Biohazard

15

Sean scavenged us a stretcher and we carried Specs to a warehouse on around sunset. We weren’t going to burn him or any of that fucked up pagan madness. We were going to do it the right way and just let The Shape have him. We set the stretcher atop some crates. We lit candles because Janie said we should. Specs loved all that occult pageantry.

Then it was time.

I’ll never get that night out of my mind. The candles flickering. The cavernous silence. That creeping chill that came in off the river. The warehouse felt like a tomb.

I held his hand and we talked. “Remember that day when we sat on that bench, Nash? We ate Dinty Moore stew and drank Dew. That’s the day I knew you were my best friend in the world.”

I couldn’t take it. I started balling my eyes out. I told them all that I just couldn’t go through with it. I lashed out at Sean and Janie and they just watched me with defeated, sad eyes. Then I looked at Specs fighting for every breath, then I knew I had to do it.

So I summoned The Shape.

I closed my eyes and concentrated on that sphere of darkness in my mind that I always associated with it. Right away, I could feel it coming and I was flooded with a primal terror that was ice-cold, freezing. The atmosphere of the warehouse immediately went from being simply neutral to activated. That’s the only way I can describe it. Around us there was no longer just dead air, but an ether that was charged and deadly and thrumming with energy. The hairs on my arms and at the back of my neck stood up like I had come into contact with a charge of static electricity.

I went down on my knees, absolutely senseless.

Janie and Sean pulled me back to safety.

I smelled a sharp stink of ozone and something like burning flesh, hot blood boiled to steam. Then an awful, acrid stench like melting wires and blown fuses. The warehouse seemed to tremble. The concrete floor vibrated. There was a searing hot flash of something like chain lightening that blinded me momentarily and then the Shape was coming: a boiling black mass like thunderheads getting ready to shoot lightening at the earth. It was a spinning, roaring, unstable irradiated elemental force that came with the heat of coke ovens and the toxic glow of nuclear reactors. Looking at it was like looking into the primeval fires of cosmic creation.

Janie screamed.

Sean fell on his ass trying to get away from it.

The Shape was pulsing, revolving on an axis of pure atomic force that was frightening to behold, a storm of fallout and dust and particulated matter with a heart of superhot plasma. It made a buzzing sound like a million angry hornets.

I stood there, feeling its heat burning the fine hairs on the back of my hands. It was matter and force and pulsating energy, but it was not mindless. It was sentient and directed. Absolute nuclear chaos that was living and evil and hungry. At the very center of the whirlwind itself, there was a zone of blackness darker than anything I had ever seen before, the blackness that must exist beyond time and space. And flickering luminously within that shrieking void of antimatter were two red eyes that looked hot enough to melt steel.

Without further ado, it took Specs.

Dear God, it took him.

The mass of The Shape was constantly changing and reinventing itself, but I suppose if you had to give it spatial dimensions I would have said it was probably something like twelve feet in height, maybe six in width. It hovered over Specs for a moment or two and that’s when he realized exactly what he had given himself to.

He screamed.

Probably with his last reservoir of air he screamed like I’ve never heard a man scream before with a wild, cutting, hysterical sound that echoed through the warehouse. Sean made to go to his aid and I held him back. Specs was beyond our help. If Sean had gotten close to that radioactive furnace, he would have been vaporized.

Because that’s what happened to Specs.

He was sucked into it and I saw him spinning in that godless void, I saw him bulge up and then literally explode into particles that were vacuumed into the central mass, made part of it, every atom leeched of its energy in the whirling subatomic storm. And then he came back out again. He hit the floor and he was a blackened, smoldering heap of refuse that sparked and popped.

The buzzing sound faded, seemed to come from a great distance. There was a resounding hollow explosion that sounded much like a sonic boom when the air collapses back into the void left by a supersonic fighter.

That was it.

It was gone and so was Specs. What was left was a smoking heap of debris that had been supercharged, disassembled at the molecular level and then, reassembled, and vomited back into this time/space.

Janie and Sean practically had to carry me out of there. They did not speak for some time and I didn’t blame them. For I had shown them something no sane, reasoning mind should ever look upon.

The face of the Devil.