Middletown Apocalypse

by Brett Abell

  That’s when she noticed the label.

  Dr. S. Harris

  Middletown University

  Department of Immunology

  She glanced back toward the stairs, but of course, the UPS guy was long gone.

  “That dumb ass,” she muttered.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “This was supposed to go to Sid Harris, over in Immunology.”

  “Ugh. Looks like it’s leaking, too.”

  She lifted the box, and sure enough, a dark blue gel was dripping out of the bottom of the box, running between her gloved fingers. “Oh crap, really?” She handed the box to Charlie. “Here, put this somewhere.”

  Charlie looked helpless. “I, uh … where?”

  “I don’t know. The sink, I guess.” Then she thought of containment. Whatever it was, cold temperatures were always best. And they had the cooler. It was currently stacked high with about thirty bodies that were waiting to be dissected by her grad students during their midterm exams, but it was kept right at freezing. “Stick it in there. In the cooler.”

  Charlie was flustered now. He ran for the cooler, crashing into one of the examination tables and nearly toppling the body of an old woman onto the floor.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “Would you please stop saying you’re sorry? Good Lord. Just get it into the cooler.”

  As he fumbled to get the cooler open, Sandy heard a wet, slopping sound behind her. She turned and stamped her feet. In her haste to see what new damage Charlie had caused, she’d left Big Boy’s intestines hanging off the side of the table. Now, all twenty-three feet of the man’s intestinal tract was oozing to the floor like wet spaghetti noodles sliding through a slotted spoon.

  She ran to the pile of guts on the floor and tried to scoop it all back into the body cavity. The intestines were slimy with fluid though, and they slid between her fingers. She had to be delicate with them. Big Boy had evidently had some constipation issues there at the end, and the intestines were tight and bulging with partially digested food. If they tore, she’d be barfing in the sink for sure.

  Behind her, she heard the freezer door slam.

  “Dr. Harris, I’m real sorry.”

  Sandy grumbled under her breath but said nothing. She got the intestines back into Big Boy’s belly, then stripped off her gloves, and went to the phone on her desk.

  “Who are you calling?” Charlie asked.

  “Sid Harris over in Immunology. I want to know what that package had in it.”

  Two rings.

  “Yeah, Sid? This is Sandy, over in Forensics.”

  “Oh, hey Sandy. How’s the show over there? You doing okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah, look. No time for small talk. I think I might have a problem. UPS just dropped off a package that was supposed to go to you and it’s leaking.”

  “Leaking?”

  “Yeah, a bright blue liquid. Like motor oil, only a really vibrant blue. Almost looks like it’s glowing.”

  “Oh my God, Sandy, where are you?”

  “I’m in my office.”

  “Oh God. The package … it hasn’t gotten cold, has it? You’re okay as long as the temperature stays above forty degrees.”

  Sandy glanced over toward the cooler. “Why? What happens at forty degrees?”

  Before Sid could answer, she heard the high-pitched hiss of leaking gas. A moment later, something behind the cooler door exploded with a muffled pop. The door, heavy steel stout enough for a bank safe, sagged outward on its hinges and slowly creaked open.

  Sandy put the phone down and took a few steps toward the cooler. From behind her, she could hear Sid yelling into the phone, saying something about calling the Army if she didn’t answer him, but she had more immediate problems. All her attention was focused on the cooler. From behind the damaged door, she heard heavy things falling to the floor, one thud after another.

  “What is that?” Charlie said, backing away from the cooler.

  “I don’t know. Just stay back, okay?”

  “No problem here, ma’am. I’m not getting near that door.”

  Sandy gave him an irritated look, then slowly pulled the door open the rest of the way. The package had exploded, spectacularly and violently, coating the walls with that weird blue gel. Body racks lined the walls. Several bodies had fallen to the floor and lay in a heap of tangled arms and legs. As she stared, dumbfounded, the body of an elderly bald man rolled from its spot on an upper shelf and thudded to the ground.

