Jacked
Shane McKenzie
“Anything?” Sid’s eyes bounced from Gabe to the large man grunting and lifting across the gym.
“Shit,” Gabe said and tossed the phone away. “Not even a dial tone. What the fuck, man? Did Tom not pay the bill or something?” He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and wrinkled his brow as he stared at the screen and started tapping it with his fingertip. “No service. You gotta be kidding me.”
“Just forget it,” Sid said. “We’ll just have to tell Tom about it tomorrow. I’m sure as hell not confronting that big fucker about this.” Sid absently watched as the behemoth exploded into some pullups, his biceps perfectly round like softball implants in his arms.
“If you keep staring, he’s gonna think you got a crush on him.” Gabe tapped his phone a few more times before giving up and tossing it aside.
Sid blinked, snorted. “Fuck you, man.” His eyes only stayed on Gabe’s smirking face for a second before rolling back toward the man on the other side of the gym. The guy was a monster. He moved to the bench press and grunted as he lifted, the veins in his forearms like inflated clown balloons under his skin. There were four 45-lb weights on each side of the bar and he pushed it with ease.
Sid finally looked away, caught his own reflection in the glass door on the other side of the counter. He touched his chest and arms. His stomach. Sighed.
Two-twenty. Sid had maxed out on bench press at two-twenty over a year ago and couldn’t get past it. He had hit his max weight with incline, decline, curls, squat press; everything. No matter how many different workouts he tried, different lifting techniques. He had plateaued. And it drove him crazy. Hours and hours at the gym; thousands of dollars wasted on supplements. It all led to frustration. And every goddamn time he saw this beast walk into All Day Fitness, he wanted to beat him to death with a medicine ball.
“…tic tacs.”
Sid peeled his eyes away from the Hulk who had moved on to triceps. The arm muscles looked as hard as marble, bulging with every pull down.
“What?”
“Dude, seriously. Your obsession with this guy is creeping me out,” Gabe said as he snickered and shook his head. “I said I bet he does so much juice that his nuts are the size of tic tacs. Tom told me the guy’s a fucking nut bag too. Spent time in the pen and got all weird and religious in there. Found Jesus and shit. Bat shit crazy. Calls himself Crow. No last name. Tom said the guy didn’t even put a last name on his application.”
Sid locked his eyes onto one of the television monitors mounted around the gym. Some basketball highlights were on and he kept his attention on them so he wouldn’t have to look Gabe in the eye, so Gabe wouldn’t see him blushing.
“Bat shit crazy? How would Tom even know that? He’s only here in the mornings. This guy shows up at midnight every day.”
“Two a day, man. Dude comes in when the place opens, comes back at night. Fucking obsessed.”
“So that’s why Tom banned him? Just because he’s a little crazy?”
“You didn’t hear? The dude’s been supplying roids to all the muscleheads around here. Tom caught him while he was making a deal in the locker room. Banned Crow and the guy buying the shit. But Crow just keeps coming anyway. Tom said to just call the cops if he showed up tonight, but the fucking phone…”
Sid had stopped listening. Gabe blabbered on, but his voice was nothing but background noise as Sid wiped the corners of his mouth and glared at Crow. Sid had already known Crow was selling the juice. He’d even saved up enough money to buy some for himself, but never worked up the nerve to actually ask the guy.
“Just look at that big son of a bitch,” Gabe said, standing closer to Sid now and joining him in staring across the gym. “Guess he never heard the expression don’t get high on your own supply. How does he even wipe his ass with his arms that big? I don’t know why anybody would want to look like that anyway. Shit looks gross, man. He holds his arms out like he’s wearing a heavy coat all the time. It’s fucking goofy.”
“Yeah whatever, man. You get your skinny ass back on that treadmill and jog in place some more, sissyboy.”
Gabe snorted, lifted his shirt, and ran his palm over the abdominal muscles pressing against his skin. “Keep talking, bitch. You could grate cheese on this stomach.” He spun around, rose to his toes. “And just look at that ass, will you? I promise I’ll get more pussy with this stomach and ass then you ever will with dancing pecs. You think chicks really like when a man has bigger tits than they do?”
