Canni

by Daniel O'Connor

  “Thank you, doctor. I appreciate that.”

  “Might I add,” she said, clearing her throat, “that he was not at all unattractive, in that veteran biker manner of appeal.”

  V smiled. “He said you harbored a criminally hot body under all of that business attire.”

  “Well,” she replied, repositioning her tissues, “I’m pleased that my calisthenics have paid dividends.”

  Not evident in the dim closet was the rosy transformation of her cheeks.

  “The snowplow operator. The one in Minnesota,” she added. “He wasn’t a cousin. He was my first love. His name was Bill Smith.”

  Cognac cherry was the color of the monster. It weighed nearly 400 pounds, and it took everything they had for Paul and his mother to push it across the office floor and wedge it against the door. They sat beside each other atop that executive desk, ready to hop off and push back should anything attempt to enter their temporary haven. The room was packed with leather furniture; the walls covered with framed certificates, paintings, and prints, all too difficult to discern with the lights off. Still, Dr. Anita Chuang recalled her own less ostentatious medical office. She missed it.

  Paul’s mind raced, wondering about the status of the others; mostly Rob and Cash. Mostly Cash.

  “I should have been less doctor and more mom.”

  It seemed the words came from nowhere, but Anita had long stored them in her heart.

  “What?”

  “I will speak for your father, too,” she added. “We wanted to give you the best life by working hard and providing, but . . . we lost sight of the big picture; both of us.”

  “Nah,” he said, “I’m lucky to have you. Don’t wither on me now. You is a hard ass thot.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Paul laughed, “Just some uneducated banter. I’m teasing. If I heard anyone else call you that, I’d straight fuck them up.”

  Anita knew that when her son felt emotion he’d default to comedy. She’d reached him. Her head went to his shoulder.

  John G found a room with an unlocked door. He entered quietly and kept the lights off; still his greatest equalizer. He crawled behind a long couch and came to rest face-down. There was Abraham Lincoln on the floor, staring at him. How much loose change might be behind every piece of furniture in the United States if we were to total it up? For John, there was merely a single, dusty penny, but it was on heads.

  So that’s what President Lincoln looked like.

  John wanted to tell Abe that he feared for his friends, feared for Professor Daniele, feared that any cure for the canni epidemic would return him to a world of darkness. He genuinely appreciated his saved mental image of Scarlett Johansson. Which of her movies to watch first? Was she even still alive? Had she turned canni? Was she possibly a perm? Was the infected guard who ran loose among his friends also a perm? Would they all have to hide until help came? Would help ever come? Would it be too late? His heart was racing beneath the sofa.

  Then, he got an idea.

  The way out, the actual way out, required a pass key, like the one Professor Daniele had. He was going to find him if he was still within and alive. Instantly, John and the penny were gone.

  With Lincoln in pocket, John was out in the bright hallway again, trying to stay near the walls but heading back toward the cafeteria. He saw security cameras above, stern in his belief that if he’d stolen a paper clip, the infantry would come from all directions, yet the place was church mouse central.

  Cash’s hands were cold. Rob did his best to warm them, ignoring the cramping of his right leg. He felt like they were in a magician’s trunk, awaiting the saw.

  Cash whispered, “Remember when we pounded Teresa with the snowballs?”

  He managed a chuckle. “In the alley, with her cousin Susan.”

  “Yeah.”

  She was smiling.

  “I miss the alley,” he said.

  “People think you’re nuts when you say your best memories are from a back alley in Brooklyn,” she added. “They picture things from movies, not kids playing sports, listening to music, having fun, eating pizza, building friendships, breaking hearts.”

  He took his hand from hers and crumpled a fist. “Here’s to the alley gang.”

  Her hands had warmed. She too, made a fist, and touched it to his.

  “Alley gang,” she whispered, “forever.”

  John entered the cafeteria. He found the scent of floor wax and disinfectant to be holding strong despite all of the blood. Tables and chairs were overturned and strewn everywhere. He attempted the impossible task of calling out in whisper.

