on her, dry humping her ass, sliding his erect penis between her legs.

I ran over there and kicked him in the head twice before he fell off her.

Then Janie was up and behind me and the Scab boy got to his feet. The side of his head was damaged—it looked fucking dented, to tell you the truth, like it was an aluminum can—and smashed-in from my steel-toed boot. Green puss and a pink tracery of blood ran from the wound.

He made a growling, snapping sound and went right after me.

I put two bullets into him. I tried to get him in the head, but my hand was shaking so badly they both went right into his throat, tearing it open in a jetting splash of arterial blood. It was like slitting a high pressure hose. He danced around in wild, drunken circles, gnashing his teeth, making choked gargling sounds, blood pissing from his neck. It probably only went on for a couple seconds, but that grisly dance macabre was forever imprinted in my mind.

He went down and that’s when the most horrible thing happened.

“Rick!” Janie said.

I heard a scream…a series of screams…but none of them were from Janie and they sure as hell weren’t screams of terror, but screams of delight. Of ecstasy. Three women came rushing out from behind the stacked boxes where they’d been hiding. They brought a high, sharp smell of rotting fruit with them. Scabs. They came bounding out, bald, corpse-faced, graying, flesh hanging in discolored folds. They didn’t come after us; they went after the dying boy.

They rushed in with a frenzied hunger, fighting for the blood that pumped from his neck. They drank it, licked it from their hands, bathed in it. While Janie and I watched in amazement and horror, they crowded the boy, slurping and sucking, pressing in like piglets at their mother’s teats. It was appalling. The sight of it. The sound of it. I should have shot them all dead because it would have effortless.

But I didn’t.

I stood there, disgusted, shocked, paralyzed like a fat juicy bug wrapped up tight in a spider’s web. They had to die and I knew it, yet I think some perverse part of me just had to see how it played out.

Finally, one of them made a belching sound and pulled her lips from the boy’s neck. She looked right at me. Her face was like yellow tallow, melted, hanging in runnels and loops, her mouth smeared with blood. A low, revolting odor of spoiled meat came from her. Her naked body was covered in scabs, eaten through with ulcers. One of her breasts was flattened, the other hung low and pendulant, ghastly white, the vein lividity beneath a purple that was almost shocking in contrast.

“You are a beeeee-utiful man,” she said with a voice that scraped dryly like a shovel across a tomb lid. “So pretty, so lovely.” She licked her flaking, blackened lips with a tongue that was bloated and gray. “How about a kiss, a hot little kiss on the mouth?”

It was like déjà vu. She reminded me of that other crazy Scab bitch back in Youngstown that I’d met up with at that deli. She was no less offensive, no less horrible, and certainly no less horny. What she did then I almost hate to put into words. She advanced on me, grinning with gray-black teeth, her tongue hanging out and rapidly licking the air. She put one scabrid hand between her legs and slid a few fingers into herself. The sound was juicy, repellent like somebody jabbing their thumb into a swollen, rotting peach. She worked herself, breathing faster and faster, some kind of drainage running from between her legs and striking the floor like piss. The stink of it was indescribable.

She got closer and I think I screamed or cried out. I remember jerking from the sound of my own voice. Then I remembered the gun in my hand. I brought it up and jacked a round right in her face. Tissue and blood splashed out the back of her head and she went down hard with a violent splatting sound. Her body shook with convulsions and then there was a hissing, bubbling sound and slime pooled out from between her legs with a stink of rotting fish.

It was enough to make us gag.

I didn’t want to look, but I did. And that’s when I noticed something was moving in that discharge. No, many things were moving. What I saw were literally dozens of red beetles, each about the size of your thumb. They were crawling in the slime, more of them coming out all the time and moving up over the dead Scab with a horrid, flesh-crawling clicking sound. They engulfed her, hundreds of them. Her flesh was mucid, pulpy, and they burrowed right into her.

And then the other two women came over, looking for food and for love, I assume. Their faces were gray, pocked with sores, wrinkled and sagging. Their eyes were radiant yellow like candleglow. They grinned and their teeth were very long, very sharp. I shot one of them in the head and fired at the other and missed. And I missed because the moment I squeezed the trigger on her sister, she went airborne. She hit me and knocked me flat. She didn’t seem as interested in fucking me as in feeding on me.

I heard Janie scream.

The Scab woman straddled me, greasy and undulant. It was like trying to wrestle a jellyfish. She breathed hot tomb-breath in my face. She spit on me, yellow foam breaking against my cheek. She tried to get her teeth at my throat and I punched her in the face again and again, her flesh soft and spongy. Then I got my hands around her throat. I would squeeze until her fucking head popped off, I decided. The flesh of her throat was like living pulp, seeming to crawl and ooze and flow beneath my fingers. She fought against me, scratching at my face, panting, making hideous slithering sounds.

She was strong, godawful strong.

But I had her, thought I had her. As disgusted as I was, I would not let go and I could feel my fingers and thumbs sinking deeper into her gray mushy flesh. Then there was a loud resounding bang, a flash, and she fell away, dead putrescent weight.

Janie stood there with my Beretta nine in her hands.

“You okay, Rick?” she said, truly concerned.

I brushed some of the woman’s remains off me. “I’ll live,” I breathed. Then I looked over at the corpse, smelled what flowed from between the legs, saw what crawled in it, and promptly vomited. It was an economical vomiting and lasted only a few seconds and then the waves of hot nausea passed.

I heard the sounds of fists pounding on the door.

Jesus, would the lock hold?

And then a voice, a very calm voice said, “You better come with me.”

 

5

The voice belonged to a graying, rather distinguished-looking man in a brown leather jacket. He was standing at the other end of the room. “I would suggest some expediency.”

I didn’t know who he was or what his game might be. But he seemed sane or close to it and there were no sores on him. We followed him to the end of the room as the door shook in its frame. Down at the end of the stacked rows of boxes there was a little ell with another fire door set in it. He opened it for us and we went in. He closed it and threw a couple locks.

“They won’t get through that,” he said, “trust me. My name is Price. And you?”

We told him our names.

“Very good,” he said. “You made short work of them out there. Nice shooting.”

“Thanks,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

We were in a storeroom, boxes and crates everywhere. There were candles flickering and a Coleman gas lantern burning away. And that’s when I saw that it wasn’t just Price in there. Over near the wall, there was a guy stretched out on a sleeping bag and he looked to be in rough shape. His breathing was ragged and hoarse. It sounded like his lungs were filled with fluid. But I didn’t look any closer, not then, because there was another guy in the corner. Some dude with a bushy afro that looked like a badly pruned bush. He had a Nikon 35mm camera. He was snapping shots of me with it.

“What’s his thing?” I asked Price.

“This is Morse,” he said. “He was a photographer once. He’s harmless.”

He snapped a few shots of Janie.

“He has no film, but it doesn’t seem to concern him,” Price told me.

Janie scowled at him. “Tell him to stop it. It’s weird.”

Morse did.

“Nice to meet you,” I told him.

He snapped a shot of me.

“He doesn’t speak,” Price said. “We’ll never know what happened to him. He does whistle sometimes, though. Now and again he’ll write something for me to read. That’s how I learned his name and his profession. Other than that…who can say?”

I looked over at the man on the sleeping bag. I could almost feel the heat coming from him. “He’s got the Fevers,” I said.

“Yes, he does,” Price said.

Price went on to explain that his name was Bedecker and he’d been a first class accountant at one time, had gotten sick only yesterday and had finally fallen down as they looted through the wares upstairs. Then the Scabs had come and they’d brought him down here. He couldn’t be moved. So they were waiting. Waiting for him to die.

Looking at the poor man, I wasn’t sure which was worse. Being out there with the Scabs or being in here with this man and his germs. His mouth was smeared with blood, his eyes bright red and glossy as he stared into space. This is what Texas Slim called Dracula eyes. His face was slack, mottled, set with expanding red sores. He looked bruised, swollen with purple contusions. Every now and then he would tremble and make low hissing sounds or he’d vomit out tarry black blood. It was all over his shirt, the sleeping bag, the floor. It smelled horrible.

“Ebola-X,” I said, very near panic.

“Yes, exactly,” Price told me, studying the man without emotion, almost analytically. “It’s dangerous to be in here with him. He’s burning with virus. Quite literally biological toxic waste. The best we can do is keep our distance and avoid his body fluids, particularly that vomit. It’s loaded with billions of particles of virus, highly infectious, all of which are lethal hot agents.”

“You seem to know a lot about this stuff,” I said.

“Hmmm. Yes. Once upon a time I was a microbiologist, a military biohazard specialist,” he told me, shrugging. “Now I’m just a survivor. Like you. Like us all.”

Price just stood there, staring at Bedecker, watching it happen with the sort of cold detachment that I suppose only a scientist could have. He was mumbling stuff under his breath. I went over to Janie. Morse was standing there with her. He snapped another shot of me.

I motioned Janie over to me, away from our intrepid photojournalist. “That guy’s boiling with fucking Ebola-X over there. We’re all in danger being in this room.”

Janie didn’t seem concerned. “Too bad it’s not the full moon.”

“Yeah, okay, Janie. Point is, we’re all in danger here.”

“There’s nothing we can do about it. Not unless you want to be a hero and throw him to the Scabs.”

“Why don’t you just stop it?”

She looked at me long and hard. There was no warmth in her eyes. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said to me. “You’re thinking you have two new sacrifices for your friend. Which one goes first? Price or Morse?”

“I wasn’t thinking about them, Janie. I was thinking about you.”

“Prick.”

She walked away from me. So that was the state of our relationship. I was beginning to realize that Janie was no longer in my corner and probably could not be trusted. The Shape was the farthest thing from my mind. For the next two weeks I would not allow myself to even think of a selection. It wasn’t until the third week that it began to creep into my mind. By the fourth week it became an obsession, one born not just out of fear of what The Shape might do if we didn’t offer it something, but of what we would do if The Shape abandoned us.

But right now there were bigger fears.

I went back over to Price and smoked a cigarette with badly shaking fingers. “What’s going on?” I said.

“Hmm. We are watching a man die from an infectious organism. And as we do so we are at ground zero of an explosive chain of lethal transmission.” He was very clinical about the entire thing. “You see, Nash, when a hot virus infects its host, what it’s trying to do, essentially, is to convert that host into virus. The process, of course, is not successful and what happens is what we’re seeing here: a man literally turned into a morbid mass of liquefied flesh.”

Price told me he had worked for the U.S. Army’s Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland. After the bombs came down, they were still in operation for several months, tracking outbreaks of infectious diseases in conjunction with the CDC. After nuclear winter lifted, one plague after another swept the country. It wasn’t until late January that the first reports of a highly infective hemorrhagic fever appeared. It started in Baltimore, then swept like a firestorm through the northeast, devastating Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and New York before setting its teeth into Ohio. The symptoms were similar to those of Ebola and the Marburg Virus—both of the filoviridae family—only much more virulent. There just wasn’t enough time to completely study this enhanced bug and it was never determined exactly whether the vector was airborne, through interpersonal contact, body fluids, or whether it was all of these things. Price saw enough of it, though, he said, to be certain that it could contaminate in all these ways.

“What happened?” I asked him. “What the hell are you doing in Des Moines?”

“I was born here. When Ebola-X nearly wiped us out in Maryland, a lot of us ran. I came back here. To my family.” He uttered a sarcastic laugh. “I watched them all die, one by one. Not from this organism, Nash, but from radiation sickness, typhoid, cholera. I believe my brother died from Septicemic Plague. My sister’s family was disease free. But the Hatchet Clans took care of that.”

“How the hell did it get here?” I asked. “That virus? I mean, I heard of outbreaks in Africa and that one in the States in Washington DC, but that was just in monkeys.”

He sighed, shook his head. “We needed more time, but we didn’t have it. It was probably brought here by someone from Africa. There was a rumor floating around that the U.S. Army Medical Command had weaponized a strain of Ebola. I suppose it could have been loosed during the turmoil of the final days. Russian virologists apparently weaponized a strain of Marburg at the Vector Institute in Koltsovo. It’s possible this strain could have found its way into the hands of bioterrorists. It’s anybody’s guess.”

I decided to ask a stupid question. “Could…I mean, is it possible that a virus could actually convert an entire body?”

“You mean turn a man into a walking viral body?” He shook his head but I saw uncertainty flash through his eyes. “We’d be giving the virus far too much credit, I’m afraid. It would have to perfectly assimilate the host cells, many of which like neurons are extremely complex.”

I kept thinking about my dream of The Medusa, the Maker of Corpses, an immense disease entity, trailing us, always just behind, turning the devastated country into a graveyard city by city. I had no doubt whatsoever that Ebola and similar pathogenic germs had mutated in the radiation and were continuing to mutate. I imagined them evolving through countless generations every week, becoming something much more complex each time, finally transforming themselves into something diabolically intelligent and unbelievably deadly.

I didn’t mention any of that to Price, though.

He said that viruses are the bridge between the living and non-living, the undead, as it were, of the microscopic world. They only act alive when in contact with living cells. They are parasites, entirely dependent on their hosts for biological processes. They are more or less protein capsules filled with genetic material encoded to replicate the virus itself. That’s it. A virus lays around like its dead until it comes into contact with a compatible cell, then it adheres to it and uses the cell’s machinery to make copies of itself. This goes on until the host cell literally explodes and out come countless baby viruses, each out to do the same thing to infinity unless the host dies or something like antibodies attack them.

“The virus has no lofty, ambitious plans, son,” he told me. “They live only to replicate themselves which ultimately, in the case of Ebola-X, destroys the host. They are cellular predators, but not organized, not thinking. I can’t imagine a line of organic evolution which would allow them to do more than this. They are probably one of the world’s oldest life forms and as such, achieved perfection many, many eons ago.”

I listened and learned, but I was not convinced. And I sure as hell was not about to argue with an expert and particularly when my only evidence was a series of fucking nightmares.

“Ah, now we see the unpleasant results of extreme amplification of the viral body,” Price said, watching Bedecker’s torment. “See how he is now rigid as of a corpse? He is filling with bloodclots. They are forming everywhere. Brain, vitals, organs, skin, bones. Hmm.”

I looked at Price like he was crazy. I didn’t know Bedecker, but he had been a human being once. Possibly a friend of Price’s and here the old man was carrying on with this insane running commentary like this was a sport’s event.

Morse was on the scene, of course, snapping shots of the dying man from every imaginable angle. He even took a telephoto lens from his bag and got some good close-ups. It was insane.

“See, Nash?” Price said. “Bedecker’s not really suffering now. His brain is liquefying. His vitality and humanity have been erased. This is called depersonalization. What you are watching now is no longer a dying man but a biological machine choking on its own poisoned by-products,” he told me. “The vomiting will continue, as will the bleeding…”

He was right. Bedecker was vomiting almost continually now, that same red-black stinking mush. Blood came from his eyes. His ears. His nostrils. He made an obscene farting sound and more drainage ran out from under his ass. Price said that liquefying sections of his stomach and intestines were being passed now, orally and anally. Blood flowed, gushed, poured as the hot agent ran from him, hungry to find a new host.

I was sick to my stomach. I tried to turn away but Price stopped me. “He is about to crash and bleed out.”

Morse made sure this was documented.

I lit another cigarette to get the stink out of my face. I told Price that I had friends over at the dealership, that we should link up with them soon as possible.

“A wise idea,” he said. “It’ll be dark soon. The Scabs aren’t active after sunset. We’ll slip away then, though I fear there are worse things out there, much worse things by night. But we can’t stay here.”

Bedecker was thrashing around, literally sloughing apart as poisoned blood and bubbling fluids came out of every opening.

“It won’t be long now,” Price said.

 

6

I took the lead. Janie was right behind me with Morse. Price was in the back. I had three rounds left in my Beretta and that was about the only safety net we had. Scared? No, I was absolutely fucking terrified.

I was thinking hard about Carl and the others. I wondered what they were doing and I prayed they were still alive. But I knew Carl. It would have taken quite an assault by the Scabs to take him out. He was a survivor as they all were. I was surprised that he hadn’t tried to come after us, but maybe he had. I just wanted to link back up with them.

Des Moines by night was dark and forbidding.

