by B. P. Kasik
Then Jerry’s phone went off. It emitted a loud prolonged grunting noise, like a straining weight lifter. Ben looked at Jerry askance.
Jerry pulled out his phone. “I never set any sound effects on this thing!”
“Right.”
He unlocked his phone and saw the alert indicated he'd received an email.
It was from the Gym.
I never gave them my email address.
He opened the message and it was a huge chunk of text loaded with links and smiley-face emojis. The message subject line: “RELOCATION ASSISTANCE!”
Jerry read through it. Contact information for homeless shelters, how to get food stamps, and at the bottom—the web site for the Gym’s property management company. It promised a wide variety of houses and apartments for rent or sale.
“I think I just figured out who bought all the houses on my street.”
“Huh?”
“The Gym wants to help me with relocation.”
Ben smiled as they pulled up to a red light. “What's wrong with that? They found out you're in need and they want to help!”
Jerry looked up from his phone. “Ben, how can you—”
And then he was distracted by a familiar-looking man standing on the corner. It was the bearded maniac who double-punched him in the head.
The guy smiled and playfully waved at him.
“Son of a bitch!” Jerry swung the door open and leaped out of the car. The impact on his left ankle as he landed was excruciating. He grew dizzy as numbness followed the piercing pain all through his lower leg. Somewhere in the distance he heard Ben call after him.
Then he looked up and saw the bearded guy leaping up and kicking his heels together, like something out of a Fred Astaire musical, before swinging his arms like he was in a hoedown.
He's acting like a cartoon character.
Jerry grit his teeth and expelled air, wincing as he pulled himself upright.
The bearded guy just smiled with malicious glee as Jerry took a couple steps toward him. He made a mock-frightened gesture and turned and ran.
Jerry pursued, pushing through the pain and ignoring the jabbing impact at every other step as his left foot hit the hard sidewalk. He knew he couldn't go like this for more than a block or two.
After a brief but agonizing pursuit, Jerry saw the guy turn into an alley.
That's a dead end!
He came around and barreled down the alley and then stopped. The ragged guy was standing with his face against the brick wall at the end, totally still.
Jerry slowed his pace. Pain was hitting every part of his body, a tingling static shock shooting up from his overworked ankle.
Halfway down the alley, he realized he’d never been in a fight. He had no idea how he was going to deal with this madman who had sucker-punched him.
This madman who was not moving. Who looked like a deactivated robot.
Jerry stopped when he was ten feet away and waited, taking a good look at the guy’s matted hair falling down and around the stained brown coat. The stench was intense. Jerry wondered when the guy had last showered. And he started feeling bad about taking the attack so personally. He was just a random victim. He could have been anyone. Clearly, this man was sick.
He took a step back, partly out of fear of confrontation, partly out of empathy, and then the bearded man leaped up and spun around like a jack-in-a-box.
He then raised both hands and shouted, “BOO!”
Jerry took another step back. The man’s face was frozen in an insane grin as he stepped toward Jerry.
Jerry realized that no one would witness it if this man murdered him. Looking up, he saw no windows on the sides of any of the buildings. And there was no one looking down the alley.
This was a trap.
He started to run, each step a painful jab up his left leg.
When he was almost out of the alley, he heard a shout.
“Dude, wait a sec! Calm down, Jerry!”
He stopped and turned around.
The raggedy man had his hands up again, but this time in a placating gesture, not a threatening one. He laughed.
“Sorry for all the theatrics, but I needed to get you alone. Can we talk?”
Chapter 25
Becky stood behind the counter at the Gym.
She got a call from Jerry on her way to work saying he’d lost his house. She figured he’d done something irresponsible like the time he lost track of their credit card bills early in the marriage, so she said something dismissive and hung up on him.
On her way into work, she saw that Jerry meant he’d literally “lost” the house. It was gone, along with every other house on the street. Just piles of rubble and debris with excavators and trucks collecting the remains.
She wanted to call him and apologize and see if there was anything she could do to help.
But she’d already been arriving there five minutes early for work—which meant she was late—and they were super-strict about cell phone usage on the job. She didn’t want to cause any trouble. So she hadn’t called.
So she scanned people’s keychain cards, greeted people as they entered and exited, and answered the phone and told people when the place opened and closed. She was sometimes tempted to ask if people were calling from smart phones and, if so, whether they knew it would take less time and effort to look up the Gym’s hours online.
But she suspected her calls were being recorded, so she diligently avoided snark. Always maintained a friendly, helpful demeanor.
A demeanor she struggled to maintain as a disheveled, sweat-drenched patron stormed into the place.
“What the hell is wrong with you people?” he screamed.
“Um, can I help you?”
“Don’t you ‘Can I help you?’ me! You psychopaths destroyed my home!”
Becky took a deep breath. Blaming the Gym for his home loss? Clearly this person was insane. “I’m sorry, sir. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The man held his phone’s screen up to her face. “You don’t know about this email you just sent me? ‘RELOCATION ASSISTANCE’? I just checked with property records and it turns out you bought all the houses on the street right before they were torn down.”
