Biohazard

5

I had my. 38 out, but I honestly felt impotent with it next to that killing iron in the big man’s hands. He was about 6’3, had to go in at an easy 250 if not more. His hair was short and choppy, but his beard was long and tangled. It reached right down to his chest. He wore a tattered jean vest with lots of patches on it. He was a biker. This guy was a fucking biker.

“We’re not Scabs,” Specs told him. “We’re not infected.”

“I know that, little man. You were Scabs, you wouldn’t be alive right now. I was looking for some normal people and I suppose you two scrubs’ll do.” He was standing under the wide awning outside a shoe store, one eye cocked to the sky. A few more drops of blood fell. “You boys better get over here. You don’t wanna get caught in a red rain.”

We got under the awning with him. I lit a cigarette, explained who we were, where we had come from, how we were looking for some wheels to head west with. He nodded, didn’t seem like he gave a shit. His bare arms were massive, set with tattoos and I could see right away that those tattoos symbolized something, all those snakes and deathheads and names and places. He wasn’t just some wannabe punk or yuppy that thought some inking would make him into a real man. He was the genuine article: an outlaw biker.

“Name’s McKree, Sean McKree. Friends call me ‘Chang’,” he told us, watching the sky. He did not look happy. “Fucking weather.”

“Nice to meet you, Chang,” Specs said.

“You can call me, Sean, little man,” he said. “My friends are all dead.”

More drops of red fell out in the streets, plopping onto the hoods of cars. Then the downpour began, an absolute curtain of what looked like blood. But not just liquid, but unidentifiable chunks of matter that thudded and splattered everywhere. It lasted about ten minutes and the stink of it was acrid. It reamed your nose right out. But that, too, faded in time. Out in the streets the liquid was drying up, leaving that sticky red film I had seen that morning. I looked closer and there was no mistaking it: there were bones in the street. Not human bones, I didn’t think, but animal bones. Most of them quite small. They had not been there before.

“It is blood!” Specs said. “Bones, too!”

“Can’t be blood,” I told him. “That doesn’t make any sense. It’s acid rain or something.”

“You’re both right.”

We looked at Sean. “You heard me,” he said. “There’s acid in that shit and it’ll burn the soles off your boots and sting your skin if you get caught out in it. But it’s mostly blood and run-off. See, there was a slaughterhouse on the Cuyahoga. Back in the day they used to release their by-products straight into the river and the river would turn red in the summer. But the EPA made ‘em clean up their act,” he explained to us. “So what they did is they built two gigantic steel rendering tanks that were like fifty feet deep and sixty feet across. They pumped all their by-products in there: blood, bones, fat, you name it. The tanks were full of acid…”

He told us that the tanks were open air so that evaporation would remove the liquid. Then the world puked out and those two full tanks of remains, acid, and run-off were just sitting there. He couldn’t be sure, but now and again something like a wind-spout brewed up off the big lake and traveled down river, sucking up just about anything that wasn’t tied down. For some reason, it sucked up what was in those tanks nearly every time. The tanks never dried out because the rain filled them up and the wind-spouts stirred them like cauldrons, scraping all the goodies from the bottom.

“I’ve seen the tanks,” he said. “You can smell ‘em for a mile. My guess is that in the plant there are other storage vats full of blood and slime, probably gravity-fed. Sooner or later, the rendering tanks’ll dry up and run out of remains. But it hasn’t happened yet.”

We stood under the awning, smoking and chatting. Sean said we had to wait until the rain had completely dried or it would eat holes in our boots. So we waited and he told us about his life as an outlaw biker. He’d been a sergeant-at-arms for the Warlocks motorcycle gang out of New Jersey, which meant he was an enforcer that knocked heads together and killed people when the club ordered it. On the back of his vest there was a flaming skull. Above it, a rocker read: WARLOCKS MC. Below it, BAYONNE, NJ.

“You’re a long way from Bayonne,” I said.

“Yeah, I am, brother. Came here to straighten out some shit. It’s what I do,” he told me. “See…just before they dropped them fucking bombs, I was sent here to straighten out some business. It was club business. Private. But since there ain’t no more law, no more feds, and no more clubs, I’ll tell you. Here in Cleveland, there was a Hell’s Angels charter, a clubhouse. One of their people-Ray Coombs, called him ‘Ratbait’-got hisself killed. A couple hitters from the Blood Brothers did him in Newark. Blood Brothers were a bunch of kill-happy maggots that were trying hard to impress the Outlaws out of Detroit, so they started offing Angels. Hell’s Angels and Outlaws were the big two in bike gangs then, you see, and they hated each other. Lots of killing on both sides, lots of retiliation and turf wars. I rode with the Warlocks. We were tight with the Angels. Word came out of Oakland, C-A, that they wanted these Blood Brothers done. They were hiding out in Cleveland, over in Stockyards. I got the job.”

Specs was wide-eyed. “You mean you’re a hit man? You mean you came to kill those bikers?”

“No, I came to fucking dance with ‘em,” Sean said. He looked over at me. “Something wrong with this guy?”

“No, he’s just been through a lot.”

Sean shrugged. “I got one of those dirt bags, then the bombs fell and I been here since. I was shacked up with an Angel called Dirty Sanchez and his old lady, Long Tall Sally. A couple weeks ago the Trogs got ‘em. I been hunting Trogs since.” He told us the Trogs lived underground, were real bad news, barely human. “When I’m not killing Trogs, I waste Scabs. But they’re like shooting ducks. Easy. Trogs takes skill. There’s sport involved.”

Out in the streets, the rain had dried up, leaving a world that was stained red. Night was coming on fast. We needed a place to crash for the night where we didn’t have to worry about getting our throats slit.

I heard a squeaking sound and saw a rat. I made to shoot it and Sean stayed my hand. Pretty soon there were seven or eight of them, big, ugly things with red eyes and those weird growths popping through their threadbare hides. They paid no attention to us. They went after the bones and within minutes there were no bones left. The rats were gone.

“You know where there’s any good rides?” I asked.

Sean nodded. “Sure. I can get you anything you want. But not tonight. Heard a rumor from a ragbag this morning that the Hatchet Clans are pushing in from the north. You don’t want to be out in the streets tonight.”

“Hell are the Hatchet Clans?” I asked.

He laughed. “Brother, you don’t wanna know.”