  “Professor Daniele?”

  Cash found herself in a rainbow. When she and Teresa were barely teenagers, they and their friends would often head from their back alley to the bowling alley. It was called Rainbow Lanes. That was the time Rob came into their lives as well. She could still smell the rented shoes, hear the music, and taste the French fries. Her mind was filled with the clattering sound of the toppling pins when she noticed through the darkness of the tight cabinet the ashen incarnation of dread across Rob’s face.

  It wasn’t clacking bowling pins; this sound came from the pots and pans on the floor outside their sanctuary. Something was moving.

  The next sound they heard was the pounding of their hearts.

  The cabinet doors were pulled open. Rob was about to launch into battle when he saw one of the kitchen workers who had also been in hiding. The man was still clutching an enormous knife, but he managed a smile though his broken English.

  “You come now. All quiet. Monster no here.”

  Rob and Cash exhaled together.

  “Thank you,” said Rob.

  The kitchen worker continued. “We go to exit. If monster come back, we . . . ”

  With a swoosh, a crash, and a growl, he was gone. Lifted and carried away as if hit by a train. Pots scattered and his knife dropped to the floor. His scream faded into the distance with the pounding feet of the canni.

  “Professor Daniele?” repeated John, a bit louder. He tried to sidestep the blood on the cafeteria floor. Treading over some fallen chairs, he spotted a pair of shoe-clad feet protruding from behind a toppled table. Approaching with caution, he next saw the suit-clad legs, followed by the bottom of the lab coat, and the shirt within. It was when he observed the pink polka dot bow tie that he knew he’d found his man.

  But, north of the knotted neck accessory, remained nothing.

  No head. Only a burgeoning basin of blood and a mangled pair of eyeglasses.

  While cursing the worst aspects of eyesight, John forced himself to frisk the professor’s body for his pass key. It fell out along with an almost-empty pack of orange Tic Tacs. Only one mint remained in the clear plastic case. John pondered that the professor never knew that he was carrying what amounted to an hourglass of his final days in his coat pocket. He suddenly felt compelled to consume that crowning mint, and he did.

  Then he saw Maurice, the fallen guard. He was prone—either dead or unconscious—arms in a grotesque composition of fracture, yet there was no visible blood in his vicinity. Tucking the pass key into his pocket beside Lincoln, John approached Maurice. He felt for a pulse—four times, in four locations—and was finally satisfied that the carotid artery had some thump to it. Ear to nose, he heard the cadence of shallow breaths. He realized that Professor Daniele likely died so that Maurice, a man deemed lesser on the dubious totem pole of life, could live.

  “Hang on, bro,” he whispered, knowing that his words went unheard. “I’m going for help.”

  Rob and Cash had a dilemma: should they remain in the cupboard and close the door or take off in a direction opposite of the galloping canni? Cash was startled, and perhaps inching toward shock, at the sight of the white-aproned cook being torn away from their view, like a bunny in the talons of a hawk.

  “It’s okay, babe,” was all Rob could muster.

  She stared blankly at the strewn pots and pans—the b
owling pins of her altered state fantasy—when the ersatz bowling ball slowly rolled into view, heretofore dropped by the canni.

  The wide-eyed and jaggedly torn off head of Professor Daniele.

  Deciding that the infected guard might still be in the immediate area, John moved in the opposite direction of the way they’d all entered the section. He moved north along the main hallway, searching for doorways equipped with a pass key scanner.

  Rob had thoughts similar to his childhood friend.

  “We should go further in, away from this area,” he whispered to Cash. He gripped the large knife that had done the cook no good; she lugged the jug of cooking oil. They stepped back into the cafeteria and saw the fallen Maurice—still unconscious, but still breathing when Rob checked. They peered at the shoe-to-bow tie section of the professor. They noticed the empty Tic Tac case and they continued through, out the other side, and entered the long hallway, northbound.

