Biohazard

11

“Shit,” Sean said, his light playing over them.

We all had our lights on them and our guns. Behind us, I could hear the squeaking and scratching of the rat pack that was tailing us. I started thinking the Hatchet Clans didn’t sound so bad.

“Kill ‘em!” Specs said.

“No,” I told him. “Not unless we don’t have a choice. No sense riling them if we don’t have to. You shoot them, they’ll be forced to fight.”

“Good thinking, brother,” Sean said.

There were eight or ten of them sitting on a section of collapsed wall, huge, fat-bellied rats with glistening red eyes. Several of them were chewing on something white and bloated. It was a human arm. There were maggots on it. One of them looked right at me, wormy growths coming out of its belly making obscene slithering sounds. Its teeth were bared, claws splayed out like it was ready to jump. Its greasy black fur seemed to flutter and bristle as if it was infested with lice. And as I watched in disgust and amazement, a grub-white parasite the size of a jelly bean hopped off the rat’s back.

“Good ratties,” Sean said, moving around them. “We’re just passing on by. No harm in us.”

We moved around a pile of wreckage and the cellar opened up into a cavernous hollow. I could see tree roots dangling from the ceiling. All sorts of junk was rising from the water, even several badly rusted metal beams. There were bones everywhere, human bones. All polished white and licked clean. I saw several skulls that were riddled with teeth marks.

“Nash,” Specs. “Nash…”

I saw.

There were literally hundreds of mutant rats. Armies of hump-backed things waiting with sharp teeth and shining scarlet eyes. I saw one that was blubbery and shapeless, almost hairless. There were several stubby, blind fetal heads rising from it. The mouths were opening and closing. And the stink…dear God. Where before it had been a high, hot smell of rot and blood and dampness, now it was a seething, noisome envelope of putrid decay.

Nothing nature had birthed could smell like that.

The rats began to inch closer, crowding us. They were behind us now and in front of us, to all sides. Wherever our lights played, we could see rows of shining, hungry eyes.

Sean took a green cylinder from the pouch around his shoulder. It was one of the white phosphorus grenades. He kept it ready.

Some of the rats were the size of beagles and terriers. Big, mutated things, some almost completely hairless, others lost in a storm of writhing, twitching growths. Many did not have the usual compliment of limbs, but three or sometimes two gigantic clawed appendages. They were so large you could hear them breathing. Many were covered with tumorous, jutting humps and open sores. Some had too many eyes, others not enough, a few were blind, squeaking things.

The rats were clustered around us, mutants, abominations of every sort, pushing in closer and closer. Hosts in this black, stinking nightmare world. Closing in, pushing us forward, leading us towards something, it seemed.

We splashed on, ready to fire our guns at any moment…but to what end? The rats would have buried us alive in seconds. There were that many.

Specs came around a section of floor fallen from above and he screamed. I’ll never forget the caliber of that scream. It sounded like his mind was venting itself, blowing everything clear so it could look upon this new thing and make room for the immensity of its horror.

He fell into me, clutching at me, pulling at me, trying, it seemed, to wrap himself around me. “Nash, Nash, Nash…it’s there, Nash! It’s right there I tell you! I saw it…I fucking saw it looking at me-”

Then my light found it, too, and something in me sank, submerged forever. I looked right at it and to this day I know I saw it, but I couldn’t have. For there are mutants and then there are mutants.

It was a rat the size of a pick-up truck.

Maybe not one rat, but two or three that had grown into a single flaccid nightmare mass that was horribly puckered, hairless, and fish belly white. That’s what I saw. It reposed on a filthy, stinking pile of debris, cannibalized human bodies, and bones in a huge oblong cavity in the wall. It was like some kind of fucking altar. That clownwhite flesh was nearly transparent like some kind of pulsating jelly and you could see the bones beneath it. The skin seemed to move, to writhe, vibrate with a slick, boneless motion as if everything beneath it was in constant, sickly motion. Two bobbing heads sprouted from trunklike necks, jaws of yellow knifeblade teeth gnashing together. But the worst part were the eyes. One head had three oozing, red orbs the size of softballs. The other had but one, filmed and pustulant. There was a third head that was limp, dangling on a stalk of neck

And I swear to you, that growing out of that body were a dozen other smaller fetal heads like on that other rat, each filled with an unnatural, atavistic life that would not die.