Sid chuckled and shoved Gabe on the shoulder. Gabe stumbled but caught himself on the wall.
“Hey, watch the goods, fucker.”
Sid smiled and shook his head as he turned his back to Gabe, then felt at the layers of fat surrounding his own belly. He thought he was obsessed with lifting weights, considered the gym his second home, but he wasn’t shit compared to this Crow guy. Sid had been impressed by how many hours Crow spent lifting at night, and just imagining doing that twice every day made him feel lazy. It was true that the guy was on steroids, but he put in the hard work either way. And Sid pulsed with jealousy.
He wanted to be a fucking monster. He wanted to intimidate.
His muscles weren’t bad. But he wanted to be bigger. Much bigger. And he didn’t want to be just big; he wanted to be massive. Crow always made him feel like a little boy bitch in comparison. And though Sid had convinced himself over the years that all it took was determination and hard work to get the physique he wanted, he was starting to soften to the idea of steroids.
I’ll just do it for a month. See how it goes. Maybe it’s just the boost my body needs to get me over this goddamn hump.
Crow’s chest heaved as he paced back and forth in front of the mirror, admiring the rock-hard body that his clothes could barely contain. He growled, his mouth a perfect arch, as if he were challenging his reflection to a fight.
Sid checked the clock. One a.m. Still five hours to go before the morning shift arrived and he could get his workout in. Beside the clock were photos of Tom holding his rowing trophies and countless mounted medals. The guy had even hung up the first single scull rowboat he ever won a tournament in. Row machines lined the wall closest to his office, and Tom held classes every week. Employees were offered free lessons, but Sid never took him up on it. Wasn’t interested in that shit. It was the weights he craved.
Sid knew Crow would be there for another hour and a half at least, and if no other customers showed up, he would be able to sneak some lifting in. He ached to wrap his fingers around the steel bars and hit the weights, work up a sweat. His muscles twitched as he watched Crow lie back on the bench press bench and explode into his reps. There was nobody else in the gym besides the three of them.
“You ever think about doing it?” Gabe said suddenly.
“Doing what?”
“The juice. You can’t tell me you haven’t thought about it.”
Sid just shrugged.
“You’ll look like a fucking caveman with tiny mouse testicles, but not much of a change there, right?”
“They fill your mom’s mouth just fine.”
“A tiny mouth, that woman.”
They both burst out laughing and Crow’s head swung in their direction, his eyes landing directly on Sid. Sid cleared his throat and returned his attention to the television. If the guy was really as crazy as Gabe said, Sid didn’t want to find out. He flipped through the channels, but as usual, there wasn’t shit on. He ended up back at ESPN and stared stupidly at the same highlights he’d seen five times already. Gabe sat in the computer chair behind the front desk and stared off into the parking lot, drumming his fingers on the edge of the desk clicking his tongue.
Sid tried to fight it, but his eyes couldn’t help it. He side-gl
anced Crow as the man moved into wide-grip lat pulldowns. The muscles in his back and shoulders flexed and stretched his shirt as he pulled the bar to his chest in a slow and steady motion, keeping his form perfect. From where Sid stood, it looked like he lifted the entire stack of plates, and Sid struggled to pull barely more than half.
The night was especially hot and sticky, not usual for the middle of October. The sky was weird, kind of blurry and out of focus. Sid just figured it was some kind of mist or something and ignored it. The gym’s air conditioner kept the place at a nice seventy-two which fogged the windows, turning the outside landscape into a hazy ghost.
It looked like something was glowing green from the street, but Sid dismissed it as the neon lights from the businesses below and went back to watching the TV. Crow groaned as he continued the intense workout, the weight plates clinking together as they were manhandled by the beast man.
Then Gabe’s hand was slapping Sid’s shoulder like an injured bird. “Dude…dude, look at this. What the hell…?”
Sid slapped the hand away as he pulled himself out of his hypnotized state caused by the sports highlights. He’d seen Kobe Bryant make the same game-winning shot six times now. “What the hell are you rambling about?”
