TV Dinners from Hell

by Amber Fallon

  “Thank you, Harvey,” Madeline said in an overly polite way, a not-so-secret message to Doug about what he’d be in for later.

  “Oh, no problem at all!” he chuckled, ignoring the young mother’s tone.

  Madeline, Mary, Doug, and Daniel all stood and watched as Harvey reached up to the seam where his wig met his scalp. Slowly, he began to pull. The wig came off, taking with it strips of Harvey’s flesh.

  Mary dropped her teddy bear. Unspeakable horrors were reflected in his shiny button eyes.

  * * *

  78154

  7–8–1–5–4 . Beep! Click.

  She wrenched the door open with a strength she wasn’t aware she possessed and slammed it behind her with a resounding Bang! Leaning all her weight against it, she allowed herself a moment to catch her breath before surveying her surroundings, a dangerous way to approach things, but she really didn’t care, at that point. Besides, she hadn’t even seen any of those…things…on this level. Sure, she had run like a bat out of hell when the words “Containment Breach” had come over the PA system, spoken by an eerily calm-sounding robot—what she and her coworkers had liked to call “The Doom Voice.” They often made jokes about the voice going rogue and one day announcing, “I’m going to kill you all.” in that same bland, even monotone. Now that felt like something of a reality, and it was certainly no laughing matter.

  She stood in the ladies’ room on the fourth level of the Life Sciences and Bioengineering wing of Heartfelt Research, Incorporated. It locked by way of a secure, coded keypad, like everything else in the building, only this one didn’t require a badge swipe to engage the mechanism. Just a few key presses, and the little light on the module would switch from red to green, allowing entry to anyone who knew the proper set of numbers. Sighing, she straightened and pressed her ear to the door, listening for any sounds from the hallway, anything that might indicate that one of those things had gotten a whiff of her. She was thankful she had chosen flats instead of heels that morning. Otherwise, she might not have been able to make it through the long corridor as quickly or as quietly as she had. She didn’t know for sure whether or not any of them had gotten loose on this level, but she had run as if she felt them nipping at her heels or clutching at her calves with their drying, decayed fingers bent into claws. Her eager ears were met with only silence. She sighed once more, this time a bit more resolutely, before squaring her shoulders and investigating her surroundings.

  The restroom itself was the same banal, sterile, functional design as restrooms all over the country, perhaps the world. Three pink stalls with swinging doors, one larger, handicapped-accessible stall at the end, and a small bank of three touch-free sinks complete with soap dispensers filled with pink goop that looked like the stuff that leaked out of chocolate-covered cherries when you bit them. On the wall hung a paper towel dispenser filled with rough brown paper that tore into uneven hanks when pulled over a set of jagged metal teeth, and, beside it, an automatic hand dryer. On the opposite wall hung a framed print of a peaceful meadow, and, below the picture, sat a little wicker wastebasket lined with a black plastic bag, all collected between beige walls, over a pinkish tile floor, and under a small bank of fluorescent lights.

  While hardly the best place to ride out however long it was until the infection was contained, it wasn’t the worst spot in the world, either. She had water, after all, and light, as well as a large assortment of magazines to help her pass the time. She wished she had something in the way of food, since she had only managed to eat a candy bar prior to the containment alarm going off, but she supposed she could stand to skip a meal or two. If she got really hungry, she recalled reading somewhere that you could survive for a while on paper products, though she couldn’t imagine actually getting that desperate. She picked up a magazine, the summer edition of some trendy publication aimed at teens, and sat down in a stall, wondering for the first time why the toilets in public restrooms never seemed to have lids.

  She had just gotten comfortable, propping her ankles up on a handrail in the handicapped stall, when she heard a droning whine and the lights flickered out. Her breath caught in her throat, and she temporarily knocked herself off balance, nearly falling. She remained silent, listening for any clue as to what was going on outside her little safe haven, but she could hear only silence—silence which seemed to be magnified by the lack of mechanical white noise that comprised the sound track of the lab.

