by David Wong
“Yeah or at least something covering their mouths.”
“There wouldn’t happen to be a door around here, would there?”
“A door…?”
“You know. One of the—”
“Oh. There’s not one in the hospital as far as I know. That would have been awfully convenient though.”
John thought for a moment, then said, “What about BB’s? It’s right on the other side of the trees there.” BB’s was a convenience store about two blocks away, but on the other side of that little wooded area. Among those trees was a deep drainage ditch we’d also have to cross.
“Man, I don’t know…”
He edged around to get a look at the Guardsmen standing between us and the woods. He said, “Come on, we wait ’til that guy goes to help unload some more of that wire, then run right through the gap there. But if we’re gonna do it, we have to do it now, before the sun comes all the way up.”
“And what makes you think those other guys won’t shoot us in the head?”
“They’re not gonna do that. All these guys know is they got up in the wee hours of the morning to fence off a hospital because a guy went on a shooting rampage and they’re afraid some diseases may have escaped. They don’t know there’s a, you know, monster situation going on.”
“And you know all of that how?”
“TJ Frye is over on the other side. You remember TJ? Came to that party a few years ago and stuck his dick in the jelly? He’s like a sergeant now. Said they haven’t been told shit.”
“Well, they’re gonna chase us.”
“Yeah but we just gotta make it to BB’s.”
John stripped off his shirt and started wrapping it around his face, like he was ready to join some riot in the Middle East. “Cover your face, unless you want them to identify you and show up at your house in an hour.”
Peering through a quarter-inch slit of wrapped T-shirt, we crouched low and stayed in the shadows until we reached the narrow stretch of lawn between us and the woods. We stayed like that for about fifteen minutes until one guard left his post to accept a cup of coffee from another. We sprinted. I immediately slipped in the wet grass and fell on my face. My shirt mask slipped over my eyes. I scrambled to my feet and just ran, as hard and fast as I could, nearly blind. I heard shouted commands but no gunshots.
A branch slapped me in the face and I knew I had reached the woods. I stumbled and clawed the shirt away from my eyes just in time to feel the ground give way under me. I was sliding down an embankment of wet grass and dead leaves, then splashed into freezing ankle-deep water. It was dark. There had been an early morning gloom out on the lawn but it was still midnight under the trees—no sign of John, or anyone else. I sloshed through the water and scrambled up the other side, pulling myself up with handfuls of weeds, knocking aside discarded grocery bags and flattened plastic Coke bottles.
A hand latched around my ankle. A different hand latched around my wrist. John up top, one of the soldiers on bottom. For a ridiculous moment I was pulled in opposite directions like a cartoon character, both men shouting frantic instructions at me. I tried to kick free and accidentally kicked the guy in the head in the process. It worked.
In three seconds, John and I were out of the woods and sprinting diagonally across a parking lot, through the bay of a car wash, down an alley and toward the gray bricks and rusting Dumpster that was the ass end of BB’s convenience store. I risked a look over my shoulder—
“SHIT!”
There were no fewer than ten soldiers following us now, the two in the lead carrying black plastic pistols with neon-green tips. They looked like toys, but I knew they were Tasers. I was eager to avoid my fifth lifetime Tasering if at all possible.
The restroom door was on the exterior of the store, around the corner to our left. I rushed up to it, grabbed a rickety knob and—
“Locked!” I said, trying to catch my breath. “The key! Inside! You have to get the key from the counter inside!”
John shoved me aside, reared back, and kicked the door. The whole knob and latch mechanism exploded. We crammed ourselves inside, pushing the broken door closed.
One … two … three …
“Hey! You two! Get the fuck out of there and lay the fuck down on the pavement before we have to—”
The soldier was cut off in midword.
I pulled open the door to find we were surrounded by panties.
We stepped out of the ladies’ dressing room at the Walmart on the opposite side of town. John and I had traveled about 2.5 miles in approximately zero seconds. Right now, at BB’s, several very confused National Guardsmen were staring at an extremely filthy, and completely empty, public bathroom.
We stepped into the aisle of the nearly empty store, two muddy men with T-shirts wrapped around their heads. John unwrapped his and said, “What is this? Walmart?”
So, I wasn’t completely honest with the psychiatrist about the whole thing with the mysterious door in the burrito stand and the Asian dude who disappeared into it. John and I have identified half a dozen of those doors around town, and we know where they lead: to each other. The only thing is you never knew to which of the other doors they were going to take you, it was basically doorway roulette. I mean, you’re not going step out in Beijing or anything, it’s always another door around town. All the ones we’ve found, anyway. But they never seem to go to the same place twice. Why? Because this whole town is fucked up, that’s why. I keep trying to tell you that. You don’t want to come here. It’s exhausting.
John and I didn’t draw much attention as we moved through the store since, at this particular store in this particular town, we weren’t even the filthiest people there. We just walked right out the front door and headed back toward town along the shoulder of the highway. It was a wet, chilled morning under a lethargic November sky that had rolled out of bed and thrown on an old, gray, grease-stained T-shirt.
