I caught a glimpse of the square earlier. The festival won’t officially start until 7:00 p.m., but the people were out and about. Way too many. I recognized a lot of them, but a lot of them, I didn’t. All buzzing around, waiting for the fun to start like kids up at the crack of dawn on Christmas morning before their parents even set out the presents. I can’t imagine what it’ll be like once it actually starts.
“I’d like that,” Darlene says.
I show up to the Woodhaven Recreation Center fifteen minutes early, wearing gym shorts, a plain t-shirt, and a worn-out pair of running shoes which really have no right to be worn-out.
A sign on the front door reads: WILL BE CLOSED AT 7 SATURDAY, JULY 3rd FOR FESTIVAL. CLOSED ALL DAY SUNDAY, JULY 4th IN OBSERVANCE OF INDEPENDENCE DAY. SORRY FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE.
There is an old woman at the front desk who waves hello to me, then takes my name and eight dollar entry fee. Another younger woman beside her works the phones. She gets up and goes in the back to get Kevin. I see a manager in another room talking on his cell. I don’t recognize any of them.
Kevin greets me with a big bear hug. He has certainly bulked up. That picture of him was definitely not Photoshopped.
I may have found a nice career writing (which was something I did secretly all my life) but Kevin completely flipped his life upside down.
We make small talk for a bit, and he eventually leads me up a staircase a few paces away from the front doors. This place is huge. I never came here much as a kid, and sometime in high school, they expanded it, adding in three more basketball courts, two racquetball courts, a running track, and an indoor soccer field.
“You ready?” Kevin asks. His gelled hair shines in the fluorescent lighting. He’s got a slight tan, not one that looks like he’s been in the sun all summer (Woodhaven doesn’t get much sun, either) but one that looks like he got from fake UV lights. It’s something bodybuilders do for their competitions, I realize, having seen cringe-worthy pictures of ripped dudes all greased up and tan in their bright pink and purple thongs. The thought of Kevin doing something as silly as that brings a bubble of laughter to my lips.
He yells this time, his voice earth-shattering, “I said, are you ready!?”
We are standing at the landing at the top of the stairs. About three feet behind me is a thirty-foot roll of jagged steps, and I almost take the tumble.
“Y-Yeah,” I say. “I guess I am.”
“I want to hear you roar, Jupiter!”
“Yes! I’m ready!”
“Louder,” Kevin bellows.
“Yes! I’m FUCKING ready!”
He slaps me on the chest, and the blow rattles my ribcage. “Good, but don’t curse here, man. It’s a family facility.”
I can feel the blood pumping through my body, the adrenaline, too. I’ve never been so psyched to workout.
“We warm up, then your ass is benching until your tits fall off.”
“Hey, I thought you said no cursing.” I flash him a weak smile.
“I can do what I want. I work here, Jupiter. Geez, get with the program.”
The upstairs splits off into two big sections. On the left of the stairs is the weight room, but we go the other way for a ten-minute warmup. Back in Chicago, this would’ve been my workout. Ten minutes on a stationary bike, and then I’m buying five bucks worth of vending machine junk.
Not today. Now I’m warmed up, in the weight room and lying on my back, looking at the white ceiling beams and dark emergency lights. Kevin is behind me in a tank top, his index fingers lightly touching the barbell as I let it slowly fall to my puffed-up chest.
Fans whir in the background. An old Bryan Adams song plays over the loudspeaker. There’s a sound of dumbbells clanking together, of shoes thumping a treadmill belt.
Then, someone screams, and the weight of the world crushes my chest.
Okay, maybe not the weight of the world. It’s actually about ninety-five pounds. I’d be okay if Kevin didn’t have the attention span of a puppy because he’s gone. What am I paying that giant asshole for?
That’s right, I’m not.
You get what you pay for, I guess.
“A little help…” I say, but it comes out like a wheeze.
The scream rips through the air again, this time causing me to turn my head in its direction. It comes for the lower floor, near the front doors. Everyone who is anyone on the second floor weight room hangs over the guardrail to get a look at who or what caused this lady to scream bloody murder. Unfortunately, I’m not one of them.