  After a moment, the generator kicked in, illuminating a single, tiny panel over the sink. “Well,” she said, grimacing, “I guess the designers of this building thought it was okay for us gals to piss in the dark!” She fumbled for her purse, digging through old tissues, candy wrappers, and grocery store circulars, until she found her father’s old silver lighter. She had never smoked, but she carried the lighter around with her for luck, and because it reminded her of her dad. Now she hoped that it contained enough butane to work up some kind of spark.

  Click, click, click.

  “Damn! Come on, please?”

  Click, click, fwsh.

  A circle of wavering light illuminated the restroom stall. She looked around warily, holding the lighter aloft like an explorer in an ancient tomb. The restroom remained the same as before, only darker. She slowly made her way to the counter by the sink, painfully aware of the sounds of her footsteps on the tile, and glad once more that she hadn’t worn heels that day. She lit the wick on a large pink, flowery-smelling jar candle before extinguishing the lighter. In the dim glow of the candle’s flickering flame, her reflection in the mirror looked haunted, ghostly. She leaned forward, placing her hands on either side of one of the sink bowls, peering closely at the girl in the mirror.

  Thump.

  The noise made her jump. She dropped the lighter, which clattered to the floor with a sound like a hand grenade exploding—at least, to her fear-heightened senses.

  Thump.

  There was definitely someone—or something—outside, in the hallway. She held her breath, afraid to move, staring at the doorway as if, by sheer force of will, she’d be able to see through it to whatever was making the thumping noise on the other side. It was far off, but not too far, and the second thump had sounded closer than the first, although she couldn’t be sure if that was a fact or if her nerves were playing tricks on her. She listened eagerly for the sounds to return.

  Thump…scrape…thump.

  It was definitely getting closer. Could the light from the candle be filtering under the door? Could it be seen from outside? Should she chance making noise by blowing it out? Her eyes played a dizzying dance between the flickering flame before her and the door mere feet away. Beads of sweat stood out on her forehead. They didn’t prepare you for this in Infection Containment Training. Nothing those classes or lectures did could prepare you for the reality of your friends, your family, your coworkers joining the ranks of the living dead, coming back to life after they had succumbed to the infection or died at the hands of another victim, and coming after you. She tried to think back to the last instruction session. They had become so much of a chore that she’d begun to tune them out months before. It had been years since there had been an actual outbreak, after all, and wasn’t society as a whole so much smarter now than it had been back then? So much better prepared to combat the infection?

  Thud…thud…ka-thunk.

  She recalled the news reports about the last outbreak, and how they hadn’t really seemed real. How her mother had objected to her taking a job with the company responsible for so much devastation, and how she had shrugged it off as something done by accident in a now forgotten and irrelevant past. Now she wished she had listened. Her throat went dry, but she didn’t dare turn on the faucet for a drink of water. Instead, she licked her lips and swallowed, trying to generate saliva, cringing at the sounds that were near deafening, so close they were to her sensitive ears. What would she do? What could she do?

  “Remain quiet. Remain calm,” she drilled h
erself. Okay, that was the first part. “Assess the situation.” Well, she had locked herself in a fucking bathroom for starters, brilliant plan that had been. Everyone else had headed up the south stairway to the designated meeting place. Doctors Whitlock and Corby were joking as they walked down the hall, she remembered. But not her! Oh, no, panic had gotten the better of her. Head toward a large, unsecured gathering of people when the containment units had been breached? March up three flights of stairs with a group of other, possibly infected, human beings? No, thank you. And so, she had fled, all on her own, as far in the opposite direction as her feet would carry her, down through the corridor linking the hard sciences wings to the rest of her department, through the specimen rooms and the autopsy chamber, down a flight of stairs…to this, her pretty pink tomb.

