ANYTHING CAN BE DANGEROUS
by
MATT HULTS
BOOKS of the DEAD
This book is a work of fiction. All characters, events, dialog, and situations in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except in the case of reprinted excerpts for the purpose of reviews.
For more information, contact: Besthorror@gmail.com
Visit us at: BOOKS of the DEAD
FIRST EDITION
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 by Matt Hults
Edited by Matt Hults and James Roy Daley
Photo Credit - Danielle Tunstall
Cover Model - Paige Rohanna Walker
Graphic Design - Cynthia Gould
E-book Design - James Roy Daley
“Anything Can be Dangerous,” copyright 2011. Original for this anthology.
“The Finger,” copyright 2007. First appeared in Undead: Skin and Bones by Permuted Press.
“Feeding Frenzy,” copyright 2007. First appeared in Fried! Fast Food, Slow Death by Graveside Tales.
“Through the Valley of Death” copyright 2011. First appeared in Best New Vampire Tales Volume One by Books of the Dead Press
“Husk (Preview)” copyright 2011.
* * *
Great books from:
BOOKS of the DEAD
BEST NEW ZOMBIE TALES (VOL. 1)
BEST NEW ZOMBIE TALES (VOL. 2)
BEST NEW ZOMBIE TALES (VOL. 3)
BEST NEW VAMPIRE TALES (VOL. 1)
MATT HULTS - ANYTHING CAN BE DANGEROUS
JAMES ROY DALEY - 13 DROPS OF BLOOD
JAMES ROY DALEY ~ THE DEAD PARADE
GARY BRANDNER - THE HOWLING II
GARY BRANDNER - THE HOWLING III
* * *
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREVIEW: GARY BRANDNER’S - THE HOWLING
PREVIEW: GARY BRANDNER’S - THE HOWLING II
PREVIEW: GARY BRANDNER’S - THE HOWLING III
PREVIEW: JAMES ROY DALEY’S - TERROR TOWN
PREVIEW: JAMES ROY DALEY’S - INTO HELL
PREVIEW: PAUL KANE’S - PAIN CAGES
* * *
A word from the publisher:
I wrote an introduction for Matt Hults’ wonderful debut novel HUSK, and made reference to a story he wrote called ‘Anything Can be Dangerous.’ Matt keeps telling me that he loves the intro and that it makes him laugh every time he reads it. At some point it occurred to Matt that he wanted the story I mentioned to be made available, and he asked me to put together a little one-story sampler, selling me on the concept that it would make a great promotional tool for his novel. Being the grumpy old fart that I am I tried to blow Matt off, telling him that I was far too busy to promote his book in any way, shape, or form. I think my exact words were, You promote the stupid thing... I’m tired and drunk; get out of my face. Of course, this didn’t go over too well and he successfully managed to twist my rubber arm and get me to do something intelligent.
I set aside the things I was currently working on, including the paperback version of Husk, along with the upcoming titles Zombie Kong, Living Death Race 2000, Into Hell, Best New Zombie Tales #3, Best New Vampire Tales #1 (paperback), the paperback version of my sophomore novel Terror Town, the ebook version of my first novel The Dead Parade, Best New Werewolf Tales #1, plus the re-release of Gary Brandner’s famous ‘The Howling’ trilogy––book one, two, and three.
When I told Matt I was busy, I’m sure he had no idea what I was talking about, or that I was so busy. But Matt’s one smart cookie, and I’m guessing that upon reading this little note he’ll be able to understand the spot I’m in. He’ll also figure out that a one-story sampler isn’t my style––so what you’re looking at here is a four-story sampler plus a preview for HUSK.
The first story is called Anything Can Be Dangerous. It’s a whole lot of fun and the only place it’s available is right here, inside this collection. Enjoy.
James Roy Daley
* * *
1.
This must be what a kid with a normal childhood feels like on Christmas morning, Greg Shader thought as he opened the box containing his new laptop computer. He stripped off the shipping tape and tossed the Styrofoam packing material aside, exposing the long sought-after prize waiting inside.
The sleek silver machine was sealed in a clear plastic bag, which gave off the quintessential smell of new electronics when Greg pulled it out of the box, but his childlike smile of delight suddenly melted from his face when he turned it over and spotted the bold red-letter message written across its front side:
WARNING:
PLASTIC BAGS CAN BE DANGEROUS.
He stared at the bag silently, holding it in front of him as if his body had become nothing more than a lifeless mound of sculpted clay.
The label’s warning was followed by the advice that plastic bags should be kept away from babies and children due to the risk of suffocation, and even though Greg understood the obligatory legal nature of the notice, the phrasing of the first sentence triggered an outbreak of goosebumps across his skin.
To anyone else, the linkage of those particular words might’ve seemed normal, maybe even humorous. Greg knew that for every warning label ever made—especially the absurd ones—there was someone who’d done what it cautioned against and lived to sue about it. Consequently, everything needed a warning label these days, or a sign, or a sticker. What unnerved him about this warning, however, was how much it read like something his mother would’ve said when he was a child.
“Anything can be dangerous, Gregory,” she used to tell him, “so never let your guard down for an instant!”
The message on the bag struck him like her words from the grave.
But she was gone. Long gone.
As was her insane mistrust of everyday items.
Discarding his thoughts of the past, he cut through the seal at the top of the bag and unwrapped the computer. Living alone, he had no children or pets to worry about, so he tossed the empty bag on the floor, along with the box and its packing material. Those simple inanimate objects might have represented potentially deadly hazards in his mother’s eyes, but to him they constituted nothing more than trash.
He spent the next hour installing various office-related programs onto the laptop’s hard drive and transferring backup files of his second suspense novel from his out-of-date desktop.
As an unemployed insurance selection specialist turned author, the laptop represented a huge milestone in his new writing career, proving that his dream of being able to tell stories for a living and still pay the bills on time could soon become a reality.