Sean was panning his light over it, making gasping sounds in his throat. Its underbelly was set with roping, snakelike growths. I think I saw eyes…yellow, mucus-filled eyes…opening amongst them.

I was floored, sickened, offended…it’s hard to put into words. But terror belongs there, too, for never have I set my eyes upon anything as revolting, as perfectly loathsome as that gigantic grub-like rat.

The other rats had backed off.

It was all too obvious why: we had been led to this hideous mutation, unharmed, as food. We were living sacrifices laid down at the feet of this deformed, nightmare mother. They had offered her only scraps…until now.

And she wanted more.

Unfurling her glistening claws from the leathery sheaths of her paws, she moved forward. It was almost a hopping, slinking motion, a slithering. Everything seemed to move at once, a biological shuddering profusion.

A ribcage vacuumed free of meat tumbled down from the heap in her pulsing wake. At her feet, wriggling in the human carnage of bone and limb, were her young. Hundreds of hairless, squealing things with transparent hides. Misshapen like deformed fetuses, they wormed through the cadavers and skinless husks like maggots in pork.

This maybe is what put us into action.

The mother hopped down, her clawed, spade-feet slapping the wet timbers. Her lips pulled back from blackened gums, fence-post teeth licked by whipping tongues. A freight train roar of hissing anger vomited from those throats as she came on, her huge, pendulous teats swinging back and forth like sacks of grain.

Sean started shooting.

Something like this…something degenerate and perverse and evil…it had to be killed, it had to be crushed.

The first of Sean’s rounds from his shotgun pulverized one of the eyes like a rotten grape, the next blew a snout apart. Specs and I started firing, too. Bullets thudded into throats and clawing limbs. They snapped off teeth and bisected teats in sprays of foul milk.

“Run!” he told us. “Over there! Get into that pipe!”

There was a small junction pipe coming out of the wall. It was big enough to crawl through on our hands and knees. Specs and I splashed our way over there, tripping over things and pulling each other up out of the water. We fired at the other rats. Specs slid into the pipe.

I turned back and saw Sean empty his shotgun at the mother rat and then pull the pin on his phosphorus grenade. He tossed it right at her and dove into the water. There was a blinding explosion of white light and flames engulfed her, they spread over the water and up the jutting beams. Rats scattered.

Sean emerged a few feet away, shouting, “Into the pipe! Go! Go!”

Everywhere there was the awful, nauseating stink of cremated flesh and hair. The squealing, mewling mother and her legions as they were roasted alive.

On hands and knees I went through the pipe as fast as I could. I could hear Sean swearing behind me. Specs was way ahead of us. I could see the bobbing light of his helmet. Behind us there was nothing but the roaring of the mother rat and the shrill, angry squeaking and squealing of her pack. I figured we’d never make it. We’d be devoured alive in that narrow, claustrophobic pipe. But eventually it opened up into another main drainline. It must have been some sort of overflow.

I climbed out and Specs was waiting there, his grime-streaked face pulled tight, his eyes huge. Sean got out after me and led us through the water to a ladder. He went up first and handled the manhole cover. I doubted I would have been strong enough to do it. Then up went Specs. Then me, leaving the subterranean world of echoing scratching and screeching behind.

Sean pushed the cover back on and it clattered into place.

We were all sitting on the pavement in the broad daylight, nothing but rusting cars on an empty street around us.

Sean was breathing hard. With his helmet on, face dirty and sweating, he looked like a coal miner just up out of the shafts. He saw us looking at him and he grinned. Then he laughed under his breath. “Dammit,” he said. “I lost my damn Trog head.”