  Doctors Anderson and Papperello-Venito, having heard nothing for what they surmised was over twenty minutes, could no longer endure their insufferable bleach closet. They cracked the door to see Rob and Cash headed their way.

  “Do you know a way out?” asked V.

  “No,” replied Rob. “Have you seen John?”

  “We haven’t.”

  “Paul and his mom?” asked Cash.

  “No one,” said Papperello-Venito.

  The doctors joined the couple on their hallway expedition. V had her key ring balled up in her fist, with the two sharpest constituents protruding from either side of her middle finger. Papperello-Venito brandished something she had not clutched in decades: a mop handle.

  John was further up the same hallway as the others, but they could not see him because he had veered just slightly left. He had come to two portals that required a pass key; the one directly in front struck him as just the passage to yet another long hall, but the one that branched to his left might be an exit. It had large letters on the door, for a start. He had no idea what they were, as his only form of reading had been braille.

  Recalling the method the professor had used on the initial entry door, John took the plastic pass key from his pocket and swiped it twice. It rumbled open. He entered a surprisingly small, insignificant room, which immediately presented him with a second door, another card scanner, and more lettering, even grander in font than the previous.

  He gave it the first swipe.

  Behind him, the door that he had not chosen, that may have led to more hallway, opened. Rob, Cash, and the two doctors could see it as they approached. Their bodies stiffened, then quickly relaxed, as they beheld the vision of a half dozen armed and helmeted security officers.

  As the rescue team entered, they were greeted with the sight of John, to their right, swiping the card at his door for the second, and final, time.

  “Noooooo!” came the screams of the security detail.

  Their semi-automatic handguns raised in unison, aimed squarely at John—or the opening door behind him. The lead officer charged at the Close Door button as John scurried aside.

  Too late.

  They came as a pack, charging like enraged bulls from a bucking chute. They trampled the guard before he could close the door and just as he and the first three Cannis perished in the bullet barrage from the rescue team. They rode out on a smell not unlike that of a flatulent hippo.

  John G, hunched in a darkened corner, covered his ears, involuntarily recalled his youthful, sightless fear of older Brooklyn kids blasting off mats of firecrackers. As he gagged on the stench and stared at those block letters, indecipherable to him, on the door he’d just opened.

  DANGER—PERM CONTAINMENT

  From their vantage, Rob, Cash, and the doctors witnessed a wave of hungry, permanently altered Cannis—at least twenty of them—engulf, and commence to devour, the entire security team. Final shots were fired blindly, serving more as funereal salute than forceful solution.

  Rob’s group did an immediate about-face. He dropped his kitchen knife as he spun, reached to grab it, and sliced the tip of his forefinger. It bled but he felt nothing. He knew they needed to exit the area before the feeding perm herd spotted them.

  All it takes is one.

  A single perm happened to glance to his right after cracking several teeth trying to chew through a riot helmet. He stood, still cloaked in portions of the Men’s Wearhouse suit he’d donned for his banking job on the morning he flipped, trained his red eyes on the four runners, and growled. Several of his covetous consorts raised their heads.

  “They see us!” yelled Cash. “Faster!”

  All members of the herd who were not getting their share of security meat stood. They came running.

  “Fuck!” screamed Cash.

  “That sounded like Caroline,” said Paul to his mother. He hopped off the cognac desk that barricaded the door to the hallway. “Help me pull this. We have to see.”

  With the fleet pack of perms gaining on them, Cash unleashed her cooking oil. With the opened jug held behind her as she ran, she swung it side-to-side, like a wagging tail. Her canola carpet bomb slicked their wake as they spotted Paul’s disconcerted face jutting from a doorway fifty feet to the fore.

  “You gotta let us in, bro,” yelled Rob.

  “No shit. Come on,” responded Paul.

  Behind them, the Cannis went as airborne as the disease they carried. Their speed and impetus worked against them on the oil-soaked floor. Up, they went, then down, some sideways against the walls, like trying to run hurdles on a hockey rink. Upon landing, the oil would also cover their hands and knees, inhibiting efforts to regain their footing.

