BIOHAZARD by Tim Curran Read Free Book Online Page A

soldier had gotten tangled up in Jakoby and finally succeeded in shoving him aside. He brought up his rifle as Paulson rushed him with a rotting body in his arms. He shot him. Gave him two three-round volleys and Paulson fell at his feet, hitting the pavement with the corpse that just simply exploded on impact.
    The soldier would have had us, too, had fate not intervened at that moment.
    Temporarily blinded from a spray of rancid flesh, his plexiglass helmet bubble was black and dripping with juice and bits of meat. He stripped his helmet off and threw it aside. And at that precise moment, one of the corpse-worms slid out of the belly of the cadaver that Paulson had dropped.
    It was one of the biggest I had ever seen.
    At first, I thought it was a section of swollen bowel spilling out from the corpse’s belly, but then it moved, it coiled over the pavement, threading in and out of the stiff like rubbery white yarn. It was huge, flattened-out and segmented, shining with slime and drainage. It was making an almost angry humming sound that was high and strident.
    The soldier saw it about the time it rose up from the corpse’s belly with a juicy, succulent noise. It didn’t have eyes that anyone could see, but it seemed to know where he was. That humming grew positively ear-shattering in its intensity. The worm’s body swelled-up, thickening, growing bulbous like some impossibly fleshy penis. The bulb or head inflated, too.
    The soldier brought his carbine to bear.
    But the worm struck first: it shot an inky stream of juice into his face and the effect was instantaneous. He screamed and fell to his knees, his hands clutching his face…only his face was no longer a face as such, but something soft and pulpy that was squirting out between his fingers.
    As the worm retreated, me and Specs went over to Weeks.
    He was still whining and crying out in a high girlish voice about being unclean, crawling about on all fours. We just looked down on him, then we started kicking him. And we kept kicking him until he went limp.
    Then we dragged his inert form over to the hopper.
    We stripped his suit off.
    And threw his ass in.
    Then we started tossing bodies and body parts on top of him, everything we could find until he was buried in entrails and torsos and limbs, shivering beneath a blanket of carrion and graveworms. Somewhere during the process, he came awake, fighting and screaming, trying to free himself from the putrefying flesh and greening meat. He screamed and clawed.
    And Specs, giggling, pulled the lever and the blades came scooping down.
    Before Weeks disappeared, we saw him in there tangled in bowels and husks, his arm wedged into a slimy ribcage. And we also saw a fat white corpse-worm slide from a body and investigate his face.
    Then the blades pushed him into the bin with the rest and the ram compacted it all with a crunching, pulping noise and fetid juice ran from the drain holes at the bottom of the truck.
    That was it.
    Specs and I tossed aside our suits, lit cigarettes like workmen after a hard day on the job, and walked away from it all. We went looking for a car. We were going to Cleveland.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    CLEVELAND, OHIO
     
    1
    Cleveland had a real bad rat problem, even worse than Youngstown. At night, hordes of them would come up out of the sewers and cellars and take to the streets in massive swarms like driver ants, devouring anything in their path. They were all rabid and incredibly vicious. By moonlight, you could see them down there, so many greasy gray bodies that you could have crossed the street walking on their backs and never once touched pavement. I saw them take down dog packs and street gangs, leave nothing but bones behind.
    Cleveland, as it turned out, also had Red Rains.
     
    2
    I woke that first night in the city to the sound of Specs screaming. We were crashed out in a big Cadillac El Dorado we found parked in an empty lot over in Fairfax, just off Cedar Avenue on East 86 th .