The moon was still pretty bright above, but shadows were everywhere, circling, shifting, tangling in the streets. As we rounded the corner from the department store, I could see the vague hulk of the dealership in the distance. On a sunny day it was a short, pleasant hop in the old days. Now, by darkness, it was a slow, hellish crawl through no man’s land. The air was damp, acrid-smelling. Off to the west I could see a flickering red glow. I assumed parts of the city were still burning or had been ignited anew. I could smell a slight odor of smoke, other things I didn’t like to think about. We moved on very carefully. I scoped out the car lots across the way, looking for anything moving out there. I heard a brief, shrill squealing in the distance. Like the sound of an insect…only it was a big, scary sound.

Just relax, I told myself again and again. It’s really not that far.

In the phosphorescence of the moonlight, everything was forbidding and ghostly. Buildings rose like defiled tombs and haunted monoliths. Parked trucks looked like ghost ships rising from the gloom. The skin at the back of my neck was crawling, moving in subtle prickling waves. Something was out there, something was moving around us in the shadows and I new it.

“What was that?” Janie said, suddenly stopping.

The sound of her voice in the stillness made me seize up. “What? I didn’t hear anything.” I wanted it to be true, but I knew it wasn’t. There had been a sound. Something.

Price said, “I would advise a bit of haste on our part, people. Survival by night in the streets of Des Moines is rather minimal at best.”

There he went being clinical again, couching everything in his uppity verse. What he meant to say was, we don’t haul ass, motherfuckers, ain’t gonna be nothing but a stain out here come morning. I ignored him. I stood there with Janie, tensing, my hand greasy on the butt of the Beretta. I decided to start moving when I heard it very clearly this time: a squeaking sound. This was followed a strong odor of decay, of dampness and subterranean dank. The way a sewer might smell, I suppose.

I had smelled it before. I knew what we were up against.

“This is disturbing,” Price said.

“It’s okay. Nash won’t let anything happen to us,” Janie told him like he was some kid in need of reassuring.

Morse circled around us, snapping off shots.

“Knock it the fuck off,” I told him.

What we were facing, if I was right, was something that not even good old Nash could do anything about. I moved forward slowly and I made it maybe six feet before I saw the first of our visitors.

A rat.

It was about the size of a tomcat, its entire body swollen and misshapen with bulging pink cancerous growths that rose from the sparse gray-black fur like fleshy bubbles. In the moonlight I saw them moving.

Every time I saw one I remembered that monster in the storm drains of Cleveland.

“Stay put, don’t panic,” I told the others. “This is probably a scout out scavenging ahead of the main pack.”

Click-click, went Morse.

The rat’s snakelike, scaly tail twitched on the concrete like it knew what I was saying. Its eyes were fixed, blood-red, shining like wet marbles. Its jaws were open, loops of saliva hanging from them. I knew from experience how fast these bastards were. I brought up my Beretta very slowly, very calmly, and drew a bead on old Mr. Rat.

He made a sudden high-pitched squealing sound.

I shot him in the head and he pitched forward, blood running from him in a scarlet pool. I could see the fat, grub-like parasites jumping in his hide.

I pulled Janie away and our chain was on the march again. I knew we were in terrible danger; I just didn’t know what to do about it other than continue on. Maybe, possibly, somehow, we’d make it through. We started to cross the street in the direction of the dealership which looked huge and tomblike in the moonlight, just crawling with shadows. We hadn’t gone far before the rats came out of their hides. They’d been waiting amongst the cars, the main pack, and now here they came. I heard Janie make a disgusted sound in her throat. The rats were everywhere with more arriving all the time. They were huge, absolutely huge. Some of them were the size of full-grown German Shepherds. And all of them dirty and stinking, eyes shining in the darkness, drool running from their jaws, noses twitching.

I knew then that the squealing noise the other rat made was either a cry for help or a warning to the others.

Well, they had the advantage now.

They crept out of the shadows, mutant horrors with growths and white twitching things coming out of their flesh. I did not look too closely. They had closed in on us and there was no way in hell we were going to make the dealership. Going back was out of the question, too, because more rats were filling the streets behind us. Our only avenue of escape was into the buildings behind us. But Janie and I had checked the doors pretty carefully in our run from the Scabs.

There was only one possibility and it was slim.

A narrow dead-ended alley cut between a couple buildings. I saw a fire escape hanging down. The ladder was pulled up, but if it wasn’t rusted too badly, I might be able to pull it down.

“Okay,” I said. “Price, slowly lead us into that alley. That’s where we’re going.”

He didn’t argue. I think by that point even his arrogance had somewhat paled. He led us to the fire escape and the rats moved in, taking their time, closing off any avenue of escape like soldiers in battle formation. They had us and they knew it.

The fire escape. I leaped up, grabbed it and pulled down with all my strength and weight. It slid down an inch, two, then seized. I threw everything into it, flopping and twisting, wishing I still had my beer belly. Janie jumped up and grabbed me around the waist and we swung together like a couple acrobats and I could feel my pants pulling down and I had sudden ludicrous vision of how ridiculous I’d look with my pants around my ankles when the rats feasted on me. Particularly with our crazy photographer taking pictures of my torment.

The ladder let go and let go fast. Next thing I knew we were on our asses in the alley. I got Janie onto the ladder. “Go, go, go!” I told her, the rats moving now, sensing something was terribly amiss with their midnight snack.

Morse went up it like a monkey and Price moved pretty quick and then I was climbing. A rat leaped and seized the toe of my boot. I shook him free and kicked another away and I made the platform above. Two rats were climbing. I stomped one on the snout and he fell, the other was too big so I shot him in the head and down he went. And by then, the alley was a sea of mulling rats. We slid the ladder up and there wasn’t a damn they could do about it.

They were squealing and squeaking, feeding on the one I’d shot, but mostly just pissed off. A few of them tried climbing the alley wall, but only made a few feet before they fell back. I waited there until they grew bored and left the alley.

We made it.

 

7

We broke a window and slipped into an apartment. It was dirty and dusty and dark in there, but there was nothing waiting for us. We made a quick check of the place and the only thing we found was the mummy of a woman in bed holding onto the mummy of an infant. Both were festooned with cobwebs. Their meat was long gone, but their skin had dried to a fine, flaking parchment that clung to the bones beneath. Both had black hair.

We decided we weren’t comfortable in there and went to another apartment. No bones, no nothing. We sat in the darkness and waited. The minutes ticked by. I had two bullets left and I was painfully aware of the fact.

“I would think the cautious thing to do would be to wait until sunup,” Price said.

And as he said it, I heard a sound from the floor above us. Something large and weighty had shifted up there, sliding its bulk across the floor.

“No,” I said. “I don’t think that would be a good idea at all. Let’s give it an hour or so.”

I knew the rats well by that point. They were industrious, cunning, relentless, but not the most patient creatures in the world. If their prey escaped as we had, they would move on to greener pastures. So we waited in the dusty darkness while Morse got a few shots for Better Homes and Gardens. We were silent. I could smell the perspiration coming off the others, feel their warmth, hear their slow breathing. They were counting on me to deliver them from this mess. I considered our options. The only logical thing to do was to make another try for the dealership, link up with the others.

After about thirty minutes, I said, “Let’s scope out the downstairs.”

We moved down the dim hallway, guiding ourselves by the moonlight that spilled through a narrow window at the end. I found the stairs and down we went. The bottom floor was occupied by a health food store which appeared to be untouched for the most part. I guess tofu and shirataki noodles weren’t a big draw when the world ended. It was damnably dark in there. Peering out the plate glass windows, I saw that the streets were empty.

Looking around, I saw that the store was not as untouched as I first thought. Something had happened here. There bones scattered over the floor, unarticulated skeletons of human beings and various animals, all just heaped and tossed around in no particular order. It was too dark to see properly, but I was guessing there were the remains of dozens.

“Why would this be here?” Janie asked. “Why here? Why dumped like this?”

Price shrugged. “Who can say? We might have stumbled upon somebody’s private ossuary.”

But I wasn’t buying that either. I kicked a skull out of the way and grabbed up a long bone. A human femur, I thought. I brought it to the next aisle amongst the moldered, crumbling organic pasta. I examined it in a stray patch of moonlight. It was scratched up, gnawed, riddled with minute punctures. Something had been chewing on it and I was guessing the same went for all the bones.

“What is it?” Janie said when I came back and tossed the bone into the heap.

I was about to tell her that the bone had been nibbled on by rats, though I honestly didn’t believe it was anything as prosaic as mutant rats. I opened my mouth to do so and I heard a shifting, leathery sound from somewhere overhead and then Price cried out and Janie screamed.

“Look out!” I shouted.

Something had Price. Something twisting and undulant had looped around his throat. I threw myself at him and tried to peel it off his throat. It was scabby and pulsing and felt almost like braided rope. But it was no rope. It was alive. I pulled my gun and fired up at the black bulk above Price. In the muzzle flash I saw a series of tendrils or tentacles, black and oily, squirming and writhing. And mouths. Something with two or three mouths that were vibrantly pink with fine sharp teeth like fish bones.

Morse was trying to take its picture. I knocked him out of the way.

It made a weird squealing sound when I shot it.

But it dropped Price right away.

I could feel a sickening, feverish heat coming from the thing as it rustled and slithered above, a rank stink like decaying hides. It was a dark shape in constant motion. I took aim and fired again and it made that shrill squealing again. In the muzzle flash I saw…I think I saw…something like a huge bat retreating into an oval cavity in the ceiling. I saw something like membranous wings unfolding, shiny flesh like greased vinyl set with a tiny hairs, mouths, and more than two beady, bulbous eyes. It moved quickly and was gone, in-between the floors.

I couldn’t even guess what it might have been.

I was only glad it wasn’t in the mood for a fight.

I got Price to his feet and got him over by the doorway. There was a circular burn around his throat like something that might be left by a hangman’s noose. But he was all right. The streets were empty and I opened the door.

“Everyone hold hands,” I said. “We’re going on a run.”

We raced across the street and nothing came loping out of the shadows to stop us. We crossed first to one car lot and then another and came around the side of the dealership. We went in there and made the first showroom and a blinding light hit me in the face.

“It’s about fucking time,” Carl said, lowering his flashlight.

 

8

The morning dawned gray and pale like the blood had been sucked from it. The dark pulled away and vanished into holes and cellars for the day. After crashing for a few hours, I was awake with Carl and Texas Slim to greet the new day.

“Tell me something,” Texas said as the others stretched and yawned and got their stuff together. “You think this is why came here? For this Price fellow? You think that’s it?”

“Yes, I have a feeling it is.”

“But why?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. It’s just a feeling. Take it or leave it.”

He looked like he wanted to leave it and I did not argue the point.

“I say we ditch that Morse guy,” Carl said. “He takes another picture of me and I’m drilling him.”

“Go easy,” I said. “He’s just confused.”

The Jeep was untouched and we were thankful for that. Texas and Carl carried plastic jerry cans of gas out to it that they had siphoned from other vehicles and set about filling it up. Janie was off packing up our stuff with Morse. I stood there, leaning up against a Chevy Cobalt, pulling off a cigarette. Mickey was there. She was watching me but not speaking.

After a time, I said, “Go ahead. Say it. Say what’s on your mind.”

I looked over at her, expecting to see the fire in her eyes. She quite often gave me the impression that she was in heat. “I was never much in the old days,” she said. “I was the kind of person you probably think I was. I made a living getting my picture taken, if you catch my drift. Sometimes I wore a bikini or something equally as scanty, sometimes I didn’t wear a thing. No porno, though. Believe me, I was offered, but it wasn’t my thing. You’d be surprised at how many calendars I did.”

I smiled. “No, I wouldn’t be surprised at all,” I told her, wondering what the sudden need for confession was all about.

She gave me a smile, threw her hair back. She knew I liked to look at her. What sexy woman doesn’t know men like to look at her?

“Bottom line is, Nash, is that I was never much. I considered myself a model. My mother considered me a whore. But I made good money posing with motorcycles and trucks and ATVs, wearing tool belts and hardhats and nothing much else.” She shrugged. “But I never felt like I was part of anything. Not until now.”

“Now?”

“You’ll probably think it’s crazy. Now that I’m with you guys I feel…needed, part of something. It makes no sense, I know. But it’s true. You make me feel safe, protected. This world is fucked up and dangerous, but I feel secure with you, Nash. I felt it right away. There’s a power coming off you. An energy. We all feel it. It’s what draws us to you.”

“I’m nothing special, trust me,” I told her.

“Oh, yes you are.”

She told me the secure feeling came from me, not the others. They had nothing to do with it. She said that when Gremlin was with us he just gave her the creeps because he was like the men she always assumed salivated over her calendars. The sort that would have fucked a toilet seat if they thought her ass had touched it. Gremlin had been like that.

“A small mind with surging hormones,” she said. “A walking idiot penis.”

I started laughing. Yeah, she had that asshole pegged, all right.

“I study people, Nash,” she told me. “I always have. People and their relationships interest me.”

“And what do you think of the relationships in my little posse?”

“I think they’re tight, solid. You have a good group,” she admitted. “Carl’s okay. He’s like your obedient watchdog. He’d never betray you. Texas Slim? Oh boy, how do you categorize him. He’s weird, but loyal. He sure likes to talk about mortuaries and embalming bodies. I have to think his interest in corpses is not purely professional. Then again, he’s about ninety percent bullshit. Underneath he’s okay.”

Mickey admitted that Janie intimidated her a bit. Probably because Janie didn’t like her and felt threatened by her presence. But there was no reason for that, Mickey said, because Janie herself was pretty, features finely-sculpted and perfectly Nordic from her blue eyes to her high cheekbones and the blonde hair that was not so much yellow as silver.

“She’s really got it going on, Nash. But if you don’t mind me saying so, she’s a little cool. Not just to me, but to you, to everybody. She’s caring and compassionate, though. She gives you that feeling that she cares a lot more than she’s willing to admit, but it’s sort of a, I care, honey, but from the end of a stick.”

Mickey said that she’d felt the bond between me and Janie right away. Like she was plugged into me or I was plugged into her and together we completed some sort of arcane circuit.

“Sure,” I said. “But I’m beginning to think that circuit is dead.”

“If it is, I’m sure she’ll blame me for it,” Mickey told me. She stared at me for some time. “You have the power and I knew it right away. Just looking at you made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. But I wondered what it was at first. Everybody walked light around you, except for Janie with her mood swings. I knew you had something going because whatever it was, the others were terrified of it.”

I could feel myself warming to her already. She was honest. Honest like Janie was honest, but more straightforward, no games, no subtlety, no esoteric feminine mystery. With Mickey, everything was on the table in plain sight. There was something very refreshing about that.

“And what do you think now that you know about The Shape?” I asked her. “Do you think I’m some kind of horrible monster? Some psycho who gets his kicks hurting other people? No mercy, just a fucking animal. That’s what Janie thinks.”

Mickey put the full force of her hungry eyes on me and it was considerable. “No, Nash. That’s not what I think at all. You do it for the good of all even though it scares you and you hate it. But I don’t hate it,” she said, moving in a little closer. “I respect the power you have. In fact, it turns me on.”

I could have laughed, but I didn’t. It was true. I could see it in her eyes. Power got her off and she wasn’t too proud to admit it.

“How’s you intuition working?”

“Just fine.”

“You feeling anything?” I said. “About what might be coming our way?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

She licked her lips and looked away. “We’re in terrible danger.”

 

9

We were driving.

It was decided that the simplest route out of the city would be the one we took in. Follow I-80 out and head west. I didn’t have the slightest idea where in the west we were going, I only knew that we had to keep heading in that direction. For it was out there somewhere. What I was looking for or what The Shape wanted me to find. In just about every way entering Des Moines seemed like an awful waste of time, yet I knew it had been important. Somehow. Was it Price? Was that it? I couldn’t say for sure, but it seemed likely. The idea of it scared me. For the only real use Price seemed to have was that he was an expert on infectious diseases.

Time would tell.

Carl was driving, complaining about all the wreckage. Mickey was sitting up front with him. I sat in the back with Price and Texas. Janie was in the way back seat with Morse. I turned to say something to her, but she held a finger to her lips. Morse was sleeping and that was a good thing. I started plying Price with questions. Maybe I just wanted to hear somebody talk who knew something about what was going on.