John said, “Did you hear? They never found Franky.”
“Wonderful.”
“What do you think happened? You think that bug thing took over his brain?”
“Hey, why not?”
“You think he’s gonna turn up again?”
* * *
If you’re asking yourself why the men with guns chasing us couldn’t just use the magic door and follow us right to Walmart, it’s because for most people, the doors are just doors. Same as for most people, the spider monster in my house would have been invisible, just as it was for Franky. Same as how if you’d been in the bathroom with me all those months ago when I saw that shadowy shape outside my shower, you’d have seen nothing. You might have sensed something, just as in your everyday life you might sit in a dark house and feel like you’re not alone, or have a nagging suspicion that something slipped around a corner just a moment before you looked. The feeling can usually be expressed by the phrase, “Of course there’s nothing there. Now.”
To be clear, if you’ve actually seen a ghost, that doesn’t make you like us. A ghost sighting is usually nothing more than your brain trying to put a familiar face on something that does not have a face at all.
John and I, on the other hand, can see what most of you can only sense. We’re not special, it’s just the result of some drugs we took. Just for future reference, if you’re ever at a party and a Rastafarian offers you a syringe full of a slimy black substance that crawls around on its own like The Blob, don’t take it. And don’t call us, either. We get enough bullshit from strangers as it is.
25 Hours Prior to Outbreak
English should have a word for that feeling you get when you first wake up in a strange room and have no freaking idea where you are.
Hotezzlement?
I was cold, and every inch of my body was in pain. I heard a crunching, like the jaws of a predator grinding through bone. I pulled open my eyes. I saw a dragon standing proudly atop a hill before me.
The dragon was on a TV screen, beneath it was a video game console with a tangle of cords snaking across
green carpet. I blinked, squinted at the sun burning in through a cracked window. I turned, hearing my neck creak as I did, and saw John sitting at a computer desk in the corner, staring into the monitor and holding a bottle full of a clear liquid that I’m sure you wouldn’t want to try to put out a fire with. I sat up, realizing I had been covered up with something in my sleep. I thought for a moment John had thrown a blanket over me but closer inspection revealed it to be a beach towel.
John glanced back at me from his computer chair and said, “Sorry, I used my spare blanket when I got that leak in my car.”
I looked around for the source of that animal crunching noise. I found Molly laying behind the couch, with her head crammed inside an open box of Cap’n Crunch cereal. She was eating as fast as she could, trying to use her paws to keep the box in place.
“You’re letting her do that?”
“Oh, yeah. Cereal is stale anyway. I don’t have any dog food here.”
The dragon sat frozen on the television, the intro screen for a video game John had apparently been playing while I slept on his couch.
“What time is it?”
“Around eight.”
I stood and felt my head swim. I rubbed my eyes and almost screamed in pain from the wound there. My shoulder felt like it had taken a bullet and it seemed like a pair of elves were trying to escape my skull through my temples using tiny pickaxes. It wasn’t the first time I had woken up at John’s place feeling like this.
My phone screamed. The display read, AMY. I closed my eyes, sighed and answered.
“Hey, baby.”
“Hi! David! I’m watching the news! What happened?”
“Shouldn’t you be in class?” Amy had failed a pretty basic English class last semester because it was a morning class and she kept sleeping through it.
She said, “They cancelled it. Oh, it’s on again. Turn to CNN.”
I talked around the phone to John, told him to switch over the TV. He did, and watched as an early morning shot of the chaos at the hospital filled the screen. The name of the city was displayed along the bottom. National news.
John turned up the sound and we heard a female reporter say, “… No history of drug use or mental illness. Frank Burgess had been with the department for three years. Authorities are combing the area for Burgess but police say the number of wounds he sustained in the standoff make his turning up alive, quote, ‘highly unlikely.’ Meanwhile, the hospital remains under quarantine due to unspecified infection risks that have only added to the anxiety in this shell-shocked community.”
They cut to a shot of our enormously fat chief of police, giving a sound bite in front of a bank of microphones.
To Amy I said, “Man, our chief of police is getting huge.”
Amy said, “They said thirteen people were hurt and I think three people died but there could be more. Did you guys hear about this last night? When it was all going on?”
A pause on my end. Too long. Finally I said, “We heard about it, yeah.”
“Uh-oh.”
“What?”
“David, were you there? Were you guys in on this?”
“What? No, no. Of course not. Why would you think that?”
“David…”
“No, no. It was nothing. Guy just went crazy, that’s all.”
“Are you lying?”
“No, no. No.”
She said nothing. She and the therapist knew the same trick. Filling the silence, I said, “I mean, we were there but we weren’t really involved…”
“I knew it! I’m coming down.”
“No, Amy. It’s nothing, really. It’s over. We just happened to be in the area.”
I heard John say, “Hey! It’s me!” I turned to the television.
Sure enough, John’s face filled the screen. The reporter’s voice-over covered the audio, saying, “… But for every hour Burgess remains at large, fear and paranoia are bound to keep growing in this small city.”