  A moan rose up from the pile of bodies.

  Her eyes flicked back to the pile of bodies. The bodies were moving, shifting, as though someone was trapped under there and trying to push their way out. The elderly bald man rolled off the pile and landed at the base of the shelves, face down.

  Her first thought was that one of her other TAs had gotten locked in the cooler when Charlie threw the package in. Whoever it was, they were trying to get out.

  “Hello?”

  At the sound of her voice, three of the corpses lifted their heads and turned dead, milky eyes at her. One of the nude bodies, a young man in his late thirties, rolled off the pile and lumbered to his feet. The impossibility of it kept Sandy rooted to the floor. She couldn’t move, couldn’t even push air through her throat to speak. All she managed was a weak sort of moan that the dead inside the cooler echoed back, though their moans were more urgent, desperate, almost hungry sounding.

  The dead man rose stiffly, but steadily. Behind him, more and more of the dead rolled off their shelves and thudded to the ground.

  And soon, they too were standing.

  The younger man lunged for her.

  In that moment, something clicked inside Sandy and she jumped forward and slammed the cooler door closed.

  Hands beat the other side. The door shifted on its hinges but stayed closed.

  Sandy glanced back over her shoulder. Charlie was standing near the row of desks along the far wall. She wasn’t sure how much he’d seen, but it was clearly enough to scare the crap out of him. Fear had nailed his shoes to the floor, just as it had hers moments earlier.

  But she was past that now.

  Sandy had reached some deeper level of fear, one where clarity had once again asserted itself.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw movement on a nearby exam table.

  The woman Charlie had nearly toppled was sitting up and trying to swing her legs off the table.

  “Charlie,” Sandy shouted, and pointed to the opposite side of the room. “Back stairs. Hurry!”

  Sandy tried to run around the dead woman, but she moved with startling speed. She put her arms around Sandy’s neck like a drunken lover and tried to bite her face.

  “Get off!” Sandy said. “Charlie, help me!”

  “I’m coming, Dr. Harris!”

  Charlie grabbed a desk chair and ran it into the side of the dead woman. She staggered, and then tumbled over the arm of the chair. The dead woman and the chair both fell to the floor, giving Sandy a chance to right herself.

  She took a few wilting steps back.

  “Dr. Harris, wait!”

  But Sandy had already backed into Big Boy’s exam table. His arms fell around her shoulders. She tried to writhe away from him, but she was too late. His teeth clamped down on the bare skin above her collar and tore into her flesh.

  She let out a scream and sank to her knees.

  As she fell to the floor, she saw the cooler doors bust open. The dead poured out, snarling and snapping, their dead, milky eyes ranging across the room for living flesh to rend to pieces.

  Charlie had had enough.

  With a startled yelp, he ran for the stairs.

  Sandy watched him go, still trying to get out from under the hulking corpse standing over her. She held out an imploring hand to Charlie.

  She screamed for him to help her.

  Charlie stopped at the foot of the stairs.

  He met Sandy’s gaze for just a second, and she could actually see him marshaling
his courage.

  He ran right into the zombie clawing at her back, ducked his shoulder, and sent the thing sprawling across the floor.

  The next thing she knew, he was kneeling by her side. “Can you stand?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  He scooped her up in arms that were surprisingly strong for someone so lanky and together they hobbled around the floundering corpse of Big Boy, still trying to regain his feet, and made their way up the stairs.

  They paused only once as they rounded the half landing at the head of the stairs, but that moment was enough to send a chill over Sandy Harris’s skin.

  For the dead were charging out of the cooler.

  And they sounded hungry.

  “Dr. Harris, you gotta move!” said Charlie, pulling her to her feet. “This way.”

  She barely felt his hands on her, barely noticed him pulling her up the stairs. She did hear the banging of the heavy backdoor as it exploded open, and she remembered the painful burn of sunlight in her eyes, but the next few moments were a blur.

