whore. But I made good money posing with motorcycles and trucks and ATVs, wearing tool belts and hardhats and nothing much else.” She shrugged. “But I never felt like I was part of anything. Not until now.”
“Now?”
“You’ll probably think it’s crazy. Now that I’m with you guys I feel…needed, part of something. It makes no sense, I know. But it’s true. You make me feel safe, protected. This world is fucked up and dangerous, but I feel secure with you, Nash. I felt it right away. There’s a power coming off you. An energy. We all feel it. It’s what draws us to you.”
“I’m nothing special, trust me,” I told her.
“Oh, yes you are.”
She told me the secure feeling came from me, not the others. They had nothing to do with it. She said that when Gremlin was with us he just gave her the creeps because he was like the men she always assumed salivated over her calendars. The sort that would have fucked a toilet seat if they thought her ass had touched it. Gremlin had been like that.
“A small mind with surging hormones,” she said. “A walking idiot penis.”
I started laughing. Yeah, she had that asshole pegged, all right.
“I study people, Nash,” she told me. “I always have. People and their relationships interest me.”
“And what do you think of the relationships in my little posse?”
“I think they’re tight, solid. You have a good group,” she admitted. “Carl’s okay. He’s like your obedient watchdog. He’d never betray you. Texas Slim? Oh boy, how do you categorize him. He’s weird, but loyal. He sure likes to talk about mortuaries and embalming bodies. I have to think his interest in corpses is not purely professional. Then again, he’s about ninety percent bullshit. Underneath he’s okay.”
Mickey admitted that Janie intimidated her a bit. Probably because Janie didn’t like her and felt threatened by her presence. But there was no reason for that, Mickey said, because Janie herself was pretty, features finely- sculpted and perfectly Nordic from her blue eyes to her high cheekbones and the blonde hair that was not so much yellow as silver.
“She’s really got it going on, Nash. But if you don’t mind me saying so, she’s a little cool. Not just to me, but to you, to everybody. She’s caring and compassionate, though. She gives you that feeling that she cares a lot more than she’s willing to admit, but it’s sort of a, I care, honey, but from the end of a stick.”
Mickey said that she’d felt the bond between me and Janie right away. Like she was plugged into me or I was plugged into her and together we completed some sort of arcane circuit.
“Sure,” I said. “But I’m beginning to think that circuit is dead.”
“If it is, I’m sure she’ll blame me for it,” Mickey told me. She stared at me for some time. “You have the power and I knew it right away. Just looking at you made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. But I wondered what it was at first. Everybody walked light around you, except for Janie with her mood swings. I knew you had something going because whatever it was, the others were terrified of it.”
I could feel myself warming to her already. She was honest. Honest like Janie was honest, but more straightforward, no games, no subtlety, no esoteric feminine mystery. With Mickey, everything was on the table in plain sight. There was something very refreshing about that.
“And what do you think now that you know about The Shape?” I asked her. “Do you think I’m some kind of horrible monster? Some psycho who gets his kicks hurting other people? No mercy, just a fucking animal. That’s what Janie thinks.”
Mickey put the full force of her hungry eyes on me and it was considerable. “No, Nash. That’s not what I think at all. You do it for the good of all even though it scares you and you hate it. But I don’t hate it,” she said, moving in a little closer. “I respect the power you have. In fact, it turns me on.”
I could have laughed, but I didn’t. It was true. I could see it in her eyes. Power got her off and she wasn’t too proud to admit it.
“How’s you intuition working?”
“Just fine.”
“You feeling anything?” I said. “About what might be coming our way?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
She licked her lips and looked away. “We’re in terrible danger.”
9
We were driving.
It was decided that the simplest route out of the city would be the one we took in. Follow I-80 out and head west. I didn’t have the slightest idea where in the west we were going, I only knew that we had to keep heading in that direction. For it was out there somewhere. What I was looking for or what The Shape wanted me to find. In just about every way entering Des Moines seemed like an awful waste of time, yet I knew it had been important. Somehow. Was it Price? Was that it? I couldn’t say for sure, but it seemed likely. The idea of it scared me. For the only real use Price seemed to have was that he was an expert on infectious diseases.
Time would tell.
Carl was driving, complaining about all the wreckage. Mickey was sitting up front with him. I sat in the back with Price and Texas. Janie was in the way back seat with Morse. I turned to say something to her, but she held a finger to her lips. Morse was sleeping and that was a good thing. I started plying Price with questions. Maybe I just wanted to hear somebody talk who knew something about what was going on.
So Price talked. “Even in the old days nobody wanted anything to do with Ebola,” he told us. “Even your veteran biohazard experts were scared of it. It gave virologists the cold sweats. The way a lot of us were thinking was that Ebola was the doomsday machine of germs, the only life form we had encountered thus far that could truly put a serious dent in the human population. Maybe more than a dent, maybe a big ugly hole. The Ebola organism was the most frightening thing we could imagine. We knew too little about it. It popped up along the Ebola River in Africa, wiped out some villages, continued a pattern of sporadic, though minor, outbreaks in the next few decades, but never really broke out. Maybe if it had, we could have nailed the bastard. But it was all sketchy. We couldn’t be sure of the vector. Was it airborne? Waterborne? Both? Neither? Were the corpses of its victims vectors? We tracked it to central Africa and there the trail went cold. We knew it was there somewhere, proliferating, but we never could find the headwater, the reservoir. Yet we knew it existed. And that scared us. We were all envisioning a massive breakthrough into the human race, the virus crashing from one individual to the next. Millions dead within weeks. So it was no wonder that biohazard people wet themselves at the idea of working with this deadly little bug. One little tear in your protective suit…well, that’s it, isn’t it? The virus will flood into your system through any tiny cut or abrasion.”
Price went on to tell us that Ebola was the perfect microbial firestorm. Once it gets inside you the war is over before the first battle is fought. So it was all bad enough on the old Ebola front, he informed us, then Ebola-X showed.
It was even worse, if such a thing is imaginable.
Basically the same bug, just pumped up and with a very bad attitude. It spread faster, it killed quicker. Ebola-X attacks every part of the human body, sparing nothing: nervous tissue, marrow, organs, lymphatics. It goes after everything, absolutely laying waste to the immune system. It begins with massive blood clotting which restricts blood supply to the various systems of the body. Starved of nutrients and oxygen, tissues go necrotic. Connective tissue become mush, the skin is covered with bright red lesions which seem to expand as you watch. The flesh goes to pulp and internal bleeding begins. Your gums go to putty and your teeth fall out. Your eyes fill with blood and blood runs from every available orifice. Black infected vomit comes out in great quantities, tearing the skin off the tongue and bringing up sloughed, dead tissue from the windpipe and stomach while blood flows from your ass thick with macerated chunks of your intestines. The organs bloat as they fill with clotted blood and begin to decay. The testicles swell up like hard blue balls, nipples bleed, and vaginas eject infected tissue and copious amounts of black-red drainage. If the unlucky victim is a woman and she is pregnant, she spontaneously aborts the child who emerges infected with Ebola-X, blood running from it, eyes brilliantly red. The child, like the