On TV, John’s voice faded in: “… And then we saw a small creature crawl into his mouth. I wasn’t two feet away, I saw it clearly. The thing wasn’t from this world. I don’t mean alien, I mean probably interdimensional in nature. I think it’s obvious from what happened tonight that this being possessed some powers of mind control.”
I closed my eyes again and groaned.
Amy said, “I’m coming down. I’ll take the bus.”
“Forget it, your classes are more important. If you fail English again I think they can kick you out of the country. I think it’s in the Patriot Act.”
“Gotta go, honey. I’m late for class.”
“You said you didn’t—”
“We’ll talk about it later. Bye-bye.”
I killed the phone and looked for my shoes.
“You goin’ back home?”
“I can’t stay here, John.”
“Yeah. But, you know. You had that thing in your house.”
“You think there’s another one?”
“I don’t know, but—”
“What do you want me to do, have the place sprayed?”
“No, I’m just sayin’. That thing, it crawled inside Franky and seemed to take him over. Well, that thing turned up in your bed. Are you assuming that’s an accident? Because maybe we should consider that it was there for you.”
I can always trust John to think of things like this.
“It don’t matter. Okay? Your couch isn’t long enough. It kills my neck on the armrest. So, it’s moot.”
“Well, you’re not gettin’ the bed.”
I took away Molly’s cereal box, which was now just empty cardboard bent in the shape of a dog head. I said, “You sounded crazy on the news, by the way. I hope you know that.”
“What? I was tellin’ the truth.”
“To what purpose, exactly? The only people who’ll be convinced by that are people who’re already nuts. I can see you’ve got your blog up right now. For what? So you can tell the whole nonsense story and be one more nutjob ranting on the Internet? It doesn’t do anybody any good. It just makes you look crazy. It makes both of us look crazy.”
“Hey, aren’t you going to be late for your court-mandated therapist appointment?”
“Fuck you.”
I glanced at my watch. He was right.
* * *
The drive through town was surreal. I had to go past the hospital (okay, I didn’t have to but curiosity got the better of me) and it had the air of a natural disaster. News vans were parked outside of barriers that were blocking the street. Cops were at a checkpoint, directing traffic away from the parking garage entrance. Three blocks later I had to wait at an intersection for five minutes while a row of green trucks rumbled past. Military. I suddenly wanted to get far away from there.
I had half hoped I would find the psychiatrist’s office closed today, as if the aftermath of a shooting rampage would be treated like a national holiday. No such luck. People got to make a paycheck I guess.
I barged in before I realized there was somebody else in the waiting room. Should have looked in through the window or something, I would have waited outside if I’d known, since the potential for really awkward conversation seems pretty high in the waiting room of a psychiatrist’s office. I tried to think of a plausible excuse for turning around and leaving. The best I came up with was to grab the potted plant in the corner and just walk out, as if it was a rental I was repossessing. I decided not to.
The lady in the waiting room didn’t even turn to me when I came in, she was transfixed by a television in the corner tuned to Fox News, covering the shooting. Jesus, slow news day. People get shot all the time, right? I found a chair as far away from her as possible. I grabbed a magazine and held it in front of my face. Seemed to be a lot of articles about wedding dresses.
“It’s happening all over, you know,” said the woman from the other side of the room. She was probably forty-five or so, hair a desperate shade of blonde.
I said, “What’s tha
t?”
“Demon possession. All over the world. You see news from the Middle East and such and you can see it spreading like wildfire.”
“Uh huh.”
“It’s easier now, now that all the souls are gone.”
“Hmm.” I flipped the page in my bridal magazine, acting engrossed in the ads. The only thing worse than always being the craziest person in the room is when suddenly you’re alone with someone crazier. She was still talking.
“Did you know the Rapture happened already? In 1961. The Lord called all the souls up to Heaven. But the bodies were left behind. That’s why the people walking around today don’t seem to have souls. It’s because they don’t. You see that story last week, the man who was being chased by the police in a stolen car? There was a newborn baby in the backseat? He just threw it out the window. A baby! People these days are just common animals. Because their human souls are gone, see.”
I lowered the magazine and said, “That’s … not a bad theory actually.”
“They called it the mark of the beast. But they don’t need a mark. They reveal themselves as beasts, with time.”
The door to the office creaked open and out walked a gorgeous teenage girl. For a baffled second I thought this was somehow my therapist, like maybe she was filling in today. But of course she was just a patient and Dr. Tennet was behind her. The crazy woman in the waiting room stood and thanked the doctor and walked out with the girl. The lady hadn’t been there for treatment. She was just giving her daughter a ride.
* * *
Right off, Dr. Tennet asked, “What happened to your eye?”
“Got in a fight with John. He said counseling was a waste of time and I told him I’d be damned if I’d hear him insult you and your profession.”
“You look like you haven’t slept.”
“How can I, with what’s going on? Have you been watching the news today? Do you know if they found Franky?”
“He wasn’t expected to live, was he? Did you know him?”
“What? No. Why would I have known him?”
“You called him Franky.”
“Well I went to high school with him. But that was years ago. I didn’t have anything to do with what happened if that’s what you mean.”