“You know what this is, don’t you?” Specs said.
“No, I don’t. But you’re gonna tell me, I’m sure.”
“It’s an omen,” Specs said. “It’s a bad omen, Nash. Real bad.”
And on that point, I believed him.
3
We walked for a good hour. After a time the red was just gone. Either the sun dried it up or it had only rained like that in particular parts of the city. I didn’t know and I really didn’t want to know. So we walked and Specs jabbered on non-stop as was his way. We didn’t see anyone on Cedar Avenue, just desertion and devastation. Why I thought Cleveland would be any better than Youngstown, I did not know.
“Too bad we couldn’t have kept the Caddy,” Specs said. “That was one sweet ride.”
“Sure,” I said, scoping out the streets ahead of us, “one sweet ride with two flat tires and a dead engine.”
“Well, it was sweet. You know it was. Would have been cool to tool around the city in that.”
“Sure, we could’ve picked up some chicks,” I said.
The city was dead. At least what we’d seen of it. Another graveyard. The rusted hulks of abandoned cars were everywhere: at the curbs, pulled up onto sidewalks, flipped over in the roads, smashed-up. I figured someone was around-or had been-because a lot of tires had been scavenged. Most likely for fires. Nothing burned like a tire.
What I saw of Cleveland was intact. I saw some neighborhoods that had burned or were fire-scarred, but not like in Youngstown. Entire sections of the city had been fire bombed to wipe out the infections and those that carried them. This did not look so systematic. Just ordinary fires, I thought.
Still, there was destruction. Buildings had collapsed into heaps of rubble that blocked thoroughfares. Houses had been burned flat. There were open cellars everywhere flooded with water and leaves, the homes and buildings that had once sat upon them nowhere to be seen. Weeds were growing up in the sidewalks. Telephone poles had fallen, some only standing because their wires held them up. Storefronts were fire damaged, plate glass windows shattered, brick facades riddled with bullet holes.
There were skeletons everywhere. Sprawled in yards, tossed in gutters, some still sitting behind the wheels of cars fully articulated. But all of them bird-pecked and gleaming white. Not just human skeletons either, but those of dogs and cats and rats and more than a few that were so unnatural looking I couldn’t be sure what they were from. Bones were the only true raw material of the brave new world and they were in abundance.
After awhile, Specs and I took a break.
We pushed a heap of remains from a peeling bench and took a break. I had an olive drab Army knapsack that I used for scavenging. We each had a can of cold Dinty Moore Beef Stew and washed it down with warm Mountain Dew Code Red. That was our lunch.
I pulled off my Dew. “We gotta get us some wheels, Specs,” I told him, because The Shape had whispered in my head that we had to keep moving west. And I wasn’t about to walk.
“Yeah, too bad about that Caddy.”
“We don’t need a pimpmobile,” I told him. “We need something rugged. A four-wheel drive or something. Roads are going to be bad now.”
We’d driven motorcycles into Cleveland from Youngstown. Then we’d abandoned them in Garfield Heights after some big birds swooped down on us and stole Specs’ hat. I don’t know what they were. Looked like ravens. But huge, mutated. We decided after that we needed something with a roof over our heads.
“You ever wonder where we’re going to be in a year from now, Nash?”
“No, I don’t. I got enough problems here and now.”
“I think about it sometimes. I wonder if maybe out there somewhere there’s still cities with real people in ‘em.”
I didn’t even bother speculating on that. I finished my stew and threw the can in the street. We survivors were terrible litterbugs. I smoked and sipped off my Dew. We’d looted the Dew from a deli in Garfield Heights. Everything was long rotten in there, but the canned stuff and soda was still good. Civilization may fall, but the Dew goes on forever.
“Why do you figure west, Nash? Why not south?”
He’d been thinking about asking me that for a long time. So I told him about The Shape. I didn’t want to because he was too wrapped up in all that occult shit and I knew he’d make it into something supernatural. And he did, of course. But I had to tell him and I did.
After that, all he thought about was The Shape.
4
It was getting on dark and we still hadn’t found a ride and I was getting sick to death of Specs speculating about The Shape-he was convinced it was an old pagan god that had resurfaced now that Christianity had bottomed out-and asking me fifty questions about it.
“Listen,” I finally said. “What I told you was a secret and we’re not going to talk about it, okay? Just let it lay.”
We had other things to worry about.
I knew well enough from Youngtown that you didn’t want to be caught out in the open after dark. We had to find a place to lay low. We were down along the Cuyahoga River. There wasn’t much but a lot of industrial sites, many of which looked long abandoned, and the usual assortment of neighborhoods and storefronts that spring up around places like that. Lots of bars and lunch counters and not much else. We needed the right place. Something defensible.
As I looked around, Specs tugged on my elbow. “Nash,” he said. “Oh boy, Nash. Look.”
Shit. Scabs. About five or six of them just up the street sitting atop a pile of rubble, half-naked and moon- fleshed and filthy, like birds of prey on their high perches looking for tasty rodents. I wasn’t entirely convinced that they’d even seen us. One of them, a woman in a black motorcycle jacket and nothing else, was staring intently in the direction we’d just come from. The others were staring dumbly at their own feet.
I carefully slipped the. 38 from my jacket pocket.
Specs and I moved very slowly towards a run of ruined buildings about twenty feet away. I was very aware of how debris crunched under our boots. I think I held my breath the entire way. It was the longest twenty feet of my life. We ducked through a massive hole in the brick facade of a bar. It looked like it had been hit by an anti-tank round and it probably had been.
We made it.
“Hey, not bad-” Specs started to say.
“Shut up,” I told him. “They’re not fucking deaf.”
I peaked around the corner. They hadn’t moved. Holding my finger to my lips, I led Specs farther into the bar room. Whatever had blasted through that wall had kept going and blew out a good portion of the rear wall, taking out most of the bathroom. We climbed free of the building into a little alley paved in bricks. The shadows were starting to get long. The alley was a cul-de-sac whose entry was blocked by more rubble. We climbed through a missing window into another building and we soon saw that it was gutted inside. The upper floors were nearly gone. You could see the sky through a jagged chasm in the roof.
“What the hell happened here?” Specs asked.
“Must’ve been some kind of battle. Looks like this place took an airstrike or an artillery barrage.”
A great section of the floor was missing, having fallen into the cellar below. We moved around this carefully, found a door, and on the other side, it was even worse. What we were looking at was like London after the blitz: heaps of rubble, buildings that were entirely gutted and reduced to debris. Roofs were gone, windows blasted out,