“Anyone? Kevin?” I say.
As I strain, the healing cut under my eye threatens to split open. My arms feel like wet noodles. If I push any harder, my head is going to explode. I might be able to roll it off of me, but I doubt it. A lung might be starting to collapse. Each breath is a pain.
So, at this point, I’m content with letting myself die.
Who would miss me anyway? Darlene…but who else? And Darlene missing me isn’t a given. I’m still baffled that she agreed to marry me. I mean me, a guy who sits in a dark room typing on a keyboard for a living. A guy who can’t fight his own battles. Ten years removed from high school and still the target of bullies like Freddy Huber.
Yeah, Darlene could’ve done a lot better than me, that’s for damn sure.
I give the barbell one last push. Everything I got. A vein pops from my forehead. I feel my face going a devilish red. Heart hammers my sternum — that’s good, at least I’m still alive. Then my vision goes spotty… and finally, black.
I’m still here. Not dead yet. Pushing with all of my might.
The bar leaves me, the pain with it. I don’t know how I did it, but the barbell is hovering above, and I’m hardly pushing. Then I rack it. The whole bench press shakes with the force. My arms drop to my sides like concrete.
I exhale, thinking to myself that in a couple months, people will start calling me Rocky Balboa.
“You should have a spotter,” a girl says.
This takes me by surprise. Still laying on the bench, I tilt my head back and see a pair of brown cargo pants and a red shirt. On the shirt is a small white stick figure holding a barbell over their head. I bet he’s lifting more than ninety-five pounds, too. On the opposite side of that stick figure is a name tag that reads: ABIGAIL CAGE. She was the one manning the phones when I called yesterday, and now she’s the one who’s saved my life.
I sit up and spin around. It’s not an easy task.
Again, I’m content with dying right now.
“I had a spotter,” I say, wiping the back of my iron-smelling hands across my forehead. A polyurethane-sheen of sweat sits on my skin. “But,” I point a thumb to my right where the crowd gathers around the guardrail, “he’s a little bit busy.”
I haven’t heard a scream in about a minute.
“Well, I’d wait until he’s not busy before you start your next set.”
“What happened down there?” I ask. Mainly because I’m too exhausted to get up and go look for myself.
Abigail Cage shrugs. “I don’t know. I was too busy saving you from being squashed to death.” She puts a hand on one of the twenty-five pound plates, smirks. “By ninety-five pounds, no less.”
I roll my eyes.
This is exactly why I’ve never wanted to join a gym. Everyone’s so judgmental. So what if I can barely bench press half of my body weight? At least I’m trying.
“Miss Fox is always screaming at things. She probably saw a spider or something. She loves the attention. Sometimes, I think she thinks that if she screams loud enough, God will finally answer her prayers.”
A fake chuckle escapes my lips. Her honesty catches me off guard. It’s…refreshing. “Right,” I say. “Well, thanks, Abigail Cage.”
“You can call me Abby.”
“All right, Abby. You can call me Jack Jupiter.”
“As in the Jack Jupiter?”
“Yeah, why?”
“As in the writer?”
I nod. “Yes, the writer.”
She huffs. “I graduated high school last year. In my last semester, I took Mrs. Beady for English, and man, she wouldn’t shut up about you and your books. We had to read one for an assignment. And she talked about you like you were her favorite child or something. Kinda annoying.”
I can’t help but smile. Beady was tough if memory serves me correctly. A little less tough now that I know she’s a fan.
“Ah, yeah, Mrs. Beady. How is that old hag?”
“Still old and haggish,” Abby says.
We both laugh.
Then, she says: “I pictured a man who could lift a little more than ninety-five pounds, that’s all. No offense.”
“None taken. I thought I could lift more than that, too.”
“Keep working, and you’ll get there,” she says.
“Thanks — ” then the scream cuts me off.