  No, she couldn’t think that way! She had isolated herself from other survivors for precisely this reason, heading away from the rest of the building to reduce the risk of running across someone who could be potentially carrying the infection. It was the safest, smartest thing to do. Or so she had thought at the time. But it hadn’t worked. There was something outside the door. Some thing with lifeless, glassy eyes and a hungry black hole for a mouth, reaching, grasping with desperate fingers…maybe even someone she had known once upon a time.

  Thud…thud…whack!

  Something struck the door! In a frenzied blur of adrenaline, she took a step backwards, foot landing squarely on the fallen lighter and causing her to lose her balance. She caught herself on the wall before she fell. There was something out there, and it had found her.

  Maybe it was another survivor, she reasoned. Perhaps someone else had had the same idea, escaping to a secluded area of the building alone rather than combating all those stairs, all those possible victims of the contaminant strain. Maybe whoever was out there was just disoriented by the lack of light in the hallway. She very briefly considered calling out, but decided against it. Better safe than sorry, as her mother always said. Besides, even if it was one of those things, it was only one of them. She doubted one, acting on its own, possessed enough strength to break down a door no matter how ravenous its hunger. After all, it wasn’t as if any sort of intelligence or memory remained after brain death, right?

  She wished she had paid more attention to Dr. Whitlock’s research. She was supposed to be his assistant, so why didn’t she recall any of his findings? It didn’t matter. She was safe, so long as she remained where she was, and stayed silent. As long as she didn’t manage to attract more of them, the one outside could pound on the door until its face turned blue, for all she cared. Then she realized its face likely was something of a bluish shade and had to stifle a laugh. Nerves, just nerves, she told herself, allowing her foot to slide off the lighter and onto the tile floor beside it.

  Thud.

  Over time, her reactions to the sound were becoming less severe, less traumatic. It was a wonder what you could get used to, given the circumstances, she mused. Okay. She collected herself, trying to plot a timeline for her eventual rescue. Assuming the threat had been isolated and the building was secure, sweeper crews would be through the area within hours. She could handle that, easy peasy, piece of cake. Just a few short hours, and she’d be home free. The sweepers would clear out the infected, including the one currently pounding on her door, and then, once that was done, they’d call for survivors. She would be among them. She’d need to be cleared, she knew, and quarantined, but that was all right. Heck, that was even welcome. In fact, she was looking forward to it. She just had to keep from going mad in the meantime.

  Thud.

  “Little pig, little pig, let me come in!” she whispered, emboldened by the security her tentative game plan had afforded her. “Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin!” A fractured, giggling falsetto.

  Thud, thud, thud.

  It had heard her, whoever it was. Whatever it was. The snotty little girl in her was glad. Let it hear her, let it sniff her, even catch her smell! Let it drool over what it was missing while she remained safe and sound, impervious to attack by one weak little dead thing that didn’t even know enough to stay dead!

  Then came a noise that chilled her to the bone, snapping across her nerves like a taught guitar string.

  Beep!

  It was the sound of one of the buttons on the keypad locking the door being pressed. Surely, that had been an accident, right? A fluke? There was no way one of those things still possessed enough mental faculties to actually understand what it was it was doing. Brain death equaled brain dead. Right? She tried frantically to recall Dr. Whitlock’s research on this very subject, but found she was unable. Panic clouded her mind like a thunderstorm, bright red flashes of hysteria like lightning bolts. Oh, God, what had he said? Something about retained cognitive abilities and habit driving the dead from somewhere deep within their mostly useless brains. Surely, they couldn’t remember something as advanced as actually opening a door with a keypad, could they?

  Thud.

  What had Dr. Whitlock said? She tried frantically to recall something, anything, some scrap of information that could spell her life or death, but nothing came to mind when she tried to think of the long hours she had spent in Whitlock’s office, recording his results so she could type them out later, and…

  The recordings! She still had yet to log some of his recordings! If she remembered correctly, her microcassette recorder was still in her purse, with at least three days’ worth of results and experimentation still on it! Her eyes flicked quickly to the door. If she played the tape, that thing would most certainly hear it and redouble its efforts to get inside, but if she didn’t, she risked neglecting possibly valuable, lifesaving information. She was torn for a moment, but only a moment. She dashed across the floor to the restroom stall and located her purse by the dim glow of the candle flickering on the counter.