Around four his cell phone rang, and Greg answered using the caller ID glowing on the display. “Hey, Jackass.”
“Ah, man, you changed my title,” Len Moore replied. “What happened to Numb-nuts?”
“Got a new bill collector. What’s up with you, bro?”
“Oh, you know, just reaping the benefits of working at a hospital.”
“Better health insurance?”
“No. Dating nurses. I’ve got a hot lead on two new RN’s down in Peds. I could set up a double if you’re game?”
Greg ran a hand over the stubble on his chin. “Let’s get some details first. What am I walking into?”
“Her name’s Mia, and I’m telling you, bud, this girl has the body of a goddess. You won’t regret it.”
“She isn’t like the last ‘goddess’ you set me up with, is she? You remember, the one who looked more like Zeus than Athena.”
“No, I promise. That was a one-time thing caused by radiation exposure. Won’t happen again.”
Greg laughed. He’d heard that one before. Despite Len’s track record as a matchmaker a date sounded like a good idea, even if it was a blind one. He hadn’t been with a girl for over a month, and the potential for sex was always appealing.
“Okay, I’m in. Where are we meeting?”
Greg took down the address. He still had a number of errands to run before getting ready, so after talking with Len he shutdown the computer and closed it up for the day.
Before leaving the room he collected all the trash from the floor, gathering the computer’s packing supplies into the box for safekeeping, just in case he needed to return it later, thus avoiding any restocking fees.
He found everything but the bag it had been wrapped in.
He stood where he was, looking left and right around the edge of the bed, finding nothing but clean white carpet.
He knelt down and looked under the bed.
Still nothing.
Plastic Bags Can Be Dangerous.
He banished the thought from his mind.
“Thanks a lot, Mom,” he said to the empty room.
He tossed the box onto the bed and went to find his car keys, not giving the mislaid bag another moment of his concern.
2.
Greg got home after one in the morning.
He parked in the driveway of the detached garage then walked to the front of the house to unlock the door, smiling to himself while he strode through the summer night air.
Mia was spectacular. Beyond spectacular. Far better than Len could’ve ever described, because her personality was as intoxicating as her appearance.
And what an appearance: red hair; green eyes; slim body; pert breasts. Greg had always possessed the looks and wit to win the ladies’ attention, but Mia’s charm and beauty had actually made him second guess his ability to entice her. For the first time since high school he’d actually felt awkward around a girl.
They’d started the evening off at a bar on the riverfront, staying only long enough for a quick drink and a round of introductions. After that, they relocated to a racetrack just north of the city, where Len’s cousin was driving in a demolition derby. There were live bands and plenty of food and drinks, but the show’s entire atmosphere reeked of redneck testosterone. Mia hated it, and so did Greg, and their mutual distaste of the event made them instant allies. About twenty minutes into the first melee of eardrum-splitting automotive battle they ducked away and took Greg’s car back to Minneapolis. By then, his initial bout of shyness had passed.
This being their first date, Greg steered clear of movie theaters and bass-booming nightclubs, preferring to find an activity that facilitated one-on-one conversation. They visited several exotic stores uptown, chatting while they window shopped, sharing summaries of their lives and desires. And they got along great. The conversation went so well, in fact, that the busy shops and crowded walkways soon became nothing more than background noise to their words, blurring into static. There were no uncomfortable collisions of interest, no lack of topics. The two of them seemed to fuel each other, keeping the dialogue going.
Their journey took them to a coffee house featuring live jazz, where they got double espressos and huddled together within the crowd, continuing their exchange using both words and body language amid the aroma of java, incense, and pipe tobacco. Around midnight, they ended the evening with a late-night stroll through the Walker Art Garden, where their mouths met on more than one occasion.
Greg had already replayed the entire evening three times in his head, now hoping to hang onto that euphoric sense of delight he’d felt while in Mia’s presence. They’d kissed long and meaningfully before going their separate ways, and he found himself content with the fact they’d not ended up in bed. He knew she was interested in him, there was no doubting that, but she wasn’t easy, and he found that appealing. They had another night planned for tomorrow—today, rather—and the anticipation of seeing her again was an experience of its own.
Greg ascended the front steps to the porch, thumbing through his keys, when he was startled by the sounds of the neighbor kid across the street. The surprise struck him like an icy hand coming down on the back of his neck.
“Damn!” he said, looking over his shoulder.
Ghost pale in the darkness, the young mentally disabled boy sat on the front stoop of his home, gleefully clapping his hands and keening, “Eyeee, Eyeee,” into the night.
Greg shook his head. He’d heard the eight-year-old late at night countless times before, but this particular instance clashed with his upbeat mood and made tonight’s display seem utterly disgusting. Yet again he found himself wondering how the neighbors to either side could stand it, or how the boy’s parents could allow him outside at such a time, especially given his condition. Not that Greg knew what his condition was, precisely. All he’d heard was the local rumor that alcohol had played a part during his mother’s pregnancy.
The boy continued clapping unabated.
“Eyeee, Eyeee.”
The disharmony of that noise had doused Greg’s ability to keep the pleasant memory of his evening with Mia alight, and he hurried to get inside, leaving the boy’s howling at his back.
3.
Despite the late night, Greg awoke early the next morning, just after seven, and the sun was already giving a preview of the glorious day ahead––the kind of day God had probably meant for humanity to enjoy on a regular basis before some asshole invented money. Thankfully, it was Saturday, the one day he allowed himself to take a break from his work.
He got up and made toast and eggs in the kitchen. Eating by the window, he compiled a mental list of possible activities for tonight’s date with Mia, fervent in his mission to recapture the feel of their previous outing. If he played his cards right—
Greg’s train of thought suddenly derailed when he glanced outside and spotted a dead dog in the backyard.
The sight of the hulking gray shape slumped against the side of the garage left him stunned, half a crust of toast still pinched between his teeth. He’d been thinking about the house and yard, about what he needed to do to make the place presentable in case Mia came over later, and that’s when he saw it.
