point your brain is pretty much jelly and blood gushes from any and all orifices while you vomit out black goo, infected blood, and macerated sections of your stomach and intestines. Death is within sixteen hours of first contact and those sixteen hours are the longest sixteen hours imaginable. I personally am not religious. I don’t believe there’s a little invisible deity in the sky who watches over us. It’s a nice, comforting thought, but I don’t believe in spiritual fairy tales and I’m pretty sure neither do the millions who’ve died in concentration camps, from mass murder, witch hunts, race crimes, and disease outbreaks. So while I don’t believe in God-though I would like to-I do believe in the Devil and the Devil is Ebola-X.
So, you get the picture, Ebola-X to human beings is pretty much like direct sunlight to a vampire…except that crumbling to dust would probably be far less painful (and messy).
Now let me tell you about Texas Slim. I haven’t said much about him; I’ve let you form your own opinions from my, hopefully, objective impressions and memories. Now Texas has an unusual past. He’s a bit quirky, offbeat, possibly borderline sociopathic. He laughs at things that make others cringe, tells very unpleasant stories that like piss in the punch don’t go down well in mixed company. Enough said. But I think beyond all that, he’s okay. He’s tough, he’s disciplined, he’s loyal, and unusually compassionate. Maybe that’s how they breed ‘em down there in Dixieland Louisiana. Regardless, I like him. He stands by me and I stand by him.
Now it would be easy enough to dismiss him as a weirdo, but don’t make that mistake. Let me tell you what happened to him before he joined up with my posse, which we could call the Loyal Order of The Shape or the Fraternal Order of the Esoteric Shape. Neither of which is very funny.
Anyway, Texas was living in Morgantown, West Virginia when the bombs fell. Being that he had a second cousin in Pittsburgh, he went there. His cousin-a large, pear-shaped woman named Jemmy Kilpatrick, who sported more tattoos than teeth-was holed-up in her apartment building with a posse of twenty others. Texas joined the posse. He was warmly welcomed…even if he did not find the romantic attentions of Jemmy so welcoming, that is. Things at the “commune,” as he called it, went well. Everyone pitched in. Everyone scavenged for food, weapons, fresh water. They did a high, fine job of it.
Then Jemmy came down with a fever.
Her symptoms pretty much followed those I mentioned above. Within six hours, her eyes were bright red-“Dracula eyes” as Texas Slim himself put it-and blood was literally gushing from her nose, her vagina, ass, bubbling out of her pores and dripping from her ears. She was like a ticking bomb for several hours, then she exploded. Burning with fevers, smelling of dank rot and drainage, she could no longer sit up and just stared off into space as the blood welled out and her skin went the waxy yellow of a transparent apple. Her flesh cracked open and bled. She became a seething mass of fevers and running blood and then…she “crashed and bled out” as the biohazard specialists say. She began shuddering with spasms. She vomited out great gouts of black-red arterial blood, spraying it liberally around and spattering those, Texas included, who were trying to care for her. She heaved out a great quantity of some greasy black substance as well. Texas said the room smelled like “a bag of hot vomit.” I don’t doubt it. But the most horrible thing of all, he told me, was the ripping sound of her anus as it opened to vent blood and tissue, which was probably what was left of her bowels. She died very quickly after that, submerging in a pool of her own blood and waste.
Now most people would have run off long before and most of the commune had.
But not Texas Slim. He stayed right to the end, drenched in Jemmy’s blood and drainage. He said the idea that he was infected by a lethal organism did not occur to him. I think he’s bullshitting. He knew, but he was not the sort to abandon those in need even at the risk of his own life.
Of the twelve people who stayed behind, all of them-save Texas himself-were infected within twenty-four hours.
For the next two days Texas was busy taking care of them as they crashed and bled out. It was as close to hell as he’d ever want to go, he told me. All those infected people stuck in that tight room stinking of rancid blood and sour vomit, convulsing and shitting out their insides, their bright red watery eyes staring at him as they fell into terminal shock and vomited out everything that was inside.
He buried all of them in a vacant lot next door.
When he told this story, it was just him and me with a bottle of Jack Daniels. He would not share it with anyone else. And as I listened, it was like the poison was being squeezed from his soul. It scared me. Scared me because I wondered if he still carried the virus and scared me because I finally had a first person account of exactly the sort of shit that was making the rounds out there. What he had been through made my own experiences with my wife wasting away of cholera sound like pink party cake and balloons.
But he survived. Both the bug and the experience.
But you can see now why I’m terrified of those germs. What they were and what they are even now becoming. Because they’re constantly changing, mutating. It’s their nature. But the very worst thing is that germs make me think of that dream I had in the Army/Navy storeroom in South Bend. For what were they now mutating into? What sort of twisted, hideous evolution had spawned that thing I saw or dreamed of? What sort of pathogenic viral horror had the moldering plague graveyards finally given birth to?
I didn’t know.
But I could feel it out there, getting closer and closer, spreading a tenebrous shroud over the ruined cities of men as it came creeping ever westward.
8
In the building, after a meal of Spam and crackers, I sat by the window listening to the radioactive dust blow through the streets below. We were up on the fourth floor in a locked room. It was good to get up as high as you could because the truly lethal supercharged dust was near ground-level. It was saturated with fissile waste materials such as Strontium-90, Cesium-137, and Plutonium. The higher dust was really just plain old dust and debris caught in the cyclone. So the higher you were, the safer you were.
But down on the streets it was deadly.
I sat there, body aching, eyes crusty from lack of sleep. The storm had died down somewhat and the building was no longer shaking, plaster falling from the walls, but it was still blowing. Every now and then a good gust would grab the building and shake it like a fist and we’d cling to each other and cover our heads, blessing the people who had built that pile of bricks to last.
Janie was leaning up against me with her head on my shoulder. Her eyes were closed, but she wasn’t really sleeping. Just shutting out the world, the moan of the wind, the stink of the apartment that smelled like cat piss and woodrot. The boys?Texas Slim, Carl, and Gremlin?were trading tales as they did, each trying to outdo the other like old men discussing who had the most miserable childhood or teenage boys boasting of sexual excesses.
“We’re going to have to spend the night, aren’t we, Nash?” Janie whispered.
“Yeah. It’s too hot out there right now.”
The wind had died down some, but not enough for my liking. Once the wind blew itself out and the dust dispersed, the roentgens would die out. But not until.
So we were staying.
“What’s the Geiger saying?”
Carl took a reading. “Were getting sixty up here. It’s dropping.”
Two hours before it was pegging nearly a hundred micro-roentgens and that was getting a little warm. Still not too bad, not like down below where the dust was probably putting out at least 400 or in places like Chicago, which had taken a direct hit from a 500-megaton device and had a lingering radioactivity so high it could only be measured in rem. There were a million micro-roents in one rem and, before civilization passed, rumor had it that Chicago was cooking at something like 5,000 rem. If anything was still alive there, I didn’t want to know what it was.
Gremlin’s voice was droning on and on about some black chick named Homegirl he had known in Fort Wayne. Hatchet Clans got her one day, just outside the city, he claimed. They gang-raped her in the street, scalped her with a butcher knife. Then, while she was still breathing and the last Clan-boy was still pumping on her, the others started cutting off her fingers and pulling her teeth and slicing off her ears for souvenirs as the Clans were wont to do.