So Price talked. “Even in the old days nobody wanted anything to do with Ebola,” he told us. “Even your veteran biohazard experts were scared of it. It gave virologists the cold sweats. The way a lot of us were thinking was that Ebola was the doomsday machine of germs, the only life form we had encountered thus far that could truly put a serious dent in the human population. Maybe more than a dent, maybe a big ugly hole. The Ebola organism was the most frightening thing we could imagine. We knew too little about it. It popped up along the Ebola River in Africa, wiped out some villages, continued a pattern of sporadic, though minor, outbreaks in the next few decades, but never really broke out. Maybe if it had, we could have nailed the bastard. But it was all sketchy. We couldn’t be sure of the vector. Was it airborne? Waterborne? Both? Neither? Were the corpses of its victims vectors? We tracked it to central Africa and there the trail went cold. We knew it was there somewhere, proliferating, but we never could find the headwater, the reservoir. Yet we knew it existed. And that scared us. We were all envisioning a massive breakthrough into the human race, the virus crashing from one individual to the next. Millions dead within weeks. So it was no wonder that biohazard people wet themselves at the idea of working with this deadly little bug. One little tear in your protective suit…well, that’s it, isn’t it? The virus will flood into your system through any tiny cut or abrasion.”

Price went on to tell us that Ebola was the perfect microbial firestorm. Once it gets inside you the war is over before the first battle is fought. So it was all bad enough on the old Ebola front, he informed us, then Ebola-X showed.

It was even worse, if such a thing is imaginable.

Basically the same bug, just pumped up and with a very bad attitude. It spread faster, it killed quicker. Ebola-X attacks every part of the human body, sparing nothing: nervous tissue, marrow, organs, lymphatics. It goes after everything, absolutely laying waste to the immune system. It begins with massive blood clotting which restricts blood supply to the various systems of the body. Starved of nutrients and oxygen, tissues go necrotic. Connective tissue become mush, the skin is covered with bright red lesions which seem to expand as you watch. The flesh goes to pulp and internal bleeding begins. Your gums go to putty and your teeth fall out. Your eyes fill with blood and blood runs from every available orifice. Black infected vomit comes out in great quantities, tearing the skin off the tongue and bringing up sloughed, dead tissue from the windpipe and stomach while blood flows from your ass thick with macerated chunks of your intestines. The organs bloat as they fill with clotted blood and begin to decay. The testicles swell up like hard blue balls, nipples bleed, and vaginas eject infected tissue and copious amounts of black-red drainage. If the unlucky victim is a woman and she is pregnant, she spontaneously aborts the child who emerges infected with Ebola-X, blood running from it, eyes brilliantly red. The child, like the mother, is toxic biological waste.

“The end result…well it’s horrible, like something thrown together by Hollywood special effects people. The body literally liquefies into fleshy soup hot with virus.” Price stared out the window at the ruin of civilization. “Ebola was bad enough, but we knew with Ebola-X we were looking at the perfect killing machine. The hand of a very angry god. A species threatening event.”

After that little discourse, nobody said a damn thing. Not for quite while. The gruesome details had done their job on us.

“Well, you certainly are a cheerful fellow,” Texas Slim told Price after a time and there was absolutely no humor behind his words.

I was still thinking about The Medusa. I wanted to relay my fears to Price somehow without sounding like some kind of paranoid whacko who couldn’t tell the difference between nightmare and reality. Later I knew, if the chance came and I could get him away from the others, I would tell him. I would make him listen. And if he thought I was raving, so be it.

We drove on and I saw Mickey watching me in the rearview. When I caught her eyes, she smiled. I was glad she was with us and at the same time I saw her as a possibly destructive element. I believed for the most part everything she’d told me that morning, but I wasn’t naïve. I knew women like her with all the right stuff in all the right places made a career of manipulating men. I knew I had to be careful.

“If I might ask,” Price said, “what exactly fuels this desire to travel west? You seem to have no clear idea of where you’re going or even why you want to go there. I find that a bit confusing.”

Texas looked over at me and I didn’t dare meet his eyes. I could feel Janie’s eyes on me, too, probably bitter with hate and recrimination. I had to tell him; he was part of this, he deserved to know. But I was hoping for a more intimate chat. I don’t know what I would have said and I never had the chance because there was a sudden impact and the Jeep fishtailed in the street, glanced off a parked car and smashed into a pile of rubble.

 

10

Of course, Morse came out of his peaceful sleep screaming and immediately reaching for his Nikon. Everyone was yelling and shouting and wondering what in the Christ had happened. Me among them. Something had hit us and hit us damn hard. This was no accidental run into a parked car or a slab of building. Something had hit us. Something really damn big. Through the windshield I could see nothing but a swirling cloud of dust.

“Is everyone all right?” I said, once things calmed down.

“We’re okay, I think,” Carl said. “Have to check the Jeep, though.”

“What was it?” Janie wanted to know.

“Perhaps our friend Carl drove us into something,” Texas Slim suggested.

“Fuck I did. Something hit us. Something big.”

But what? That’s what I kept asking myself. We had come around a blind corner created by a shattered building and its attendant rubble and then…I don’t know…I saw a flash of silver. Then…boom.

“I think it was a bus,” Mickey said. “It came out of nowhere…but it looked kind of like a big bus.”

“That’s what I saw, too,” Carl said.

I looked from one to the other. “A school bus? A Greyhound? Hell kind of bus?”

“Nothing like that,” Mickey told me. “It was bright silver. Like a train.”

We piled out. The front passenger side quarter panel of the Jeep had a good dent in it, a very big dent, but it wasn’t pushed in enough to rub against the front tire. Carl checked the engine, the undercarriage. Everything was okay. For once, vehicle-wise, we’d caught a break.

“I’m still wandering what it was,” Texas said.

“Look,” Mickey said, examining the dent. She scraped something out of it with her fingernail: a strip of silver paint. “See? I told you. It was a big fucking silver bus.”

Morse got a shot of the paint.

I was picturing one of those chartered coaches that used to take elderly people down to Bransom, Missouri for foot-stomping country music. One of those out on a wild joy ride. It was ridiculous, but the image in my mind persisted.

“It didn’t have windows,” Janie said.

We all looked at her.

“That’s what I saw. I wasn’t really looking. I think I was nodding off,” she explained. “But then I opened my eyes and I saw this metal, silvery thing. It was huge. But it had no windows. No windows at all.”

I thought maybe some kind of military vehicle. But silver bus…silver bus…those words kept running through my mind. Where had I heard something about a big silver bus?

Mickey was tapping a long index finger to her lips. “That guy…do you remember? That weirdo in the bathrobe? He was saying something about a silver bus.”

Carl laughed. “That fucking Gomer? Shit, he had painted purple toenails and he was carrying a fucking phonebook. He said he ate his dog.”

But I was remembering now, too. The bathrobe guy, crazy, deluded, shellshocked…but not necessarily wrong. What had he said exactly?

They came in silver buses. I saw ‘em. They had orange suits on. They took Reverend Bob and threw him in the bus.

“Might I ask what you people are talking about?” Price said.

I told him. I told him about the guy and what he had said which had struck me as being very odd at the time. Now I was wondering if it wasn’t so odd after all and I think Price was wondering the same thing.

“Hmm. A silver bus. Men in orange suits, did he say? Interesting.”

There was no time for speculation then. We were wide open in the streets. We got back in and Carl got behind the wheel and got us rolling. As we drove out, I tried several times to engage Janie in conversation but she wasn’t having it. Every time I spoke to her, she’d ask Texas or Price a question or pose for one of Morse’s photos.

She’s gone over the line, hasn’t she? I kept telling myself. Bitch is alive because you’ve taken care of her and now she’s turning on you. You gonna put up with that, Rick? Maybe you ought to introduce her to big brother Shape next month…

An angry, betrayed sort of revenge fantasy, that’s all it was. I wouldn’t do that to Janie. But on the other hand, if it came down to it, who would I select? Looking at the faces crowded into the Jeep, I knew it wouldn’t be easy if it came to it.

Every corner we turned, every street we prowled down, I expected trouble. But there was nothing. Nothing at all. My guts in my throat, Carl drove us out of Des Moines. And even then I think I really knew where we were going. Because I’d heard it in my sleep last night.

Nebraska.

 

11

We left Des Moines and drove for a few hours until we spotted a little roadside park with a historical marker. A river ran through it and there was a waterfall back along the trail. We were dirty and we needed to clean up. So we took turns bathing and it felt wonderful. Janie and Mickey went first. Then Price and Texas and Carl. I made Morse go alone. I figured nobody wanted him clicking shots of them in the raw even if there was no film in the camera.

I went last. The water was chilly, but refreshing and I could have stayed in there all day.

I needed to think.

We were right on the outer edge of something and I knew it. Some great abyss was opening before us and it had everything to do with Nebraska, where The Shape wanted us to go. The endgame was coming soon. Destiny was just over the state line and I knew it. I felt it right down into my marrow.

As I stood under the cascading water, I thought about all that I had lost. I thought about Specs. I thought about Sean. But mostly I thought about my wife. I thought about Shelly and it seemed she’d been dead a hundred years. Her image was still in my mind. But it was no longer clear, no longer fresh, almost like an old photograph that was slowly fading.

And that scared me. It really did.

I remembered Shelly dying and I started to cry. I was happy that she had not died alone and unloved like so many others. I was glad that I held her hand as she passed. She was out of it by then and probably didn’t even know I was there, but I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that at all. I think she was aware. I think she died knowing I loved her.

You would have been such a good mother, I thought. Remember how we talked about kids, Shelly? Remember that? Oh, our children would have been so lucky to have you as a mother. You would have been so perfect. You were an angel in every way and I’m glad I told you so and I only wish that we’d have had kids so I could be telling them now how wonderful of a woman their mother was.

These were the things I was thinking.

I couldn’t seem to think much else. I stood there in a daze and somewhere during the process, I realized I was not alone. Mickey was standing there at the edge of the river, up to her ankles in the water.

“Mind if I join you?” she asked.

Well, I wanted to tell her to go away and leave me brood, but I didn’t and I honestly didn’t want to. “Sure. Come on in.”

Mickey stepped out of her shorts and her T-shirt and she was amazingly beautiful. Just long-legged, high breasted, her skin bronzed by the sun, long dark hair sweeping down one shoulder. I don’t think I’d ever wanted anyone as badly as I’d wanted her at that moment and she damn well knew it. She’d been orchestrating this since she joined us and I hated her for it. Almost as much as I hated myself for giving into it.

“Come here,” I told her and it was not a request.

I swept her into my arms and her flesh was cool from the water, but I could feel the heat blazing between her legs. I took hold of her roughly and she did not fight. Her tongue was hot in my mouth. We fondled and kissed like that for a moment and then I grabbed her by the hair and pulled her down, slid my cock in her mouth. I forced her head up and down on it and made her gag. When I was hard, I grabbed her by the hips, digging my fingers into the cheeks of her ass and she wrapped her legs around me.

There was nothing tender about it.

I brought her over to a waist-high shelf of rock and put her down. I spread her legs apart and slid into her. She was a fantasy fuck, there was no doubt about it. I took her like I hated her. I slammed into her and made her cry out. And when I came, I shoved her away from me. There was no love involved. It was brutal, violent.

And that’s exactly what she wanted.

By the time I was done and I stepped out of the water with her trailing behind, I knew one thing for sure: Janie had been watching us.

 

12

And she had been. I knew it. I could see the recrimination in her eyes, the way she looked at me like some squirming thing that had slid out from under a rock. Maybe it was my imagination. I don’t know. She’d been giving me the evil eye for so long it was hard to be sure.

That night I dreamed of The Medusa moving east to west like some immense malefic vacuum cleaner sucking up the last of the human race from decaying cities like dust from a carpet and leaving nothing but polished white bones behind.

It was getting closer and closer and I could not get away from it. I saw its face. And worse, it saw me. It called me by name.

And then hands were shaking me awake.

“Nash,” Janie said. “It’s just a dream. That’s all it is. Just a dream. You have to be quiet. I finally got Morse to sleep.” She told me this like he was some little kid she had to tuck in. Maybe he was.

I laid there, looking up at her, sweat running down my temples. “I saw it,” I told her. “It’s coming for us. It’s getting closer.”

She just nodded. “It’s been coming for a long time.”

“You’ve…you’ve seen it?”

“In my dreams. We probably all have.”

“Janie…”

“Go to sleep, Rick.”

“Stay with me,” I said. “Don’t leave me alone.”

She shook her head. “It can’t be that way anymore and I think you know why, don’t you? Go to sleep. When you wake up you can tell yourself it was only a dream.”

I never felt so alone before.

 

13

As we drove to Nebraska, Price and I spent a lot of time talking. He was a very intelligent man and there seemed to be little he did not know about. One night, sitting by a fire in a sheltered field off the highway, I told him about The Shape. He was part of it and I figured he needed to know.

It was just the two of us.

I was expecting him to laugh at the very idea. He was a scientist. An educated man. But he did not laugh…he looked very grim as I told him about The Shape. Afterwards, he went silent for a long time, lost in thought.

Being Price, he had a few theories on my friend.

He said that The Shape was the ultimate cosmic chaos, something born of nuclear fission and plutonium saturation from the very blast furnace of creation…something that was nothing until the radiation brought it into being, gave it body and mind and attitude, if you can dig that. A wraith essentially, a spook birthed from a thermonuclear womb, a supercharged flux of sentient radiation.

A brand new devil for a brand new world.

“The destruction of our old world, Nash, has given birth to a new one that is very frightening in all respects,” he said. “The biological mutations we’ve all seen are really minor in comparison to things like this Shape of yours and other things that may be coming to pass out there now. There’s nothing supernatural about any of it…but at the same time, it’s all so beyond our science and our meager simian powers of reasoning, that it seems almost godlike.”

“You haven’t seen The Shape,” I told him. “But when you do…well, let’s just say it’s enough to put you to your knees.”

“I believe it would be.”

The Devil of the new world, as it were, Price believed to be a random series of particles that became organized and cohesive and organic, for lack of a better word, as a result of massive fallout. And let’s face it, as crazy as that sounds, this particular bogeyman had been waiting to be born a long time. All the raw materials were there in barrels of radioactive waste, the cores of atomic reactors, and stores of unstable isotopes. Just laying there waiting, waiting to be born. Much like the inorganic chemicals of Azoic earth had waited to become life.

I had always wondered why The Shape only showed on nights of the full moon. Sometimes I could talk to him in my head on other nights, but only on the nights of the full moon would he show for his latest meal. I figured it was all impossibly esoteric and mystical, something supernatural that my poor little brain could never hope to understand.

But Price had a theory on that, too.

In fact, wasn’t much that guy didn’t have a theory on. From female orgasms to the mating cycles of katydids, Price had a very definitive opinion. He was one of those guys that were just too smart for their own good. I tried to argue with him about a few topics, but that was a mistake. He made me feel like a striped ape wallowing in my own shit. He was a professional debater and he took me off right at the knees, leaving me feeling stupid and annoyed and goddamn uneducated. Annoyed mainly, because he never seemed to see me as an equal, but as an object of amusement like a cute little puppy that had learned not to piss on the furniture, but hardly an intellectual equal.

And you would think that I would have been offended by that, but I wasn’t. I admired people like him. I really did. Often in blue collar people like me you get a sort of reverse snobbery where anyone with money or higher education becomes an object of ridicule. And, yes, sometimes it was warranted, but very often not. In Price’s case, it was not. He was highly intelligent and intuitive and if I were to have dismissed him out of some Neanderthal bias, then the only fool would have been me.

So I did not dismiss him.

I listened; I learned.

Price had a theory on the full moon bit, too, as I said.

And he gave it to me in the form of a lecture as always. He said that if you looked through the body of folklore and tradition concerning the moon—he had, of course—then you would see certain underlying principles that were intriguing. The moon, he said, had a history of inciting the human species. It drove men mad. It regulated the menstrual cycles of women. It was forever an object of religious importance. To many primitive societies, the moon was considered a goddess, the creator of time and space, the repository of human souls…those unborn and those awaiting reincarnation. This Moon-Goddess ruled the cycles of creation and fertility and death and this was why ancient calendars were very often based on lunar phases and the menstrual cycles of women which were very often identical in duration. The moon ruled not only the tides, but human and animal life, rebirth and procreation. That’s why Scottish girls at one time would only wed on a full moon and why certain crops could only be planted beneath its glowering eye. Witches were said to draw down the moon, to call up demons and familiars only on this blessed night.

