BIOHAZARD (10 page)

“I’m over here, you bitch,” Sean said.

The Trog looked at him and I wondered at that moment if she did not recognize him. She let out a shrill, piercing scream that grew in volume, an unearthly wailing that went right through me, scraping along the inside of my skull like a fork. I thought my bladder would let go. I almost fell over Specs. The scream echoed through that deserted building and came right back at us: it was an agonized sound like an animal being put to death.

Then she spoke…or made sounds like speech. I’m not sure. But this is what I heard:
“Yyyyyyoooooouuuuu,”
she hissed with a timber that made everything inside me pull up tight.
“Yyyyyyooooouuuuuu…”

If Sean hadn’t had that shotgun, she would have torn out his throat and washed herself in his blood. She stumbled towards him, blinded, hissing, and very pissed off.

Sean let her get within four feet and then he gave her a round right in the belly. 12-gauge shot at close quarters, it nearly torn her in half. She went down screaming and thrashing. He gave her another right in the chest and she flopped, screeched, and then went still. The stink of her blood was just as bad as her urine.

“That’s how it’s done,” Sean said.

My legs went out from under me and I sat down hard next to Specs who’d already folded up. We sat there, speechless. We thought killing that thing would be enough. But it wasn’t. Not for Sean. He set aside his shotgun, kneeled down by the Trog. He wrapped her hair in his fist and pulled it tight. Then out came his hatchet. With a couple quick strokes, he decapitated her.

He stood up, holding that vile grimacing head by the hair. Blood dripped from the severed neck. “Either you boys want this for your trophy cases?” We just looked dumbly at him. “Didn’t think so.” He opened his potato sack and dropped the head in, tied the sack off at his belt.

I finally found my voice. “What the hell do you want that for?”

“I got my reasons, brother,” he said. “See, Trogs are superstitious, I think. Maybe they believe in ghosts or something. I don’t know. But they don’t care for their own dead or parts of ‘em, for that matter. I was in a pinch one time with three of the fuckers bearing down on me. I only had one round in my gun. What to do? I threw a trophy Trog head at the others and they ran off like the Devil was coming down to fucking Georgia. You should have seen it!”

I was very happy that I hadn’t.

9

There was no way in hell I wanted any part of Trog-hunting. You couldn’t have paid me to go after those monsters. They lived down in the sewers mostly, Sean told me, and I was content to let them stay there. But something happened that changed my mind.

We left the building, got out into the sunshine—Sean had promised us he had an unopened bottle of Jack Daniels back at his apartment and I was all for that—and right away we saw carnage. Scabs. About a dozen of them were lying dead in the streets. Their blood was very bright, very red spilled over the rubble. They had been dismembered, hacked and slit, disemboweled. Their entrails were strewn everywhere. One particular set was hung from a STOP sign. They had all been decapitated, the heads set neatly next to one another on the curb.

“Hell’s going on?” I said.

Sean went down to a low crouch right away like he was back in the Army, a recon scout sneaking through enemy territory. I didn’t know what the hell was going on.

“Who killed ‘em?” Specs wanted to know.

“Shut the hell up, both of you,” Sean told us and meant it.

He moved towards the bodies, eyes scanning the terrain in all directions. He went over to one and pulled something free of an abdomen. It looked like a broken stick. But when he brought it over, I saw it was a spearhead of all things.

“Hatchet Clans,” he said. “Must’ve swept through while we were inside. Get back in the building.”

“I’m not going back in there,” Specs said.

“Then you can die out here, little man,” Sean said. “Because you
will
die. The Clans leave nothing alive when they sweep an area.”

I went back into the building. I decided to err on the side of caution. It was the second time Sean had mentioned these Hatchet Clans. I didn’t know what they were, but if they scared Sean they must have been some real bad boys.

We got inside and Sean told us to stay away from the windows. He stayed by them, watching the streets.

“What are these clans?” Specs asked.

Sean let out a long, low sigh. “They’re fucking dangerous, that’s what,” he said. “Scabs are psychotic, but they’re disorganized. Half the time when there’s no game—people, I mean—they’re killing each other. But the Hatchet Clans are organized into large units. They kill anything they see. Those they don’t kill, they rape, torture, or enslave. You don’t want to fuck with ‘em. They’re…savage, primeval. That’s the best I can do. They don’t use guns. They use axes, spears, hammers…whatever. Let’s put it this way: you ever seen those shows on TV…when there was TV…about army ants marching through the jungle and fucking devastating everything in their path? That’s what the Hatchet Clans do. They’re raiders for the most part. They like to scalp people, cut trophies off ‘em.”

I had a lot of questions, but I didn’t ask them. I was scared. Specs was, too. Sean was a badass. I didn’t think there was anything he couldn’t handle, but the Clans had him spooked and that was enough for me.

After about ten minutes of silence, he motioned us over. “Look,” he said.

I saw two or three men come over a heap of rubble. They wore filthy old Army overcoats. One of them had a machete. One was carrying a length of chain in his hand. The other had a fireman’s axe balanced atop one shoulder. They were looking around. The most amazing thing was that they had gas masks on like soldiers from the trenches of World War I.

