explode into particles that were vacuumed into the central mass, made part of it, every atom leeched of its energy in the whirling subatomic storm. And then he came back out again. He hit the floor and he was a blackened, smoldering heap of refuse that sparked and popped.
The buzzing sound faded, seemed to come from a great distance. There was a resounding hollow explosion that sounded much like a sonic boom when the air collapses back into the void left by a supersonic fighter.
That was it.
It was gone and so was Specs. What was left was a smoking heap of debris that had been supercharged, disassembled at the molecular level and then, reassembled, and vomited back into this time/space.
Janie and Sean practically had to carry me out of there. They did not speak for some time and I didn’t blame them. For I had shown them something no sane, reasoning mind should ever look upon.
The face of the Devil.
16
For weeks afterwards, I had nightmares about that night. I kept seeing The Shape take Specs and what had become of him. I kept seeing the blackened, burning heap of refuse he had been reduced to. He had been my friend. A very loyal, very kind-hearted guy. And I had given him to that fucking nightmare and how in God’s name could I ever get it out of my mind or learn to live with myself?
It was that night as Sean went off by himself to brood and drink, that Janie and I made love for the first time. She was so much younger than me that I felt like some kind of deviant, but I did it anyway. I lost myself in her and her hot body against mine was the finest thing I’d ever known. At least, that’s what I told myself.
What a wonderful world it indeed was. Empty cities and spawning mutants, bioplagues and Red Rains and fallout and…The Shape. I didn’t know what it was and I refused to speculate. Though when I had looked on it I was certain that it was the very stuff the universe was made of. The meat, as it were, of primary cosmic generation.
Sean did not come back that night.
We were worried. Around noon he showed up with an SUV and a full tank of gas. He had two men with him. One was tall and lanky, the other shorter and heavily muscled. Pretty as Janie was, they did not even give her a second glance. They stared at me and I was certain I saw something like fear and awe in their eyes. I wondered what Sean had told them and decided it really didn’t matter.
“This is Carl and Texas Slim,” Sean told me. “They want to go west, too.”
“Welcome,” I told them, wondering if one of them would have to burn some day to keep the rest of us safe. “Welcome.”
There were five of us then.
ELKHART, INDIANA
1
I was in league with The Shape.
If I’d doubted it before, there was no mistaking it after Cleveland.
I made sacrifices to it, I did the selecting and I did it not only to save my sorry ass but the asses of my little posse. We took care of The Shape and The Shape took care of us. We were healthy. We weren’t riddled with sores and radiation burns like the others. There was no disease in our bodies and our genes weren’t going crazy from fallout. The Shape led me on, always pointing me in the right direction and I always found a few treats for him and, in return, we were alive and we were strong, we always had full bellies, safe places to lay our heads at night. No, I don’t know how it worked. Not really. Only that being in league with that thing gave us all a sort of protective magic.
2
We stood around by the river watching the woman burn for maybe a half hour or so, the stink of cremated flesh hot in our faces. Long after it was done and she was nothing but a smoldering skeleton, we stared at the flames licking from her ribcage and the hollows of her skull. It was morbid, but we were fascinated, unable to look away as a child cannot look away from a roaring campfire. Something about the mystical call of the flames, I suppose, as transfixing and hypnotic now as they’d been to our ancestors huddled in an Ice Age cave.
The smell was sickening.
You would think after all the incinerated bodies we’d come across-and, yes, produced-the smell would be something we wouldn’t even notice anymore like a guard at Belzec feeding corpses into the ovens. But we did notice. All of us. The burnt scarecrow tied to the blackened tree was something we’d see in our minds for days. And smell. Because the smell of burnt hair, roasted flesh, and oxidized bones would stay with us, haunting us, coming into our dreams until we’d wake, sweating and terrified, certain that a charred and grinning skull would be on the pillow next to our own.
“I think she’s done,” Carl finally said, lighting a twig off the burning corpse and firing his cigarette with it.
Texas Slim chuckled. “A little honey sauce, some taters and beans, we got ourselves a barbecue.”
I laughed; so did Sean. It was funny. Even funnier the way the human mind works. In the worst of situations there is some kind of psychological trigger or safety valve in the brain that overrides all else, releasing stress by making us joke about the most horrible things. I suppose it’s the same thing that made soldiers in the trenches of World War I adopt human skulls as pets, giving them silly names like “Mr. Jingles” and “Lippy” and the same thing that made people burst out laughing at funerals.
“That’s enough,” Janie said, standing far and away and downwind from the burning woman. “I won’t listen to it.”
“Sure, Janie,” I said. “We were just kidding.”
Janie didn’t like that kind of shit. She saw nothing funny in the dead even though they were scattered everywhere now. The cities were graveyards and the streets were littered with remains. To her, a body was still a body. To the rest of us a body was of no more importance than a bag of leaves or a cardboard box. But that was Janie. The last of the bleeding hearts. An endangered species.
It had been nearly two months since we rolled out of Cleveland with Carl and Texas Slim in tow. And a hard two months they had been, fighting with the Hatchet Clans, hiding from radioactive dust storms, searching for vehicles and finding food. The days went by in a blur.
And now, there I was, staring at the remains of another offering for The Shape.
Janie stomped off.
Texas Slim and Sean kind of eyed me warily as friends will do when your girlfriend is in a mood. I bummed a cigarette from Carl and stood there, uncomfortably, smoking and watching the St. Joseph River roll on by.
“Hey, Nash,” Sean said. “I ever tell you about the time I sold my wife for a dollar?”
Texas Slim giggled. “This is a good one.”
Sean smiled in the moonlight, his teeth crooked and missing. “We were in Sturgis, man, you know, the biker rally? Well, sure as shit, me and the old lady were at each other’s throats. All day long. It was always like that with us. That’s why I got this scar on my forehead, you see. We was at this hop-and-grind joint and she passed out. So things being what they were, I started making out with her sister who was sitting next to me. She’d fuck anything with a third leg. Well, Trixie wakes up and I’m tongue-fucking her sister and she yells something and hits me in the face with a beer bottle. One mean bitch, that Trixie.” He laughed. “Anyway, there we was in Sturgis. We’d been