But much of that was superstition and yet, he told me, there was a germ of underlying truth to it all. For the geomagnetic pull of the moon had a decided impact on all living things and their individual electromagnetic fields and maybe it was at these times of greatest influence—the full moon phase—that certain doors were open that might be closed on other nights. Maybe witches really did call down demons and nameless monstrosities and maybe those things were much like The Shape in origin and composition. The same geomagnetic force that made crops and women fertile, might also create an ideal environment for something like The Shape to physically manifest itself, exploiting cosmic and lunar energies to give itself substance.

Just a theory again, but I liked it.

Price was a smart guy, like I said.

I think he was dead right about not only the moon’s influence, but about the nature of The Shape itself. And I told him as much. Not that being right came as much of a surprise to him; he was usually right.

“It wants us to go west,” I told him. “It’s been pushing me in that direction ever since Cleveland. I don’t know why. But there must be something out there. Something…”

Price put his analytical mind on it and right away said, “Maybe it’s not pushing you towards something, but away from something.”

God, the guy was good.

There were other things I wanted to say to him. Things about my dreams, about The Medusa, but I wasn’t ready just yet. It was coming, though. I knew that much. Because The Medusa was out there, chewing its way through the ruined cities of men, picking the last meat off the last bones of humanity. And it was coming for us.

Knowing this, feeling death and plague gathering behind us, I said, “You worked in a lab back east, right? Tell me what that was like. Tell me what happened at the end.”

 

14

“As I told you,” Price said, “I was a biohazard specialist. My area of expertise was Level 4 hot agents, highly infectious organisms capable of causing pandemics. At research facilities like Fort Detrick, there were four levels of biohazard, you see, Biohazard Level 4 being the most dangerous. This is where we manipulate and study infectious diseases for which there are no vaccines: hantaviruses, dengue fever, hemorrhagic fevers, the Marburg and Ebola viruses, other hot agents that have been weaponized or genetically altered to increase their virulence.”

Price said that in order to gain access to a Biohazard Level 4 complex it was like going into outer space. You went through multiple airlocks in a self-contained Hazmat suit that looked very much like a space suit. So much that everyone called them this. You were decontaminated going in and out, subjected to chemical showers and ultraviolet lights, low-level radiation, scanned by mechanisms that could detect the presence of lethal bioorganisms. It was quite a process, apparently. Level 4 containment zones are kept under negative air pressure, he told me, so that if there is a leak, the air will not flow out into the world, but be sucked back into the hot zone itself.

After the bombs came down, there was one pandemic after another and everyone was scrambling to keep up with them. The team Price was part of—the Special Pathogens Branch—were interested in Ebola-X which had broken loose in Baltimore. They needed to study it before it was too late and this was no easy thing with the infrastructure of the country crumbling around them.

“But we had priority and we were under military jurisdiction,” he said. “We were ordered to begin a massive biocontainment operation. So this is what we did. To begin with, we needed specimens to work with. So a Biocon SWAT team swept down in full Hazmat and secured us some thirty people from an apartment complex. They were taken to the Slammer, which is a biologically secure facility, half hospital and half working laboratory.

“I was there during the op. Several of those we took—and we did take them, Nash, make no mistake on that, civil rights be damned—had already slipped into terminal comas. Many were bleeding out. The majority were obviously infected, but really just terrified.”

And it was only the beginning of their terror.

They were brought to the Slammer and each was sealed in biocontainment cells. Within hours, even the healthier individuals were beginning to crash. This new enhanced Ebola moved very swiftly, Price and the others soon learned. It was a pathetic sight to see human beings being destroyed in such a way, he said. Their eyes were staring out, glassy and brilliantly red, blood running from their noses, their faces transformed into rubber fright masks from massive destruction of facial connective tissue and the fact that their brains were degrading into a pudding of gray matter.

There was no time to lose.

Although blood and other tissues had been collected, they needed liver tissue collected at the moment of death. This was called an agonal biopsy. A biopsy syringe was inserted into the liver which, like the other organs, had begun to liquefy. And it is here, at the point of death, that the cadaver undergoes spontaneous liquefaction as necrotic organs and tissues literally melt and fluids drain free in copious amounts, the blood black as tar, all of it cooking hot with virus.

Within forty-eight hours, all the subjects were dead.

Price said it was interesting to note that Ebola-X—while mimicking ordinary Ebola or Marburg in that it attacks the skin, soft tissues, organs, etc. like some ferocious viral wolf—also mimics radiation sickness. They ran into a lot of that at Detrick. Subjects whose faces were splitting open from sores, whose hair and teeth had fallen out. It looked like exposure to toxic levels of radiation. But it was just the virus. He said all of the subjects became delusional as their brains were eaten away and more than a few became psychotic. And all of that—from the sores to the baldness and the rage—made me think of the Scabs. Maybe there was no connection.

Price went on, “We performed a series of autopsies and found exactly what we knew we’d find,” he said, his face sculpted by shadows. “The liver was yellow and liquefied, kidneys ruptured, intestines filled with blood and decayed. It was the same with all organs and connective tissue. They had gone necrotic and dissolved. Each cadaver was the same…biological waste as the result of extreme viral amplification.

“The next stage was to cultivate the organism,” Price said. “We put organ tissues from the dead into flasks with living cells from the liver we had biopsied. We did a series of these with blood, mucus, various discharges and mashed organs. Then we put them into an incubator which mimics the temperature of the human body. Within two days we had a thriving culture of virus. We got our first look at our monster.”

Price was silent for a few moments. I had the feeling that what he was telling me were things that he maybe hoped would die with him. Though he could be clinical to the point of cruelty at times, when he was telling me these things he was filled with pain.

“The virus?” I said finally.

“Yes. We put it in the beam…that is, under the eye of the electron microscope. We were looking at a filovirus very similar to Ebola or Marburg.”

Filoviruses, or “thread viruses,” are quite unique in the world of virology. While many viruses look like balls or plugs, the filoviruses are quite alien in appearance and resemble braided rope or coiling worms. Many think they look much like spaghetti. Price said that even to a microbiologist there is something invidious and evil about them and no one who has studied them has not felt it.

“What we had was Ebola, no doubt of it, but mutated from its ordinary state. A new strain, unspeakably deadly.”

Under the microscope was a sort of elongated viral body with dozens of slender threads looping from it. Like white worms or tentacles, he told me. They watched Ebola-X invade healthy cells with savage abandon, an unstoppable army of killer microbes. They would send out their thread-like tendrils, grab a cell, overwhelm it, on and on. Once they had infested a cell, they pretty much gutted it of nutrients and genetic material, forming inclusion bodies—crystalline blocks of pure virus—which were replicated viral broods getting ready to hatch and infest. The cell itself would be grotesquely swollen by this point, literally pregnant with virus. Each inclusion body moved outwards toward the cell wall, touched it, and exploded into hundreds of new viruses. These viruses then penetrated the cell walls, causing the cell itself to distort and bulge and finally burst…releasing newborn viruses to find more host cells where they drain them, multiply, and burst free again. The process begins again. An absolutely alarming geometric progression.

“Such a process is horrible when you think about it,” Price said. “Viruses making viruses ad infinitum, blocks forming, blocks exploding with hundreds of hatchlings, the host cell bursting, the viruses turned loose, traveling through the bloodstream and clinging to any available cell in a relentless amplification of the original virus.”

It was horrible, all right.

It was downright scary, in fact. I was starting to get ideas that left me cold and it all tied in with what I saw in my dreams and what Price was describing to me:

“I’ll never forget my first view of the thing,” he told me. “It was an absolute obscenity. I was always fascinated by the deadly beautiful horror of Ebola, but this mutated variety literally terrified me looking at it. You would have to see it, Nash, to appreciate what I say. That elongated body with dozens of serpentine white worms coming from it…like snakes, undulant vipers. I thought…yes…that first glimpse of it…I thought I was looking at the face of Medusa.” He wiped sweat from his brow. “I had the strangest feeling that nightmare was aware that I was watching it. That it was looking at me and knowing it was my master. It was pure evil and I knew it. I…dear God, just looking at it made me want to slit my wrists.”

Medusa.

I sat there for some time, just smoking my stale cigarettes, staring into the fire and contemplating the end of my own species. Because it was coming and there was no denying it now. The war had thinned the human population considerably, weakening what was left…and Ebola-X would now kick the race’s legs out from under it. It would exterminate us. And not as some mindless germ, but as a mutated, hideously evolved germ that knew exactly what it was doing and took grisly pleasure in the same.

Before I could stop myself, I blabbered it all out to Price. My dreams. The Medusa. What it looked like and what I thought it to be and how it was sweeping east to west and leaving well-picked graveyards in its wake.

“It’s unbelievable,” was all he could say. “And you think The Shape is leading you away from it…to some unknown destiny?”

“Yes. It wants us to get to Nebraska. It wants that very badly.” I shook my head. “Why Nebraska? Why not South Dakota or Wyoming or Montana? I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

“Well, there could be one reason,” he said. “The Creek.”

“The Creek?”

“Yes, Bitter Creek. At Detrick we called it ‘The Creek.’ The Creek is a Level 4 Biocontainment facility in Bitter Creek Nebraska,” he told me. “It was a research complex and storage facility. I’ve never been there, but I knew of it. We all whispered about it.”

I felt a chill up my spine. “And what…what is stored there?”

“Bioweapons,” he said. “Every nasty germ we’ve been genetically engineering is stored there. That’s the rumor. In the worlds of virology and microbiology, it’s like Area 51. It carries the same mystique.”

Bitter Creek.

I could feel The Shape warming to the idea of it. This was it then. The end was in sight. That’s where we were going. I would lead and the others would follow. Straight into the heart of darkness, straight into the valley of the shadow of death.

Straight into Hell.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BITTER CREEK, NEBRASKA

 

1

A storm hit us when we crossed the Nebraska state line. It started with rain and hail and fierce winds that tried to strip the Jeep right off the highway. Pretty soon it wasn’t just rain hitting us or chunks of hail the size of golf balls, but all manner of debris. The winds picked up anything and everything, creating a lashing, wet whirlwind of flak that made the Jeep shake and jerk like it was pushing through an artillery barrage.

If that was our welcome to the Cornhusker State, it wasn’t a very friendly one. I suppose my old pal Specs would have called it a bad omen.

Carl got us off I-80, cut through some farmland and pulled before a huge barn that seemed to be about as long as a football field. Covering our heads, we ducked inside. We were glad for the shelter.

There were cattle stalls up both sides with lots of hay and a concrete drive down the center. At one time, they must have had quite a few head of cattle in there.

Carl and Mickey and I watched the storm through the doorway.

It was really something. The rain was still coming down along with occasional barrages of hail. The sky was flat black, seamed with brilliant scarlet and indigo bands that seemed to flicker and expand like Northern lights. We could see bolts of lightening sweeping the countryside in the distance, just flashing and arcing like airstrikes. The thunder made the barn shake.

“Fucking storm beat the hell out of the Jeep,” Carl said. “She’s drivable…at least for now.”

“We just have to get to Bitter Creek,” I said.

“And where is that?”

“According to Price, it’s north, up in Boone County.”

Mickey nodded. “Okay. And what’s in Bitter Creek?”

“That’s what we have to find out,” I said.

I wasn’t about to tell them what I thought or felt or what Price said about the Level 4 facility there. No sense spooking anyone more than they already were. Because I could see it in their eyes: a combination of excitement and dread and there was no mistaking it. They knew we were nearing our destiny, that something very big was just around the corner.

“Maybe it’ll be paradise,” Mickey said with all due sarcasm. “Maybe it’ll be the light at the end of the tunnel.”

Carl pulled off a cigarette. “Sure, honey. And maybe it’ll be hell on earth.”

“Let’s just ride this storm out for now,” I said.

I left them there hashing it out. I went over to the others. They were sitting on a low stone trough. Janie had broke out some MREs and Texas Slim was regaling them with a story of a tornado at his aunt’s farm in Oklahoma. This was his version of dinner theater. I wasn’t hungry, but I listened to Texas tell of cows getting sucked up into the funnel, their badly worn carcasses getting deposited in the parking lot of an all-you-can eat barbeque joint twenty miles away.

“So at least none of that beef went to waste,” he said.

I walked away, Morse snapping a few shots of me, and leaned against one of the stalls. The smell of hot food made my stomach flip and flop. I stayed there by myself, chain-smoking and wondering if I was leading those poor people to their deaths.

Lost in thought, I looked up and Janie was standing there.

“What’re you thinking about, Nash?” she asked me, though I could see by the set of her face that she had absolutely no interest. “Something important or just musing over Mickey’s tits?”

“I was musing over Mickey’s tits.”

Janie shook her head and turned away.

“It was a fucking joke,” I told her. “C’mon.”

She stayed though it was obvious that she no longer cared for my company and could you honestly blame her? All men lust in their hearts, don’t they? But only the stupid ones let it go any farther than that.

“I was thinking about these people, Janie.”

“What about them?”

I pulled off my smoke, wishing to God I could quit and knowing there wasn’t much point to it at that stage. “They’re following me because they have some kind of faith in me or they fear The Shape or they think it—or I—will keep them safe. For the most part, they don’t question; they accept. And that bothers me. The faith they have.”

“Well, faith of any sort would bother a guy like you,” she said and then noticing that I was oblivious to her barbs, said, “They need something to believe in, Nash. Everyone does. Especially now. And you have to admit, for the most part they’ve been lucky with you.”

“Specs and Sean weren’t so lucky.”

But she had no interest in discussing the dead. “And you’re bothered by this faith?”

“Yes, I am.” I ground out my cigarette. “We’re going to a place called Bitter Creek, Janie. All I know is that somewhere near there Price says there is a storage facility the Army kept its germ warfare agents at. That’s all I know. But I know it’s where I’m supposed to go. I know, somehow, that it all ends there. I have to go there…but I don’t know about the rest of you. I wonder if I shouldn’t tell you people to keep heading west and just drop me off. I don’t like the idea of the rest of you facing what I know I have to face.”

“Hmm. Suddenly you have some overwhelming desire to protect their lives?”

“Yes.”

“It’s too late, Nash. They’ll follow you and you can’t get rid of them.”

“What about you?”

She studied me with her cold blue eyes. “I have my own reasons for staying with you and, believe me, they have nothing to do with love for who or what you’ve become.”

“Why don’t you tell me what I’ve become?”

“What good would it do?”

She turned away and I grabbed her hand. She yanked it away like she’d just touched a rattlesnake. “Don’t touch me, Nash. You don’t have the right anymore. I’ll stay with you like the others. But only because I need to, not because I want to.”

 

2

“You smell that?” Carl said about ten minutes later.

I stopped brooding. The wind was coming from the other direction, through the half-open door at the far side, and I could smell death on it: hot, putrefying. It was a smell I knew well, the bouquet of every city in the country and the world for that matter. But in that barn you did not expect it. It was high, nauseating and it was getting stronger.

Carl, Texas, and I grabbed our guns.

We tracked the smell to the far end of the barn and each step I took on the way there made my heart sink a little lower. We didn’t need more trouble. We had to get to Bitter Creek. And with what might be waiting there, wasn’t that enough?

“Something around that stall,” Texas said, his Desert Eagle .50 cal in his hands.

Carl moved forward with his AK. I followed.

Corpses.

There was some kind of trough cut into the floor and its purpose was unknown to me. There were five or six bodies in there. They were greening, going soft with rot. They were all bloated up, that stink so thick it was nearly palpable.

“Shit,” Carl said.

One of the bodies moved. Then another. It was incredible, but I saw it and despite all I knew about horror by that point—which was considerable, I might add—I found myself gripped with an unreasoning superstitious terror at the idea of a moving corpse.

But there was nothing supernatural about it.

The bodies were infested. That’s all it was. A corpse-worm that was perfectly white and perfectly smooth slid out of the eye socket of one of the bodies. It was slimy and steaming, about three feet of it wavering side-to-side in the air, that bulb-like head opening and closing like it was breathing.

Carl shot it, cut it in half before it could spit some of its digestive enzymes at us. The bullets shattered it into a fleshy sauce of black bile. The rest of it slid back into the eye socket.

