Middletown Apocalypse

by Brett Abell

  Lewis’s hand stopped shy of the curve of her workout-pant-covered cheek. “Hmm.” Bear took the helmet off the end of the bench and strapped it on his head. “Maybe so.”

  Lewis separated from her and his lips moved over words Bear couldn’t hear over the bangs and rubber-on-rubber screeches of the few climbers. The tiny girl’s hand lingered on Lewis’s chest as she answered him and then left.

  Bear sniffed and heaved himself back on the bench. “Oh, not a chance.”

  He slid the harness over his claws and then up his legs to his crotch.

  Lewis stood over him. “Hey, Bear.”

  “Who’s your friend?”

  “Katie? You know Katie.”

  “Are you and her a thing?”

  Lewis tilted his head and Bear laughed as he synched up the strap on his waist.

  “No, Bear, that’s Katie Harper.”

  Bear shrugged. “If your family is having some feud with the Harpers, I’ll take her out.”

  “No, Katie Harper, Stan’s sister.”

  Bear stared. “She’s in high school?”

  “No, she’s a freshman at Purdue. They’re having some kind of fall break or her classes got canceled for some project or something. I don’t hear words when she talks sometimes.”

  “Stan isn’t so tough.” Bear slid off the bench and walked on his knees toward the wall. “I could kick his ass with both legs cut off.”

  “Nice.” Lewis handed Bear one end of the rope fed through the pulleys near the ceiling. “He’s the one that makes your legs. I wouldn’t piss him off too much.”

  “That’s my future brother-in-law. We’re tight.”

  Lewis shook his head. “Damn, Bear. More climbing, less blabbing.”

  Charlie Noble found his way outside.

  ***

  Bear leaned hard on the wood railing as he took the next flight of stairs. The doors leading into the second floor of the biology department were flung open. One of the hinges was pulled away from the wall and splintered through the old plaster, exposing the slats underneath. Boone Causey would have had a fit. He would have gone back to his truck, gotten his tools, and fixed it without permission. Bear hadn’t driven since before the accident and his father’s tools had been pawned before they resorted to selling the land.

  His nose wrinkled from a pungent smell wafting out of the open doors as he took enough steps to be above the doors. He saw broken glass on the floor and an overturned chair. A few drops of blood trailed away behind one of the lab tables. These were the undergrad labs, and it appeared someone had fumbled during the last class. By the smell, they had dumped bleach out and then opened the doors to air it out into the engineering wing on the third floor.

  Bear blinked and turned away. His climbing session had worn him out and his muscles quivered from trying to climb the steps. The elevator only went to the second floor, so what was the point of using it for half the trip.

  He heard someone yelling deeper in the biology building. He shook his head and coughed. It smelled stronger than bleach. Bear had an Uncle Jack, on the Horner side, who ran an auto body shop in downtown Peru when Bear was a kid. He used to lift the batteries out of totaled vehicles and recharge them to resell. Bear walked past the recharge room once with his dad and started coughing until his dad carried him outside under his arm. The smell from the open lab was more the smell he remembered from that bubbling acid. What the hell did those undergrads spill? Bear’s uncle tried to burn his shop for the insurance money and then ran off with the music minister’s husband from their church. It was still talked about in hushed tones. Of course, Bear decapitated a deacon’s daughter after half a hand job, so he wasn’t one to judge, he supposed.

  “Bear.”

  He blinked and brought his attention up from his footfalls. Stan held out his fist and Bear bumped knuckles with Stan Harper. He was short like his sister and also had long blond hair, but he had an Abe Lincoln beard that was reddish and he lacked her curves. Bear was thinking about Katie’s ass when his backpack slid off his shoulder, and he had to hold the wall to keep his balance.

  “You climbed today?”

  Bear nodded. “A little.”

  “I was hoping you’d be up for a run.”

  “You being an asshole, Stan?” Bear followed Stan into the engineering lab that looked for all the world like the kind of place high school kids would build birdhouses in as opposed to any sort of university lab.

