Specs, Jakoby, and me stood tight with him, ringing him in so that Weeks would have to shoot through us to get at him.
“Step away from him!” Weeks ordered us. “Get away from him or I’ll cap every one of you!”
“Go ahead!” Specs shouted. “Go right ahead!”
Weeks moved in still closer and so did his soldiers and I was figuring this was it, this was how it ended and what a goddamn revolting way to go, standing there knee deep in human remains in filthy suits with flies buzzing all over us.
Weeks was going to shoot, there was no doubt of it, but then Specs reached into the hopper and grabbed an arm that was bloated white. “Hungry, asshole? How about a wing?” he threw the arm and it hit one of the soldiers with a moist thud that put him on his ass. He screamed.
We started laughing.
“How about a thigh?” Jakoby said and heaved a maggoty leg.
“Got me a breast here,” Paulson said, gathering up a withered trunk. “At least I think it’s a breast…” He let it fly.
Then all of us just went mad with the idea.
Limbs and bones, entrails and mucid clots of flesh started flying, raining down on the soldiers, making them jump and duck as they were spattered with carrion and maggots. Weeks tried to dart back, but I tossed a head that broke apart and splattered him with wormy gray matter.
He, of course, screamed.
Screamed and went right down on his ass.
One of the soldiers said, “Screw this,” and turned, jogging across the parking lot.
“Get back here!” Weeks called out to him. “You’re deserting your post!”
But the guy didn’t listen and Weeks shot him, dropped him right there.
After that, it was sheer pandemonium.
One of the soldiers shot Jakoby as he tossed handfuls of grave matter at him. And about the time he went down-staggering, bullet-ridden, but managing to crash into the guy who had shot him-I threw a loop of bowels at Weeks and they struck him right in the chest leaving a gray, snaking stain on his white biosuit. He screamed and tossed his rifle.
“I’m contaminated! I’m unclean! I’m filthy! Dirty! Dirty! Dirty!” he shrieked out from inside his helmet, rolling around on the pavement, maybe trying to wipe the putrescence off himself.
The other soldier had gotten tangled up in Jakoby and finally succeeded in shoving him aside. He brought up his rifle as Paulson rushed him with a rotting body in his arms. He shot him. Gave him two three-round volleys and Paulson fell at his feet, hitting the pavement with the corpse that just simply exploded on impact.
The soldier would have had us, too, had fate not intervened at that moment.
Temporarily blinded from a spray of rancid flesh, his plexiglass helmet bubble was black and dripping with juice and bits of meat. He stripped his helmet off and threw it aside. And at that precise moment, one of the corpse-worms slid out of the belly of the cadaver that Paulson had dropped.
It was one of the biggest I had ever seen.
At first, I thought it was a section of swollen bowel spilling out from the corpse’s belly, but then it moved, it coiled over the pavement, threading in and out of the stiff like rubbery white yarn. It was huge, flattened-out and segmented, shining with slime and drainage. It was making an almost angry humming sound that was high and strident.
The soldier saw it about the time it rose up from the corpse’s belly with a juicy, succulent noise. It didn’t have eyes that anyone could see, but it seemed to know where he was. That humming grew positively ear-shattering in its intensity. The worm’s body swelled-up, thickening, growing bulbous like some impossibly fleshy penis. The bulb or head inflated, too.
The soldier brought his carbine to bear.
But the worm struck first: it shot an inky stream of juice into his face and the effect was instantaneous. He screamed and fell to his knees, his hands clutching his face…only his face was no longer a face as such, but something soft and pulpy that was squirting out between his fingers.
As the worm retreated, me and Specs went over to Weeks.
He was still whining and crying out in a high girlish voice about being unclean, crawling about on all fours. We just looked down on him, then we started kicking him. And we kept kicking him until he went limp.
Then we dragged his inert form over to the hopper.
We stripped his suit off.
And threw his ass in.
Then we started tossing bodies and body parts on top of him, everything we could find until he was buried in entrails and torsos and limbs, shivering beneath a blanket of carrion and graveworms. Somewhere during the process, he came awake, fighting and screaming, trying to free himself from the putrefying flesh and greening meat. He screamed and clawed.
And Specs, giggling, pulled the lever and the blades came scooping down.
Before Weeks disappeared, we saw him in there tangled in bowels and husks, his arm wedged into a slimy ribcage. And we also saw a fat white corpse-worm slide from a body and investigate his face.
Then the blades pushed him into the bin with the rest and the ram compacted it all with a crunching, pulping noise and fetid juice ran from the drain holes at the bottom of the truck.
That was it.
Specs and I tossed aside our suits, lit cigarettes like workmen after a hard day on the job, and walked away from it all. We went looking for a car. We were going to Cleveland.
CLEVELAND, OHIO
1
Cleveland had a real bad rat problem, even worse than Youngstown. At night, hordes of them would come up out of the sewers and cellars and take to the streets in massive swarms like driver ants, devouring anything in their path. They were all rabid and incredibly vicious. By moonlight, you could see them down there, so many greasy gray bodies that you could have crossed the street walking on their backs and never once touched pavement. I saw them take down dog packs and street gangs, leave nothing but bones behind.
Cleveland, as it turned out, also had Red Rains.
2
I woke that first night in the city to the sound of Specs screaming. We were crashed out in a big Cadillac El Dorado we found parked in an empty lot over in Fairfax, just off Cedar Avenue on East 86^th. Looked like it had been a pimp’s car once…leopard seats with hot-red plush carpeting and tinted windows. Specs slept in the back; I took the front. Next morning, he woke up screaming.
I panicked and pulled my gun, wiping sleep from my eyes. All I had was a little five-shot snub-nosed. 38 belly gun I’d taken off the mangled corpse of a cop in Ravenna a few days before. “What? What? What?” I said, looking for a target, anything.
Specs was breathing hard in the backseat. “Just had a dream…did I cry out?”
“Yeah, you fucking cried out, asshole. I thought you were being murdered.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, Nash. Sometimes I get these bad dreams. Just corpses everywhere, you know? Sometimes I dream about my sister, about Darlene.”
Poor Specs. I didn’t want to get him going on his dead sister again. In those days I still had a watch on my wrist-a nice Indiglo Timex that Shelly had given me for my birthday-and I hadn’t gone native yet and started clocking the time by the position of the sun. Watch said it was ten in the morning…but inside the car it was pretty dark. I thought maybe it was the tinted windows, but it wasn’t that at all.
The windows, all the windows, of the Cadillac were covered in something dark. I didn’t get it. I pulled off some tepid water I had in a bottle, tried to clear my head.
“What’s all over the windows?” Specs asked me and I could already hear the paranoia creeping into his voice. Poor guy. Specs was a good person in most ways, but he was paranoid as hell. He saw the boogeyman around every corner and who could really blame him?
“I don’t know,” I said.
The Caddy had old-style crank windows. A huge vehicle back when they’d rolled them off the assembly lines in Detroit with plenty of leg room. I tried the windows and so did Specs, but they were jammed up. So I did what I didn’t really want to do: I opened my door.
The world was red.
The streets, the buildings, even the trees and stoplight were fucking red like they’d been dipped in red ink. It was insane. Specs and I got out and walked around. Everything was covered in that crusty red film. I had never seen anything like it. It looked like the sky had rained blood during the night. I walked over to a spreading oak tree and, sure enough, a few drops of red were still dripping from the branches.