“Specs, Specs,” I’d say. “Knock it off for chrissake.”
He’d lay there in the darkness, face shiny with sweat, just blinking. He was all messed-up from Doomsday and who wasn’t?
One night as I sat there sharing a smoke with him, he said, “You know what, Nash? I believe in omens and portents. I think the future’s already written if you can figure out how to read it.”
“No shit?” I said.
“Really, Nash, I’m not kidding.”
I pulled off my smoke. “Specs, what difference would it make? The future is fucking black. You don’t wanna know about it.”
“Oh yes you do. If you read the signs they can keep you alive, keep you safe. If I had some Tarot cards I could show you your life path. What’s gonna happen.”
“I don’t wanna know what’s gonna happen.”
Specs went on and on about all that whacky new age shit he was into. They could call it what they wanted, but it all sounded like fairground gypsy fortune telling to me. But Specs loved it, loved talking in great detail about everything from pyramid power to the energy of crystals.
After about twenty minutes of that, Paulson said, “Why don’t you girls go get a room? I’m trying to fucking sleep here.”
Specs was excited, though. “But, Nash, listen-”
“Go to sleep,” I told him. I shut my eyes, thinking about all that crazy shit and remembering my wife. That night I had my own nightmares. I dreamed that rats were eating Shelly.
13
The showdown, the endgame as it were, came not three days later.
We were making the rounds, collecting the dead, and Weeks got a call over the radio that there were a bunch of corpses dirtying up the parking lot over at the Southern Park Mall. Couldn’t have that. In a city inundated in the unburied dead, what remained of the civic authority wanted that goddamn mall parking lot cleaned up. Couldn’t have all the friendly tourists that came to American Eagle or Victoria’s Secret or Build-A-Bear Workshop seeing all the carrion out there. What would they think? Didn’t matter that the mall was in ruins now and what tourists usually showed up were either crazy or burning with fallout.
Outside Sears, there was a heap of bodies pretty much on the order of what I had seen at the 7-11. One big stinking ugly mess. When we pulled up in the truck, we could already hear the flies buzzing. A flock of gulls and crows took to the air.
We shitheads jumped off the back of the truck, looked at each other, and just shook our heads. The stink was bad enough to put a maggot off meat. Just a great, flyblown heap of corpses that had to number in the hundreds. The scavengers had been at them and had dragged bits and pieces off in every direction.
“Okay, Fuckhead,” Weeks said. “Take Shit-fer-Brains with you and wade in. Ain’t gonna smell any better ten minutes from now.”
“This is ridiculous,” Specs said. “They’re all soft…we’ll need shovels.”
“Shut the fuck up, Mama’s Boy. Get in there. You, too, Mr. Fucking Useless. Load that hopper. Let’s go!”
When we didn’t move fast enough, one of the soldiers cracked a few shots over our heads. But even that only made us drag ourselves forward. When we got to the perimeter of the heap, staring at all those rotting husks and bird-pecked faces and trailing limbs, the rest of the crew just looked at me. Lately, they’d been looking at me a lot. I guess I was the leader of the revolt that we all knew was coming. And I could feel it gathering momentum…electric with potential, just waiting to explode. I think they could, too. We were waiting for a catalyst to light the fuse and it was coming, God yes, it was certainly coming.
“Let’s do it,” I told them. “Let’s load that fucking hopper. Then we’ll see.”
We went at it.
It was revolting even by the standards set by other such jobs. The corpses were so ripe they pulled apart like boiled chicken. Arms came off, legs came off, moldering flesh pulled right off the bones beneath. We backed the truck up close as we could because this rank, evil-smelling mess had to be thrown in the hopper piecemeal. It took hours. We sweated in our filthy biosuits, enveloped in a gagging cloud of flies and grave-stench.
Somewhere during the process, Specs lost it.
He usually didn’t so much as clear his throat around the soldiers, but today was different. Maybe he, too, was feeding off that potential. He was all assholes and elbows, crouched over and digging into the cold cuts, just lost in his work. Sinking his gloved hands deep into that seething, crawling rot, firing it behind him, arms pinwheeling, letting it fly into the hopper. A corpse-worm slid out of the remains of a child and he stomped it to white mush before it could do so much as writhe in the sunlight.
“That’s it!” Weeks told him, keeping his distance, his carbine balanced over one shoulder. “That’s the way, Mama’s Boy! Get that shit in the hopper! Got to it, you sonofabitch!”
This spurred Specs into greater feats of corpse clearing. He dug into the mess, letting limbs and bones and globs of offal fly, almost knocking me on my ass with a stray femur. Then he happened upon a head. The head of a teenage girl. The face was nothing but fungus and corpse jelly oozing from the white skull beneath…but it stopped him dead.
He held up that head and it had long red hair hanging from the scalp. Hair that was greasy and clotted with filth, but red all the same.
“Fuck you doing, Mama’s Boy?” one of the soldiers asked.
And everyone was kind of wondering the same.
Specs stood there, trembling, holding that decayed head up. Slime dripped from it and loathsome black beetles crawled over the backs of his hands and up his arms.
With a gagging, strangled cry, he dropped it.
It hit the pavement like a moist, soft pumpkin and broke right apart at his feet. Beetles poured from the shattered skull, a crawling flood of them.
Weeks stepped back even further, of course.
Specs kept making that gagging sound.
The head was the catalyst we were waiting for.
I stood up from the carrion pile. My white biosuit was smeared gray and black with corpse waste. I brushed some stray maggots off my sleeve. “Hey? You okay, Specs…Specs? You okay, man?”
“Get to work!” Weeks shouted.
But we were ignoring him. Specs was having an episode and maybe we were filthy with decaying flesh and corpse slime and maybe we spent our days juggling human remains at gunpoint, but all this bonded us together. Made us stronger. Made us care for each other and in the process, made us a little more human than the drones with the guns.
“I said, get to fucking work!” Weeks called out, popping a few rounds into the air.
“Go fuck yourself,” Paulson told him.
Weeks took two trembling steps forward, ejecting the magazine from his tactical carbine and slapping a fresh one in place. “Hell did he just say to me?” he asked his soldiers.
“Told you-” one of them began, suppressing a mad desire to giggle “?told you to go fuck yourself…sir.”
Weeks raged but we paid him no mind. We were clustered around Specs, touching him, reassuring him, while he went on in a whining voice about his sister, about Darlene. Darlene and her beautiful red hair and how she rotted away in her bed of typhoid fever.
About this time, we realized that Weeks was shouting at us. We turned and he had his weapon on us, his hands shaking on it. He was either scared to death or so pissed off he could’ve passed nails.
“Mr. Fucking Useless!” he cried. “Step away from those Shitheads! Do it! Do it! Do it! You better goddamn well do it right fucking now, you miserable ass-sucking squeeze of shit! I’ll drop you where you stand! Yer a fucking walking dead man!”
Paulson pulled off his helmet and threw it at Weeks who nearly jumped right out of his suit trying to avoid the filthy thing. It hit the ground and rolled across the parking lot.
“No,” he said. “I refuse.”
“No? No? No? Fuck you mean, you refuse?” Weeks said, his voice very dry like all the spit had just dried on his tongue. “You can’t refuse me! You can’t fucking well refuse me! Are you out of yer fucking mind? Are you? Well…ARE YOU?”
“Yes sir, believe so,” Paulson said.