This one is far worse than all the other screams, and there’s a cry of help that follows. It’s enough to rattle the mirrors plastered on all of the walls. One of those screams I’d have a victim in my novels belt out. It gives me the chills.
With a little more strength in my body now and being less light-headed, I get up. Abby’s eyes are wide, and she starts to shuffle in that direction.
“That one sounded a bit more serious,” she says.
Kevin shifts back and forth. This guy who can probably bench press nine-hundred pounds in comparison to my ninety-five is frightened but rightfully so.
As I get closer and see the pale looks on the other people’s faces, I start to get this feeling of dread knotting in my chest.
I mean, if a guy like Kevin Crawford can be spooked like he is now, then how will I fare? This thought almost stops me from moving forward until Abby passes. And I can’t let her upstage me again. It’s bad enough she had to save my windpipe from being slowly crushed by a barbell. How would I carry on knowing I let myself get spooked by a woman’s screams when everyone else wasn’t?
I walk up to Kevin, standing directly behind him. His large back and wide shoulders make it damn near impossible for me to see past him. Plus his shadow is like a great oak tree.
Against the railing, crowded next to Kevin, is an older fellow drenched in sweat, another man I’d consider a senior citizen with a basketball under one arm, and now, me.
The woman below takes to sobbing now.
A collective gasp fills the air. I mouth the words: What the fuck? I’m looking at the front doors. There’s six of them, mostly glass. Two of them act as the entrance, while the other four, which are separated by a chest-high, wall act as the four exits. They’re all about as heavy as the weights upstairs, I swear. Their glass is spic and span as if they’re Windex’d every hour or so.
Except for the entrance door.
I can’t see through it any longer. A smear of red takes up most of the view, like someone covered in paint forgot there was a door there. There’s a handprint on the mat about a step in from the door. My eyes follow the trail. On the mat, which houses the Woodhaven Recreation Center’s barbell-holding stick figure, is the old woman from the front desk. She clutches what looks like a limp CPR dummy wearing the attire of a police officer.
My mind races. I get that spike of blood pressure that comes so often in my life when I’m scared as all hell.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
Nobody answers. The three men up here with me stare with their jaws hanging open.
Miss Fox’s arms are covered in blood. She’s holding the cop’s head in her lap, one hand presses against his neck where the bulk of the red seems to flow from.
“What the hell?” I say.
“It’s Doaks,” the sweaty, middle-aged guy says.
It takes me a moment to realize that this guy speaks the truth. Doaks is covered in so much blood, he’s almost unrecognizable. Now it’s my turn for my jaw to drop.
Since no one is moving, I back away from the guardrail and head down the steps.
It’s much worse than I expected.
Nine
Miss Fox is now wearing as much blood as Doaks. There are tears in her eyes, and she mutters something about God. Praying to him, begging for forgiveness, I don’t know.
Behind me, I hear the footsteps of the three men from the weight room. And outside, rising high above the blubbering woman and the tennis shoes slapping against rubber-lined steps is the sounds of the Fourth of July parade revving up in the town square not too far away from the rec center. The marching band beats their drums, there’s rock music playing over loudspeakers, people are talking and cheering, walking down the road to where the action is at, unaware of what chaos is slowly unfolding in the gym.
Miss Fox looks at me, smears of red on her forehead from where she brushed her salt-and-pepper hair out of her face.
“Help me,” she says. “Please, someone help me.”
Another employee passes me in a flash. He’s a blur of red shirt and khaki pants. He’s probably pushing sixty, graying hair, clean-shaven face and a neck like a bullfrog.
“Oh, God, Fiona,” he says. “What happened?”
She babbles on for a moment before saying, “I-I don’t know. I saw him walking toward the entrance, holding his neck. He almost collapsed, but I grabbed him and got him inside. He was talking, and when we got through the doors, he fell. I couldn’t hold him anymore.”
Abby Cage disappears behind the front desk. She’s gone for a few seconds before she’s back with a stack of bleach-white towels, the kind they have at the front of the weight room so you can clean off the machines when you’re done using them.