  “No, that’s what I told you to come here to see.” Stan moved aside a welding torch nozzle attached to a hose to the left and a welder’s mask to the right. He lifted another titanium leg like the others he had designed for Bear, but this one had a small, curved paddle on the end. “It’s like the ones they use in the Para Olympics, only better.”

  “How better?”

  “I made it. Everything I make is better, Bear. It’s better polymers and design, but still within competition regulations.”

  “It feels light.”

  “You’ll probably run the fastest 4-40 of your life.”

  Bear cradled the leg to his chest. “Why would I need to run a 4-40?”

  Stan licked his lips. “The same reason you still put on your legs before your pants. Defiance? Because you had me build you climbing legs even though we live in Indiana? Competitive spirit? For the fuck all of it? You pick. Just try them on and try it out.”

  Bear grabbed up the other leg and hobbled to a chair in the corner, near one of the windows. “I can barely keep my balance right now. I’m going to fall on my face.”

  Bear could see out the window across the trees to one of the fountains. The angle caught a blur of light, but he could see two guys fighting on the ground and other students gathering around with their phones out.

  Stan leaned back on the corner of a table. “You won’t fall on your face. They balance better than you think. And only I will see you fall on your face this time.”

  Bear unstrapped one walking leg and set it by his pack. He pulled the blade runner leg up over his stump under the shorts. “This strap is different.”

  “It’s a soft strap, like a bandage.” Stan leaned forward and opened his hands. “Can I show you?”

  “Sure. Don’t get fresh though. I’m still worked up from seeing your sister in workout clothes today.”

  “Hey, Shit Head, watch it.”

  “Oh, I watched it.”

  Stan shook his head and bound the straps over to tighten the leg on both sides. “I molded this to you perfectly from the scans. You can go tight on these straps and they won’t chafe when you run. But if you touch my sister, I’ll cut off your arms and not replace them.”

  “Still would be totally worth it.”

  “Stand up and get a feel for it before you put on the other one.”

  Outside, the kids scattered from the scene. More guys had jumped on the pile, so whoever was on the bottom of the other guy’s friends was getting his ass chewed off, Bear thought. He imagined campus security or the town cops were rolling in and everyone without skin in the fight was running for cover. He didn’t hear sirens.

  Someone was still shouting in echoed argument down in biology.

  Bear stood and lost sight of the action outside. He looked down and flexed his hips. The blade felt more natural and stable than his walking leg. “It feels good. I actually kind of want to run now.”

  “Cool, put on the other one and we’ll do a couple laps in the lab before we go outside.”

  Bear narrowed his eyes at Stan. Someone slammed a door into a wall downstairs with a report like a gunshot. Stan jolted, but Bear just thought about his father’s tools again, and he recalled the smell of acid from his memory.

  “Are you kidding?”

  “No, I can run. I brought workout clothes. I won’t be up to your speed in competition, but I can hang with you for a while.”

  “You are dead serious about this. Competition?”

  Glass shattered somewhere in the building.

  Stan held out hi
s hands. “Yes, Bear. Why do you think we are doing this? Maybe my designs will make a million dollars or get me into a graduate program above what a Middletown University degree deserves, but that’s not why we’re doing this.”

  Bear sat back down, wearing one blade and one sneaker. “Dude, you’re in love with me, right? That’s why you are jealous of me and your sister. Listen, Katie and I will always have a place in our lives for you.”

  Bear smiled and reached out to touch Stan, but Stan swatted his hand away. “Stop, dick. Seriously though, I will weld a chastity belt on you, if you keep joking about her.”

  “So, you are doing this because you want me to run again?”

  Stan shrugged. “You’re here instead of Ohio State because of all this. I’m here because I got suspended my senior year with half an ounce too much pot, so Craptown University in the hole where I was born was the only school that would accept me. But I made shit that got you out of a fucking wheelchair. You wanted to climb, so I designed something better than we could ever buy or afford. Now I made these and we’re going to fucking run just because.”