  Thud! Thud! Thud!

  She fell to her knees, half in gratitude, half in desperation, as she dug through her purse, fingers at last falling on the smooth, rectangular lines of her recorder. Victory! She cast her purse aside, the contents spilling out everywhere in a noisy clatter, but that didn’t matter. She no longer cared about trying to be quiet. She held the small electronic device aloft as if it were a torch and she The Statue of Liberty, before thumbing the button marked with the two little white arrows indicating rewind.

  Thud! Thud! Thud! Thud!

  Beep.

  Her heart caught in her throat. She tried to recall the musical tones that differentiated the buttons in numerical order on the keypad, but found herself at a loss. That couldn’t have been the number seven, could it? Surely not. She was just being paranoid. And, even if it had been, it was absolutely some sort of mad coincidence, right?

  The tape recorder clicked to a stop, signaling that it had finished rewinding to the beginning of the tape.

  A hiss of static.

  “Dr. Melvin Whitlock, Bacterial Sciences Division. Project Lazarus, Day 38. It appears as though the test subject has suffered no ill effects as a result of the neurotoxin administered once again, leading me to the conclusion that the nervous system of the infected is no longer viable as a means of survival, or of attack. More research is necessary.”

  Thud! Thud!

  Beep.

  She was sure it was a seven this time. She swallowed back tears of fright, her hands shaking so badly she could hear the vibrato in the recording of Dr. Whitlock’s voice.

  Static crackled.

  “…possessed of any sort of…reasoning ability…” Bursts of white noise interrupted the flow of information. “…otherwise remain dead…does seem to be…link between…memory…it would appear that certain memories remain embedded somewhere in the brain, accessible by the subjects in their post-infected state. Repetitive actions mostly, answering the phone, sometimes even dialing a frequently used number, like that of a loved one…”

  Her face went slack. Oh, God, no! That thing out there might actually b
e able to get in and get her. But most of the people on this floor were men, and the codes for the men’s and women’s room doors were different. She might be safe. She was probably safe.

  Beep, beep, beep.

  That was the first part of the women’s door code, she was sure of it. 7-8-1. She played it over and over in her head. It was like a children’s nursery rhyme in its familiarity, the way it had been drilled into her head with repeated use, just like it had been drilled into…

  Beep, beep, beep, beep.

  She screamed and threw her recorder at the door, shattering it. A rain of broken plastic and metal pieces clattered down in front of the little gap between the floor and the bottom of the door—a gap through which she could just barely make out a slowly shifting shadow.

  She dashed into the handicapped stall, nearly losing a shoe in the process, and slammed the door behind her, sliding the lock home, for all the protection it would afford her. Restroom stalls were built to give the illusion of privacy, not of safety, and she had no delusions that the thin metal walls would not provide much of either for very long once that thing made its way inside. She cowered down between the wall and the toilet, clapping her hands over her ears and sobbing, no longer caring who or what might be listening.

  7-8-1-5-4. Beep! Click.

  * * *

  THE GLEN

  A sun-drenched meadow stretches out before you, soft grasses in shades of luscious, verdant greens, dotted with wild flowers of every color. The mossy scent of the nearby forest, ferns and oaks and redwoods, mingles with the delicate perfume of the blossoms, carried on a gentle breeze that caresses your skin.

  You take off your shoes. The grass tickles the bottoms of your feet and in between your toes. The sun feels warm and welcoming, and you can’t help but recall childhood summers spent around a lake very much like the one you see in front of you. Calm, pristine water, smooth and still as a mirror, reflects the beauty of the scene around you. You feel a sense of bliss like nothing you can recall. Leaving your shoes and socks behind, you roll up the cuffs on your jeans and wade into the clear, shallow water, grinning as minnows dart around your ankles and dash away in sparkling silver streaks.