“We should burn those bodies or something,” Carl said.

“Why?” Texas asked him. “Once those worms are done eating, they’ll just starve anyway with no more meat to be had.”

“True,” I said.

Texas and I turned away and walked towards the others. I called out to them that it was nothing but a worm and they relaxed. Carl was right behind us. He couldn’t help himself, he pointed his AK into the pit and gave the remains a couple of three-shot bursts.

And that’s when we all heard the screaming.

 

3

A man came charging out at us. He had a shovel in his hands and he planned on using it. I don’t know where he’d been hiding—maybe under the straw—but he charged right at Carl before any of us could intervene and before Carl could get his weapon up. He swung the shovel and Carl ducked out of the way. It barely missed his head. The shovel blade hit the concrete with such force it sparked.

Then Carl cracked the guy with the butt of his AK and down he went.

He was some raggedy old man with a white beard. He was on his knees, breathing hard, blood running down his temple.

Carl got his rifle on him.

“We won’t hurt you,” I told him and he just looked at me with wild, confused eyes. The eyes of an animal. He muttered something, but it made no sense. The others were circled around us by that time. He saw them, panicked, and crawled away on all fours towards the door.

Carl made to go after him.

“Let him go,” I said.

He made it to the big door, slid it open and the rain poured in. It was coming down in sheets. The old guy was soaking wet in seconds. He cried out something and darted out into the storm. All of this happened in under less than a minute.

We saw him out there, the rain and wind hammering into him. He started first this way, then that, and then…then he screamed. We all saw something huge and undulant move in his direction. It hit him and dragged him off into the rain. None of us could be sure what it was. It just happened too fast. In the back of my mind I had an image of a gigantic snake coming out of the murk.

He screamed again and that was it.

Guns in hand, we watched, we waited, but there was nothing. Just the rain spraying into puddles and lashing the sides of the barn.

Nothing else.

 

4

The storm ended a couple hours later and by that time we knew without a doubt that there were things out there, out in the pastures and cornfields. We had no idea what they were, but we could hear them. For some time we’d been hearing low squealing and sharp screeching sounds. And once a resounding booming noise as if something had placed an extremely large foot down.

The storm had left a pinkish fog in its wake, but the Geiger told us it was harmless. Still, it was heavy and claustrophobic and I didn’t like the idea of legging it out to the Jeep with what we were hearing. As it was, the Jeep was only a vague phantom in the mist.

“It might be advisable to wait until the fog lifts,” Price said.

I was going to disagree with him because I really had to; we had to get moving. Whatever it was, it was building in me: the need to get to Bitter Creek as soon as possible. The idea of waiting was just not an option. His suggestion was greeted with a stony silence by everyone.

Everyone but Mickey. “I think he’s right, Nash.”

But nobody wanted to wait; I saw that.

“I’ll lead the way out,” Carl said. “Nash, you come with me. Texas, you get my signal, lead the others out.”

I knew then it wasn’t just me. The others felt it, too. They were as filled with anxiety as I was. We had to go. We needed to go.

Carl went out and I was right behind him. The fog felt moist, almost sticky against my face. Ten feet from the door, the barn vanished. It was swallowed by the consuming fog which seemed to thicken by the moment, stirring itself into an opaque soup that began to look less pink and more blankly white and suffocating.

We found the Jeep and sighed.

“Okay,” I called out to the others, wiping a dew of moisture from my face. “Come on!”

Carl jumped behind the wheel and turned the Jeep over. The ignition sputtered a few times and my heart dropped. Sometimes those weird lightening storms will fuse out the electrical systems of vehicles and you’ll never get them running again. The ignition caught finally, the engine holding a fine idle.

I allowed myself to breathe.

I knew we weren’t alone out there. I could hear occasional dragging sounds in the distance. I was aware of ghostly shapes moving through the fuming mist.

Something moved near the back of the Jeep and was gone before I could draw a bead on it.

“Hurry!” I called to the others, trying to watch every direction at the same time.

Something else moved past me. I could have shot it. It was close enough…but what I saw, well it was too crazy. Just a hunched over shape running on all fours. It looked almost like a hog, a huge and barrel-bodied hog, bristled and corpse-white. That’s what I saw. I thought it had the face of a man.

I heard others hopping about in the mist.

Carl got out of the cab. “Are they fucking coming or what?” he wanted to know.

The words barely got out of his mouth when I heard the hopping sounds again and something made a shrill squealing and dove out of the mist, flattening Carl. I ran over towards him and some pig-faced mutation came at me. I put two rounds in it, fired three more into the mulling, hopping shapes in the fog, and something hit me from behind and put me face down.

I came up fast, fired a shot, and heard Carl cry out.

I scrambled over to him and one of those things…whatever in the Christ they were…had him pinned down. It looked like a hog, all right…except that it was swollen a blubbery white. Carl was fighting against it as it pummeled him with its split hooves and tried to get its snout at his throat. I got over there and kicked the thing two or three times until it fell off. I should have shot it…but I was afraid of hitting Carl. It rolled off him, greasy and shining white, and came right up, its face caught somewhere between a hog and a man. Its pink, glistening eyes were on me. It was snorting and squealing madly, its mouth almost like a blow hole and filled with sharp yellow teeth that were curled back like those of a rattlesnake.

It dove and I put three rounds into it, which dropped it but hardly killed it.

Carl had his AK then and he blew its head apart.

It lay there, legs kicking in the mud, splattered with dirt and leaves and splotches of dark red blood that looked almost black against its luminously white flesh. Its head was drilled open in three or four places, jelly-like blood pulsing out with a horrible sputtering sound.

“Jesus,” Carl said turning away.

Texas, I knew, had gotten the others back into the barn for safety. He was calling out to us.

“Yeah, bring ‘em over,” I said.

I saw no more of those hog things.

The others were coming now. I couldn’t even see them, I could only hear them stumbling over the muddy drive, splashing through puddles. That’s what I heard, the Beretta 9mm tight in my fist. And then I heard something else and if the engine coughing dropped my heart, this made it plummet into black depths. It was a deafening, almost primeval roaring sound that shook the world.

I had the doors open and I pushed Janie and Mickey inside, then Texas and I almost made it. Yes, we almost did. Then Price cried out. He’d been coming around the rear of the Jeep to get in on Carl’s side…and then something took him.

I heard him scream.

Something coiled around him like the thing that had taken the crazy old farmer. It was black and smooth and serpentine, flattened, the outer edges set with spikes like the traps of a carnivorous plant.

I fired at it. So did Carl for all the good it did.

I saw Price get taken. He didn’t get pulled off into the fog, he got pulled up into it as if whatever had gotten him was hovering right over us.

Morse started snapping pictures like a combat photographer and I pushed him inside.

Carl jumped into the cab and I made to follow suit, except something like a whip lashed out of the fog and hit me. Not only hitting me, but tossing me ten or fifteen feet away.

Carl called out.

I heard someone in the Jeep scream my name. I wanted to believe it was Janie, but I’m sure it was Mickey.

Getting to my knees, the breath knocked out of me, I looked up.

The thing was right above me. It had to be nearly the size of a mobile home. Huge and swollen and lumpy, covered in greasy mats of fur or wiry spines. It was hanging there like it was buoyant, filled with gas. Maybe it was. First thing I thought—although it makes no sense—is spider. But it was no spider. I don’t know what the hell it was. I saw clusters of orange globular eyes, appendages of some sort akin to legs or tentacles, but segmented like the tails of scorpions, pink and pulsing, the edges serrated with spikes. In the very center of that grotesque, rolling profusion up there was a great black abyss that might have been a mouth.

Those limbs were draped everywhere.

I felt very much like a fly in a spider’s web. I knew whatever way I moved, it would have me. So I did not move…I crouched there, stunned, feeling an aching need to piss. The beast hung above me like some freakish nightmare that had being birthed from the fog itself. Slimy and dripping and bristling. The appendages trembled from time to time with shuddering tremors.

It had something in its mouth.

I think it was Price.

It was working him, rendering him. Sucking and slobbering and chewing. Something fell from that colossal maw and clattered to the ground. It was a human femur, polished and gleaming.

I felt a wet peal of hysterical laughter bubble in my throat.

Slowly, painfully slowly, I began moving forward, towards the Jeep which seemed about two city blocks away.

I was a human slug, inching and wriggling forward, moving at such a lethargic pace it took me ten minutes to make it five feet. And even then, I kept moving. The beast was still chewing and slurping, but its limbs twitched and quivered from time to time. Perhaps sensing prey or merely flexing their alien musculature.

The Jeep.

It was close now.

When I was within six feet of it, I panicked. Panicked and crawled madly through the mud until I reached it. The beast moved and slithered and its many limbs—Christ, dozens of them—contracted and fluttered and a few of them began to search over the ground like questing fingers.

It was insane.

The beast kept eating, dropping bones and other things.

I could see it pretty clearly. Or at least that part of it that was hanging from the fog.

It looked like something from a 1950’s B-movie, some blasphemy from a Roger Corman flick…a gigantic, hairy jellyfish with those coiling pink appendages.

That’s all I could see and it was enough.

I jumped up and ran to the door of the Jeep. I got it open and jumped into the front seat just as something brushed over the top of my head. When the door was closed, that thing got pissed. It dropped appendages and they slithered over the roof of the van, looking for what had gotten away. For one terrifying minute, those limbs were covering the Jeep windows, squirming and scraping, pink suckers kissing the glass. As crazy as it sounds, it was much like being in one of those car washes with the soft flaps brushing up against the windows. I watched those dozens and dozens of pink suckering mouths. They looked like lips.

When the thing pulled away, Carl gunned us out of there.

Something scratched against the roof and something else pounded the tail gate and made the Jeep shake. Then blood, very red and running, splattered over the windshield and Carl cleared it with the wipers. I saw one of those semi-human hog’s heads roll off the hood.

Then we were back on the main road, racing through the mist.

I never asked any of them why they didn’t try to come after me when I was trapped out there and I didn’t think I needed to. I knew why: they’d been paralyzed with fright.

 

5

Carl stayed well outside of Omaha, cutting north up to U.S. 30, and the farther we went the quieter it got in the Jeep. Even the small talk petered out after awhile.

We drove on through the fog, moving slowly in case there were stalled cars or trucks on the road.

Carl drove and drove and drove.

The silence grew thicker, almost permanent.

We drove for an hour and then stopped in a little town to gas up. I do not remember the name. It was dead, completely dead. A black silence echoed through the streets. The houses were gray and sagging, paint beginning to peel from their boards. The lawns were overgrown, weeds spouting up through cracks in the streets. The windows were all dusty and blank. Nothing had lived there in a long time. Mickey found a few skeletons in a little park across from the gas station where Carl did some siphoning.

But that was it.

We drove away.

I slept for awhile and when I came awake, Mickey was sleeping with her head on my lap, her knees pulled up to her chin. I looked over at Carl and he smiled at me with a wicked grin. Mickey came awake and looked like she was ready to do what Carl had been insinuating.

The fog was still pretty heavy.

We rolled into another little town and the streets were deserted, burned-out houses to either side. Lots of wrecked cars, weedy lots, and shattered plate-glass windows.

“Look,” Mickey said.

I saw them: people. They were lined up on the streets as we passed, faces distorted from sores and growths, raw and rotting. Ulcers had eaten holes right through them. For every one that stood, a dozen more were sprawled on the pavement or rotting in the gutters. They were all hot with plague. They threw things at us that splattered against the Jeep. I want to think they were rotting tomatoes.

We drove for a few more hours and then slowed down. I saw a town ahead.

“Bitter Creek,” Carl said.

 

6

We didn’t go in the first night. We camped outside at a little roadside park. It was getting late and I don’t think anybody wanted to charge in there in the dark, especially without knowing what it was we were charging into. We built a fire and we ate and we sat around. Nobody said much.

It was a nice night.

The fog had lifted and the stars were bright. It could have been a sky ten years ago or anytime before Doomsday. The only telltale giveaway was an occasional flickering purple-blue corona at the horizon. Other than that it was perfect.

I was thinking about Price and all the things he’d told me, how they all fit in with what I knew and what my dreams told me. I was sorry Price was dead. He hadn’t wanted to go out in the fog, but we had made the decision for him. Was that a portent of death? Probably not. Just a very wise man recognizing a fool idea when he saw one.

I squeezed my eyes shut and all I could see were the faces of dead friends. Then that faded and I saw the cities to the east—lifeless, wind-blown, heaps of smoldering bones. Nothing but death to the east of the Mississippi now and nothing but death creeping slowly west. Iowa was dead now. So was Minnesota, Missouri, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and East Texas. Dead. Kansas was going to its grave and so were the Dakotas. Nebraska would fall next and I knew it.

The Medusa was getting closer, moving faster and faster.

I started to sweat and shake because like The Shape, I could feel it out there chewing westward town by town. I had some kind of vague psychic uplink with it and I could feel it getting closer, seeking me out on a hot wind of pestilence.

“You okay, Nash?” Mickey said. “You look funny.”

“He always looks funny,” Texas said.

“Yeah, I’m okay,” I said.

Nobody believed it and neither did I.

I studied my posse each in turn.

Good old Carl, always at my side. Just like Mickey said, my loyal watchdog. Texas Slim, perpetually amused by all around him. Mickey, eyes burning hot and salacious, always ready to please. Janie, her love grown cold, nursing secrets and resentments. And Morse, just crazy as crazy got, fooling with his camera. I think I was attached to them in one way or another and that’s why I wanted them gone.

But I knew they wouldn’t leave.

Because something was out there and they wanted to see it, too.

 

7

We walked into town that first day, armed to the teeth. I needed to see Bitter Creek up close and personal. I wanted to know what it looked like and felt like and smelled like.

We found our first corpse within the hour.

Some guy twisted up in the grass, a four-leafed clover tattooed on his right bicep. It hadn’t brought him any luck at all. He was slashed open, burnt, crushed…almost looked like he’d fallen out of a burning plane a half a mile up. But that wasn’t it. His death had been ugly and brutal, certainly, but it had nothing to do with planes because there were no more planes. Just like there were no more trains or baseball games or TV. Not much of anything, you came right down to it.

Just the six of us.

We were crouched in a cornfield, watching the little town below us in the valley. There was a sign ahead on the side of the road, its Day-Glo surface blasted with bullet holes. BITTER CREEK, it said. And beneath that: CLASS C BASKETBALL CHAMPS 1996.

I wondered if Lucky had played basketball.

I figured he hadn’t. He was so mangled and misused it was hard to tell if he was thirty or sixty, but with that tattoo, I figured he was some kind of tough. Guys with tattoos are always trying to tell the world something. But this guy? What was he saying? Not much. He looked like something you scraped off the bottom of your oven. But that tattoo was unscathed. Go figure.

Carl said, “I figure this guy ran out of luck.”

“Sure as hell,” Texas said.

There were lots of things that could have killed the guy, but we all knew the Children had gotten him. When they got their hands on someone they always left them looking like this.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s go. Let’s find out what all this is about.”

Morse took a couple pictures with his Nikon and nobody mentioned the fact.

We cut back to the road and followed it towards town. We hadn’t gone too far when we came to yet another gruesome sight: scarecrows. A ring of scarecrows circled the town like a noose. Except, of course, they weren’t scarecrows exactly, but mummified human corpses that had been picked by birds, blown by the dry wind and baked in the sun. The crosses they’d been nailed to were very tall, maybe twenty feet, and they rose high above us like the masts of galleons.

“Looks like a warning,” Carl said. “Something to scare outsiders off.”

Morse got a few shots of them.

“I don’t think it’s anything quite that simple,” Janie said, but would elaborate no more.

She was becoming increasingly mysterious and mystical. But, all that aside, I had to agree with her. This was no warning. Not exactly. I was thinking more along the lines of an offering. I wondered if those poor bastards had even been dead when they were nailed to the crosses. I decided I didn’t want to know.

I stood there, smoking a cigarette with Carl, staring up at them, senseless and transfixed

“You boys might want to watch those cigarettes,” Texas Slim said. He pushed a boot down into the yellow grass. The grasses crunched, broke apart into tiny fragments. “Awful dry here. Awful dry. One dropped match or cigarette…”

I could imagine the place burning and it made me smile. Because even then, hovering at its perimeter, I knew it was nothing but a vile pesthole. It had the same atmosphere as a plague pit.

