Biohazard

26

It was coming.

The Shape was coming.

It was cycling itself into being, burning through the ether.

Gutting the fabric of this world.

I had called it and now it was coming. Right away I felt something in the air around me change…break open…twist in upon itself as if the very atoms were being realigned or shattered, turned inside out. The air was heavy. Heavy and thrumming and I could not move. Some yawning, pulsing electromagnetic field had seized me and squashed me flat, pushing me down to my knees at the altar of my god.

Expiation.

Sacrifice.

Burnt offerings.

I tried to forget that the woman tied to the fence had a name. I turned my face away, the air crawling with static electricity. The woman moaned, thrashed, cried out. But I did not hear her. I refused to hear her. All around, a humming and a crackling. A raw, cutting stench of ozone. And then the heat, the burning cremating heat of the living thermonuclear oven as it took on physical form.

Hungry.

Starving.

The heat…the blazing energy…the sound of a million, billion hornets buzzing…sawblades ripping into steel…a screeching…a whirring…the world shrieking out as it was disemboweled at the subatomic level. Then the woman-Marilynn, God yes, Marilynn-screamed. A single economical scream that lasted only seconds.

The Shape took her, consumed her.

I did not look.

But Mickey did. You could not have pried her eyes from it. She stared in rapt, almost erotic fascination at what was happening.

Marilynn…

I heard her melt with a crackling sound like burning cellophane. And then it was over and the world was just the world again. I opened my eyes. I made myself look as I made myself look every month on the night of the full moon.

Marilynn was a blackened scarecrow, still smoldering.

A pall of greasy black smoke hung in the air.

Burnt offerings.

She had been melted, reduced to a fused clot of bone and meat and marrow. A bubbling black slime that liquefied, smoking and popping, oozing down the fence into a pool of superhot irradiated refuse. The dry grass blazed where it made contact.

The stench of her burning flesh was still in the air.

I vomited.

And later, still feeling The Shape and knowing that it owned me, I looked up at the night sky, the pale moon brooding high above like a skull.

I opened my mouth.

And screamed.