entire walls missing. And floors? There were no floors. Just huge pits that looked down into the cellars below that were dark and ominous, choked with debris and flooded with black water. There was only a skeletal framework of joists to walk on. It would be risky.
“Oh, I don’t know about this, Nash,” Specs said. “I don’t like this at all.”
But we really didn’t have a choice. Behind us, I could hear a lot of shouting and screaming. More Scabs had shown up. Going back that way wasn’t an option.
“You can do it,” I told him. “The joists are an easy foot across. Just don’t look down.”
We moved over to the edge of the pit, kicking up clouds of brick dust. I started out on one of the joists and it wasn’t so bad. Plenty of room to walk. The trick was not to look down. It wasn’t that it was a deep drop…probably eight feet or so, but eight feet into rubble and twisted metal, that rank-smelling water and who knew what kind of things lay right beneath the surface that would impale you?
“Come on,” I told him. “Don’t look down.”
Hesitantly, he started across. He moved like a turtle at first, but once he got his feet under him it was no problem. We crossed the joists, ducked through a jagged archway and found ourselves in another building lacking a floor. I noticed that a cobwebbed rocking chair hung from the floor above by a section of electrical wiring. It swayed back and forth. The water below us was caked with leaves. A few plastic bottles bobbed.
I was about two-thirds of the way across on the center joist when I heard a muted splashing. Maybe not a splashing exactly, but sort of a slopping sound. I looked back and Specs was still coming, offering me a goofy smile. He hadn’t heard it.
“This ain’t so bad,” he said. “Like walking curbs when you’re a kid.”
I nodded, smiling thinly. I heard that slopping again and looked back. This time I saw something. Something that froze me up and made my heart start hammering. Cool sweat ran down my face. Near to where Specs was I saw…thought I saw…a puckered white face pull down beneath the leaves and water.
I made it across.
“Something wrong, Nash?” Specs asked me.
“No, it’s cool,” I told him, just waiting for a pair of white, mottled hands to reach up and pull him into the flooded stygian depths. But it didn’t happen. He made it across and we darted through a missing wall. Before us was a solid expanse of brick with no egress. Instead of going forward, I feared, we had somehow gotten turned sideways and were moving lengthwise through the buildings. We’d have been at it quite a while at that rate. I compensated, led us around some huge heaps of shattered brick, through a near-collapsed doorway, and into the utter darkness. In the distance I could see a patch of light.
We were in some kind of warehouse, I thought.
Boxes and barrels were stacked around us. It was very gloomy in there. There were roughly a million places for unfriendlies to hide and about the same amount of ways to die. The floor was concrete and unbroken.
I led Specs forward and he clung to me, pulling at the back of my jacket, bumping into me, grabbing me by the arm. It was like going through a carnival spookhouse with your badly frightened kid brother. The. 38 in hand, I moved us along, trying not to trip over anything. We were not alone in there. I heard a scratching once and a dragging sound another time.
When the patch of light-a missing door-was about fifteen feet away, Specs pulled me to a stop.
“Listen,” he said.
I heard it right away: a sort of low, coarse breathing in the darkness. Behind us, I could swear I saw grotesque forms threading through the shadows. Whatever was in there was closing in on us. I grabbed Specs and raced him to the door and out into the blinding light.
Nothing followed us.
The sky above looked odd, I thought. Kind of roiling with bloated pinkish clouds that started to look less and less pink and more brilliantly red by the moment. A drop of rain splatted at my foot. Another ran down the windshield of a wrecked pickup truck. Except it wasn’t rain…it wasn’t water. It was red. Like blood.
“Shit,” I heard Specs say.
I turned to find the nearest shelter and there was a big guy with a pump shotgun in his hands. He looked mean. “Where do you assholes want it?” he said. “In the belly or in the head?”
5
I had my. 38 out, but I honestly felt impotent with it next to that killing iron in the big man’s hands. He was about 6’3, had to go in at an easy 250 if not more. His hair was short and choppy, but his beard was long and tangled. It reached right down to his chest. He wore a tattered jean vest with lots of patches on it. He was a biker. This guy was a fucking biker.
“We’re not Scabs,” Specs told him. “We’re not infected.”
“I know that, little man. You were Scabs, you wouldn’t be alive right now. I was looking for some normal people and I suppose you two scrubs’ll do.” He was standing under the wide awning outside a shoe store, one eye cocked to the sky. A few more drops of blood fell. “You boys better get over here. You don’t wanna get caught in a red rain.”
We got under the awning with him. I lit a cigarette, explained who we were, where we had come from, how we were looking for some wheels to head west with. He nodded, didn’t seem like he gave a shit. His bare arms were massive, set with tattoos and I could see right away that those tattoos symbolized something, all those snakes and deathheads and names and places. He wasn’t just some wannabe punk or yuppy that thought some inking would make him into a real man. He was the genuine article: an outlaw biker.
“Name’s McKree, Sean McKree. Friends call me ‘Chang’,” he told us, watching the sky. He did not look happy. “Fucking weather.”
“Nice to meet you, Chang,” Specs said.
“You can call me, Sean, little man,” he said. “My friends are all dead.”
More drops of red fell out in the streets, plopping onto the hoods of cars. Then the downpour began, an absolute curtain of what looked like blood. But not just liquid, but unidentifiable chunks of matter that thudded and splattered everywhere. It lasted about ten minutes and the stink of it was acrid. It reamed your nose right out. But that, too, faded in time. Out in the streets the liquid was drying up, leaving that sticky red film I had seen that morning. I looked closer and there was no mistaking it: there were bones in the street. Not human bones, I didn’t think, but animal bones. Most of them quite small. They had not been there before.
“It is blood!” Specs said. “Bones, too!”
“Can’t be blood,” I told him. “That doesn’t make any sense. It’s acid rain or something.”
“You’re both right.”
We looked at Sean. “You heard me,” he said. “There’s acid in that shit and it’ll burn the soles off your boots and sting your skin if you get caught out in it. But it’s mostly blood and run-off. See, there was a slaughterhouse on the Cuyahoga. Back in the day they used to release their by-products straight into the river and the river would turn red in the summer. But the EPA made ‘em clean up their act,” he explained to us. “So what they did is they built two gigantic steel rendering tanks that were like fifty feet deep and sixty feet across. They pumped all their by- products in there: blood, bones, fat, you name it. The tanks were full of acid…”
He told us that the tanks were open air so that evaporation would remove the liquid. Then the world puked out and those two full tanks of remains, acid, and run-off were just sitting there. He couldn’t be sure, but now and again something like a wind-spout brewed up off the big lake and traveled down river, sucking up just about anything that wasn’t tied down. For some reason, it sucked up what was in those tanks nearly every time. The tanks never dried out because the rain filled them up and the wind-spouts stirred them like cauldrons, scraping all the goodies from the bottom.
“I’ve seen the tanks,” he said. “You can smell ‘em for a mile. My guess is that in the plant there are other storage vats full of blood and slime, probably gravity-fed. Sooner or later, the rendering tanks’ll dry up and run out of remains. But it hasn’t happened yet.”
We stood under the awning, smoking and chatting. Sean said we had to wait until the rain had completely dried or it would eat holes in our boots. So we waited and he told us about his life as an outlaw biker. He’d been a