“What…what the fuck is that?” Gabe peered through the glass doors and squinted. “It’s moving…that’s weird shit, man.”
Sid couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. There was that green light, and it seemed to flicker, but nothing else. He shrugged and shook his head. “I don’t see shit.”
“Right there…in the street.” Gabe jabbed his finger in the air. “That green stuff. You see that shit? What the hell…?”
Sid rose to his tip toes and squinted. Green stuff? There was the parking lot with three cars in it—two in the front and one alone across the lot—and the other closed businesses in the shopping center.
Then he saw it. A slow, lazy movement along the black road. Like ooze. He could see now that the light was coming from this stuff. “What the hell?”
“You see it?” Gabe walked around the counter and up to the window, wiped it with the bottom of his shirt. He cupped his hands around his eyes and pressed his face to the surface. “It’s like…syrup.”
Sid joined Gabe at the glass but still couldn’t see well enough. Once his calves burned from standing on his toes, he finally swung the door open and stepped outside. The smell greeted him immediately. An earthy, mossy smell. Like a fish tank that needed cleaning. The air felt even hotter than when he’d arrived a few hours before, thick and almost gooey, difficult to breathe in.
And the noise. Like a thousand strips of bacon frying over a fire.
Sid trudged across the parking lot and peered down at the street below. His jaw hung open and his mouth was filled with the hot salty taste of the dense air, it made him salivate. Gabe walked up beside him and gasped, grabbed Sid’s shoulder and squeezed.
The All Day Fitness parking lot sat on a bit of a hill with the street a few feet lower. The ramp-like entrance was so steep that cars constantly scraped their undercarriages on it. Claw-like gouges marked the oil-stained cement.
And in the street, running like a slow-motion river was a substance Sid couldn’t quite wrap his head around. Slime is what came to mind. Green. Bright green. The slime bubbled as it crawled across the street, already deep enough to cover the asphalt and conceal the yellow lines in the road.
“It’s a fucking toxic spill, man. Radioactive waste and shit.” Gabe kept slapping Sid on the shoulder until Sid finally stepped far enough away from him. “This is fucked up. Real fucked up.”
Sid scratched his head and stepped closer to the edge of the parking lot and peered down into the slime. “But why would there be toxic waste? There’s no nuclear power plants around here.”
“Well what is it then? This is…I don’t know man, like some fucked up government shit, right?”
“Don’t be stupid. There’s gotta be…” Sid trailed off as he took a step closer to the edge of the parking lot.
The slime oozed and bubbled out of the sewer drains. The stuff pumped out rhythmically, a constant flow, slow and steady. A manhole cover rattled in place as the stuff boiled out.
“The grass. It’s coming out of the fucking grass too!” The pitch of Gabe’s voice had gone up an octave and he backed away with both hands on his head.
The ooze seeped out of the soil and turned the grass brown on contact. Flowers and bushes withered and blackened as the mystery gunk flowed into them, soaked into roots.
“What in the hell…?” Sid knelt down beside the grassy hill leading from the parking lot into the street. The ooze only bubbled out of the lower portion of the hill, then ran down and accumulated into the shallow, flowing river.
A brown minivan suddenly appeared from around the corner. Sid and Gabe were silent as they watched it pull onto the main road, its tires kicking up slime as it drove down the street in their direction. A hissing sound coasted into the air like floating cobras.
Smoke spiraled off the van’s tires as they melted and turned into a rolling mess of molten black rubber and green goo. By the time the van crept to a stop below and a couple dozen yards away from where Gabe and Sid stood, the tires were gone, nothing left but blackened metal rims. The paint on the van bubbled and oozed off the doors and hood like metallic oil. The windows beaded with moisture as the tint liquefied and ran off.
Then a woman opened the door. Sid tried to call out to her, tell her to stay in the car until they could figure out a way to get her out safely, but before he had a chance she was already splashing around in the muck, trying to wade through it to the sidewalk. The slime was up to her lower shins. She turned her head back toward the van and called out to someone, then her expression twisted into a knot of pain.