Fur. Ears. Paws. Tail.
He got up and went to investigate.
He wasn’t even halfway across the lawn when he recognized that it was Gracy, his neighbor’s five-year-old German Sheppard.
“Ah, shit,” he whispered to himself.
He glanced to the Jacobsons’ house next door, guessing that Tom and Angela were still fast asleep, probably unaware that the dog was missing. He wondered if he should tell them now, even if it meant waking them up.
His mental debate tapered off when he got closer to the animal and saw the full extent of its condition. The dead canine lay on its back, legs up, jaws open. In life, Gracy had been a healthy, stalwart specimen, but now her emaciated body looked ancient, her skin shrunken tight around her bones as if vacuum-formed to her skeleton.
“What the hell?” Greg muttered. He recalled seeing her playing outside just the other day.
Bright white fangs smiled up at him where the dog’s withered lips had peeled back; her nose had become a fleshless cavern in her skull. Both her eyes were missing, the sockets dark and empty, and Greg’s eggs and toast seemed to come alive in his belly when he noticed the flies that had already begun to explore those twin ovoid cavities.
How on earth was he going to break the news to his neighbors? He didn’t have a clue. Even to him it was obvious that the dog hadn’t died of natural causes, and he found himself fearfully wondering if it had caught some kind of abnormal disease.
As he pondered that thought, he suddenly realized that the green-gray mass of flesh that jutted from the Sheppard’s gaping maw wasn’t a bloated tongue, but rather a distended length of regurgitated intestine.
“Oh, God!”
He retreated to the driveway, away from the corpse, when he caught a glimpse of the garage door in his peripheral vision.
It was open.
He hadn’t opened it last night when he’d come home. And he was pretty damn sure it was closed when he’d arrived.
Collecting himself, he moved to the open doorway and examined the inside. The overhead light bulb remained dark, but the sunlight streaming in over his shoulder easily illuminated the single car space.
There was blood on the floor.
He saw it right away, a red trail of quarter-size droplets leading clear to the back wall, vanishing behind the collection of scrap lumber he kept stacked in the far corner.
He snatched up a long-handled shovel from the tool rack mounted near the main entry but didn’t dare go inside. What if the thing that made the bloody trail was the thing that killed Gracy? Maybe it was a wounded animal, something infected with a germ or virus that caused the ghastly deformities he’d seen on the dog?
He decided that his best bet was to close the door and call animal control.
He was about to back his way to his car, intent on retrieving the automatic control box for the door, when his eyes spotted something protruding from where the crimson stains disappeared behind the wood.
He squinted, focusing on the sight.
And suddenly he realized what he was looking at.
Without another second of hesitation, he strode inside, marching straight to the end of the blood trail, where he found the bag sitting behind the lumber.
Sure enough, it was the plastic bag his computer had come in, the one with the warning. It was half-full of clotted dark blood, some smeared across its transparent plastic skin.
He squatted down, still at a distance, and peered into the gloom between the stacked wood and the wall, but found nothing other than the bag and its grisly red contents.
Using the shovel, he dragged the bag into the open. A pair of work gloves hung on a peg beside the lumber and he quickly slipped them on. But what should he do? Tom would likely call the police once he found out what happened to Gracy, and the investigating officer would undoubtedly want to look around the scene, maybe inside the garage. He’d see the blood, the bag, and then what? Would they suspect that Greg was the killer?
No. That was ludicrous. Greg had been on good terms with the Jacobsons’ since day one. Besides, he had no motive to kill their dog. Hell, he liked their dog! But something deep down told him that he didn’t want anyone else to see the bag, even if it meant tampering with evidence. If he hid it somewhere, he could discard it himself later, when no one else was around. Better yet, he’d destroy it …
Plastic Bags Can Be Dangerous.
“Gracy!”
Greg flinched, spinning toward the voice.
“Gracy!” Tom Jacobson called from next door. “Come on, girl. Where are you?”
Greg knew it was only a matter of seconds before Tom glanced to his right, through the branches of the hedge separating their properties, and saw his dead pet, forty feet away.
He turned his attention back to the bag, uncertain of what to do—
And found it draped across his foot.
“Jesus!”
He kicked the thing away, hit the button for the automatic door, and dodged under it as it descended. Running from the garage, he went to tell his neighbor about the dog and suggest that they call the police.
4.
The evening with Mia would’ve been as splendid as the last if not for the memory of the bag. Its gory afterimage remained imprinted in his mind, dominating his thoughts and polluting his mood.
He’d met Mia just after six, and they decided on a trip to Valley Fair instead of eating out. It sounded like a great idea at the time. He’d secretly hoped that the excitement of the amusement park’s rides and the noise of the crowds would distract him from his thoughts and help him focus on Mia, but the morning’s experience refused to relinquish its hold and the cheery atmosphere of the park only acted to further expose his dispirited frame of mind.
The bag.
The police never found it. That’s what was truly bothering him.
After seeing his dog, Tom Jacobson indeed called the police. Greg explained to the responding officer how he found Gracy’s remains slumped beside his garage and that he’d also spotted several drops of blood near the door. He never said that he went inside, though. And he never mentioned the bag.
Previously, he’d been uncertain what would happen if the police discovered it in his garage, all full of blood, but by then he wanted them to find it, especially after … after it moved.
He was still having trouble believing it himself, mainly because he hadn’t actually witnessed its advance, but it somehow crossed three feet to his foot. And he knew he hadn’t imagined its proximity to him. He’d felt the weight of its liquid cargo when he booted it away, its warmth on his ankle. There was just no mistaking it; the damn thing had moved! Nevertheless, how could he possibly hope to tell that to the police and expect them to believe it? Answer: he couldn’t.
So he’d kept quiet, waiting for the officer to find the bag and take it away.
Only the officer hadn’t found the bag. He’d done a brief search of the garage, noted the traces of blood in his report, but that was it. Gracy’s remains were taken by animal control to be autopsied for possible contagions, Tom got a case number, and, la-tee-da, life was back to normal.
