That was The Shape.
It never showed itself and maybe I was too unclean to look upon it. It told me how it had to happen, how it all had to come down. I had a benefactor. I didn’t know what it was or what it wanted at that point, but it kept talking to me, whispering in my head, always pointing me in the right direction, keeping me alive. It terrified me. It intrigued me. I felt special. I felt damned. Months later, I could not be sure I really heard it. Maybe it wasn’t a voice at all, maybe it was some warped subjective impression. And maybe I was just insane. But that’s how it began. That’s how I sold my soul to stay alive. That’s how I got into the business of condemning people to death.
But I didn’t know about that part. Not then.
10
After that, I lived like a spider.
After The Shape had whispered to me-alluding to things I must do but never naming them-I hunted the city, seeking out damp, dark corners and crevices where I could secrete myself, webby and lightless places where the roving gangs of scavengers and the packs of wild dogs couldn’t find me. I became good at hiding and stalking mainly because The Shape was always in my head, telling me where to find food and shelter, which damp and dripping cellars were safe and free of rabid rat colonies.
Then one day while out searching for weapons, I got drafted.
The Army or what was left of it found me.
I came out of an alley and I saw two men in white biosuits. They carried tactical carbines and were pointing them right in my face. There was no point in running; they would have cut me down in ten feet. So I just stood there, dumbly, the Browning Hi-Power at my waist and my scavenger bag thrown over one shoulder. I suppose by that point I looked like any other ragbag…unwashed, ragged, eyes crazy and desperate.
They kept their rifles on me.
“Listen,” I finally said, holding my hands up, “I don’t want any trouble. I was just trying to find something to eat. I’ll just back away and go my own way. Okay?”
The two men just looked at each other through the plexiglass shields of their white helmets.
I started backing away.
And as I did so, the one on the left sprayed the alley wall with his carbine. 9mm rounds chewed into the brick just above my head. I went down on my knees, hands still up. “Jesus…take it easy, guys…just…take…it… easy…”
“You ain’t going nowhere, fuckhead,” one of them said. He looked at his partner. “Check him.”
The guy charged over and knocked me on my ass. He stripped the Browning away and the scavenger bag, took my knife, everything but the clothes I wore. Then he made me lay spreadeagle in the alley, facedown in a dirty puddle. He ran a Geiger Counter over me, checked for sores, ulcers.
“Looks clean,” the soldier said.
“Get up, fuckhead,” the other guy said. “Congratulations, you’ve been drafted.”
I looked up at him. “Hell are you talking about?”
But the guy just laughed as I was handcuffed and led to an olive drab tactical van down the street. They shoved and kicked me all the way. And when they asked me how I liked the Army, I told them to go fuck their mothers. Which got me a rifle butt to the back of the head and a ticket to la-la land.
Drafted.
That’s what those assholes called it.
I was part of a clean-up crew, me and a bunch of other idiots that had been likewise “drafted.”
There was nothing remotely military about the job. We simply had to pick up bodies. Decked out in white biosuits, we tooled around in garbage trucks collecting the dead which were a serious health threat.
That was how I met Specs, this skinny little guy with oversized glasses that the soldiers liked to pick on. Me, Specs, two others guys named Paulson and Jackoby made up the collection crew. Of course, the sergeant in charge?some hardballed lifer named Weeks?collectively called us his “Shitheads.” He also had pet names for us: I was “Fuckhead,” Specs was “Mama’s Boy,” Jackoby was “Shit-fer-Brains,” and Paulson was “Mr. Fucking Useless.”
It was quite a scene.
The corpses were gathered, then tossed into the hoppers like Monday’s trash. The first time I saw Paulson pull the lever and cycle the bodies through, the hydraulic ram crushing and compacting the bodies, I threw up. Right in the street. My stomach was already bad from handling all that green meat, but the sound of it, those blades scooping the bodies into the main bin and smashing them to a pulp…it was just too much. I went down on my knees and stripped my mask off, blowing my guts right on the pavement.
The soldiers burst out laughing.
Weeks said, “You don’t like that shit, Fuckhead? Maybe next I’ll throw your ass in there, you fucking pussy.”
Specs helped me to my feet. “You get used to it, man. It’s fucked up, but you do.”
No draftee in any war went through worse shit than we did.
You stood there in those hot suits, flies buzzing around you and maggots dropping from your gloves, just filthy with all the revolting shit that oozed from the bodies. And that was bad enough, but what was worse was hearing those cadavers compact. Even our helmets couldn’t muffle the sound of dozens of putrefying corpses being crushed, bones snapping and flesh being squished to mush. Every time a load was cycled through, black muddy ooze would run from the bottom of the hopper and rain to the street, squeezed from the corpses like pulp from tomatoes.
And the smell of it…dear God, it was unspeakable.
But we had no choice.
While I and the other poor bastards tossed bodies in the hopper, the soldiers would keep their guns on us. If you tried to break out, tried to run, they’d cut you right down, throw you in the back with the stiffs.
When the honeybuckets were full, we drove them outside the city to the dump, emptying the hoppers into the immense body pits where the corpses were burned. A mile from the dump, you could see clouds of black smoke rising into the sky, smell the cremated flesh and burning hair. It was like standing downwind from the ovens at Treblinka.
If there was truly a hell on earth, then this was it.
11
Weeks was not only a psychotic who shot anything that moved, he was deluded and paranoid and should have been in a loony bin somewhere. I never learned what his deal was, whether he was born nuts or if Doomsday had totally unhinged him, but he did not believe that the United States had been decimated by nuclear weapons. At least, not the kind fired by people. He was certain that aliens from outer space were responsible and that even now, they were spreading disease and pestilence and were hiding out in human form.
“Tell me where you came from,” he said to me one day.
“Youngstown.”
“Oh, you think you’re funny? You think this is a fucking joke?”
“You asked me, I told you.”
He put his carbine on me. “And how am I supposed to know you ain’t one of them? You ain’t an Outsider?”
That’s what Weeks called them: Outsiders. He never once used the word “alien” but then he did not have to. Everyone knew.
I didn’t even know what the guy looked like. He never, ever took off his biosuit. He even slept in it. Even back at the barracks he wore it religiously because he had no intention of any Outsider bugs getting him and changing