“Oh shit, man. Is she retarded? Didn’t she see what that shit did to her car?” Gabe said.
“Maybe she didn’t realize…” Sid rushed down the concrete ramp and toward the street but didn’t get close enough for the stuff to touch him or even get near him.
The woman screamed, slipped and splashed onto her back. Her shoes were already gone, eaten away, and her bare feet shone a bright pink like roasted pork. Her toes were spread wide, red toenails liquefied and trickling down the sides as she bellowed and the back of her sweater and jeans disintegrated.
She rolled in place, thrashing her arms and legs as the slime spilled over her. It only took a few seconds for her clothes to burn away completely. The flesh of her torso and thighs sizzled, burned that same pork color as her nude body flipped end over end. The goo dreadlocked her hair as her head shook from side to side until finally melting it away, leaving her scalp bare and smooth. The shrieks belting from her mouth went from high-pitched to a low, gurgly groan.
“She’s dead…she’s fucking dead, man.” Gabe covered his mouth and squatted, shook his head and mumbled to himself.
Sid could do nothing but stand there and watch as the woman’s bare body continued to roll in the slime. Even though it spun, it stayed in place, as if some invisible spider were wrapping her up in its web. Her flesh seemed to soak in the slime, drinking in the verdant hue, filling her mouth and eyes and ears. And she began to bloat. Right before Sid’s eyes, her body fattened, inflated. The slime’s color began to dye her skin until she resembled a giant frog.
She had stopped making any noise at all.
The van continued to cook in the gunk, slowly roasting. And that’s when Sid noticed all the other vehicles. All the other people. Just a few blocks down the street were countless cars, SUVs, and pickup trucks. All sizzling and being consumed by the slime. Their passengers spun in the green river like bloated pollution, some of them slowly starting to climb their way out. They walked slowly, nude and glistening, like giant slugs with bulbous appendages.
Need to call an ambulance. But how’s it going to get here?
“Mommy?”
Sid flinched at the sound of the child’s voice. The little b
oy poked his head out of the driver’s door. He wore a Dallas Cowboys cap and had the stem of a lollipop protruding from between his lips. The candy fell from his mouth when he spotted his mother spinning a few feet in front of him, her skin completely green and glistening with thick slime.
The boy gasped, whimpered. He started to crawl out of the car.
“No!” Sid shouted. “Hey, hey! Stay there, okay? Don’t get out. Don’t let it touch you!” Sid had both hands out in front of him.
The boy glanced at him then back at his mother. “Mommy!”
Sid was already looking for a way to reach the van, get the boy out of there. I can get some benches from inside, maybe lay them out like a bridge.
Gabe must have thought of a similar plan because he was already rushing toward the gym’s doors. Either that or he’s bailing on me. Fucking coward.
“Just wait right there. Don’t move, okay? You can’t let that stuff touch you.”
But the boy was deaf to Sid’s warnings. He glared at his mother, bared his teeth, and hopped in.
Sid turned his head, winced when he heard the sizzling. The crying. He ran back into the gym and went straight for the phone, refusing to accept that it wouldn’t work. I have to try, he thought. But Gabe was already on the cordless landline, the receiver pressed hard against his ear.
“It’s still fucking dead. There’s nothing.” Gabe turned the phone on and off over and over, but still got no dial tone.
Sid sprinted across the gym toward his locker, slammed into it and swung it open. He fished into his jeans pockets for his cell.
“What in the fuck is goin’ on?” Crow sat at the bench press, sweat dripping from his brow. His thick forearms rested on his knees. “You hear me, kid? What’s the fuckin’ deal?”
Sid ripped his pants out of the locker. “Slime…slime everywhere.” His fingers wrapped around the phone and he yanked it out, tossing the jeans aside.
“What in the fuck you talkin’ about?” Crow stood, his hands balled into fists. Muscles twitched and hardened all over, and though Sid felt a moment of intimidation, he turned away from the musclehead and dialed 9-1-1.
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