Biohazard

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.

“It’s blood, Nash. Jesus Christ, it’s blood,” Specs said, clinging so close to me I thought he was going to kiss me.

I shoved him away. “It ain’t blood. It was some weird rain. Like an acid rain or something.”

But I wasn’t even sure that I believed it. Something inside me clenched tight as we walked those blood red streets. There was no life or movement anywhere. Just that hazy sky above and the graveyard stillness and all that red. It was like some kind of expressionistic painting or something and it made me go cold inside.

“You know what this is, don’t you?” Specs said.

“No, I don’t. But you’re gonna tell me, I’m sure.”

“It’s an omen,” Specs said. “It’s a bad omen, Nash. Real bad.”

And on that point, I believed him.