There wasn’t much meat on the man, but the rats were taking what they could get. One of them had its snout buried in his throat and was tugging at something in there. The other two were digging in his belly, yanking out his entrails and gnawing on them.
Bold bastards…and in the daytime yet.
The rat that was digging in the man’s throat pulled its gore-smeared snout free and made a low hissing sound. It was ready to defend against all and any poachers. It rose up on its haunches, ready to fight. Droplets of blood glistened on its whiskers. There were wriggling worm-like growths suspended from its belly that looked like teats…except that they moved, pulsed. I aimed, fired, knocking the rat free of the man and pulverizing its head into splashing meat. It rolled over once, legs kicking, and died.
The other two abandoned the man’s belly, leering at me with flat red eyes. They both opened their mouths, blood-stained teeth bared. Strips of tissue hung from their jaws. I shot first one and then the other. The first took a head-shot and died quick enough, the other, a hole punched through its belly, tried to crawl away, squealing and bleeding, dragging its viscera behind it over the dirty pavement. I shot it again and it did not move.
The dying man looked up, his face contorted in utter agony. He had crawled out from behind a dumpster, the rats eating him the entire time, no doubt. He left a smear of blood in his wake. I watched him, wishing there was something I could do. Times were hard, savage, yes, but I still felt compassion at times like these and I wanted nothing more than to help the poor guy.
But it was too late and I was no surgeon.
The rats had done irreparable damage, the trauma gruesome and unpleasant. The guy’s belly was open, his throat was open, his bowels had been pulled out and bitten. Bad enough, but he was obviously dying long before they attacked. Radiation poisoning. I had seen it plenty of times by then and I knew it when I saw it. Most of the guy’s hair had fallen out, his scalp and skin split open in jagged ruts. There were sores everywhere. Most of his teeth were gone and those that remained were rotting brown in the gums. He was bleeding from his ears, his nose, his mouth, even his eyes.
He held a hand up to me, a sickly blotched claw really, as if needing to make contact with a human being one last time. Then his arm fell and he lay there, bleeding, vomiting out bile and blood, gasping in pain.
“Sorry, old man,” I said. “Wish there was something I could do.”
Tensing myself, I put a bullet in the old timer’s head to alleviate his suffering. It was the only thing I could do, but doing so made me feel cold and empty inside. Had I known any good prayers, I might have used one then.
“Don’t mean nothing,” I said under my breath, amazed, as always, that after all the shit I’d been through there could still be something as intangible as guilt in my soul.
Deeper in the shadows of the alley…a rustling, a skittering.
More rats.
Probably a colony near.
I walked quickly back to the van. It was mid-afternoon and usually the rats didn’t get too active until night, but you never knew. They could be unbelievably vicious if you threatened their nests. If they came after me in numbers I could empty my gun into them and it still would do no good. They’d bury me alive in teeth and claws and lice-infested bodies. My bones would be licked clean in minutes.
When I got back in the van, I told Carl to get us the hell out of there.
The van started to roll again, jerking and wheezing, but gradually picking up speed.
2
The thing I hated about Janie most of all was that she was brutally honest, absolutely not a shred of bullshit in her soul. Way things were, deceiving yourself and those around you was a way of life. It kept you sane, kept your feet on the ground. But not Janie.
Whenever we were alone, Janie would look at me with those eyes so clear and so blue, and she’d ask me that same question again and again and again: “Where, Nash? Where are we going? Where are you pointing us to?”
“West,” I’d say. “We’re going west.”
“Why west? What’s out there but more of the same?”
“Because that’s where we have to go. That’s all.”
Janie would keep her mouth shut for a few moments. Then she’d say: “Is that what it wants? Is that what The Shape tells you to do?”
And I would suddenly feel absolutely numb with fear, a gnawing anxiety rising up from within that threatened to swallow me alive. I would not be able to speak. I would lay there, dumbly, Janie in my arms, feeling the cool sweat on her body, smelling her musk and sweetness. The Shape, The Shape, The Shape. Oh dear God. What it wanted, what it demanded.
What I had to give it once a month during the cycle of the full moon.
Jesus.
See, that was Janie: no bullshit. The others would never dare ask me something like that. They knew about The Shape. They knew what it wanted…but it didn’t make for pleasant conversation so it was not brought up.
But Janie wasn’t like that. She’d hit me with questions and I would have to answer them. I’d find my voice, some old and scratchy thing that sounded distant and tinny like an old 78, and tell her, “Yes, that’s what it wants. It wants us to go west. There’s something out there.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Something out there and maybe something we have to get away from back here. I don’t know.”
I wouldn’t say anymore than that. She did not need to know what I suspected was behind us, chewing its way across country, city by city, leaving charnel waste in its path.
Janie would breathe in and out and I’d run a hand over her naked back, that deliciously smooth tanned skin, thinking how she was so much like Shelly. Except that Shelly was dead and Janie was alive.
“How long, Nash? When will it be satisfied? When will The Shape have enough?”
But I would never answer that one because it sickened me to contemplate it. What I would have to do and who I might have to do it to. For I knew with an awful certainty, sure as there was blood rushing through my veins, that there would never be an end to it. I didn’t know what The Shape was exactly, but I sensed that it was part of this new world, a natural force now like wind and water and sunshine.
It would ask things.
I would do them.
And if it ever asked for Janie? If it ever did that…if it ever goddamn well did that…I didn’t know what I’d do. Because there was no fucking way it would touch her.
I would not allow it.
I didn’t care how hungry it was…
3
Although we found no vehicle that day, we caught a woman for The Shape. Carl got her while out scouting on foot. She was hiding in a building. As he passed by, she threw a rock at him. So he went after her, beat her into submission, bound and gagged her and brought her back.
Janie wasn’t real cool with that.
The woman was barely human, that’s all I can say. She wasn’t infected like a Scab, not yet, but from the look in her eyes that wasn’t too far off. She looked like she wanted to tear out somebody’s throat.
Janie pulled the whole sympathetic thing and told us how that woman was a human being with rights like everyone else. “I want to talk to her, Nash.”