  Paul opened the door as far as it would swing before it hit the edge of the bulky desk. The light from the hallway streamed in with his friends. Rob held the door as Cash, and the pair of government physicians, climbed over the cognac counter, then, he followed. Anita Chuang’s eyes were drawn to the newly-illuminated office walls. There, in the au courant proportions of light, in the thick of a cognac frame, hung Camille on Her Death Bed.

  Paul, Rob, and the others, pushed the desk until it closed and reinforced the door behind them. Dr. Chuang stood alone, brushed spellbound, as the Monet returned to darkness.

  In the hall, most of the permanent cannibals had regained their balance. Their soles remained slimy, so they advanced more tentatively in their march. The remainder of the perm herd lingered back over the remains of the security team, feeding.

  “Are you guys all okay? Rob, it looked like you were bleeding,” said Paul.

  “Yeah, it’s nothing. Sliced my finger. You and mom doing all right?”

  “All good,” he looked over at his mother, standing in the darkness and staring at the far wall, arms at her side.

  “Mom?”

  No response. Paul turned to Rob. His heart revved like a Harley. The forced air from the vent above felt frosty on his skin. It was too dark for the others to detect how white he’d become.

  Still clutching the knife in his bloodied hand, Paul called out a different name—loud enough to be heard, but hopefully not by anything outside the door.

  “Dr. Chuang!”

  She turned toward him, sniffling. “Sorry,” was all she said, in a whisper. Paul went over and embraced her.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I got a little overwhelmed; paranoid from the cannabis, maybe. I’m not accustomed to it.”

  The perms trudged just beyond the office door. In no hurry, they treaded cautiously upon their lubricous footing. They could be heard by the group hunkered behind the barricaded entry. The sound of stomping, sliding feet was almost tolerable, but if there was to be the slightest hint of a tap, brush, or God-forbid, pound, on that door, hearts would stop.

  One after another, with fecal waste sliding down their legs, they toddled by, hunting for the warm, pulsing blood and raw, fibrous flesh that they lost out on in the security ambush.

  Within the darkened office, the six internees were all pushing up against the de
sk lest anything try to crash through.

  In muted timbre, Paul had a question for Rob. “Where is John?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “And the professor?”

  Rob closed his eyes and shook his head.

  “Aw man. There should be a rescue team soon, right?” asked Paul.

  Rob leaned in closer. “They just ate the rescue team.”

  “As long as these things don’t know we are in here, we’ll be okay,” whispered Cash. “Sooner or later, even if it takes hours, someone will come for us. It’s a government facility.”

  “But what about John?” asked Rob.

  “I don’t know,” she replied. “If we open this door now, we all die. That wouldn’t be much help for John. If we give them all time to pass, when we are reasonably certain they are gone—if that ever happens—then we can go find John.”

  “Do we even know that your friend is alive?” inquired Dr. Papperello-Venito.

  “We don’t,” said Cash.

  “I see.”

  The doctor’s message was clear to all.

  The perms continued to pass. It took several minutes, with them negotiating the oily footing, but the initial herd was moving further away from the office door. Problem was, the second group had just finished devouring the rescue team and had begun to move down the hallway. Some struggled as they came upon the spilled cooking oil, but they managed it well. They were covered in the lukewarm blood of their victims, yet their hunger remained. Soon, the second group reached the office door, but like the coterie ahead of them, they ambled past it, unaware of the potential feast within.

  The slowest of them all was a heavyset fellow in a torn, soaked, and filthy Vegas Golden Knights jersey. Never gifted with a flair for balance, he went down face-first, shattering an eye socket. It didn’t faze him. Something else had garnered his attention.

  A drop of blood on the floor. His thick tongue emerged, like a famished leech, to taste it. Then he saw another and another, leading like breadcrumbs to the office door. On that door was a partial handprint; more blood. Rob’s blood. The thing crawled over and began to rise. It steadied itself by placing a hand against the office door. The touch barely rattled that fortified barrier, but inside it sounded like the end of the world.