too happy about it. She held onto it like I’d given her a moist brown turd to call her own.
Outside, I saw no more Scabs.
We were lucky, real lucky.
Radiation had made the Scabs. Who they were before did not matter. The radiation stewed their chromosomes, made their hair fall out, made their faces go white and, yes, scabby. Most of them had black glistening eyes, but some had pink eyes like albinos. Dosed with radioactivity or not, they were mean and violent as hell. And insane. Just crazy mad. They’d come at you with weapons, with their bare hands, with their teeth. All anyone knew was that they were dangerous like rabid dogs and you had to put them down the same way.
Anyway, things were real quiet in the streets.
A dirty, glaring haze hung in the sky, glancing off the buildings and the cracked windshields of cars. You had to squint to see anything. And that’s probably why we didn’t see the three Scabs waiting for us.
One of them was drooling, his body twitching with spasms like he was amped up on Meth. The one next to him was doing the same, his eyes rolling in their sockets, his entire body jerking around like he was a marionette hooked up to strings. There was some kind of bubbling gray slime coming out of his left nostril. Both of them were grunting like rooting hogs. They all had knives and they wanted to use them.
Knives against guns…didn’t make much sense, but nothing about these guys made sense.
The third one was semi-coherent. “The cunt,” he said. “We want your cunt. Give us that cunt. We want her.”
“Only cunt here is you,” Carl said.
Texas Slim giggled. “I don’t think the lady cares for the term.”
“Shut up,” I told him.
“We want that cunt,” the Scab said again.
I kept Janie behind me. “Come and get her. She’s yours.”
Their brains were so melted, they just didn’t get it.
They stepped forward and I dropped two of them with the. 30.06, both gut-shot, and Carl put two rounds in the other guy. He fell over dead. The other two were squirming around, bleeding and moaning, making weird squealing noises. They were in pain and death would be a long time in coming.
“Let’s go,” I said.
“Nash,” Janie said. “You can’t let them suffer.”
“Fuck I can’t.”
“Rick.”
“C’mon, Janie. Enough already. Save the Pollyanna shit for another time.”
“Rick, you can’t.”
“Sure he can, Janie,” Texas Slim said, pulling out his knife. “In fact, if one were to employ a bit of creativity, they could die that much slower.”
He bent over to have a little carefree fun mutilating the dying Scabs and I told him to knock it off. Goddamn Texas Slim. He’d spawned in the shallow end of the gene pool. Maybe he had tortured puppies as a boy and had moved on to bigger things since. You had to keep your eye on him. He claimed to have studied mortuary science in Baton Rouge and had an unhealthy interest in corpses and those about to become so. I had seen him do some things with the dead that were not only unpleasant, but obscene.
“You’re going to let them die like that?” Janie said.
“They’re not even human,” I told her.
I pulled her away and she wrenched free and I knew we were about to have a fight and make the others uncomfortable, but suddenly then and there, out in the middle of that hazy dead street, we all just stopped. The only sound was the dying Scabs rolling in their own blood. Just silence. A silence that was so heavy it seemed to have physical weight.
Nothing moved.
No breeze stirred.
The air suddenly grew very dry, charged with static electricity. And hot. Sweat popped on Janie’s face. It rolled down my brow and dripped off my nose.
“Oh shit,” Texas Slim said. “Here comes the blow.”
Dust storm.
The ground started to shake and there was a distant rumbling. I looked around, wondering where we were going to make shelter. My throat was dry. The world began to thrum as the storm grew nearer.
Gremlin looked desperate. “Nash! C’mon, fucking Nash! Are we just going to stand here and wait for it or what?”
I wanted to backhand that bastard, put him to the ground and leave him there until that storm cycled in and fried his shit. The need to do that was very strong.
“Look,” Carl said.
There it was. It was coming out of the east in a raging tempest, gathering up dust and dirt and refuse and anything that wasn’t tied down. It was huge and hungry and roaring like a primeval monster. Everything was shaking now: the streets, the buildings. As the storm came-and it came really fast-it cast a murky shadow before it. That shadow engulfed block after block and?
“Run!” I said. “Over there!”
There was a building across the way that looked pretty sturdy and pretty solid. We made for it, but the door was locked. Carl blew it open and everyone jumped in, clambering around in the darkness. Texas Slim found an old desk and used it to secure the door shut.
“Okay,” I told them. “Let’s find those stairs.”
Through a grime-streaked window, I watched the street out there darken as the storm moved in. And by then, the whole building was shaking.
7
Ever since Doomsday, germs terrify me.
No, I’m not talking OCD here or anything so trifling, I’m talking about the horror that I feel when I think of all the really nasty germs floating around out there and what they can do. The radiation, as I said, did something to those germs, made bigger, badder, more virulent bugs out of them, creating deadly strains and mutated life forms of the sort I didn’t even want to think about. I suppose some are the same old bugs, but many I know for a fact are much deadlier than they once were. Case in point, it was rumored that some exotic form of hemorrhagic fever similar to Ebola was burning its way through Akron and had already devastated what was left of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.
Except, as it turned out, it was no rumor.
The form of hemorrhagic fever we’re talking about here is, like I said, very much like Ebola. You remember good old Ebola, don’t you? It laid waste to quite a few villages in Zaire, the Sudan, and the Ivory Coast back when the wheels of the world were still turning and not completely flat. It was big news. Scary news. A deadly, communicable “hot” virus that was filling graveyards with no end in sight. But it did end. It came and then left, ostensibly of its own choosing.
Now this lethal strain of hemorrhagic fever-let’s call it Ebola-X, that sounds suitably frightening-is like Ebola squared, Ebola to the tenth power, Ebola with a seriously pissy disposition, Ebola jacked-up on Meth and feeling extremely virile and kill-happy. I know these things because, at the very end, after Doomsday and right before our government collapsed, this new virulent Ebola-X was already laying siege to places like Washington D.C., Baltimore, and Boston.
And it’s still out there, mutating, generating, taking what godawful form I can only guess at.
Let’s say for the hell of it that you have contacted Ebola-X. From what I understand, communicability is roughly 98% and fatality 100%. This is death row, people, with no governor’s last minute reprieve. It begins with muscle aches, the sweats, and a spiking fever. Next comes agonizing abdominal pains, pinpoint hemorrhages in your brain. Your eyes go a bright, glistening blood-red. Your skin goes yellow and cracks open with sores. By this