“Be a shame,” Mickey said.

The six of us rounded the crest of a hill and, stretched out below us, was Bitter Creek. It wasn’t much. Maybe it had held four or five thousand at one time, but that was before the bombs fell. Just another drop of a town in the puddle of Nebraska. A little place surrounded by cornfields.

Mickey grabbed my arm as we started down. “Be careful,” she said. “We all need to be careful now.”

I knew it, too.

The town was just another graveyard, yet I knew it was special. Some how. Some way.

“Where’s that facility that Price told you about?” Carl asked me. “The germ warfare place?”

“Probably outside town somewhere. We’ll look for it tomorrow,” I told him, tuning into the psychic shortwave of the town and feeling its dead immensity settling into me. It was like putting your ear up to the wall of a tomb.

No one said anything as we entered the city limits. There were no signs of anything alive. But there was a smell in the air: death. A putrescent blanket that covered us, suffocating us with its heat and heaviness.

“Mmm, that air,” Carl said. “Nothing smells quite like Nebraska.”

The streets were lined with rusting cars and debris, the gutters clogged with brown leaves and broken glass. The sun was high in the sky in a hazy, filmy pocket, reflecting off the filthy glass fronts of the main drag. All of which had white crosses painted on them. The military had done that in Youngstown, I remembered, when they cleared houses of plague bodies. But I didn’t think that’s what this was about. This was something even darker, something pagan at its roots, something more along the line of hex signs.

A police car with flat tires and an imploded windshield stood watch on the outskirts. Behind the wheel there was a skeleton in soiled rags. A silver badge winked on its chest. It was not the only skeleton we saw. There were others sitting on benches, laying in the grass, even parked in chairs behind the windows of businesses. I rather doubt they had died in that state; someone had arranged them that way.

“I smell something,” Mickey said.

I was waiting for Texas or Carl to crack a joke about that, but no one spoke. I could smell something, too. Putrescence, surely, but this was something almost worse: the stench of disease and drainage, hospital dressings foul with seepage and gangrene.

We came to something like a village green and it was crowded with people who were sitting or sprawled on the ground, huddled tightly together like beggars. Many of them were dead, but many were not. The living ones saw us, but did not speak.

We kept our distance.

“They’re full of the Fevers,” Texas said.

There was no doubt of it. Faces were ulcerated, pocked with sores, cracked open like dry earth and running with bile. Eyes were blood-red and glazed. Limbs contorted. Bodies bursting with blood. They were coughing and sucking in rattling breaths. There had to a hundred or more and all of them burning hot with Ebola-X, plague, cholera, anthrax, diseases I could not begin to identify. They gathered in a pool of their own drainage and filth like people at an open air festival waiting for the first band to take the stage.

I had to wonder who or what they were waiting for.

“I’m thinking we shouldn’t linger,” Mickey said.

We moved on.

 

8

We walked down those empty, leaf-blown streets of Bitter Creek and I knew we weren’t alone. We were being watched and it wasn’t by The Shape, even though I could feel my significant other getting nearer. It was funny, but I could actually feel it, feel The Shape out there—in my guts and along the back of my neck like a hand coming out of the darkness. You didn’t need to see it to know it was there. It wasn’t time for a selection, not for another week or more.

But The Shape was active.

We were in Bitter Creek.

It had been waiting for this.

But what I felt watching me was not The Shape. It could have been more of the infected like in that park. Because we’d already come across five or six other little communes like that, all of them dying or dead, but waiting. Just waiting.

I didn’t think it was them, though. This was something else.

I could feel it just fine. I didn’t know if the others could. There was someone out there. I just hoped that whoever it was, was human.

“When are you going to tell us why we’re here?” Janie asked me. “When will the grand plan be revealed to the faithful?”

I ignored the sarcasm. “When it’s revealed to me, that’s when.”

The tension between us was almost unbearable now. Everyone was aware of it, but nobody was talking about it. Too much shit to deal with without all that fucking baggage that Janie and I had so carefully packed. Mickey felt the tension and sidled up right next to me, making sure a bare arm or bare leg was in contact with me. Skin to skin. There was alchemy in that and she knew it.

I stood on a street corner, swallowing, feeling the town, sending out fingers of perception in every direction. Where was it? Where was the revelation? I knew it was here. I could feel it going up my spine like fingernails, coiling in my belly, filling my blood with electricity…where was it? When would it show itself?

I reached out to that sphere of darkness in my brain which I acquainted with The Shape’s WiFi, but got nothing. The Shape was near, but very much offline.

“Well, Nash?” Janie said. “Are we going to stand here while Mickey dry humps your leg or are we going to get to this already?”

“Fuck you,” Mickey told her.

“Wouldn’t put it past you,” Janie said.

I started walking again.

We came up to something like a town square. Lots of brick-fronted businesses with dusty windows, simple frame houses spread out beyond. The lawns were all yellow and overgrown, the streets plastered with wet leaves. A Mobil station, a video store, a bowling alley, a café…this could have been any of a thousand towns in the country. They were all laid out approximately the same…Main Street or Elm or whatever as a hub, everything else radiating out from it like the spokes of a bike tire. Same old, same old. Just another dismal little town filled with death. You could smell it in the air…a sharp, almost pungent yellow smell of age and decay and memory sucking into itself. The moldering, old smell of a library filled with rotting books…except it wasn’t the books that were rotting here.

I saw more white crosses. They seemed to be in the windows of every business and every home.

“What do you make of it?” I asked Texas.

He shrugged. “Damned if I know. The cross, as I understand it, only exists for two purposes: to call something in or ward something else off.”

I wondered what Specs would have made of it with that mind of his.

As we walked, sensing the place, letting it fill us like poisoned blood, Janie kept looking at me. I pretended I wasn’t aware of it. But, eventually, I looked over at her and those blue eyes of hers were blazing. Hate? Anger? No, maybe something like disappointment. Something beyond disappointment. I didn’t know what it was. Not then. But it was coming. She was brooding something inside. Something she was going to share with me when the time came.

But not before.

We all had our guns out and we were feeling tense. There was a thickness in the air, the sense that although maybe we were the only ones wading through this particular stream, there were others watching us from the grassy banks, just biding their time, studying us.

About that time, Mickey stopped. Stopped and cocked her head. “I feel…I feel like I’m being watched,” she said.

Janie sucked in a breath. Maybe I did, too.

“That’s just me,” Texas said. “I been watching your ass is all.”

“Shut up,” she said.

Mickey, as I’ve said, was intuitive as all hell…she could read people, she could read situations. And she wasn’t liking this one at all.

Morse, of course, seeing her standing there looking darkly beautiful and haunted like she did when she was sensing something, snapped a picture of her. Mickey didn’t even flinch. She’d had lots of pictures of her taken in the old days and she was a natural at it.

We moved through the streets very slowly, trying to pick up on what was watching us. Outside a little drug store, we found two bodies. Children. They were curled up on the sidewalk, reduced to husks….just wiry and blackened, crumbling. When Carl nudged one with his boot, it fell apart like cigarette ash. I’d seen it before. Sometimes, the Children just decayed like isotopes, burned themselves up from the inside out.

We kept moving.

And still, those eyes watched us.

“Nash,” Mickey said, gripping the Browning Hi-Power she carried in both hands like a cop on a shooting range, “I’m getting a real bad feeling here. There’s somebody watching us out there.”

Even Carl didn’t have a smartass response for that.

Morse scanned the streets with his telephoto lens, humming under his breath. Janie looked at me and I looked at her. Maybe I was going to take charge like a true leader, maybe I was about to rally my troops, but something happened.

A door slammed.

Slammed damn hard.

We all jumped.

Then we went after it. We cut down an alley and came out on another tree-lined street. Houses, buildings, and then a little ma and pa lunch counter at the end. I saw movement behind the plate glass windows and went after it. I went in first with my Beretta in my hands, ready to start busting caps. Inside, it was typical…flyspecked windows, a long counter, lots of empty tables. Everything dusty and wreathed with cobwebs. A cross on the glass.

And a girl.

She could have been eleven or twelve, I was thinking. She just sat there in a booth like she’d been waiting for us. She was out in the daytime, so I knew she wasn’t one of the Children.

“Hey,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

But she wouldn’t answer me.

She was dressed in rags that might have been jeans and a sweatshirt once. Her face was grimy, her red hair clotted with filth. And she stank like she hadn’t had a bath in months, like she’d been pissing and shitting herself. And judging from those dark stains at her crotch, I think she’d been menstruating, too.

“Take her,” I told Carl.

Carl liked that bit. Strictly stormtrooper fantasy. He handed his shotgun to Morse and went over to the girl.

“You got a name, sunshine?”

She just looked up at him with this dull, bovine look. He put the questions to her about who had survived and where they were and what she was doing alone. She just kept staring, though, either an idiot or mad or simply made that way by the world pissing down its own leg and leaving her stranded in a dead town.

He slapped her, just warming up. “Talk, you fucking cunt,” he said.

But the girl didn’t even make a sound. He might have been striking a rump roast thawing on the counter…this girl wasn’t much more than that: animate meat.

“Stop it!” Janie said. “She’s just a child! Don’t you dare hit her!”

Carl drew back his hand to start again, but I shook my head and he stopped. He shrugged, grabbed the girl by her hair and threw her to the floor. He planted a knee in the center of her back and dug some duct tape from his pack, taped her wrists together behind her back. She did not fight. She did not struggle. When Carl was done, he yanked her to her feet.

“Nash?” he said. “Request permission to piss all over this wench so she at least smells a little better.”

Morse took a picture of her.

“Request denied,” I said.

“All right,” I said to my troops. “Let’s take a five.”

“I’m all for ten,” Texas said.

“Yeah, I need to sit down a minute,” Mickey said, dropping into a booth and crossing her long bronze legs, making sure I saw her do it.

I did.

And Janie saw me looking, too.

We ate some MRE spaghetti and pork and beans. Nobody’d had breakfast and we were hungry. I sat there watching the girl and had a smoke, maybe feeling sorry for myself and the shell of the world at the same time. I was looking at the big picture and seeing me and my people, all the other scattered bands, as insects crawling over the rotting cadaver of some dead beast. I think, essentially, the analogy worked.

I closed my eyes for a moment and all I could see was that formless gray pestilence getting closer. The Medusa. I had the shakes. My heart was pounding. I had an overwhelming urge to vomit out everything I had bottled up inside.

“Okay,” I finally said. “Break’s over. We got shit to do.”

We all got to our feet and right away, I was feeling that same old bit again, that we were being watched. I just couldn’t shake it. It wasn’t The Shape and it wasn’t that girl, so then what?

I remember Mickey looking over at me, telling me with her eyes that she was feeling it, too. And then I heard a thudding report out in the streets and it took me almost a split second to realize it was the bark of a rifle.

A hole opened in the plate glass window.

We all dove down, except the girl and Morse. Jesus, stupid harmless Morse. Now he wasn’t a fashion photographer doing spreads for Newport News and Spiegels, no, now he was a combat photographer. For as those rounds kept chewing into the dusty windows and they fell apart like candy glass, shattering amongst us, Morse just stood there with his Nikon to his left eye, working his telephoto and f-stop, trying to get a good shot for Newsweek or Time.

I yelled for him to get down. I don’t remember what I said, but something about getting his fucking head down and then there was another report and a slug caught Morse right in the telephoto. Lucky shot or really good aim, I didn’t know. But I saw that camera fly apart and blood and meat blast out the back of Morse’s skull. He folded up and died without saying a word. I told everyone to shut the hell up. Somebody out there had a long-range rifle, maybe a .30-30 or a .30.06. I wanted them to get closer so I wouldn’t miss.

Silence.

No sound out in the streets and none in the café. After a few moments, I heard a couple voices calling out there. Sounded like kids, teen-agers maybe. We stayed put, drew those bastards in. And they came, muttering amongst themselves. I whispered for the others to just get ready and I rose up behind one of the booths so I could get a look. Sure, maybe a half-dozen kids and some older guy with a rifle. They didn’t bother sending out a scout, they came towards the café in a group.

“Get ready,” I whispered.

Mickey had her Browning, Texas had his Desert Eagle .50. I had my Savage 30.06 and Carl had his AK.

I watched those peckerwoods converge on the diner. They were quite a crew. They were all long-haired and so filthy that you couldn’t tell if they were boys or girls. They carried pipes and axe handles and baseball bats. From the stains on them, I figured they knew how to use them, too. The older guy kept his rifle up, urging the others forward. As they made to climb through the shattered windows, we came up shooting. We drilled three of them before the others even knew what happened. The old guy started shooting and killed one of his ratpack with a wild shot, but did no other damage. We kept shooting and pretty soon they were all down. Even the old guy. Mickey had jacked a couple rounds into his right kneecap and he was done.

Carl hopped out there first, kicking his rifle away.

I followed with Mickey behind me. A couple of those teenagers were still alive, vomiting out blood into the street. They smelled so bad and were so dirty, even Janie wasn’t rushing to their rescue. They looked like Neolithic savages, filthy and bruised and pockmarked, their teeth rotting from their mouths. The air stank of gunpowder, violent death, and voided bowels…but I don’t think they were infected.

Carl was kicking the old guy when I got there.

I told him to stop. Mickey had done quite a job on his knee. It was blasted to mucilage, one of the bones sticking right through his pant leg like the end of a shattered Pepsi bottle.

“Filth! Trash! Fucking garbage!” he yelled at us. “Y’all ain’t nothing but trash and dirt and cunting animals, that’s all you is!”

“Shut the fuck up,” I told him.

He just stared at me, eyes simmering with hate. “Think you’re something all special, eh boy? You ain’t shit.” To prove that, he spit. “You…you and these animals…y’all don’t know what yer in for. No sir, y’all ain’t got a clue. But I know. Yes sir, I know.”

Texas Slim was kneeling next to him. “So why don’t you elaborate, kind sir.”

“Hell he say?” the old man wanted to know.

“He wants to know what we’re in for,” I said.

The old man laughed with a bitter, resentful sound. “Idiots…y’all don’t know, do you? Ha! This town ain’t gonna be nothing but a boneyard come tonight or tomorrow or the next day! It’s coming for all of us! Coming out of the east, yes sir! And there’s those here that want it to come! You see all them sick ones? They been pouring in for weeks! For weeks! Some have died, but others is hanging in just so they can see it! Look it in the face when it comes home to roost!”

“Look what in the face?” Mickey asked him.

The old man offered her a grin of brown, rotten teeth. “The Devil,” he said. “The Devil.”

Everyone bristled at this, but none of them were surprised. I had talked with them about it and they had not needed my words. For inside, they knew just as I knew.

Mickey came over and wiped some dirt from my cheek. You should have seen how she did it. She licked her fingertip and then drew it real slow over my skin.

Mickey wanted me and I suppose I wanted her again, too. I mean, really, how could a guy not want Mickey? She was a pin-up girl, a centerfold. She had the tits and the ass and the legs, was darkly pretty and seductive. You could just imagine how many guys had whacked off over pictures of her in magazines. Yeah, she was hot. So hot a picture of her in your pocket would have burned a hole in your pants and started a brushfire in your crotch.

But the truth was, she scared me.

She really did.

While Janie turned her head when I called up The Shape and it took its sacrifice, Mickey liked to watch. She really liked to watch. Death and violence got her off. Maybe it always had or maybe it was something the end of civilization had unlocked in her. I didn’t know, but I did know that she had some seriously scary psychosexual issues. She liked to watch The Shape take its offerings of meat and blood. She liked shooting people. She liked looking at the aftermath of bodies and shattered anatomies. And right then? Looking down at those dead teen-agers? She was getting off. If we weren’t there, she would probably have masturbated. Her nipples were standing hard against her t-shirt and I was willing to bet that if I slipped my hand down the front of her cut-offs, I could have slid two fingers into her without much trouble.

She was looking from the bodies to me, the hunger all over her. She looked like she wanted to take a bite out of something or have something take a bite out of her.

Janie was watching this, of course.

I caught her eyes once and quickly looked away. Something in them made me wither. I had slept with both girls now, Janie repeatedly.

Trust me, it was no notch on my belt. Because it was always there in the back of my mind, that dread question of what I would have to do if either of them became pregnant. Because if the stories were true, babies always became like the Children and usually right away. Monsters. They came right out of the womb like that, literally burning their way out and killing their mothers in the process.

