BIOHAZARD (19 page)

There were survivors out there that thought the Children were ghosts or ghouls, supernatural things that crept out by night to feed. That wasn’t true, of course, but you could hardly blame anyone for thinking it. For it was really hard to imagine anything as scary as the Children. Radioactive fallout was part of life here in the new spooky world. You had to live with it and learn how to detect it, what places were hot and how to avoid them.

But the Children made that difficult.

Because they were, essentially, fallout and fallout that was cunning and evil. Fallout that hunted its victims.

I figured they did it for a reason. Maybe they absorbed something from people, something they needed. It was hard to say, but it had to be
something.
I knew they were not supernatural even though sometimes they acted that way and they
did
only come out at night. They were not flesh and blood as we understood flesh and blood, but a
different
sort of flesh and blood. Something completely alien right down to their blazing hot subatomics.

But they could be killed.

If you put a bullet in them, they’d literally burn up like atomic piles right in front of you. I suppose if you stuck a spear in them the same thing would happen, but if you got that close you’d fry.

So bullets worked best.

The smart thing was to avoid them, to hide out by night and stay off the streets. That was your best bet. I had no idea where they laired themselves for the daylight hours and I honestly didn’t want to know. In the back of my mind, I always envisioned them stretched out like the undead in reactor cores. Nobody really knew.

These days, everyone was afraid of kids because all kids became
Children.
It was rumored that they were coming right out of the womb like that and pregnant women were being killed on sight by gangs to avoid any more Children being born.

It didn’t bode well for humanity’s future given that the next generation were hideous mutations.

Extinction was only a matter of time.

3

We took time to reload when we were an easy block away, darting beneath an old oak and planting ourselves in its shadows. We caught our breath. Had a drink of water from our bottles. The Geiger was reading forty micro-roentgens which was strictly background radiation. That was pretty normal. Before the war, background rad was something like ten to fifteen micro-roents in your average American city. Now twenty was the low end and fifty to sixty being the high end…of course, that didn’t take into account places like LA that had taken direct hits and were still cooking hot.

But I didn’t like that. The Children were out there, they would find us again. I had hoped that they wouldn’t be in this town, but they were here like everywhere else. No, another house wasn’t an option. It had to be something different.

“Hear that?” Texas Slim said. “That’s not coyotes.”

I heard it all right: the telltale baying of dogs echoing out through the shadow-carved town. Children. Dog packs. Jesus. South Bend was no different than every other town. I supposed they were all like that now, maybe some even worse.

The night was warm, but not unpleasantly so. Just the sort of night you might have spent out on the front porch with a cold beer in your hand in the old days. I led them down alleys and streets, through a maze of avenues, and across an empty field.

Downtown.

Main Street. It was a graveyard like every other main street in the world now. Windows broken, buildings half-burned out, the corpses of cars and trucks clogging up the streets. Drifts of sand pushed into doorways. Desolation and nothing but.

The sidewalks were choked with leaves from the past autumn. Nobody was there to sweep them up now. There were things beneath the leaves, probably skeletons, but nobody bothered to look. The windows were all dirty from sandstorms.

We moved past storefronts draped in shadow.

A video store. An insurance office. A café. Several stores with soaped out windows and badly faded going-out-of-business signs. We passed a department store with dusty, cobwebbed Halloween costumes behind the dirty windows, saw yellowed and curled Halloween decorations in the windows of several others. A theater with the lofty title of The Grande Ballroom still had an all-night horror show up on its marquee. Many of the letters were missing, but it looked like it was really going to be some kind of All Hallows hoot with four movies and a couple stage acts.

“See that, Texas?” Carl said. “Halloween horror show. Be like a fucking family reunion for a peckerwood like you.”

“Quiet,” Janie said.

As I saw the marquee, the decorations, the memories weighed down on me. Good God, Halloween. I’d forgotten about that being that every day was fucking Halloween now. The bombs had come down a week or so before Halloween and that was almost a year ago now.

Shit.

We kept going, waiting for something to show its ugly face, but so far nothing had. Janie was right behind me, Texas Slim behind her, and Carl taking up the backdoor with his shotgun.

So many shadows…spilling, pooling, spreading over the streets in tar-like lagoons of night. A light breeze was blowing, leaves skittering about, sand trickling against windows. I led them around a car stalled on the sidewalk, a Chevy. It looked like it had popped the curb and been abandoned there, two of the doors still thrown open. Moonlight flooded it. There was sand and leaves inside. The browned skeleton of a child was curled up on the back seat nearly buried in sand. It still had blonde curls. A girl. Looked like she had gone to sleep, gone peacefully, probably waiting for her mother to come back.