Or at least it should’ve been. Greg still hadn’t gone back into the garage since the officer left, and he was beginning to wonder if he would ever set foot in there again.
“Is something wrong?”
Greg looked up, stirred from his thoughts by Mia’s soft voice.
“Sorry. What?”
She gave him a sheepish grin. “Well, I don’t mean to be blunt, but you don’t seem to be having a very good time. Last night … I thought we got along great. Tonight feels different. I know we just met, so if you’re uncomfortable or something, please tell me.”
“No,” he answered. “God, no. I’ve been looking forward to seeing you all day.”
She flashed him that fantastic smile.
“I just … I had a rough morning, and I guess it’s still troubling me a bit. I apologize.”
“Is it something you want to talk about?”
He hesitated, but decided to tell her. He felt bad enough making her suffer through the first half hour of their date wondering if she was the source of his distracted behavior, and he wanted to put things right. He didn’t tell her everything, though. He kept the details of his story centered on the shocking discovery of the dog and his surprise at Gracy’s unnatural death.
“That’s terrible,” she agreed. “I hope they catch whoever did it.”
“Me too.”
To his surprise, talking about the ordeal did make him feel better. In fact, it helped put everything in perspective. The bag of blood, the dog’s grotesque carcass; those things still stuck in his mind, but they no longer carried the eerie air that had dampened his spirits since he found them.
By the time they reached the next ride, his attention was once again focused entirely on Mia. She was happy, and that made him happy, and he slipped his arm around her waist as they walked side by side toward the entry gate of the Ferris wheel. It was a risky move, this being only their second time together, but she allowed it and even leaned her body against him.
They’d settled into the end of the line when he noticed an empty plastic bag with the fair’s logo on it go tumbling across the thoroughfare not far away, bounding end over end, propelled by the breeze.
His newfound smile faded.
The wind was blowing in the opposite direction.
5.
“What the hell is going on?”
Greg had asked himself that same question at least a dozen times since dropping Mia off at her apartment, but he had yet to come up with an answer.
After he saw the lone bag whisking across the thoroughfare at the park, he’d begun to see them everywhere.
Not that that’s hard to do, he thought. This is America, after all; plastic is about as commonplace as dirt.
Such an explanation sounded good when applied to the physical aspect of his sudden aversion to plastic, but deep down he knew that the menacing quality he’d begun to associate with such a mundane material was not only unusual, it was pure fucking nuts.
He didn’t let it trouble him around Mia, though. He forced himself to block it out. Now that she was gone, however, he found himself dwelling on the topic once again and genuinely fearing for his sanity.
He turned right, onto Quincy Street, intent on parking in front of the house rather than go up the alley to the garage. Even from a block and a half away, he noticed multiple police cars lined up along the street across from his house, as well as an ambulance parked along the curb. Their red, white, and blue flashers lit up the area like a Fourth of July fireworks show.
Greg parked in front of his own house and got out, pausing on the sidewalk before going to the door. He saw fellow neighbors standing on their doorsteps, watching the scene unfold, and couldn’t help be curious himself.
“It’s a hell of a thing,” a voice said from behind.
Greg flinched and turned around to find Tom standing at his back.
“I heard it was the boy,” his neighbor said, indicating toward the house. “You know, the slow one. I guess they found him in the basement.”
“Damn,” Greg muttered. “You mean … dead?”
Tom frowned, nodding. “Child Protective Services should’ve stuck their nose into that shit-heap years ago. All afternoon I’ve been listening to the kid’s mother calling his name, telling him to come home. Christ, they don’t even keep track of him. Like always, she never actually went out to look for him, either. Just stands there on the steps in her bathrobe, shouting up and down the block. Poor bastard was probably down there the whole time, already gone.”
Greg rubbed his arms, smoothing the goose bumps that had risen on his skin. “Did you catch how it happened?”
“Suffocation.”
Despite the warm, windless night, Greg shivered.
“Chad Wilks, the neighbor on the right, told me that he saw them working on the kid through one of the windows when he came out. Said he had a plastic dry-cleaning bag stretched over his head so tight it looked like he’d been shrink-wrapped.”
“Oh, damn,” Greg thought aloud.
“First Gracy, now this,” his neighbor continued. “Angela always says shit like this happens in threes. If that’s the case, I wonder what’s next?”
Greg shrugged, but said nothing. Without another word, he ascended the front steps and went inside his house.
6.
Sundays were Greg’s lazy days, but try as he might he couldn’t seem to relax.
At breakfast, he found himself standing in front of the open refrigerator, scanning the food. He’d bought groceries the day before meeting Mia, and he was acutely aware of how many items were stored in plastic bags.
Grapes, celery, sliced turkey meat, tortillas. There were eleven in all. Eleven bags in the refrigerator alone, with more on the counter, in the cupboards, and under the sink.
A box of thirty Ziplock bags in the junk drawer.
A roll of a hundred garbage bags beside the trash bin.
He closed his eyes, massaging his temples. He had to stop this; it was getting ridiculous.
He was thinking like his mother.
The idea chilled his spirit like an ice water bath.
No. He was nothing like is mother. She was insane, he wasn’t. Crazy people didn’t question their delusions or wonder if they needed help. Besides, his mother had seen threats in all sorts of objects, not any specific one. And if his fixation on plastic was the result of some malfunctioning gene passed on by his mother, why would it start affecting him now? He’d never felt this way before.
Whatever the case, he wanted it to stop.
Reaching into the refrigerator’s crisper, he extracted a bag of apples.
The warning on the side read:
KEEP AWAY FROM SMALL CHILDREN.
THE THIN FILM MAY CLING TO NOSE AND MOUTH
AND PREVENT BREATHING.
“They got that right,” he said, dumping out the fruit.
