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real threat either. So what? Shoveling corpses for a living doesn’t exactly put you on the road to a brighter future. What I had done—and what my intention had been from the start—was to symbolically emasculate that little pushbutton jarhead in front of everyone. And I had. From that point on, as far as we were concerned, he wore a fucking skirt.
    I had sown the seeds of open rebellion and the big one was coming.
    The showdown.
    I think all us shitheads were ready for it, hungry for it even. I knew it was coming because The Shape had already told me. Just like he/she/it had told me that it was going to work out in my favor.
     
    12
    When we weren’t out collecting corpses for the common good, Weeks and his bully boys were based out of the National Guard Armory over in Austintown. It had once housed elements of the 838 th Military Police Company. There was a bunkroom that looked like a hospital ward in an old movie. That’s where we shitheads slept. They locked us in at night and let us out in the morning. It was quite a life. We’d come in after a day of handling the cold cuts, just filthy and stinking of decay, and they’d stick us in that room, make us sleep in our own filth.
    At night, Specs would have awful nightmares. He’d be crying out or sobbing in his sleep which pissed the other guys off because they needed their rest. He’d be in the bunk next to mine and I’d have to shake him awake.
    “Specs, Specs,” I’d say. “Knock it off for chrissake.”
    He’d lay there in the darkness, face shiny with sweat, just blinking. He was all messed-up from Doomsday and who wasn’t?
    One night as I sat there sharing a smoke with him, he said, “You know what, Nash? I believe in omens and portents. I think the future’s already written if you can figure out how to read it.”
    “No shit?” I said.
    “Really, Nash, I’m not kidding.”
    I pulled off my smoke. “Specs, what difference would it make? The future is fucking black. You don’t wanna know about it.”
    “Oh yes you do. If you read the signs they can keep you alive, keep you safe. If I had some Tarot cards I could show you your life path. What’s gonna happen.”
    “I don’t wanna know what’s gonna happen.”
    Specs went on and on about all that whacky new age shit he was into. They could call it what they wanted, but it all sounded like fairground gypsy fortune telling to me. But Specs loved it, loved talking in great detail about everything from pyramid power to the energy of crystals.
    After about twenty minutes of that, Paulson said, “Why don’t you girls go get a room? I’m trying to fucking sleep here.”
    Specs was excited, though. “But, Nash, listen—”
    “Go to sleep,” I told him. I shut my eyes, thinking about all that crazy shit and remembering my wife. That night I had my own nightmares. I dreamed that rats were eating Shelly.
     
    13
    The showdown, the endgame as it were, came not three days later.
    We were making the rounds, collecting the dead, and Weeks got a call over the radio that there were a bunch of corpses dirtying up the parking lot over at the Southern Park Mall. Couldn’t have that. In a city inundated in the unburied dead, what remained of the civic authority wanted that goddamn mall parking lot cleaned up. Couldn’t have all the friendly tourists that came to American Eagle or Victoria’s Secret or Build-A-Bear Workshop seeing all the carrion out there. What would they think? Didn’t matter that the mall was in ruins now and what tourists usually showed up were either crazy or burning with fallout.
    Outside Sears, there was a heap of bodies pretty much on the order of what I had seen at the 7-11. One big stinking ugly mess. When we pulled up in the truck, we could already hear the flies buzzing. A flock of gulls and crows took to the air.
    We shitheads jumped off the back of the truck, looked at each other, and just shook our heads. The stink was bad enough to put a maggot off meat. Just a great,