Could I let Janie or Mickey suffer like that?

And better, would I have the balls to put them down if and when it happened?

 

9

The Hatchet Clans came not thirty minutes later.

Just when you think things can’t much worse, they usually do.

I decided to let the old man and the girl go. We didn’t need them and I was pretty sure they didn’t need us. I didn’t know what to do with the old man. I did my best splinting his leg. He looked like he wanted to tear my throat out the entire time.

Carl cut them loose and the girl ran off. The old man looked at us one last time, spit at my feet, and out the door he went, hobbling off with a broken broomstick for a crutch. He looked almost casually at the corpses of his posse and then went on his way. He didn’t make it half a block before he screamed.

Carl and I were just dragging Morse’s corpse out the door…and I saw three Clansmen hacking on the old guy. Scouts. That meant the main body was coming. I got back inside and told the others to hide. And just in time. For rolling down the streets like a storm, the main body was coming. Screaming, breaking windows, they had arrived.

I watched them storm past the front of the diner in their filthy, ragged olive drab overcoats and gas masks, scalp locks greased, axes and pikes, chains and clubs in their hands. Several carried decapitated human heads. They swung them by the hair. They found the bodies of Morse and the teenagers and set on them in a pack, more pressing in all the time like swarms of insects. They scalped the teenagers. They eviscerated them, dismembered them. They took Morse’s head with them.

We were in unbelievable danger.

If it came to it, we could kill quite a few, but I knew that in the end they’d overwhelm us with sheer numbers. They mulled about for about an hour, marching around and hissing to one another through their masks. None of them came into the diner. I figured that was a real spot of luck.

I thought we were going to make it.

Then twenty of them charged. They weren’t as stupid as I thought. They knew where we were and they played us, let us relax, let our guard go down slightly—because with the Clans in the street it never went down completely—then they attacked.

We killed at least ten of them, ducked into the back room and went out the rear door into the alley. Right into a nest of those assholes. We started shooting and dropped quite a few, but it was close-quarters combat and they came from every direction.

I saw Carl go down beneath a tangle of five or six of them.

And Texas Slim shouted: “Nash! On your left!”

I turned and shot another that was bearing down on me with an axe. And then Texas knocked me to the pavement and took a spear in the belly for it. He’d saved my life but sacrificed his own. They kicked my rifle away and beat me down with clubs. They had Texas down. He was screaming as he was jabbed repeatedly with five or six spears.

I fought to my feet and something collided with the back of my head. The last thing I saw was them hacking on Texas and Janie being dragged away down the alley.

 

10

I remember coming awake to the sound of my own voice: “Janie? Janie? Janie…where are you, Janie?”

I blinked and blinked again. Finally my eyes opened, focused, and I saw the Hatchet Clans. We had been taken to some kind of encampment outside town. In the distance I saw those crucified mummies up on the crosses. There were fires burning, canvas tents pitched. I was tied to a post driven in the ground. Mickey was to one side of me and Janie was to the other. Both of them were unconscious. They were still dressed, so I supposed they hadn’t been raped or tortured yet.

But that was coming.

Because that’s what the Clans did with women. With men, they generally killed them outright. But maybe they had a special purpose for me. Maybe they would make a grand spectacle of my death.

For the time being, we were of no interest to them.

I watched them sharpen axes and spears, fashion weapons from slats of wood and lengths of iron. If they had voices, real voices, I never heard them, just that indecipherable hissing. Now and again they’d make ratlike squealing sounds as a fight broke out between individuals. And when they fought, trust me, they fought to the death.

I watched a couple of them—women, I thought—threading things onto a length of metal bailing wire. Human heads. Five or six of them. They jabbed the wire into the ear and pushed it right through and out the other ear. Then they tied off the wire between two green tree limbs jabbed into the ground.

One of the heads belonged to Carl.

 

11

I must have went out cold again because when I awoke, two of the Clansmen were standing right before me and I could smell the hot stink of raw meat, filth, and urine coming from them. One had a knife and he cut me free. Numb, I pitched straight forward like a tree into the grass. Blinking in the hazy sunlight, I looked up at those gas masks on their faces. I knew the subhuman things that were beneath them.

They hissed something at me.

And when I didn’t understand, one of them kicked me.

I wanted them to kill me. It was the best I could hope for. I didn’t want to see what they did to the girls. Texas and Carl were dead. I was having trouble wrapping my brain around that. Because with their deaths, in a way, everything had died. The core of my posse was gone. My connections were severed. Because Texas and Carl connected me to Sean who connected me to Specs who connected me to Youngstown and Shelly and my life. And now it was gone. I had no center.

“Fuck you,” I said at the Clansmen which is what stupid, thick-headed idiots like me always say when we know we’re the ones who are fucked.

They said something in their garbled voices.

Then I heard thunder. Or what I thought was thunder. But it wasn’t thunder at all. Because it came again, a lot closer: a shrieking explosion that vaporized five or six Clansmen, scattering pieces of their anatomy in every direction. Another round hit. Another and another. I could smell fire and smoke and blood.

The encampment was under siege.

The Hatchet Clans were scurrying around madly. I heard the reports of automatic weapons. I saw Clansmen fall beneath volleys of bullets. Through clouds of twisting smoke and around blazing tents I saw the raiders step into view: forms in shiny plastic orange suits with helmets on. There were faces behind the darkened plastic helmet bubbles and air lines leading from the mouthpieces to tanks on their backs. They were completely enclosed. They carried stout, short-bodied submachine guns in their hands.

I remember thinking: Those are Hazmat suits, biocontainment suits. The kind of suits people like Price wore when they worked with hot agents. Space suits. That’s what Price called them.

This was a fucking biocontainment team.

The Hatchet Clans were outnumbered, out gunned.

They died in numbers. I could hear Janie and Mickey shouting out. I scrambled over the ground, found a dying Clansman and took his machete. He grabbed my leg, snarling at me. I brought the machete down on him again and again. I didn’t stop until the blade was gored with blood and he stopped moving.

And when I turned back to race to the girls, two men were standing there in their orange space suits. I could not see their faces through the visors. I could only hear the sound of their respirators hissing in and hissing out. They had their guns aimed right at me—H & K machine pistols, I thought, the kind counterterrorist units used. They did not lower them.

Speaking through an external speaker with a modulated, artificial voice, a man said: “Drop your weapon please.”

I was overwrought, I suppose. My life had disintegrated in the last twenty-four hours. I wanted blood. I wanted payback. I wanted some sweet, clean revenge. I suppose I must have looked dangerous with a bloody machete upraised to attack. “But my friends…they fucking killed my friends…” I said.

“They’re dead now, the Clans are dead,” the voice told me. “They can’t hurt you anymore.”

I could hear an occasional report of a submachine gun as the Hatchet Clans were mopped up. Soon, I didn’t even hear that. There was only silence. The murmuring sound of voices coming through speakers.

I dropped the machete.

They did not lower their weapons. A couple others cut Janie and Mickey loose. They came over to me, eyes despairing and full of questions.

“Come with us,” the man said.

“What do you want? We haven’t done anything,” I told him. “Where are you taking us?”

“To the place you wanted to go,” he said. “And tonight…tonight you will meet that which you have been running from.”

I felt a chill run up my spine. We had been rescued, yes, but I had a nasty feeling we were about to be given to something far worse. After all the selecting I had done, I had the nastiest feeling that it was I who had just been selected.

“What the hell is this?” Mickey said to me.

But I didn’t have a fucking clue.

 

12

Of course, I did. In a way I did.

This is exactly what bathrobe guy had been talking about that day in Gary: They came in silver buses. I saw ‘em. They had orange suits on. They took Reverend Bob and threw him in the bus. I remembered how intrigued Price had been when we related the story to him after the silver bus hit us in Des Moines. He knew what it meant. Even then he knew exactly what it had meant.

Janie, Mickey, and I were taken in a sliver, windowless bus out to an Army base beyond Bitter Creek. This was The Creek. It sat behind a high chainlink fence, actually a series of them with dog runs between, a collection of low white fabricated buildings attached to a larger brick complex. Numerous outbuildings were scattered about. The signs were everywhere: U.S. GOVERNMENT PROPERTY ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE. And my favorite: DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED.

We were taken into one of the buildings at gunpoint. Inside, it was clean with electric lights. I even saw operating computers. It was like going back in time a couple years. For in this complex, the old world was still operating, smoothly, efficiently. We saw other forms in orange space suits mulling about. Many of them stopped what they were doing when they saw us. Several backed away like they were afraid of us.

“I demand to know what this is about,” Janie said. “We haven’t done a damn thing. What do you want with us?”

Her question went unanswered. This was a military operation, it seemed. We’d get answers if and when they decided to give them to us. We were ushered through a series of hissing airlocks that had to be opened with plastic ID cards. There were guards with guns behind every one. We went through two more airlocks, the signs announced BIOSAFETY LEVEL ZERO and then BIOSAFETY LEVEL 2. Each time the door slid open, I could feel the difference in air pressure. It was like you were being sucked into the room. It was what Price had been talking about: negative air pressure. At Level 2 we were bathed in blue ultraviolet light. Next, we climbed into an elevator and went down quite a ways. When we climbed out a sign said BIOSAFETY LEVEL 3: STAGING AREA. There were signs around that read: DECON. Which I think referred to the chemical showers you had to go through before going in and particularly when you came out.

We passed through Level 3 and then we reached the big, bad one that price had told me about. There was a stainless steel door before us and just the sight of it made my guts crawl up into my chest:

 

EXTREME CAUTION

BIOHAZARD

 

We went through another airlock and into an anteroom with more Decon showers, ultraviolet light sterilizers, and hoses that sprayed chemicals—judging from the signs—on you with the touch of a button.

Janie, Mickey, and I pretty much stuck together. We felt like monkeys going into a test chamber and that’s exactly what we were. We were terrified. More figures in orange suits waited for us. Several had blue suits on with airlines hooked to overhead pumps that moved as they did, sliding on tracks. All we could hear was the hissing sounds of respirators.

They echoed and echoed until it sounded like you were living in an iron lung.

The walls were gray, hoses hanging from the ceiling. Every corner and crack and crevice were caulked thickly with some kind of goo, probably to keep anything from slipping out. There was a series of rooms leading off the first as we were led deeper into the maze. I saw labs and animal containment areas lined with cages. We were brought into a small room with three plastic contour chairs against the wall, each separated by about five feet so you could not hold the hand of or touch the person next to you.

We were told to sit and we did.

We didn’t even dare move.

Two figures with submachine guns watched over us. Then the third one who’d led us in motioned to them and all three left. A clear plexiglass door slid shut and locked into place.

Janie and I exchanged looks of absolute dread. We smiled thinly at each other, but there wasn’t much hope. We knew we were screwed.

“We know about it. We know about your sacrifices to your pagan god. Very well. Make your selection…which of the females goes with you and which stays here?”

It was pointless to argue. I suggested taking me, but that wouldn’t do either, I was informed. Only two of us would see the Medusa, the third would stay behind.

“Nash!” Mickey cried, “Jesus Christ, what are you doing? Are you out of your fucking mind, you sonofabitch? I belong with you! You know I do—”

Two more guards came in, they took hold of Mickey and held her down. She fought. She screamed. She clawed. But in the end, the man took a syringe with a long needle from the black box and jabbed it into her throat, depressing the plunger. Shocked and shaking, Mickey was put back in her seat. Her face was wet with tears.

“This is fucking crazy!” I shouted. “We’ve done nothing! We’re no threat to you! We’re not fucking infected! Take us somewhere! Anywhere! Put us in quarantine together! Just get us out of this fucking lab!”

The man was unmoved by anything I said. It meant nothing to him. He stood there like some kind of fucked-up automaton from a B-movie, just staring at me through his visor. Now and then, through the darkened bubble, I could catch a glimpse of a face in there. But I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t see his eyes and they were what I most wanted to make contact with.

The man and his guards stepped to the door. It slid open behind them. “On the contrary,” he said. “Your friend has just been injected with a mutated, lethally hot strain of the Ebola-X virus. As we speak, her system is being flooded with millions of viral particles.”

The door slid closed.

This was my hell, my pay-off. All that selecting and sacrificing had led here, down a very dark path to this awful moment of betrayal. I felt dead inside, used-up, hopeless. It took some time before I could even look at Mickey, at the broken deceived thing she now was. Her gaze was enough to make me want to put a gun in my mouth.

“You’ll pay for this, Nash,” she promised me. “In the end, you’ll suffer like I did. You’ll die horribly and you’ll die alone.”

 

13

Within thirty minutes it began.

Janie and I wanted nothing better than to comfort Mickey, ease her mind somehow, make her realize that she was our friend and we stood by her regardless of what had happened…but we couldn’t. She was infected with Ebola-X and we didn’t dare come into contact with her. Not that it would have mattered. Mickey hated both of us. She wanted us, and particularly me, to know agony.

Within minutes, the real Mickey was…gone.

That shocked look in her eyes, she just sat there shaking. She did not respond to anything we said. It was like she had not just been shot up with Ebola, but with some sort of sedative.

We kept calling her name, trying to snap her out of it, but she did not seem to realize we were there.

And then, like I said, within thirty minutes it began.

She went limp in her chair, head lolling to one side, limbs dangling. She was still shaking and as we watched she began to convulse violently, these little broken agonized sounds coming from her throat. Her eyes slid shut. Sweat ran down her face and you could smell the hot stink of it as her fever spiked. Her entire system was under attack. It was devastating.

She sat there, slumped in that chair for a time, not moving or making any sound, then the convulsions began anew. Blood began to run from both nostrils. Her lips peeled back from teeth that were red-stained. A mist of blood came from her mouth. She jerked upright, hands gripping the arms of her chair. Then her eyes snapped open and they were a brilliant, translucent red.

Janie cried out.

It wasn’t so much like Mickey was infected by Ebola-X, but literally possessed by it.

She tore at herself, tearing at her skin with her nails. She ripped her shirt open and her breasts and belly were contused with rising sores. She yanked out locks of hair from her head. She screamed with a deranged shrieking sound.

It took her with amazing speed.

Her face—so pretty, so darkly sensual—began to contort like the muscles beneath it were no longer working in conjunction but fighting against one another. The left side began to sag, the right side twisted up in some grim corpse-like rictus. In classic Ebola this was due to brain damage, soft tissue destruction and the dissolution of connective tissues…but with this mutated form of X, I began to suspect it was something even worse.

Her flesh popped with red sores, it went from that lovely olive hue to one that was discolored, mottled, set with livid contusions that seemed to spread out as we watched. Blisters bulged on her face, her legs, from one breast. They popped open, spewing drainage. And as each one popped, dozens more took their place until her face was unrecognizable, just a twisted mask of jellied flesh. Then she began to bleed. It came out of her eyes and mouth, trickled from her ears and bubbled from her pores. She fell to her knees, vomiting out profuse amounts of tarry black blood and poisoned bile.

She let out one last agonized scream.

She gyrated on the floor, head thrashing wildly from side to side and tossing loops of blood over the floor, up the walls, onto the clear plexiglass door where they ran like rain drops. She squirmed face down on the floor, moving with such wild contortions that she seemed practically boneless. Then she rose up on her knees straight as a post and threw herself at the door, striking it with her face and hands, making splatting sounds, and sliding down the glass leaving a greasy smear of blood and macerated tissue.

She trembled and went still, seemed to deflate as if the air was let out of her.

Long before any of that happened, Janie and I were clutching each other, pressed into the corner.

“Why don’t they take her away, Nash?” Janie wanted to know. “Why don’t they just take her away?”

I didn’t know. The room was a slaughterhouse of blood and leaking fluids. The stench of drainage, blood, and infection was hot and nauseating.

Easily a half an hour later, Mickey began to move.

Her corpse began to tremble.

She had to be dead. She had crashed and bled out, the virus burning through her. Then she sat up, her back to us, staring out the plexiglass door through the mess she had made on it.

“Mickey?” I said.

She stood up painfully and turned to look upon us. Her black hair was greasy with blood, filthy plaits of it hanging over her face which was bulging, distorted, like hot wax that had cooled too quickly, settling into all the wrong places. One eye was sealed shut in a web of tissue, the other was huge, bulging from its raw socket like a bleeding, raw egg yolk. Her lips were sealed shut with strings of flesh on the left side of her mouth, but on the right the lips had sunk away, leaving a grin of gums and teeth.