He turned the bag over in his hands, exploring its surface. He stretched it, crunched it into a ball, shook it back to its original shape. There was nothing remarkable about it, nothing to inspire fear, but he held it away from his body as he handled it, as if touching something foul.
Grimacing, he placed his right hand inside the bag, wearing it like a glove. If he was going to combat this new phobia, he was going to do it now, before it got any worse—
The plastic clamped tight around his forearm.
WHOOSH!
It sucked to his skin as though the air inside had been drawn out by a vacuum and sealed to his flesh.
“What the hell?” he shouted.
He clawed at the lip of the bag, digging to find a purchase. His hand inside immediately began to tingle, the healthy pink color of his skin taking on a tinge of purple.
“Shit!”
He grasped the edge of the bag and yanked it off, tearing it up the middle, feeling dozens of fine hairs jerked from their roots.
He tossed the bag aside and stumbled backwards, to the door. Almost weightless, the rent plastic floated to the floor like gossamer strands of spider silk, and Greg was outside before it touched the ground.
He stopped halfway across the backyard, looking around. The rational part of him––the Greg Shader he’d been up until two days ago––searched the yard in humiliation, hoping no one had seen his frantic behavior. But another part of him was assessing the surroundings, alert for the next sign of danger.
He heard a rustling noise and whipped around to face it.
The side door to the garage was cracked open, and the black lawn bag that he saw projected from the interior immediately retracted into darkness.
“Screw this!” he roared.
Though only dressed in boxer shorts and a white tee shirt, he bound across the distance separating his house and the Jacobsons’, going straight for the backdoor. He knocked half a dozen times, pounding harder than intended but not giving a shit.
He needed help. Now.
“Tom, open up!”
When there was no immediate answer, he tried the knob for himself, found it open, and stepped inside the Jacobsons’ kitchen without waiting for an invitation.
That’s when he saw the cocoons.
Two human-size bundles of assorted plastic bags lay in the middle of the floor, with more bags entering the space from the living room doorway, slip-sliding closer. Greg stood frozen. He watched the smooth-surfaced material curl tighter around the two forms on the linoleum and felt his bowels loosen when he saw several of the outermost bags begin to fill with blood.
An extra large trash bag turned toward him as he watched, slipping across the floor like a shiny black slug.
He turned and ran for his car.
7.
Greg drove into the parking lot of the Amoco station three blocks from his house and shut off the engine, trying to calm down.
What the hell was he going to do?
He had the five dollars of emergency gas money he kept in the MagBox with the Mitsubishi’s spare key, and the next obvious step would be to call the police. But would they believe him? And even if they did, would they get to the Jacobsons’ in time to see the bags for themselves? For some reason he didn’t think so. It certainly never worked that way in horror movies; the threat always seemed to vanish before the protagonist could get others to view it. But this wasn’t a movie; he had to do something.
He thought about lying to the police, telling the dispatcher he’d seen a burglar break in through his neighbor’s window. But then they’d be looking for a human suspect and might walk into an ambush.
His worst fear, though, was that the Jacobsons would be found alive and well.
It was a horribly selfish notion, one that made him sick to even think it, but deep down it was true. The longer this went on, the more certain Greg was that he’d end up in a mental asylum.
There was a siren in the distance, and the sound alerted him to how vacant the area seemed. No other vehicles shared the gas station’s parking lot with him, and other than a few cars, barely any traffic moved on the streets. He didn’t like that. Maybe his perception was skewed thanks to the morning’s insane events, but he felt there should be more people out and about by now, even for a Sunday.
And what about Mia?
Was she up yet? Or had the plastic bags in her apartment surrounded her in the middle of the night, all at once pouncing on her body, smothering her while she slept and sucking her blood out like a brood of polypropylene vampires?
He had to call her, had to make certain she was safe.
He got out of the car and hurried across the vacant fueling area to the front of the store. He needed change for the pay phone and God help the clerk on duty if he was given any shit about his current apparel.
But there was no clerk on duty.
An open magazine lay on the counter beside the cash register, but he saw no employees in sight. It was dark, too, and Greg noticed that the overhead lights were off.
“Hello?” he called.
There was no reply, but he took a step backward as if his inquiry had been answered by the ferocious hiss of some unseen adversary.
There was something here, all right, something he knew he didn’t want to face, and he fled from the doorway without a second thought.
When he turned around, he saw at least three-dozen bags coming across the street. They tumbled end-over-end, blown by a nonexistent wind. Some were clear, some opaque, some brown or black. Most were the size of hand bags found at grocery stores, but one looked big enough to contain a kitchen stove or a dishwasher.
“Jesus Chri—”
He was still standing outside the gas station’s doorway when a white plastic bag dropped over his head and sucked to his face. The bag’s lip went tight around his neck, pulled backwards like a garrote wire, and Greg stumbled blindly in reverse, back toward the store. He felt the air being drawn out of his lungs, felt the flesh of his lips and nose and cheeks deaden as the blood beneath the skin was forcibly sucked to the surface.
Thrashing like a drowning victim, trying to remain upright as he was hauled backward, trying to breathe, he realized that he had but seconds to act or he’d be dead. Thinking fast, he opened his mouth as wide as he could and thrust two fingers into his open jaws, piercing the membranous plastic, making an air hole.
The strategy worked. The vacuum broke, and the constricting bag relented, allowing Greg the opportunity to grasp the ruptured portion of its body and widen the tear, freeing his face.
But he was still being dragged backward, the ripped bag still tight across his throat.
He saw that he was inside the store again, facing the door as it drifted closed on its pneumatic hinges. Then, in a nightmare moment of perfect awareness, he caught a glimpse of himself and the monster behind him in the reflection of the glass.
What he saw made him scream.
It was a man-shaped accumulation of bags; or rather, the corpse of the store clerk mummified in plastic. Greg saw tiny bits of the man’s uniform shirt and purple skin under the semi-transparent wrappings, a patch of dark hair, the vague definition of a face.