The older guy grabs a handful and stuffs them against the sheriff’s neck. “We gotta call someone,” he says, and before he’s done with the sentence, the towels soak through with red. He grabs more, jams them against the others.
This is when I unfreeze.
I run to the phone since my iPhone is baking in the glove box of my rented car. For this first workout, I wanted total focus. No music. No small talk. Just me and the weights. Isn’t that just the stupidest thing? Yeah, like I said before, hindsight is 20/20.
I grab the office phone and dial 911.
The old woman — Fiona Fox — starts screaming again. Tears fall from her eyes, slicing the drying blood on her cheeks like some kind of fucked-up Moses parting the red sea. Her screams are even worse this close. I have to plug one of my ears to listen for the voices assuring me it will be okay on the other end.
It rings once, twice, then…dead. A semblance of a busy signal, then fuzz. I try again. This time, I don’t even get a ring. It’s the “We’re sorry, the number you have called cannot be reached. Please hang up and try again” lady voice we all love to hate. I’m about to try for a third time because the third time’s the charm and all when I hear the sheriff’s voice through my plugged up ear.
He doesn’t talk so much as croak.
“There…there’s so many of them. I-It just happened so fast…”
“What happened so fast, Sheriff? What?” the man holding the bloody towels asks.
“It’s the e-end of the world.”
Hearing the sheriff’s gurgling voice say that sends shivers up my back. I blink a few times, thinking this will be a dream and I’ll wake up in bed.
That doesn’t happen.
Obviously it’s not the end of the world. If I look out the window, I can see some of the festival stragglers, wearing Uncle Sam hats, dressed in the patriotic red, white, and blue. No, it’s not the end of the world. The whole town is out there enjoying the world right now.
This must all be some kind of sick prank. Kevin put it together to get back at me for not keeping in touch for the last decade. He knows I write horror novels. How funny would it be to prank that guy who writes about zombies and werewolves?
Freakin’ hilarious.
“Call someone!” the man holding the towels says to me. He turns, and I see the worry on his face. His eyes are glassy. Maybe he’ll cry. Maybe he’s
on the verge of a heart attack. I don’t know. Pinned to his chest opposite of the barbell-holding stick figure is his name tag that reads: MANAGER and below it, TOBY LAVENDER.
Something about his expression tells me he can’t fake this.
“Get an ambulance out here right now!” he snaps again. This time, he bares his teeth. And the intensity in his wrinkled forehead spurs me to dial 911 for the third time, prank or not.
I get nothing.
A dead line.
“Phone’s down,” I say. “I tried three times.”
It’s not a good enough answer for the guy.
“Try a goddamn fourth time!” he shouts.
The boom in his voice shakes more sobs and tears out of Miss Fox. I pick up the receiver for the fourth time but pause when something catches my eye outside.
I see more of the festival-goers coming this way, not toward the square but toward the rec center. This street is a dead end — all forest and steel barriers. This has to be a prank.
It doesn’t make sense, but I see it. I see the top hats, the kids holding tiny American flags, more and more people. Ahead of them all is another cop. This one is a woman, and she has sleek-black hair that catches the sun. She’s limping, laboring over toward the rec like a drunk. I chuckle at the idea of the cops celebrating instead of doing their jobs. I really couldn’t blame her if she pounded a few beers while on patrol. I’d do the same thing.
It’s all part of the show, I think to myself.
Back to the phone. I punch in 911 again. Get nothing. Just got to go with it until one of them jumps up and yells GOTCHA!
“Not working,” I say.
Toby Lavender growls at me, then sweeps his gaze over the small crowd of onlookers. “Someone use their cell phone. Come on! Quick!”
Kevin Crawford has an iPhone in a case wrapped around his massive bicep. His fingers work their way inside until he pulls it free. With one clean rip, he disconnects the headphones that hang from his arm like a spider web. I see him fiddle with the screen for a moment then put the phone up to his ear.
The Dead Collection Box Set #1: Jack Zombie Books 1-4 Page 4