“What are those masks for?” Specs whispered.

Sean shook his head. “Fuck if I know. But they all wear ‘em. Must’ve looted ‘em from an Army depot or a National Guard Armory, Army-Navy surplus or something. I’ve never seen what’s under the masks, but I heard their faces are eaten by some kind of fungi.”

I’d seen and heard enough.

Sean kept watching them. “You see two or three like this, you can bet there’s thirty more. These are scouts. Hate to tell you, brothers, but we’re in some real shit here. They swept through before. Now they’ll start hunting building to building.”

Specs looked at me. His eyes were bulging. “Oh, that’s fucking great. Now what?”

“Calm down,” Sean said. “We best get down in the cellar.”

Specs looked close to a panic attack. “With the Trogs? Are you nuts? I been down there. There’s a hole in the wall. That’s where that Trog came from.”

Sean grinned. “Damn right there’s a hole in the wall. It leads into the sewers. And that’s where we’re going.”

10

Under the circumstances, we didn’t have a choice.

Our helmet lights on, we entered the jagged hole in the wall. I didn’t know if the Trogs tunneled their way out or if it had been hit by a bomb. Regardless, we went into it and emerged in the shadowy labyrinth of the sewers. As far as our lights could see, nothing but a brick tunnel that looked to be crumbling in spots. It was about seven feet in diameter. It was roomy enough, but it was still a sewer. A foot of water washed past us, carrying debris and occasional rat corpses.

“This is nice,” Specs said.

Sean stepped down into the water and we did the same. It was warm. Almost unpleasantly so like standing in a stream of urine.

“This is a main rainwater drain,” he told us. “It cuts for miles under the city. There’s hundreds of lines branching off it. Some like this and some you gotta crawl through on your hands and knees. Okay, let’s go.”

I didn’t even ask him where we were going.

We splashed along, our lights bouncing with each step, huge sliding shadows moving over the tunnel walls. The smell down there was awful. Just dank and polluted, the stink of moist rot and stagnant water, other things I didn’t want to contemplate. Water dripped and bits of masonry fell now and again. We saw huge colonies of corpse-white toadstools that grew from cracks in the tunnel. I swear they were pulsing almost like they were breathing. A fetid mist came off the water.

“How far do we have to go?” Specs asked.

“Quite a bit. At the very least I want to get a good five, six blocks away from here.”

“And how are we gonna know when we’re that far?”

“I’ll know.”

“But—”

“Just shut the fuck up for awhile,” Sean said.

I suppressed a smile. Specs was like that. He got nervous and he’d talk your head right off. It was his way. Pouting, he walked along at my side, casting sidelong looks at me, maybe waiting for me to rise to his defense. I had no intention; what we needed now was quiet.

We came to places where the tunnel was nearly blocked by fallen rubble. Many times it was because of a collapsed building whose blasted cellar had opened right up into the tunnels below. There was moss growing everywhere, some kind of green mildew that was luminous.

We’d gone about a block when we saw our first living rats. They were immense and filthy, eyes lit like red Christmas bulbs. They let us pass, but they kept a tight eye on us.

I kept hearing things behind us. Subtle sounds like scratching. It might have been our echo because everything echoed down there, even our voices. But the farther we went the more certain I was it was no echo.

Finally, Sean stopped. “You hear something?” he said.

“Yeah.”

We all heard it plainly: a scratching and squeaking as of many, many rats. The sound was getting louder. I had dealt with the rats before. They were bad enough when there was only a few, but when they came in numbers you were in trouble.

“Move it,” Sean said.

We hurried down the tunnel which sounds easy in the telling, but splashing through a foot of water gets hard going after awhile. Sean knew his way—or I hoped he did—leading us down side tunnels and then into the mainline again, back and forth until I had no idea where we were. We came to a cave-in and stepped around it into a flooded cellar. There was no building above it; it had been blasted away. The sun sure looked inviting. But there was no way to get up to it. Back into the tunnels, this way and that.

We charged into another offshoot and Sean stopped. “Trog,” he said, then relaxed. “Shit, it’s a dead one.”

It was stuck in a little ell, standing up. It was gray and withered looking, near-mummified. Even its hands were folded over its bosom. A fine plaiting of green mildew grew over it like a caul.

We came into another cellar. It was black in there, the water up to our knees by this point. Dead things were floating in the leaves. Broken beams and shattered sections of concrete rose around us like dock pilings. I saw human bones sticking up out of the water. A ribcage here, a yellowing femur there. The air smelled like blood and meat. I didn’t like it in the least.

We came around a rubble pile and right into a nest of rats.

11

“
Shit,” Sean said, his light playing over them.

We all had our lights on them and our guns. Behind us, I could hear the squeaking and scratching of the rat pack that was tailing us. I started thinking the Hatchet Clans didn’t sound so bad.

“
Kill ‘em!” Specs said.

“
No,” I told him. “Not unless we don’t have a choice. No sense riling them if we don’t have to. You shoot them, they’ll be forced to fight.”