It was strong, too. Try as he might, he couldn’t break free.
Instead, he turned the attacker’s momentum against it, throwing himself into the creature’s chest, driving it backward as hard as he could. They tumbled in reverse, half-falling, half-running, until they crashed into the array of refrigerated soft drink containers along the back wall of the room, shattering one of the glass doors.
The two of them collapsed to the ground, and Greg was released. He rolled away and sprung to his feet, simultaneously flinging aside the remains of the bag draped around his neck. The creature struggled to get up, too, but it had become snagged on the soft drink racks like a fish on a hook. It lurched back and forth, arms outstretched, straining to reach him.
Greg turned and ran for the door—
But stopped short when he found the front windows of the building covered by bags.
He slapped both hands to his head at the sight, clenching his eyes shut and shaking his head in denial.
This can’t be happening! It just CAN’T!
But when he heard movement behind him and pivoted to see the clerk-wrapped thing on the floor beginning to stand up, he fled for his life. He shot through an open door to the right of the register and found himself in a small storeroom area. Along the back wall of the room he spotted another door marked EXIT.
Greg dashed outside, squinting as his eyes readjusted from the gloom of the store to the mid-morning sunlight. He found himself at the back of the building, near a dumpster, and even though he spotted a number of overstuffed garbage bags heaped in the container, none of them seemed to possess a malevolent life-force.
He didn’t question it.
Rounding the dumpster, he crept to the front of the building and peered around the corner. The bags were still plastered to the windows, crinkling softly as they caressed the glass. He expected to find the entire parking lot—the entire town—overrun by more plastic-enveloped cadavers, but the fueling area and the streets and shops beyond appeared mercifully vacant.
On the count of three, Greg sprinted to his car.
He reached it unmolested. Got in. Started the engine.
As he sped away from the station, he looked in the rearview mirror and saw that the bags no longer clung to the station windows.
They were trying to follow.
8.
He drove south on Central, ignoring the speed limit and running red lights. Mia’s place was only fifteen minutes away, and Greg decided to check on her first and sort out the rest of this nightmare later.
He passed several payphones along the way, but shuddered at the thought of getting out of the car again. There were other vehicles on the road, too. Not many, but some. Greg considered flagging down one of the passing motorists, but unless the other driver had also been attacked by a plastic-wrapped dead man, he guessed they’d have a pretty hard time believing his story.
Six blocks from the highway he slammed on the brakes, bringing the car to a screeching halt in the middle of the road. Ahead, roughly five miles away, the skyline of the city loomed into view. Multiple columns of black smoke rose from different locations among the skyscrapers, billowing darkly into the air against a perfect blue sky. There were shapes moving within the haze, about mid-level with the buildings, and after another moment, Greg saw that they were helicopters.
“Oh, God,” he whispered.
He knew he wasn’t crazy now. This was too big, too broad.
He was watching the smoke, tracking the endlessly circling aircraft, when he had an idea. “One of those must be a media chopper,” he thought aloud.
With a shaking hand, he flipped on the radio and dialed through the entire bandwidth, searching for a news broadcast, a bulletin––anything. Nothing but static.
“Dammit!” he cursed.
How could this be happening? What could’ve caused it? How would it end?
Then another, more terrifying question entered his mind: had his mother known this was coming?
The idea chilled his blood. It would explain why she’d been so obsessed with seeing the lethal potential in everyday items. And if it were true, it would mean that she hadn’t been crazy. Maybe she possessed some sort of precognitive sixth sense that had forewarned her of this day without specifically identifying the threat. After this morning, such an idea didn’t seem so far fetched.
But vampire bags? Jesus!
He was still frozen on that topic when three large lawn bags slapped against the side of the car and windshield, startling him from his thoughts.
They slid around the seam of the glass and side panel, probing the door seal, searching for a way in.
He let off the brake and slammed on the gas, bringing the car up to speed. He planned on using the aerodynamic design of the vehicle to work in his favor and let the outside airflow blow the bags away. But they held on! He didn’t know how, but they clung tight to the door and windows, inching across the glass.
He went faster, entering another business district doing double the posted speed limit. The bag on the windshield, a black Hefty, was fanning itself out, trying to block his view of the road.
How could it know to do that? his mind raged. How intelligent are they?
“Fuck off!” he screamed.
He flipped on the wipers and let out a wild cheer when the bag got swiped clear from the glass and thrown off the side of the hood. He craned his head around to watch it flip-fall in his wake, eventually flattening on the pavement.
He faced forward again just in time to see a police car pull out in front of him.
“Oh, shit!”
It came out of an alleyway between two buildings, emerging into his path half a heartbeat away.
Greg hit the breaks, swerved the car hard to the left. The tires squealed. He missed the cruiser’s front bumper with scant room to spare, and the stink of burnt rubber assaulted his nostrils. Then he was spinning the wheel right again, struggling to correct his course, but it was already too late. Even before the car began to spin, he could tell he was going way too fast to pull out of such a sharp turn, and now the momentum had him. It was like being on ice.
The car shrieked across the street, skidding in a full 360-degree circle, then collided with the curb along the opposite lane, hitting hard enough to flip over. It all seemed to happen at light-speed. Greg’s head whacked the ceiling with the initial impact, and the next thing he knew, he was hanging upside-down, held in place by his seatbelt.
His vision blurred like a bad video feed for a moment, but then cleared when he remembered the bags clinging to his door. He had to get out. Fast.
His hands groped the side of his hip, sliding along the Nylon strap, unable to locate the belt release, and a full lifetime seemed to pass before he realized he was looking on the wrong side.
“Fuck!”
He reached to the right, found the belt buckle, unlatched it, and dropped to the roof of the vehicle. The passenger side window had shattered in the crash, and Greg scrambled out through its frame as fast as he could. His legs wobbled under him when he first stood, but after several steps he regained his balance.