Becky shook her head. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, sir.”
“Like hell you don’t! Get me your manager, right now!”
She wasted no time dialing Deane’s extension. The Gym rep wasted no time coming out from the door immediately behind her. Big smile on his face. “Yes, my name is Deane. How can I help you?”
The man screamed incoherently and cussed the Gym rep out with everything in his verbal and emotional arsenal.
The Gym rep was unfazed. “That is most disturbing. I’m terribly sorry for what you’ve been put through. It sounds like quite an ordeal!”
“It was! You ruined my life!”
“Sir, we merely offered to help you find a new house. What’s so bad about that?”
“What’s bad about...you destroyed my home! You destroyed all our homes on the street! We only need to find new homes because you took ours away!”
The Gym rep nodded thoughtfully. “Hmm...I can see where you’re coming from. That’s quite the conundrum.”
The man stared at the Gym rep, shaking with rage.
“So if the relocation services we offered are not satisfactory, what do you propose we do to help you?”
“Give me my house back!”
The Gym rep laughed. “I’m afraid that ship has sailed. But maybe an extension on your free trial membership?”
“I didn’t take the stupid trial membership! I don’t want to go to your stupid Gym!”
The Gym rep stopped smiling. “That’s most unfortunate. Please come with me, sir. Let’s see if we can sort this out upstairs.”
The man was still shaking with rage as the rep put his arm around his shoulder and led him up the enormous glass stairs.
“Now we understand you’re upset about l
osing your home. And we realize this was an abrupt development.”
“Wrecking our homes with no notice!”
“Exactly. Sometimes change happens fast. The pace of society and progress—faster all the time, yes?”
The man said nothing as they neared the top of the stairs.
“And sometimes, people can’t keep up! What can we do then?”
“I…”
The Gym rep smiled wide. “The only thing we can do!”
And he shoved the man sideways off the stairs. His skull cracked as he hit the top stair and then he fell like a rag doll, hitting the ground with a series of cracks. Blood flew in every direction. The stairs and counters and lobby furniture became all-red Pollock paintings.
Becky screamed, then cut it off after a second. The other Gym employees looked nervously at her, then up to the Gym rep.
He was still smiling as he pointed down at the mangled corpse. “Such a shame when accidents happen, yes?”
Everyone nodded.
Becky kept a hand over her mouth as she nodded vigorously.
An accident, yes. That’s all this is. An accident.
He cupped his hands down and yelled at Becky. “That mess isn’t gonna clean itself up. Get to it, please and thank you!”
Becky nodded again, wide-eyed. She brought her hand down from her mouth and twisted her lips into an amenable smile.
The Gym rep turned and walked away, then passed gas. “Oh, excuse me! So much excitement, seems to have upset my tummy!”
He giggled.
Becky barely heard him as she got out the mop, water bucket, and oversized trash can.
By the time the floor was shining and the parts were carted away, Becky wasn’t bothered at all.
It was just another mess to clean.
She’d done it before.
Chapter 26
Jerry sat with the strange man on an antique, dilapidated bench in Robert E. Lee Park.
They looked up at Lee’s statue.
The bearded guy turned to Jerry. “Pretty messed-up that we still have a statue of that guy looking so triumphant, memorialized for time eternal in a public park.”
“Some people see him as a hero for state’s rights.”
“State’s rights…You know that confederate flag never actually flew in battle, right? It was a post-Civil War modification. People are flying a flag that was designed after they lost. It’s a memorial for losing the war, not fighting it.”
Jerry looked back up at the statue. “I don’t really care about any of that. I’m mostly curious about why you punched me and egged me into following you down a dark alley.”
The raggedy man laughed. “Yeah, fair enough. Which one are you more curious about?”
“Please, start wherever you like!”
“You started going to the Gym and you noticed weird stuff, right?”
“Yes. No. Well...it didn’t seem weird at the time.”
“Right. The Gym does that to people. It’s a form of mind control and I don’t know how they’re doing it. They have a power source. I’m determined to find it.”
Jerry breathed through his nose. “I’ve seen too much weird stuff to doubt you. But I am gonna ask how you know this.”
“Alexandria. They opened a Gym in Alexandria. There’s a dozen gyms up there. No one was crying out for a new one. But they opened one. I worked in D.C., but lived down the block from the Gym, so I joined it for convenience’s sake.”
“You worked in D.C.?”
“I was pretty important. But that doesn’t matter now. A few months after the Gym opened, my entire neighborhood had mutated into muscle-bound monsters and supermodels. And the Gym was beautiful and amazing at first, but the place got uglier and uglier. They had nice stuff, but no one was maintaining it and it became like a warzone in there. People were attacking and killing each other and the bodies remained where they fell. People would just step over them on the way to their exercise bikes.”
“Did they have a personal trainer in there?”
“Yep. That seems to be a constant at every Gym. Bad as people get, he always seems to be the worst.”
“Wow.”
