Anything Can Be Dangerous (4 page)

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.