Biohazard

3

We walked for a good hour. After a time the red was just gone. Either the sun dried it up or it had only rained like that in particular parts of the city. I didn’t know and I really didn’t want to know. So we walked and Specs jabbered on non-stop as was his way. We didn’t see anyone on Cedar Avenue, just desertion and devastation. Why I thought Cleveland would be any better than Youngstown, I did not know.

“Too bad we couldn’t have kept the Caddy,” Specs said. “That was one sweet ride.”

“Sure,” I said, scoping out the streets ahead of us, “one sweet ride with two flat tires and a dead engine.”

“Well, it was sweet. You know it was. Would have been cool to tool around the city in that.”

“Sure, we could’ve picked up some chicks,” I said.

The city was dead. At least what we’d seen of it. Another graveyard. The rusted hulks of abandoned cars were everywhere: at the curbs, pulled up onto sidewalks, flipped over in the roads, smashed-up. I figured someone was around-or had been-because a lot of tires had been scavenged. Most likely for fires. Nothing burned like a tire.

What I saw of Cleveland was intact. I saw some neighborhoods that had burned or were fire-scarred, but not like in Youngstown. Entire sections of the city had been fire bombed to wipe out the infections and those that carried them. This did not look so systematic. Just ordinary fires, I thought.

Still, there was destruction. Buildings had collapsed into heaps of rubble that blocked thoroughfares. Houses had been burned flat. There were open cellars everywhere flooded with water and leaves, the homes and buildings that had once sat upon them nowhere to be seen. Weeds were growing up in the sidewalks. Telephone poles had fallen, some only standing because their wires held them up. Storefronts were fire damaged, plate glass windows shattered, brick facades riddled with bullet holes.

There were skeletons everywhere. Sprawled in yards, tossed in gutters, some still sitting behind the wheels of cars fully articulated. But all of them bird-pecked and gleaming white. Not just human skeletons either, but those of dogs and cats and rats and more than a few that were so unnatural looking I couldn’t be sure what they were from. Bones were the only true raw material of the brave new world and they were in abundance.

After awhile, Specs and I took a break.

We pushed a heap of remains from a peeling bench and took a break. I had an olive drab Army knapsack that I used for scavenging. We each had a can of cold Dinty Moore Beef Stew and washed it down with warm Mountain Dew Code Red. That was our lunch.

I pulled off my Dew. “We gotta get us some wheels, Specs,” I told him, because The Shape had whispered in my head that we had to keep moving west. And I wasn’t about to walk.

“Yeah, too bad about that Caddy.”

“We don’t need a pimpmobile,” I told him. “We need something rugged. A four-wheel drive or something. Roads are going to be bad now.”

We’d driven motorcycles into Cleveland from Youngstown. Then we’d abandoned them in Garfield Heights after some big birds swooped down on us and stole Specs’ hat. I don’t know what they were. Looked like ravens. But huge, mutated. We decided after that we needed something with a roof over our heads.

“You ever wonder where we’re going to be in a year from now, Nash?”

“No, I don’t. I got enough problems here and now.”

“I think about it sometimes. I wonder if maybe out there somewhere there’s still cities with real people in ‘em.”

I didn’t even bother speculating on that. I finished my stew and threw the can in the street. We survivors were terrible litterbugs. I smoked and sipped off my Dew. We’d looted the Dew from a deli in Garfield Heights. Everything was long rotten in there, but the canned stuff and soda was still good. Civilization may fall, but the Dew goes on forever.

“Why do you figure west, Nash? Why not south?”

He’d been thinking about asking me that for a long time. So I told him about The Shape. I didn’t want to because he was too wrapped up in all that occult shit and I knew he’d make it into something supernatural. And he did, of course. But I had to tell him and I did.

After that, all he thought about was The Shape.