  Her next clear image was of the two of them standing on the lawn south of the stadium, a flood of students and alumni staring at them with mixed reactions of horror and confusion on their faces. In the parking lot, at the edge of the lawn, Sandy saw one of the university’s cops.

  She tried to raise her hands over her head and wave him down, but the best she could manage was to swat at the air like her head was swarming with bees.

  Still, he came running.

  “That’s good,” she said, her voice a slurry mess.

  Charlie wasn’t listening, though. He’d let her go. She was swaying like a drunk, barely staying on her feet. He stood a few feet off, watching the crowds of thousands moving back to the dorms on the south side of campus. They were laughing and singing—evidently, Middletown had won the game—and they were completely oblivious to the nude figures rushing out of the morgue.

  And when at last they did see them, the undergraduates all broke out into laughter.

  That lasted for all of about three seconds.

  Right up to the moment the first of the post-game revelers fell beneath the teeth and fingernails of the dead.

  After that, the laughter turned to screams.

  It became a riot.

  There was nowhere to run.

  The officer she’d recognized swam through the crowd, until he eventually came face-to-face with one of the dead.

  It was a woman in her forties, dead from a methamphetamine overdose, clawing the eyes out of a young freshman in a Death Cab for Cutie t-shirt.

  The dead woman rose from her kill, her sagging breasts and belly dripping with blood, and charged the officer. He didn’t have a weapon—none of the officers had weapons after the university’s decision last May to disarm their entire police force—and the best he could do was to wrestle the corpse to the ground.

  It did him little good.

  The other dead swarmed him, fell on him, pulled him apart.

  Sandy turned in confusion, barely able to wrap her head around what was happening. Then Charlie was in her face, his hands on her shoulders. “We have to go!” he said. “Can you move?”

  She nodded.

  He pushed her toward the university’s police department headquarters. Thousands of confused people were running every which way, crisscrossing the lawn.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  He nodded to the police station. “That way. Just stay with me, okay?”

  # # #

  UPS kept Russell Sloane to a pretty tight schedule. On-time deliveries had to be above ninety percent, at a minimum, with a minimum of one hundred and thirty stops per shift.

  Period.

  Anything below that and you were put on notice.

  Russell—Russ, to his friends—didn’t have much trouble making his performance measures, though. He’d been doing the delivery thing for six years now, and he was pretty good at it. The quotas they gave him were easy if you knew how to keep your truck organized. Middletown University was part of his normal zone, and, whenever he had deliveries there, he held them until the afternoon, especially on weekends. The campus was dead most mornings, nobody but professors and groundskeepers around, but in the afternoons, there were hot chicks everywhere. He’d been told Middletown was mostly a science-oriented school, and that kind of surprised him because the sciencey chicks he remembered from high school were all nerdy and gross with acne. But, evidently, things changed in college. Or, maybe it was just a Middletown thing. Either way, in the afternoons, walking around campus, you couldn’t turn around without running into a hot chick.

  And today was one of the best days he’d ever seen.

  The football game was over and people were everywhere. He parked his truck in the A Lot, south of Scott A. Browne Field, and bought a cherry flavored snow cone from the concession stand. He’d worked hard all morning and had skipped lunch. He was hot and sweaty, so the snow cone tasted good. He took a moment to savor it and do some people watching.

  He got some of his best ideas this way.

  Four years earlier, while visiting some old Army friends in a hotel in Houston, he’d gotten onto an elevator that was crowded with eleven giggling and slightly drunk Japanese stewardesses, and he’d thought to himself: Oh holy hell, this is one for Penthouse Letters.

  That thought changed his life.

  Two days later, after getting off work and settling into the couch with a beer, only to find there was nothing on TV, he’d taken up a pen and paper instead.

  The stewardesses were still fresh on his mind, and he’d written:

  Dear Penthouse Letters,

  I’m no Joe Pornstar or anything, but I know a little something about women. I know that look. You know the one? You stare into her eyes and she smiles back, but it’s kind of a hungry smile, and you know she just loves to get spanked; really loves it when you slap that ass while you’re …

  The rest was easy. The words just sort of spilled onto the page. All seven hundred and fifty of them.