He looked up and saw the officer coming toward him, marching up the middle of the road. He never imagined he’d be so glad to have nearly sideswiped a policeman while speeding like a maniac, and the thought of it actually made him laugh. Then he remembered he was only in his underwear and didn’t have his license with him, and that made him laugh harder.
But his amusement died as the officer pulled his gun.
Not because of the weapon itself, but because of the wrinkly, milky-white plastic head staring at him from under the man’s uniform hat.
“No …”
The thing strode forward, forty feet away and closing, walking with a stiff and irregular gait Greg had failed to notice offhand. Now it seemed appropriate.
The thing raised its sidearm as it lumbered closer but didn’t fire any shots. Maybe it couldn’t see well enough to aim properly, or maybe it didn’t really know how to use the weapon in the first place. Whatever the case, Greg wasn’t going to wait around to find out. Instead, he spun in the opposite direction, and—
And here was the sight he’d expected to see back at the Amoco station.
Dead people. Dozens of them. Wrapped in plastic and walking right toward him.
Like a scene out of Night of the Living Dead, they shambled forward, moving up the sidewalks and street with limited prowess, in uncoordinated numbers. But there was purpose in their jerky movements, a visible determination in the folds of the polymer material that covered their faces.
And blood. Sucked from their victims and dripping from swollen stomachs.
Greg ran.
He dodged left, around the wreck of his car, and sprinted between two buildings, into a back alley. There he found a steeply slanted concrete retaining wall on the east side of the alley, marking the base of a wooded hillside. Greg hit the wall running and clambered up eight feet to the top like he was walking on air. And he didn’t stop. He tore into the forest, grunting and cursing as he clawed aside leafy branches and tangled networks of vines.
The climb measured less than fifty feet all together, but the pace at which he took it left him gasping at the summit. He found himself at the rear of a residential neighborhood, its parameter marked by row after row of neat cedar fences. Greg scaled over the first barrier at the same feverish pace he’d ascended the hill, not allowing himself to catch his breath until he collapsed safely on the other side.
He slumped back on his ass the moment his feet touched the ground, falling to a rest atop a plush carpet of healthy green grass. His lungs burned as if breathing acidic vapors with each inhalation, while his legs had almost no feeling at all. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d pushed himself so fiercely.
He took slow, deep breaths, attempting to calm himself. At the same time, he knew he had to keep moving. Those things could be coming.
He wiped stinging beads of sweat from his eyes in preparation to get moving again when he saw something that stopped his breath in mid-draw and made him freeze where he was.
Minus his labored breathing, the day remained eerily silent.
He was in someone’s backyard, seated several feet from the edge of a rectangular in-ground swimming pool. It was a good size one, too, at least twenty feet wide by forty feet long. On the far side of the pool, closest to the house, Greg noticed a wide portion of the concrete walkway looked wet, making it appear darker than the rest of the walk encompassing the pool. The watery trail continued up the path toward the house, soaking the steps and floorboards of a broad deck before vanishing through an open sliding glass door, into the shadowy interior of the home.
Greg tensed as something moved inside. Something big.
Before he even had time to speculate on what it was, the pool’s aqua-blue solar cover slid out the open door, onto the deck, spilling forth like a gigantic amoeba.
Greg gasped.
The portion he could see covered nearly half the deck and it still wasn’t totally free of the house. Of course it had to be the same size as the pool, but part of him imagined it being much larger, massive, filling each room of the house with its horrible bulk. The thing had no eyes, no mouth, no real features whatsoever, yet it displayed the same mannerisms of a predator searching the yard for prey, moving as if testing the air for a scent, listening for a break in the silence, or watching for any sign of movement.
There was blood on it, too.
Greg could see the crimson smears coming off its belly as it oozed further into the light, then caught sight of three or four darker shapes held within it, trapped behind its almost-transparent skin. None of them were moving.
Greg leapt to his feet and burst into a sprint, racing past the deep end of the pool in a terror-inspired fervor, toward the front-left corner of the yard. He heard the hiss of the solar cover gliding over the railing of the deck as he crossed the walkway that ran parallel to the house, but he didn’t look back in fear of going mad. Instead, he sprinted to a central-air fan unit where the house met the fence and jumped on top of it, using it like a booster step to launch himself over the top of the fence. The barrier only stood six feet high on the pool half of the property, but the land dropped off in the next yard, and Greg suddenly found himself nine feet in the air.
He hit the ground with a growl of pain but rolled with his fall, got up, and kept going. He shot across the street at the front of the house, passing through two more yards before reaching the next street. There a car and a minivan sat in the middle of the cross streets, mangled together in a head-on collision. Greg didn’t notice anyone in the minivan, but a withering, twisting mass of plastic bags filled the interior of the car, and he continued running at full speed across the street and through the next set of yards without slowing.
He had to find some transportation.
9.
Greg eventually needed to slow his pace, but he kept moving, still cutting through yards, heading south. He was at least five blocks from the pool house now, although the distance did little to separate his thoughts from the sight of the blood-splattered solar cover and its indiscernible contents. He’d been ultra cautious in his selection of which yards to travel through since then, and he visually scanned each new area with paranoid apprehension. The size and value of the properties he encountered here were rapidly decreasing, and he guessed that he was nearing the highway.
Minutes ago, a helicopter had roared past, skimming the rooftops. Greg wasn’t positive, but he thought it might’ve been a military aircraft. Since then, all had been quiet—save for a faint, smoky-smelling wind that rustled the treetops.
He squeezed through the branches of a dry hedge and emerged in the weedy back lot of a dilapidated three-story apartment building surrounded by trees.
He wasn’t familiar with this end of town, and he hoped he was still moving in the right direction. He had no idea how to hotwire a car, and he didn’t trust knocking on the doors of homes that could be crawling with plastic bags, so he’d been hoping to find a ride once he reached a major artery of traffic.
He jogged around the side of the building.
