Anything Can Be Dangerous (5 page)

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.

Steeling himself for what he planned
to do next, Greg backed up several paces. He picked up the fire
extinguisher—using the act to buy himself another second of mental
preparation—then ran forward, leaping onto the corpse’s chest like
jumping on a stepping stone.

A horrible
crack!
issued from beneath his feet as his weight
came down on the dead body, and again when he launched himself
forward, finally landing on the floor at Mia’s doorstep. A
quarter-inch-deep pool of hot plastic welcomed his feet.

Screaming, Greg used the empty
extinguisher to knock in the door, calling Mia’s name as he charged
inside. The plastic stinging his feet tried to cling to the carpet
with each step, tugging at his skin.

He searched the two-bedroom space from
front to back, prepared to shred any plastic bags he encounter with
his bare hands if need be, but nothing assaulted him as he dashed
from room to room.

“
Mia!” he shouted through
the smoke. “Where are you?”

He found her huddled in the corner of
the kitchen closet, a ten-inch butcher knife clutched in her
hands.

Greg mewed at the sight of
her.

Dressed only in panties and a torn
“Vote for Pedro” t-shirt, he saw a frightening number of
reddish-purple streaks that crisscrossed her exposed skin. The
capillaries in her right eye had burst, changing the previously
unblemished white around the iris blood-red, as if that eye had
glimpsed a vision of Hell.

Tears blurred Greg’s vision, but
suddenly, miraculously, she gasped and uttered his name.

“
Greg … Oh, God,
Greg!”

He took her in his arms, holding her
tight.

“
They came at us from
everywhere,” she said. “Lucy must’ve got up before me and found
them … my roommate … her screams woke me up.”

“
Don’t think about it,”
Greg told her, still holding her.

“
They … they sucked her
insides out through her mouth!”

She sagged forward, leaning harder
against him. Hot tears soaked through his shirt, heating the skin
over his heart.

“
But they didn’t get you,”
Greg reminded her as he ushered her toward the living room window
that accessed the fire escape. “You fought them, and you won. But
you have to keep fighting for me, Mia. We have to both keep
fighting if we’re going to get through this!”

At that, Mia looked up at him. The
hurt was still there in her features, the grief of losing her
friend, but it had become a background to the tone of resilience he
heard in her voice.

“
What the hell is going
on?” she asked. “What’s happened to the world?”

“
It isn’t the world that’s
changed,” Greg answered. “It’s the plastic.”

Once again he thought of the discovery
he’d made back at the highway.

“
The bags are all new,” he
explained. “So far, all the ones I’ve seen have been clean and
spotless. No rips, no smears of garbage.”

He told her about the Amoco station
and the dumpster outside, how it had been practically overflowing
with bags yet none of them had been possessed like those inside the
store.

“
But why not?” she
asked.

“
Because they were old,” he
replied. “They didn’t come from the same batch of plastic that
created these new ones …”

He stooped down and picked up an empty
box of kitchen wastebasket liners, as well as a vacated case of
storage bags.

“
Look,” he said, pointing
to the fine print on each package.

—
Made with 35% recycled
resin—