“And of course, the Gym bought up all the nearby real estate and knocked down every house and townhouse to make room for a parking garage and several parking lots.”
“That last part sounds familiar.”
“You wanna know the best part? They didn’t even need them. Most people walked to the Gym and the parking lot and garage were never more than a quarter-full. They just had them there for the sake of having them. It stretched the Gym out over several city blocks. For no reason.”
“That’s nuts.”
“Yep. And they do that everywhere. I don’t know why.”
“And you were a Gym member throughout all this?”
“I was. And I was going crazier and crazier over time. I stopped going to work. I eventually started sleeping at the Gym. I used an overweight man’s dismembered rib cage as a pillow most nights. It got softer and softer as the fat decomposed.”
Jerry swallowed.
“That was mild compared to most folks’ sleeping arrangements. Blankets sewed together from human skin. Mattresses made of human organs. The bedposts-
“Enough!”
“Fine, fine. There was all this amazing original art on the walls and it was all covered with blood or destroyed. You’re right—there’s a lot of stuff you don’t need to hear. Just take my word for it—you think it’s bad in your Gym now, you just wait. It’s gonna get worse. It always does.”
“Is that Gym in Alexandria still open?”
“It is. I left a year ago. I shudder to think about what’s going on there now.”
“That’s...what...how did you stop? And why didn’t you become a muscle monster like everyone else?”
“Second question first: I WAS a muscle monster. I stopped working out and the muscles disappeared. I looked normal again a week after leaving Alexandria. And first question second: I overcame the Gym’s spell by accident. Two psychos were playing “Surprise Dodge Ball” with people in the Gym and they threw the balls—severed heads, of course—at the sides of my head at the same time. I guess they hoped it would crush my head, but it hit me in the temporal lobes and I instantly felt like a changed man, felt like I was myself again for the first time in memory.”
“Like you punched me in the head?”
“Yeah. I discovered that’s how you awaken people.”
“How does it work?”
“The temporal lobes are the parts of your brain that affect short-term memory and emotion. I don’t know how the Gym is tweaking us there, but they are. They make is so we can’t remember things and our feelings are scrambled.”
“So hitting the brain in those spots fixes them?”
“Well, not exactly.”
“I’m not fixed?”
“It only lasts a day. The Gym’s influence is too strong.”
“I’m gonna fall back under its influence in a day?”
“Yeah, 24 hours after my hit.”
“Oh, no.”
“If all goes well, you won’t need to worry about it. I’m going in there tonight to take out their power source.”
“You’re what?”
“Don’t worry about it. I know their power source is in the basement. And I’m gonna blow it up.” He opened his trenchcoat and revealed a pair of grenades dangling from fabric hooks.
Jerry held his breath. “That seems like a really bad idea on every level.”
The stranger laughed. “I don’t pretend to be perfectly connected to reality anymore. But I have a perfect certainty about their basement. Something’s down there. Every Gym has something in the basement.”
“What makes you think you can even get in?”
“Your Gym here doesn’t have a militia yet. No one guards the front doors. Enjoy that while you can. Back in Alexandria, the whole city’s getting taken over. I’m sure D.C. is next.”
“How�
�” Jerry massaged the sides of his head. His temporal lobes. His brain. Which had not been his own for weeks. “How do you manage to keep the Gym from affecting you? Do you hit yourself every 24 hours? Do you set a calendar alert?”
The man laughed. “Yeah, something like that. If you keep enough distance from the Gym, you don’t have to. But just to be safe, I wake up and carefully ball up my fists and hit myself above the ears. Every day.”
“Wow.”
“It might be affecting me.”
“Might be. Why didn’t you try to awaken people back in Alexandria?”
“Too far gone. It was like playing whack-a-mole with a never-ending stream of moles. Think about the logistics—thousands of people. And there’s only so many hours in the day. 24, to be exact. Then they were right back to Gym-possession.”
“Why couldn’t you enlist people to help de-program people.”
“Tried. No one believed me. I looked crazy, even after their minds cleared. There wasn’t enough time to make a difference. Imagine that, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“And even when we tried to organize something, we were massively outnumbered. I was lucky to get out of there alive.”
“Rough.”
“Yeah. This ends here. If I can stop the Gym now, we can...I don’t know. I haven’t thought that far.”
“Good plan. I’m coming with you.”
“No.”
“C’mon!”
“Okay. Yes. I’ll find you tonight. Where are you staying?”
Jerry started to give him his address, then realized it didn’t exist anymore. So he told him Ben’s address. “Find me there. Please don’t go alone.”
“I won’t.”
“Hey, why don’t you do your…’knockout game stunt’ on more people here? Set more minds free?”
“I just got here.”
“Okay.”
The stranger got up to leave. Jerry called after him, “I never got your name.”
He looked back at him and said, “True. But it’s not important.”
Then he disappeared around a corner.
Chapter 27
“Pump! Pump! Feel the pump!”
Andy pushed and pushed and pushed on the bar, but it was just too heavy.