6
Bill Hermes was a good man. A wise man seasoned by time and experience. Did I listen to his advice? Of course not. I stayed. God help me, but I did.
Food and water were the biggest problems. For so long I had been mainly concerned with nursing Shelly back to health and in doing so, I had let everything else go to shit. Mother Hubbard’s cupboard was bare as Miss July’s thigh so I took to the streets with the rest of the gutter rats, scavenging anything I could find.
When Shelly’s deterioration began, the city had been running a series of aid stations with fresh water, food, and medical supplies. But in the many weeks since these had all been closed up and boarded down. Other than the Army out patrolling there was little order, state and local government having collapsed on just about every conceivable level.
So gun in hand, I hunted.
And was hunted.
I had a 9mm Browning Hi-Power I’d taken from Bill Hermes’ apartment. I’d never killed a man in my life and never truly wanted to, but I knew the time was coming. I’d jacked a few rounds over the heads of some bad boys that had been coming after me, but never anything more.
Then, about three or four days after Bill died, some old guy came up to me in the street, wanted a cigarette. Poor bastard was shot through with acute radiation sickness: teeth all gone, hair fallen out, face covered with ulcers.
But I wasn’t taking any chances.
I put the gun on him, told him to stay back. With so many dying of infectious disease in the city, I had a real horror of all the nasty germs floating around out there and what they could do. The radiation did something to those germs, made bigger, badder, more virulent bugs out of them. Some were the same old bugs, but others were much deadlier than they once were. And I’d already been exposed to cholera by then and God knew what else. My number was going to come up sooner or later.
The old man attempted a smile. “Just want one of them cigarettes. That’s all.” He broke up into a coughing fit, spewing blood and bile to the sidewalk. “Gimme one, friend. Gimme one and I’ll tell you where there’s food. I ain’t got but a day or two left. It won’t do me no good.”
I threw him a pack and a book of matches. “Keep ‘em. I got more.”
He was nearly orgasmic as he smoked that cigarette. Such is the nature of addiction. Something I knew well. I had quit smoking three years before…but after the bombs came down, what with the stress I started again. After he got a few drags down, he told me where there was a deli. Canned food that had barely been touched. I was welcome to it.
I scouted down a few streets, found the back door to the deli like the old guy said. And like he said, the deli had a storeroom with boxes and boxes of canned and dried goods. Like a kid in a candy store, I filled my sack with canned pasta, vegetables, tinned milk, mac and cheese. I was pretty happy about it all. I was doing real good. Too good, I soon learned.
When I tried to leave, a woman came stumbling out of the front of the store. She was wearing an old fur coat with nothing on beneath. Her flesh was pitted with spreading sores and flaking scabs. There was some crusty fungal growth coming out of her nose and she was entirely bald. She looked at me with glassy, fixed eyes and grinned with a mouth of graying, broken teeth.
“Mine,” she said, holding out her filthy hands. “It’s all mine!”
I put the Browning on her. “Get the fuck away from me.”
“Mine!” she said, yellow foam running down her chin like she was rabid. “Give it to me, pretty boy! It’s all mine!”
She launched herself forward and I didn’t even get a shot off.
I brought the gun up, yes, but like most people that weren’t used to killing, I hesitated. And that split second of hesitation was all she needed. She threw herself at me, knocking me flat, knocking the gun right out of my hand. I hit the floor and then she was on top of me, pinning me down. Her stench was gagging, sickening: like warm rotting fruit, a fermenting and moist odor. She had her scabby hands around my throat, squeezing the life out of me. My guts heaved. I needed badly to vomit. And it wasn’t just her stink or the rot of her face or the foul slime that dripped from her mouth…it was what she was doing.
Gyrating.
Dry-humping me, rubbing her infested crotch against me with greasy violent gyrations.
“Pretty boy! Pretty boy! Pretty, pretty, pretty boy!” the hag kept saying, ribbons of slime hanging from her mouth. “I’m fucking the pretty boy!”
It was this more than anything that gave me the strength to fight back: pure, unreasoning physical revulsion. I hit her in the face three, four times, her head rocking back each time. And then I clawed at her eyes. Her ulcerated flesh was so soft with rot that my fingers slid right into her cheek and scraped against the skull beneath. And somewhere during the process, I hooked my knee under her and threw her off.
Then I dove for the gun and she scrambled after me on all fours like some obscene, fleshy spider. The Browning in my fist, I let out a savage screaming war cry and pulled the trigger.
The bullet caught her right in the belly and she went down to her knees, pressing scabby hands to the wound. Blood juiced out between her fingers.
“Ohhhhhhhh! Look what you did, pretty boy! Look what you did!”
When she came at me again, I shot her in the head. Brain matter and blood sprayed against the wall in an oily pattern. She hit the floor, mouth still opening and closing like a fish gulping for air. She trembled and flopped around and then jerked into stillness. In death, there was a mucid hissing and something like a gray clotted slime flooded out from between her legs.
Rotting fish. It smelled like rotting fish.
I threw up. The vomit came out in a warm spray and kept coming until I was shuddering with dry heaves. And when it was over I wondered if I hadn’t just been purging my stomach contents, but maybe something more ethereal and necessary like my soul.
Anyway, I backed away from her corpse, into the store, made to run and there were two more: a man and a woman. Both bald. Both foaming at the mouth. Both with sores on their faces and those crazy eyes.
I shot both of them.
Kept shooting even when they were down.
This was my first altercation with the Scabs, as they were known. After that, after what that hideous woman had done to me which I likened almost to rape, I shot those ugly, infected bastards on sight without hesitation.
That was my first taste of blood. I had popped my cherry. It got real easy after that.
There were crazies everywhere. But, oddly enough, good people, too. People that would warn you against dangerous neighborhoods, places where night-things lay in wait, areas where the National Guard would shoot you on sight. One day, being chased by a gang of Scabs, a guy with a long black hillbilly beard came to my aid with a shotgun. He seemed all right. Afterwards, we had soup in his barren basement apartment. He never spoke and would only grunt when I asked him things. There were two shrouded forms stretched out on the floor.
“Those are my daughters,” he finally said. “I killed ‘em. I killed both of ‘em. They was starting to change.”
“Change?”
The guy put black fierce eyes on me. “Into them others. The ones with the glowing eyes. They only come out at night. Better watch yourself.”
I got out of there, thinking the guy was as crazy as the rest. It wasn’t until two days later that I knew he wasn’t. You see, that’s when I saw one of them.
One of the Children.