Just as he did, a balding middle-aged man with a mustache and goatee flew around the corner at precisely the same time, followed closely by a half-naked woman wearing only the charred remains of a short yellow bathrobe. They saw Greg and both screamed, eyes wide with fear and surprise. The man skidded to an abrupt halt, slipping on the grass, and Greg didn’t see the gun in his hand until he heard the loud crack of the shot that exploded against a tree trunk less than two feet from his head.
Greg slid to a stop himself, slipped, regained his balance, spun around, and dashed back the way he’d come, leaping through the hedge even as the woman screamed, “Wait! Come back!”
Rather than answer, he turned left and raced down a shallow creek bed, putting a solid three blocks of ground between himself and the couple before slowing to a quick walk. By then, his lungs burned in protest again.
He climbed up the creek bank and found himself on a cracked and littered street that terminated about fifty feet away in a cul-de-sac rimmed by a duplex and several other old houses. Beyond it, Greg could see the land rose at a sharp grade, coming to a height that brought it level with the roofs of the houses. Through the trees, he spotted the telltale noise barrier created to help reduce the roar of traffic coming off the highway.
He tried to tell himself it was doing a hell of a job, because he couldn’t hear any noise at all, not a single engine, but he knew the terrible truth: there were no cars on the highway to hear.
Nevertheless, he had to check.
He located a dirt path probably made by teenagers to access the barrier wall, then walked another six blocks west before coming to a spot where he could get on the other side. Twice he heard gunfire from separate areas of town, but neither bout lasted long.
The highway looked like something out of a war movie.
He’d been wrong with his initial thought that there were no cars here. In fact, there were scores of them. They were scattered across all six lanes, spaced out as far as he could see in both directions. Some stood alone, while others had clustered in groups. They were smashed into the lane divider, the noise barrier, the lampposts. Ravaged scraps of metal and rubber lay everywhere. Half of the ruined vehicles had flipped over, some on their sides, creating the largest, most chaotic display of mechanical wreckage Greg had ever seen.
A few smoldering fires lingered here and there among the ruins, but the few vehicles that had gone up in a blaze were now nothing more than blackened, burned-out hulks.
He thought of the poor unsuspecting motorists, all cruising along at seventy miles an hour, off to the mall, or church, or coming home from a weekend getaway. How many of them had had plastic bags in the back seat, or the trunk, or the glove compartment, unknowingly traveling with a killer waiting to strike?
Greg let his eyes move from the river of twisted metal to a billboard along the roadside. It was a huge picture of a giant hand cupping a small and fragile sapling pine tree. The caption read:
The Future Must Grow; Recycle Today!
The bags are the ones doing the recycling now, he thought. They’re recycling us.
And suddenly, something clicked in his head.
Astonished, he looked up at the recycle billboard again then glanced around to the nearest wreck. Two cars down, he found a Chevy Avalanche half imbedded in the rear of a fourteen-foot U-Haul truck. Strewn around the open passenger door were three brown paper bags of fresh groceries that had split open on the pavement.
Greg rushed over and searched through the items. He picked up an empty box of Reynolds Plastic Wrap, finding the familiar triple-arrow triangle on the back.
“Son of a bitch,” he gasped. “That’s how they’re doing it!”
Dropping the box, he turned a slow 360 degree circle, his eyes darting around the wrecks, searching the rumble. He started jogging west, excited, afraid, still looking for what he wanted.
A quarter mile down he found it: a scraped and dented red Yamaha motorcycle, possibly the only type of vehicle that could maneuver through this obstacle course of destruction and still give him speed when the conditions allowed. It was on its side, having slid halfway under a pickup truck, and it took Greg a full ten minutes and a gallon of sweat to work it free. As he’d hoped, the key still sat in the ignition, and when he settled himself onto the seat and tried it, the engine revved to life.
Then he was off, weaving his way west.
10.
Greg saw the smoke from four blocks away.
It coiled skyward like an unearthly black serpent, rising over the rooftops of Mia’s apartment complex.
He gunned the motorcycle’s engine, cutting between car wrecks at suicidal speeds and weaving on and off of the sidewalk before skidding to a halt at the entry of the building.
Three stories overhead, a window exploded, showering him with glass.
He dodged the lethal rain without losing any skin and slipped through the broken glass of the main security door, which someone had apparently shattered using a potted plant from the lobby. He took the stairs in great bounds, pushing through the ache that echoed in his thighs after his earlier sprint up the hill. Mia’s apartment waited on the second floor, on the far side of the building—
Through a tunnel of fire.
Greg emerged from the stairwell to find the main hallway leaping with flames.
He flinched backward as the intense heat touched his skin. At the same time, he drew in a sharp breath of smoke that seared the back of his throat and overpowered his olfactory senses with its toxic aroma.
He managed to retreat three steps before stumbling over a scorched bundle of plastic similar to one of the cocoons he’d seen at the Jacobsons’. No sooner had he laid eyes on it when a dripping tentacle of half-melted plastic reached out toward him.
He shuffled out of reach as the stubby appendage slapped down on the floor, immediately adhering to the carpet like a slime-coated worm dropped on a hot griddle. It twitched feebly for a moment, then fell still.
He pushed to his feet and was about to return to the stairs to search for a fire hydrant when he glanced to the heap that the plastic limb had extended from and spotted a black man’s arm protruding from the mass, clutching a fire extinguisher.
Gasping, Greg seized the red metal cylinder and spun to face the flames.
CO2 vapor plumed out ahead of him as he emptied the extinguisher into the blaze, and soon he saw that the entire hallway outside Mia’s apartment was completely covered by fire-charred bags. Melted plastic dripped from the ceiling and walls like sludge from a ruptured oil tanker, coating the floor with a molten pool that billowed stinking black smoke.
He looked from the hot liquid to his bare feet.
Then turned to the dead man.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
Not wasting a second, he seized the cadaver with both hands the way a sanitation worker might lift an over-sized garbage bag off a street curb and heaved it into the mass of melted plastic blocking his path.