Radiation. Plague. Who could say?

We skirted more wrecks, refusing to look inside them, but always wary of anything moving in them. Nothing did. We came around a dead minivan and there was movement. People.

“Stay back,” I told them, keeping my rifle on them. “Just stay back and we won’t have any trouble.”

But these people were not going to try anything.

We all saw what they were. Four or five of them…a man and a woman and a few kids, a family maybe. They were crouched there, holding onto one another. The stench coming off them was nauseating, like hospital dressings rank with gangrene and drainage. And there was a good reason for that: their faces were lumpy with rising sores, splitting and bleeding. It looked like one of the kids had some kind of growth coming out of his eye. They all breathed with rasping, phlegmy sounds. The man reached out a hand, broke into a fit of coughing, and vomited a dark slick of blood onto the walk.

The family crawled towards us with squishing sounds, but nobody fired. Last thing we wanted was to be blasting blood and fluids into the air. Lot of the germs that had mutated with the fallout were airborne pathogens. These days, it was all collectively known as the
Fever
: a lethal zoo of what military biohazard specialists call “hot agents.” And unfortunately, at this zoo, the cages were wide open and all the creeping beasties were in the air, the water, you name it.

I jogged away and the others followed. Next to the Children, there was nothing scarier than bodies hot with plague.

I ran across the street kicking my way through drifted sand, around a rusting furniture truck, and my luck almost ran out right there. A dog was waiting for me, a big one, in a pool of moonlight. Looked like it might have been a shepherd once, but it was hard to say. Its hide was patchy, threadbare, grotesque pink tumors and open sores rising like bread dough. A dark sap dripped from them.

I went down on my ass to avoid colliding with it.

I crawled away and then the others were with me. The beast was making a low mewling in its throat. Its fur, what there was of it, was sticky and spiky with discharges from its open wounds. It had only one eye, the other consumed in a pulsing pink growth that had burst out of its skull. The entire body was flabby and loose.

It tensed itself to leap and as it vaulted up I fired twice, dropping it to the pavement. One round punched through its chest and the other smashed its head open, cleaving it apart almost perfectly. It lay there, mewling and jerking around, its head waving from side to side on a snaking trunk of a neck that almost looked boneless. Blood spattered the walks.

We got out of there.

I could hear more dogs howling in the distance. I had no idea what I was looking for, but I knew I’d recognize it when I saw it. And then there it was: an Army/Navy store. The door was open, a down of leaves and sand having blown in.

We went inside, clicking on flashlights.

Displays were tipped over, a case of war medals smashed…but other than that, the store was relatively unscathed and that was a real rarity these days. All of which made me think that South Bend must have been hit pretty hard by disease.

4

Good thing was, save for the barking of dogs and the occasional sound of rats running in the streets, nothing at all happened. We found a storeroom in the back and crashed there for the night, sleeping in shifts.

And so the night passed.

When daylight finally came, sweeping the night terrors back into their holes, it turned out that the Army/Navy store was a real windfall. We found another locked storeroom in the basement and it was just full of goodies…once we popped the door with a crowbar. Cartons of military MREs and freeze-dried hiking food, cases of bottled water and packets of water purification tablets. Sleeping bags and flashlights, waterproof raingear and parkas and blankets and first aid equipment. Upstairs there was camo clothing in every size, some of it American and some of it British DPM.

While Janie and I took inventory, Texas Slim and Carl went out hunting a new vehicle. They bickered their way out the door, trying to decide whose mother had entertained more bikers in a single night. I was glad to get rid of them. That shit went on almost constantly, the nipping and arguing and insulting. It was what they did and they enjoyed it, but it got old after awhile.

“
There’s a ton of stuff here, Nash,” Janie said, standing amongst heaps of blankets and clothing and green metal boxes.

“
We’ll just take what we need.”

That was an unwritten rule these days. No sense being a glutton, no sense being a hog, just take what you needed and leave the rest for some other unfortunate soul. I believed in this completely. I knew others did, too. There were always plenty who didn’t, of course, but I truly believed that karma would sort their asses out in the end.

“
What do you think the chances are they’ll get us a decent ride?”

Janie laughed. “Pretty good if they don’t kill each other first.”

“
Ah, they’re pretty tight, I think. They just express their feelings for one another in a strange way.”

“
Let’s go to the storeroom, Nash. I want to show you something.”