  Someone dropped something down the stairs from the second to the first floor. It sounded too heavy for books, but no one screamed, so it couldn’t have been serious.

  “Because we’re stuck at Middletown University, Stan?”

  Stan looked away, out the window. “Because fuck it. Why not? Fuck Ohio State. Fuck Middletown University, Middletown High School, and Middletown fucking town. They can all burn down for all I care. No one would notice anyway. If I make something that helps you move like the wind, maybe I can make even better shit after that. When I’m in class regurgitating numbers to professors that are just doing this while they jockey for a better job at a better place, I think about this stuff. Making this gives me purpose.”

  Bear bit his lip and blinked. He swallowed three times. “Jesus, Stan, I don’t know what to say. I’ve just been drifting most days. Same thing in classes. This has meant more than I realized. Thanks for fuck all, man. I didn’t think I’d walk again before I met you. But running …”

  “Put on the other leg and I’ll introduce you to my sister.”

  Bear unstrapped his walking leg and pulled it off. “You’re right. It’s time to move forward.”

  “I thought so, dick.” Stan walked toward the doors. “I’ll close the doors until you’re comfortable with them. Then, we’ll head outside.”

  Bear held up the second blade and inspected the straps. “I only just started climbing. I probably weigh thirty pounds more than in high school, even without my legs. I’ll probably throw up from running.”

  “Good. That will turn off my sister.”

  Stan pulled the first door closed and set the lock latch into the floor. He brought the other door around to close it.

  “Hey, Stan, help me with these straps again, would ya?”

  Stan paused just a few inches shy of closing the engineering lab. He turned and said, “Just lace them over like I did with the first one. I won’t always be there to do it for you.”

  The door burst away from Stan’s grasp and a kid in a university sweatshirt shoved Stan backward. Stan fell onto the table and knocked the torch nozzle onto the floor. “What the hell?”

  The kid’s eyes were bulged and bloodshot. Blood ran down from his neck on both sides and soaked into the front of his shirt. The kid held out his hands like claws and stumbled toward Stan.

  Bear stood and took a step, but crashed to the floor, realizing that he was still holding his second leg. Stan grabbed up the welding mask and swung through the side of the kid’s face, spinning him away. It wasn’t until then that Bear saw another person hanging off the kid’s back with his teeth sunk into the back of the kid’s neck.

  “What the fuck?” Stan rolled up onto the table and crawled away.

  Bear’s eyes fixed on the broken, bloody bone sticking out of the shredded flesh of the man’s severed legs as he chewed on the student’s neck. Bear lost all sound to a ringing in his ears, and he saw himself back on the side of the road unable to move as Stacy lay dead next to him.

  The kid crashed to the floor and the person on his back rolled underneath the table and came up staring at Bear. One eye socket was an empty, bloody pit, while the other locked on Bear. His jaw dropped and bloody teeth hung open as the body pulled itself toward him. A brown smear spread behind him as he closed the distance on Bear.

  More shapes lumbered into view at the top of the stairs. Stan ran across the room and grabbed the other door. Before it closed, he saw empty eyes and bony, bloody fingers. “What … what the hell is this?”

  Stan whirled the door closed and it bucked against him. Bear swallowed and thought to himself, he’s too small to hold it. The door thundered again and Stan leaned into it. “Help me, Bear. They’re fucking zombies.”

  Bear looked back at the meat dragging itself along the tile of the lab. Stan’s words didn’t register with Bear and he watched its mangled face, unable to move himself.

  “Bear, help me. Hold the door while I get something to block it.”

  The door slid open and Stan spun his legs along the tile, pushing back. Pale hands clawed through the gap.

  Bear watched as the legless creature grabbed the titanium shaft of Bear’s leg and bit down on the polymer running blade. The single eye narrowed and the brow furrowed as the thing chewed.

  “Bear, it’s a zombie. Get away from it, man. Don’t you watch TV? Go for its head.”

