“What did you do?” Carl said. “Just fucking watch?”

“What was I supposed to do? There was ten of them and one of me.”

Texas Slim thought that was funny. “Thought you said you loved her?”

“I did. Every chance I got.”

That sent Texas Slim into gales of laughter. “Ain’t that something? Ain’t that just something?” he said. “I loved a girl like that once. She was colored, too…no, maybe she was Indian. I use to bone her in the ass every chance I got. She only had one tit, though. But that was okay.”

“One tit,” Gremlin said. “You ain’t real picky are you?”

Carl laughed. “Oh, he’s picky, all right. He only fucks his left hand. Got himself a thing for it.”

“I fuck them both. You know that,” Texas Slim admitted. “And when I do, I only think of your mother.”

“There you go again.”

“That’s sick,” Gremlin said. “Real sick shit talking about somebody’s mother like that. When I jack off, I think only of hot, young stuff.”

He cast an eye on Janie when he said that and nobody missed it. I saw it. I think he wanted me to see it.

Texas Slim said, “Hey, Gremlin? Are you aware they have a romantic day for couples, Valentine’s Day?”

“Yeah. I heard that.”

“Well, they have a romantic day for single fellows like you, too. It’s called Palm Sunday.”

“No shit?”

Janie was trying not to laugh, but she couldn’t help herself. Either could I. This was my bunch, my posse. Like kids in a locker room. Christ.

Gremlin laughed for a bit, too, then got right down to doing what he did best: complaining.

“I’m so sick of this waiting I could puke,” he said. “We gonna have to stay in this shithole all damn day, Nash?”

“Yeah, and probably the night, too.”

“Shit. I ain’t got nothing to drink and nothing to fuck. I can’t stand this waiting around.” He stood up and paced back and forth while Texas Slim and Carl talked about radioactive women they’d known. “I mean, shit, Nash, what we need is some wheels. Get our ass out of this city.”

“Sure. And if you want to go out and look for one in that dust, you go right ahead. Me? I’m staying. Too hot out there for my ass. My dick is already glowing in the dark.”

Janie punched me and Texas Slim laughed.

“Yeah, quit your fucking whining, man,” Carl said.

“Yeah,” Gremlin said. “But it stinks in here.”

“So do you, man, but you don’t hear me complaining.”

Gremlin didn’t even laugh at that. “I’m sick of this shit. We left our food in the van, nothing to eat. This fucking bites it.”

“You had Spam like the rest of us,” Janie said.

“I don’t want Spam, woman. I want a steak and a baked potato with sour cream. I want some bread and butter. I want a piece of pie and some ice cream and?”

“That all?” Carl said.

“No, that ain’t all. I want some decent grub. I want some booze. I want some cigarettes that aren’t stale and I want a blowjob.”

Carl just shook his head. “Texas, suck his dick, will ya?”

Texas Slim smiled, shook his head “No sir, doctor told me to go easy on the sausage and gravy. I follow his orders.”

“This is fucked up,” Gremlin said. “You guys just joke and laugh and where the hell’s any of it getting us?”

He was starting to get on everyone’s nerves. We were getting sick of listening to him. At first, it had been kind of humorous the way he’d complain about anything, from sleeping bags to canned beans to the lint in his belly button. Always bitching about something and complaining about something else. But it was not humorous anymore, it was just plain bullshit. Way things were these days, you just had to take what you could get. Wasn’t anybody’s fault that the Scabs attacked and the storm came. Shit happened. You lived through it, that’s all. Armageddon taught a body patience if nothing else.

Carl said, “Hey, Nash, wanna get high? Wanna get reeeeaaal high?”

I declined as a joint was lit.

We were always finding dope. There was no shortage of it. There was just a shortage of people to smoke it, was all.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the world and what it had been and what it was now and what it might be in ten years or a hundred. How do you live through something like Doomsday and not become as shattered as the cities around you? And how do you find the plaster to patch up all those jagged cracks and crevices that have split open your mind and your soul and made you maybe something less than human? How do you hold yourself together and find any sort of optimism again? God knew, I wanted to be like Janie. Wanted to be kind and caring and tolerant like I once was. Part of me wanted that very badly. But it was fantasy. And another part of me knew that only too well and that part was the dogged, grim realism that cemented me to this new fucked-up world.

The world was shit.

To survive you had to be an animal.

The end had brought things into being that had no right to exist and it had changed others to absolute nightmares. That was the world these days. Like something Roger Corman had envisioned back in the fifties… mutants and roving gangs, religious crazies and nature run wild. Like in one of those old movies that I used to watch on the late show when I worked three to eleven at the shoe factory in Youngstown, The Day the World Ended or Panic in the Year Zero or World Without End. Just laying there on the couch, chewing takeout pizza and drinking beer, never once thinking I would be living through some kind of fucked-up horror movie.

But I was.

We all were.

Things had changed. The fallout had killed hundreds and hundreds of millions. There were resulting mutations and degeneration and savagery on the part of those that did survive. I had seen my share, but I knew there were worse things out there. Things I could not or would not want to imagine and one of them had come to me in a dream. Regardless, I knew very little about radiation or nuclear physics or genetics or any of it. Yes, I had a solar- powered Geiger Counter. But I didn’t really know how it worked or how radiation affected things like atoms or biology.

Back in Youngstown, after it happened and everyone was just kind of wandering around in shock, the germs started sweeping the cities. There was a guy in my building named Mike Pallenberg. He taught physical sciences at East Palestine High. A real smart guy. He was an assistant football coach for the Bulldogs and when I was in high school I was a running back for the Lisbon Blue Devils. So we had a little rivalry going. A friendly one. When he was dying from radiation sickness, on his deathbed, he said, You just wait, my friend, you just fucking wait. There’s things gonna happen now I’m glad I won’t be around to see. All that nuclear energy released at once…it’ll affect the weather, living things, everything. You wait. See, it’s the molecules. They’ve changed just as cells have mutated and physics as we understand it has been bent on its ear. This world is mutating, organically and physically, microscopically, matter and energy and subatomics going haywire. Nothing will ever be the same. Not for a hundred-thousand years.

If ever.

Mike was absolutely right.

I had seen mutations. They were real. The radiation wrought evolutionary changes that would never have to come to be in a sane, sunlit world beneath the eye of a loving god. And it wasn’t always the changes you could see. Much of it was, as Mike hinted, microscopic. Diseases that men had beaten off years ago mutated and spread like wildfire after the bombings. And that’s what worried me now. The germs. What they were becoming. Because I had seen cities where plagues, super-plagues, the Fevers, had turned them into leper colonies.

And those germs were still out there.

Mutating, waiting to burn through what was left of the human race.

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