“Fever?” I asked, almost breathlessly, remembering my dream.
Texas Slim shook his head. “No…looked like radiation. His hair had fallen out and that sort of thing.”
“Yeah, but we almost didn’t get it because of the dog in the yard,” Carl said.
“Oh, you’re going to go into that, are you?” Texas Slim said.
“Dog?”
“Sure,” Carl said. “Big black mutha. Probably chained out there for days, crazy and foaming at the mouth. Texas here, he tries to make friends with it. Tries to pet it.”
“I didn’t try to pet it.”
“Sure you did.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did, you idiot. You were talking all sweet and sassy to it like you wanted to bone that fucker. Not that I’d be surprised.”
Texas just laughed. “Now see, Nash, that’s sheer invention on the part of my friend here with the small penis. Carl gets confused sometimes. His head isn’t right. But, you know, what with his mother mixing it up out in the barnyard with anything willing, it’s no wonder he turned out this way.”
Carl took a step towards him. “What I tell you about my mother?”
“Nothing I hadn’t already read on the bathroom wall.”
“Keep it up, you peckerwood sonofabitch. One of these days you’re going to dip that wee little pee pee into something and it’s going to get bit off.”
“So I’ll keep it out of your mouth.”
I had to break them apart at this point because the last thing I needed were these assholes swinging on each other and busting out each other’s teeth. Like we didn’t have enough to worry about. And it was about that time that the sandstorm started kicking up. I told Carl to find a garage somewhere to store the bus and by the time he got back the sand was already blowing.
So we hid out in the Army/Navy store and just waited.
There was nothing else to do.
We spent another four days in South Bend because we could not leave.
Visibility was down to a few feet. We listened to the sand blow and blow. It was driven by high winds that howled through the town, burying the streets in drifts and swirling eddies, churning sand-devils whipping and lashing against the building. For days it was like that, the moaning wind and the sound of sand grating against the windows and walls in a fine granulated grit. It found hairline cracks and seams and blew into the store, dusting the floor and covering the displays and shelves in a powdery down.
We waited downstairs in the storeroom, listening to it rage.
Even down there we could feel the sand on our skin, clogging our pores, getting in our hair and dusting our faces. It went on and on.
We huddled together and paged through old magazines and nobody said much. We all wanted to be on the road. We wanted to ditch this desolate burg.
But Mother Nature had other ideas.
As we waited, Carl and Texas Slim tried to stare each other down almost constantly and Janie was pretty much ignoring them and giving me the cold shoulder. It was a long goddamn wait. I spent my time consulting the dog-eared map in my pocket, wondering what we might run into out on the interstate, the whole time my belly filled with needles because we were trapped there. Waiting. I couldn’t shake the dream. Maybe I was paranoid- definitely-but I was feeling that hideous something coming from the east as maybe I’d been feeling it for a long time. I did not doubt its reality. The bottom line was we had to keep moving west. That’s the way it had to be and nobody asked why.
They knew.
They knew, all right.
Just like they knew that the next full moon was less than a week away and it would soon be time for me to make a selection.
The time of The Shape was nearing…
GARY, INDIANA
1
We came into the city on a day that was still, ominous, and hazy. Our VW hippie microbus was on its last legs. Like the wild free-loving days of Haight-Ashbury, the bus was past its prime. She seized up twice out on I-80 coming into Gary and Carl said her bearings were shot and her carb was gummed up. As it was, we pretty much coasted into the city, the love machine wheezing like an asthmatic old man. We needed new wheels because hoofing it across country just wasn’t an option.
We skirted Tolleston and cut through Ambridge until we reached downtown. Coughing out clouds of blue smoke, our VW microbus rolled to a stop before a row of tenements and died with a backfire.
Inside, Carl swore. And then swore again.
I stepped out, fanning my sweaty face with a Cleveland Indians baseball cap. I lit a stale cigarette with a cupped match and then looked around at the devastation…the overturned cars, the rubble, the garbage blowing in the gutters. Drifts of sand were pushed up against the buildings. A crow sat atop the traffic light ahead, cawing. The day was hot and hazy, picked dry as desert bones,
Other than that, there was nothing.
Just the deathly silence that was uniform to most cities since the bombs had come down. A pick-up truck was pulled up to the curb, a crusty yellow skeleton behind the wheel. Birds had built nests in the slats of the ribcage.
I was trying to get a feel for things. Where we should go and what we should do when we got there.
From inside the bus, Texas Slim called: “Nothing here, Nash. Let’s pack it in.”
I ignored him, stepping away from the bus and studying the ruined buildings around me. I saw no life, no movement, but I knew it was out there somewhere. Hidden eyes were watching me, gauging me. The days had long since vanished when you welcomed strangers with open arms.
That’s not how it worked now.
There were people here, I knew, and not all of them were thick with radiation and Fevers. I had to find one of them. Somehow. Some way. The full moon was coming fast now.
If I couldn’t find someone, it meant selecting one of my own and I didn’t like that idea.
There were five of us now?Janie and I, Carl and Texas Slim, and the new guy, Gremlin. We called him Gremlin because we’d picked him up in Michigan City, found him trapped in the trunk of an old AMC Gremlin. Scabs were out the night before, he said, looking for recruits and he jammed himself in the trunk and then couldn’t get out. He was so wedged in there it took all of us to yank his sorry ass free.
I hadn’t made my mind up about him yet. There were things I didn’t like about him?his perpetual bitching?and things I did like: he did what he was told without question. Janie was neutral on him. Carl and Texas Slim liked to pick on him a lot, which was their way of feeling him out and finding out what he was made of.
I scanned the streets, looking for a decent vehicle but all of them were wrecks. I turned my back on the VW and then I heard something. At first, I wasn’t sure what it was, only that it seemed to be coming from the alley across the way. I called out for the others to stay in the bus in case it was a trap and walked over there. Plugging my cigarette into the corner of my mouth, I pulled the Beretta out of my waistband. I worked the slide and jacked a round into the breech, got ready for what might come.
In the alley, shrouded in shadow from the buildings on either side, there was a man.
Barely a man, in fact. Just some emaciated stick figure pulling itself along like a worm. He had three riders on him?rats. They were huge, the size of cats, their bodies swollen and tumorous beneath pelts of greasy gray fur. They looked up with shining rabid eyes and then got back to work eating the man. This is what I had been hearing…the chewing sounds of rats feeding, moist and slobbering like dogs working juicy bones.