“Nash,” she said and it sounded like her throat was filled with wet leaves. “Do you wanna fuck me again?”

Janie cried out and I think I did, too. I held her tight against me as terror filled both of us. I looked upon Mickey, the abomination she had become, and I was literally speechless. It felt like the inside of my mouth had been sprayed with oil. I could not seem to get my tongue to work to form words.

Mickey came forward, pus dribbling from holes in her face. She gripped one breast in her bloody hand and squeezed it. It was the most obscene thing I’ve ever seen. Because when she squeezed it, it bulged then ruptured open, black juice and liquefied tissue running down her belly.

“What’s the matter, Nash? Ain’t I good enough to fuck?” she said, getting so close that the heat and stink coming off her made me retch with dry heaves. “Ain’t I hot enough? Ain’t I? Ain’t I? Ain’t I?”

God only knows what might have happened next.

But the door slid open and two men in orange suits led her out of the room. She went willingly with them, sensing that she was now part of them and not part of us. They had an orange suit for her. She stepped into it. Rubberized boots went over her feet. A helmet went over her head. The respirator was turned on. I could hear the hollowing hissing of her breathing.

Faceless as the others, she walked off with them.

That was the last I saw of Mickey.

There was no doubt what was going on by that point. There could be no doubt. I could hear Price’s voice in the back of my head: You see, Nash, when a hot virus infects its host, what it’s trying to do, essentially, is to convert that host into virus. But he had said complete, successful conversion was impossible. But he’d been wrong because that’s what was happening here…beneath those orange and blue spacesuits there were no people, no healthy organisms of ordinary flesh and blood, but walking, functioning, thinking masses of hot virus, viral imitations of human beings and nothing more.

They had nothing to do with Janie or I.

They were in league with The Medusa and they were waiting for it to come, their savior, their prophet, a new god for a seriously warped new world.

Janie and I had not been assimilated yet. That made us dangerous. That’s why those figures in the spacesuits had backed away from us when we entered the complex: it had been revulsion and fear. Fear of infection. Fear of contamination. For they feared healthy, normal bodies with their active compliments of antibodies as much as we feared Ebola.

Janie and I were nothing but disease masses now, infections to be eradicated. We were the abnormal ones.

After a time, two forms in orange suits returned. One of them carried the black box.

“It’s time,” the one with the box said.

“Don’t do that to us,” I said. “Please. Just kill us. Destroy us. Don’t shoot us with that virus.”

“We’re not going to do anything to you,” the man said. “When you are converted, it will be she who touches, she who welcomes you into the fold.”

He was talking about The Medusa.

“Please,” Janie, said, tears running down her face. “Don’t hurt us. Don’t hurt us.” She put her hands to her belly. “You can’t. I’m pregnant.”

 

14

Three hours later, I was still reeling from that one.

But it all made sense when I finally calmed down and was able to look at it with some kind of perspective. Janie had been strange and moody for some time now, even worse than usual, and that had less to do with me being with Mickey than with something much larger than all that. She told me knew since Gary. When we were in that pharmacy after the Hatchet Clan attack and after those birds fed on the Clans, she had slipped off and gotten a pregnancy test. One of those home jobs where you just read the strip. I remember her disappearing that day. Then coming back with that funny look in her eyes.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I said.

“What would the point have been, Rick? What would it have changed?”

“I had the right to know.”

“Maybe you did. Maybe you didn’t.”

The men in the space suits took us out of the complex by gun point and led us off into the fields and brought us to a hilltop. You could see for miles from our vantage point. And what I saw was a little valley spread beneath us and it was filled with people. The same sort of people we had run into in Bitter Creek: the diseased, the dying, the suffering. That crazy old man had said they had been congregating in the town for some time and for a particular reason.

It’s coming for all of us! Coming out of the east, yes sir! And there’s those here that want it to come! You see all them sick ones? They been pouring in for weeks! For weeks! Some have died, but others is hanging in just so they can see it! Look it in the face when it comes home to roost!

That’s what he had said and now I was seeing them, thousands upon thousands of them crowded together beneath us, a hot wind of pestilence blowing off them as they waited in the seepage of their wastes and drainage. They were moaning and chanting, holding leprous fingers up to the sky, watching for the coming of their god with ulcerated faces and eyes filled with blood.

Dozens of men in spacesuits with submachine guns ringed the bottom of the hill in all directions. Dozens more waited at the fringe of the crowd below. There would be no escape for Janie and I. None whatsoever. At least, that’s what they thought. But I had already decided that a swift charge at them would make them open up on us, cut us down out of sheer terror. Because they were afraid of us.

Dying beneath a hail of bullets was better than the alternative.

“When will it happen, Rick?” Janie asked.

“Soon,” I said.

And it would be soon because there was a spreading stain of gray rising up at the horizon and I knew it was The Medusa, darkening the land as it…or she…came.

I sat there, holding Janie’s hand like we were a couple lovers waiting for the fireworks to begin on the Fourth of July. I drew off a cigarette, wishing I had a cold beer to go with it. Wishing for a lot of things, I guess. What vexed me was that even though I understood much of what was going on now, I still did not understand my part in it or, more precisely, The Shape’s part in it. Why did it want us here? What was so fucking important about all this that it kept pushing us west?

What did it want here?

What did it need here?

I had to know, somehow I had to know. I closed my eyes to the mulling crowds below and shut my ears to their fevered cries. I concentrated on that sphere of darkness. This time I did not call it up. I communed with it.

 

15

Right away a wave of blackness rolled through my brain. My mind was uplinked with that of The Shape and The Shape was letting my mind reach out beyond until I could sense The Medusa out there. I could feel a horrible crawling in my head as if thousands of worms had infested my brain, tunneling, digging deeper, breeding and brooding, their hot, moist eggs bursting with millions of writhing larval young.

I screamed.

In my mind I screamed.

For this was The Medusa, what it was: an invasive life force of infestation and pestilence and charnel horror. Not worms, not really, but exploding particles of virus.

The Medusa’s voice was in my head, a dry and snakelike hissing.

I could smell millions of slimy corpses rotting, bursting with gas and worms, greening with putrescence. It was a crypt smell, a stench of fuming corpse ovens, of carrion boiling with maggots, of viral infestation. Of cities heaped with the dead and plucked white bones piled like ramparts up into the sky.

The voice hissed and the worms dug deeper and I felt my mind implode like thunder, as The Medusa enveloped it in a black, pestile cloud of corruption, invading my mind as its children must invade cells: sliding tendrils through membranes, draining them dry, bloating them with a hideous viral pregnancy like millions of eggs hot and juicy that would erupt with seeking death—

 

16

Janie shook me out of it and I was thankful for that because I don’t know if I would ever have come out of it on my own. My eyes opened and I saw that creeping shadow closing in on the valley. I saw the faithful cheer and heard them scream with delight or terror and perhaps both. The Medusa spread across the earth like a fire storm destroying everything in its path.

I had felt it in my mind and I had seen it in my dreams and now I saw its physical reality as everyone in the valley did.

A spreading gray shadow that was blank and formless, as far as the eye could see: lifeless, hollow, a vapor of dead alien plains. Then…fragmenting, swelling and bursting, slitting open like some immense birth canal in an undulant mass of white and worming tendrils that reached for miles, reached right up to stars themselves as the world became carrion threaded by a million-billion hungry corpse worms. The tendrils split apart into more webbing tendrils and filaments and snaking ropes of slime that were viscidly alive.

And beyond it, rising like the cold marble graveyard face of the moon was The Medusa itself: an elongated, mutating, ever-changing firmament of gaseous malevolence. An elongated face like a dead-white moldering corpuscle, flaking and fragmenting in the hot cemetery wind of plague breath and swirling bone dust. A living pestilence of viral matter with a mind of gnawing starvation and immense black tunnels for eyes that reflected the tenebrous glare of shadowy sterile worlds and the dripping voids between the stars.

The faithful began to scream.

They had waited for her, dreamed of her in their bacterial delirium and she had come. Now they sat at her table not as guests but as food and she looked down upon her gathered offerings with a sawtoothed, contorted, cadaverous grin of plague pits, her eyes pulsating with evil color, verminous yellow wastes kissed by cold flames of fever.

Shrouds kissed by stillborn winds, rustling like graveyard rats in subterranean tombs, she unraveled herself, taking what was offered, taking her sacrificial lambs.

I watched them scream as she settled over them, one by one popping like overripe pumpkins and rotten gourds, their blood and tissue and disease meat vaporized and sucked up into the chaotic maelstrom that was The Medusa. She left nothing but smoldering bones in her wake as she moved across the valley taking what was hers and hers alone.

Janie screamed as we felt that hot wind blow up at us like a breath from a crematory oven. She screamed. She fought in my grip. She went absolutely hysterical as I held onto her feeling numb and emptied by the sight of this haunter of the dark.

She grabbed my face. She kissed it again and again. “If you love me,” she cried. “Don’t let her take me! For the love of our unborn child and the love I have for you, don’t let it end this way! Call it! Nash…call The Shape…”

Revelation.

This is what made it push us here, prod us ever westward. Yes, it wanted to keep me and mine out of the path of The Medusa. But that was only part of it. The Shape did not love us. It was not some caring, compassionate father figure protecting its children. It did not know love. It did not understand loyalty or devotion or even the need to protect life itself: it knew only hunger and here was the ultimate feast that it had known was coming all the time. This table had been set a long time ago and now it was filled with food just as The Medusa herself was a banquet of life force.

I kissed Janie as that wind grew hotter and held her beautiful face in my hands one last time, then I called up The Shape. I peered into that sphere of darkness, that zone of blackness which was a conduit to it and maybe its own black little beating heart.

I summoned it.

And it came.

Something shifted around us, the air was filled with a thrumming energetic vitality. It went heavy, crackled with static electricity. There was a sudden thrumming sound and an overpowering stink of ozone.

The Shape rose up out of the ether, a whirlwind of shrieking matter, black and buzzing, angry and spinning. A writhing, energized cloud of radioactive dust and debris and force. An elemental field of sentient electrons, wrath and destruction and appetite and I could feel the raw force coming off of it. A stink blew off of it like fused wiring and melting steel, cordite and the breath from foundry ovens.

The Medusa was a relentless, unstoppable machine of death, but The Shape was a sentient, living thermonuclear furnace.

It rose up high as two story building.

It paused there, sparkling with flecks of luminosity and arcs of electricity. Two leering red eyes looked out from that storm of atomic refuse. The noise it created…like screeching metal and hurricane winds and bubbling cauldrons…was so loud you had to shout over the top of it.

“Take them! Take them all! Take everything that’s yours!” I screamed at it.

When it moved, that buzzing sound rose and its body envelope began to spin faster. It was doing that now as it came in my direction. At the last moment, I could feel the blazing, cremating heat of the thing and it was like standing too near a smelter full of molten steel. The Shape was still thirty feet from me at the bottom of the hill, but close enough to bake my skin and singe my eyebrows. I collapsed at that very moment. But at least I knew something…I knew what it had been like for those others, I knew the horror they must have felt as they were scalded and incinerated, kissed to ash and embers by that abomination.

The Shape did not want me, of course. It went right for the men in orange suits. They were vacuumed into that living kiln, that living nuclear reactor.

When The Shape takes them, it takes them fast.

They were sucked in, absorbed and leeched and disintegrated, dissolved and vomited out the other side. When they were pulled in, The Shape lit up like phosphorus, like blazing witch-light. You couldn’t see much when they were assimilated by the thing, but if you didn’t look away, you could catch a few glimpses. Sometimes they flew apart like meat in a vacuum chamber and you saw blood and tissue, limbs and organs and I don’t know what spinning into that seething radioactive tornado. I think it actually took them apart at the subatomic level, particulated them, consuming their electromagnetic fields and the very bonds that held their molecules together. When it had what it wanted—and, believe me, this took about ten seconds—it reassembled them, integrated them, and spewed them out the other side…but never the way they went in. Just smoking, blackened heaps that were often anatomically altered. I’d seen arms growing out of backs and heads jutting from bellies, bodied reversed and rearranged from molecular dispersal and realignment. And sometimes, when The Shape took two or more at once, they came out like what we were seeing: a steaming and sparking clot of melted wax with bones thrusting out in every which direction. The figures in the space suits had had their atoms mixed like the fly and the scientist in that old movie. The mass they had been reduced to cooled fairly rapidly and we could see that they had all been fused into one, like plastic army men heated and squished into a whole.

It was sickening and repulsive.

Then The Shape took the faithful that The Medusa had not yet reached.

They were pulled in and disassembled, changed and slapped back together, spit out into a fused and burning mass.

Janie stood up and watched it. I stood by her. We held each other as The Shape moved at The Medusa. I never loved her more than I did at that moment. I loved her so much it squeezed tears from eyes knowing that I had betrayed her in so many ways.

In my ear she said, “Our child can never be born, Rick. You know what it would become. What they all are.”

Then she kissed me and ran off down the hill.

I went after her, but not fast enough.

She dove right into that whirlwind of devastation, that thing born of breeder reactors and atomic cremators, that living chain reaction of thermonuclear waste.

I screamed when she came out the other end…smoking and sizzling and mutilated.

There was nothing I could do but dive in myself, but The Shape was moving too fast now, gaining speed for its collision with The Medusa. I scrambled back up the hill and ran as fast as I could, rolling down the other side and into a leaf-filled ditch.

I didn’t see The Shape collide with The Medusa, but I heard the explosion. The detonation of two fields of energy colliding. The world went up like an exploding sun, a blinding blue-white flash of light that blinded me and a thundering eruption that shook the earth, leveled the hill and nearly buried me alive in soil, rocks, and debris.

That was it.

When I dug myself free finally, there was no one and there was nothing. The world was a void of steam and smoke and gradually diminishing heat. As it cleared I saw the valley had become part of a greater pit that stretched for miles, blackened and smoldering. Every tree as far as I could see had been blasted to a stump. Hillsides were flattened. Like I said, a void.

I looked into my mind for that sphere of darkness but it was gone. Just gone.

I was alone.

Absolutely alone.

 

17

Back in high school, as you recall, I read a story in a science fiction anthology and the writer began it by relating the shortest horror story in the world:

The last man on earth sat alone in a room.

There was a knock at the door.

For two weeks now I’ve been thinking about that story as I sit alone in this room dictating the events that you have just heard on a digital voice recorder I swiped from the complex. For two weeks I’ve been here in this little house that sits on the edge of the abyss created by the collision of The Shape and The Medusa, which is the borderland between today and tomorrow and perhaps yesterday.

Everyone is dead.

I can’t know that for sure, of course, but in my heart I feel that it is true. There are still birds in the sky and things that scurry in the woods. Three nights ago I heard a wolf howl on around midnight and it was the most lonesome, haunting sound I have ever heard. So there is life out there, but none of it is human.

Writing this down has been a great joy for me, a greater horror, and the greatest pain I have ever known.

I’ve had to admit things about myself, look at my life from a bird’s eye view and what I saw has not been pleasant. I only relate what happened and now, as they say, my tale is told. Two days ago red spots started popping on my skin. I am weak. My joints ache. This morning my nose began to bleed.

Mickey has her revenge.

Her curse is complete.

It will be done in twenty-four hours, I think, as I can feel it escalating. Speech begins to get difficult. How I contracted Ebola-X two weeks after the last vectors were destroyed in that atomic firestorm of the collision, I do not know. My Geiger Counter told me that the area was saturated with radiation for three days before dropping back to the high end of near-normal. Radiation sickness I could understand…but this, well, it makes me believe in Karma, it makes me believe that I’m paying for the lives I took.

It makes me believe that Mickey’s curse was the real thing.

I’m ending this recording now. I doubt if anyone will ever listen to it because, let’s face it, there’s no one left to listen to it. I will lay down now in my deathbed and wait for it while I dream of my beautiful wife and remember my friends, remember Sean and Carl and Specs and Texas and Mickey. And particularly Janie and the love we shared, the child we made that was never to be born.

The last man on earth sat alone in a room.

There was a knock at the door.

It was Death…

 

 

 

--The End--