  On a lark, he signed the manuscript Russ Surewood and sent it off to Penthouse.

  To his great surprise, they bought it.

  A hundred bucks.

  For twenty minutes work.

  After that he was hooked. He took little moments from his day, little fantasies about the hot chicks he passed on the street and the MILFs he delivered packages to and the hippie chick waitress at Sonic and even the older cutie he’d seen that morning over at the morgue—at least until he’d realized she was elbow-deep in some guy’s guts—and turned them into what he’d come to call his quickies.

  Since that first one to Penthouse four years earlier, he’d done almost a thousand of them.

  And published hundreds.

  The rest, he was thinking of doing as a self-pubbed thing on Amazon. He’d heard that was getting to be a big thing these days. Mix it with some of the Lovecraft he’d read back in high school and run with it.

  He’d even come up with the name of his collection: Booty Calls of Cthulhu.

  Russ had almost pulled the trigger on that one until he realized somebody had beaten him to it.

  But even without a book for sale on Amazon, the Russ Surewood brand was a moneymaker. There were literally hundreds of girlie mags out there, and they were starving for content. Blogs too. The Russ Surewood byline started to appear everywhere, from Hustler and High Society to Juggs and Trailer Park Cuties Monthly, and before he knew it, he was bringing in enough extra cash to make paying the taxes kind of a bitch.

  He even started paying quarterly.

  By that October, Russ Surewood was bringing in more cash each month than Russell Sloane was with his UPS gig. He even had a brand new Dodge pickup waiting for him back at the UPS terminal, complete with a personalized license plate that read simply: GUD WUD. And so, on days like today, he didn’t mind cutting a few of UPS’s corners in order to do a little people watching.

  Like the Middletown cheerleader sq
uad that was just now coming out of the Edelman Athletic Center.

  Russ watched them join the throng of spectators moving across the lawn, headed to the parking lots or back to the dorms, and thought about all the possibilities a bunch of college cheerleaders could bring to the table.

  Or to a hot tub.

  Or a pool table.

  Hell, even a counter over at the hot dog stand.

  Within seconds, he could tell even an elevator full of Japanese stewardesses wouldn’t be half as much fun. Believe it or not, after more than a thousand quickies, Russ Surewood had yet to take on a troupe of college cheerleaders. The idea put his mind into overdrive.

  That is, until he zeroed in on the lone redhead of the group.

  The blondes and brunettes could wait for another day, he decided.

  The redhead, now she was special. As he watched her mount the bus with the rest of the squad, the Russ Surewood part of his brain was busy concocting visions of her and all that red hair in a Bikram yoga studio. All that steam, a water bottle, a towel falling to the floor.

  Meanwhile, the crowd west of the stadium started to swell with noise.

  It took him a long moment to realize anything was wrong.

  He heard the yelling, the screams, but paid them little mind. Middletown had just won, after all. Everybody was in high spirits.

  Gradually though, the screaming got louder, and Russ turned his attention that way. Something seemed off.

  A middle-aged man in a Middletown jersey stopped next to him. He was holding a hot dog in one hand and a soda in the other. “What’s going on?”

  Russ shrugged. “No idea,” he said, and slurped at his snow cone. The man kept walking toward the commotion. Russ watched him slip into the crowd, and then let his gaze drift over the scene. Something was definitely going on over there. The yelling kept getting louder, and it was starting to sound like a panic.

  He’d seen his fair share of fights on school playgrounds as a kid, and that was the memory that flashed into his mind as he watched pockets of the crowd gather into knots. It reminded him of the Brownian movement patterns his teachers had stuffed down his throat back in his high school days. It hadn’t made sense then; but now, watching the crowd, watching all the bodies rushing together and bouncing off each other, he finally got it.