BIOHAZARD (38 page)

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.