  Bear grabbed the chair behind him and spilled his backpack, dumping climbing legs, one blade, and one sneaker out on the tile. The creature raised its head away from the unsatisfying meal and looked around at the legs on the floor. Bear shoved the chair with the legs out into the thing’s face. It held onto Bear’s leg and pulled his knee out straight. It crawled up his leg against the chair and ducked, its open mouth toward the flesh above the harness and bandages. Bear pushed down against the back of the chair and pushed the creature down the length of his leg. The bloody teeth dragged along the metal with a nails-on-chalkboard screech. Goosebumps rose on Bear’s arms and the monster clawed the tile on both sides of the leg, fighting against the chair.

  Bear pictured himself as a lion tamer trying to keep the beast back with just a chair to excite the crowd. He muttered as sweat slicked his forehead. “The Peru circus doesn’t have animals.”

  The crowd outside the door growled as Stan rammed his shoulder into the door over and over with shrill crashes that echoed off the cinderblock walls of the lab. “Bear, I need … oh, shit.”

  Bear looked up over the fight with the chair and the mangled monster to see the student that brought the creature in on his back now standing and staring at Bear with eyes milked over. The silver knight on his university sweatshirt was marred with trails of blood that blunted the usual silver sheen. The Middletown Silver Knight had fought a bloody battle.

  The student advanced on Bear and bumped dumbly into the table between them. A long section of rebar jostled where it leaned on a column next to the tank for the welding torch and fell on the table between the student and Stan on the other side. The student circled around and moaned as he approached Bear. Bear kicked and pushed with the chair, but the creature on the floor held tight.

  Stan whistled and the monsters outside the lab growled and banged louder. “Hey, fucker. I got your lunch right here. Come this way, you dead piece of shit.”

  Dead? What the hell is Stan saying? Bear couldn’t unstick his brain to process any of it.

  The student blinked and turned around. He wavered on his feet and then walked into the table between him and Stan. The table tipped, dumping equipment and tools across the tile. The rebar rolled against Stan’s shoe.

  Stan grabbed up the rebar and fed it through the handles of the door. He released the door and it bounded against the bar. Stan leaned back on both ends, bending the rebar into a curve until he could brace both ends against the floor.

  The student climbed over the table an
d planted his foot on something glass, which crunched.

  As the mob outside shoved, the door bounced back farther and farther each time. The moment the door bounced back flush, Stan threw his weight into the door and snapped the latches into place. “Ha! That’s engineering, bitches.”

  The bloody student grabbed Stan and he screamed.

  “Stan?” Bear tried to unhook the leg to get free, but he couldn’t figure out the bandage-style straps. He felt the creature reach past the chair and close its fists in the material of his shorts.

  Bear lurched the chair downward in one jolt and felt it connect with the thing’s face. Bear figured he must have knocked the dude out because he let go of Bear’s shorts.

  Stan shoved back against the larger student and they stumbled across the lab, but he wouldn’t let go of Stan.

  Bear pushed the chair off of him and saw one of the legs had jammed halfway into the empty eye socket. The thing lay dead at Bear’s running blade. Bear turned his head and threw up a film of brownish acid that burned his throat. He coughed and gagged and gasped for breath. He thought about his uncle’s recharge room.

  Stan backed into the tank and lifted the nozzle and hose with his foot. His arms shook as the student opened his mouth and tried to lean down into Stan’s face. Stan grabbed the torch with one hand and banged it against the edge of the column until he got a white spout of flame.

  Stan pressed the nozzle into the student’s forehead. Blue and red flame licked out across its face. The student’s hair sizzled back and the jelly of his milky eyes ran down his cheeks. The skin broke and charred away from the bone. Finally, the muscle went slack and the student folded to his back on the floor with its brains still bubbling and popping out through the hole in its forehead.

  “What the hell?” Bear coughed.

  Stan shut off the welding torch as the smell of cooked flesh and burnt hair reached Bear’s nostrils. He leaned forward and threw up more than just stomach acid. He spit several times into the puddle by the dead thing and then looked away.

  Stan touched Bear’s shoulder and Bear scrambled away. Stan said, “Bear, it’s just me. Are you okay?”