Anything Can Be Dangerous

by Matt Hults

  He squinted, focusing on the sight.

  And suddenly he realized what he was looking at.

  Without another second of hesitation, he strode inside, marching straight to the end of the blood trail, where he found the bag sitting behind the lumber.

  Sure enough, it was the plastic bag his computer had come in, the one with the warning. It was half-full of clotted dark blood, some smeared across its transparent plastic skin.

  He squatted down, still at a distance, and peered into the gloom between the stacked wood and the wall, but found nothing other than the bag and its grisly red contents.

  Using the shovel, he dragged the bag into the open. A pair of work gloves hung on a peg beside the lumber and he quickly slipped them on. But what should he do? Tom would likely call the police once he found out what happened to Gracy, and the investigating officer would undoubtedly want to look around the scene, maybe inside the garage. He’d see the blood, the bag, and then what? Would they suspect that Greg was the killer?

  No. That was ludicrous. Greg had been on good terms with the Jacobsons’ since day one. Besides, he had no motive to kill their dog. Hell, he liked their dog! But something deep down told him that he didn’t want anyone else to see the bag, even if it meant tampering with evidence. If he hid it somewhere, he could discard it himself later, when no one else was around. Better yet, he’d destroy it …

  Plastic Bags Can Be Dangerous.

  “Gracy!”

  Greg flinched, spinning toward the voice.

  “Gracy!” Tom Jacobson called from next door. “Come on, girl. Where are you?”

  Greg knew it was only a matter of seconds before Tom glanced to his right, through the branches of the hedge separating their properties, and saw his dead pet, forty feet away.

  He turned his attention back to the bag, uncertain of what to do—

  And found it draped across his foot.

  “Jesus!”

  He kicked the thing away, hit the button for the automatic door, and dodged under it as it descended. Running from the garage, he went to tell his neighbor about the dog and suggest that they call the police.

  4.

  The evening with Mia would’ve been as splendid as the last if not for the memory of the bag. Its gory afterimage remained imprinted in his mind, dominating his thoughts and polluting his mood.

  He’d met Mia just after six, and they decided on a trip to Valley Fair instead of eating out. It sounded like a great idea at the time. He’d secretly hoped that the excitement of the amusement park’s rides and the noise of the crowds would distract him from his thoughts and help him focus on Mia, but the morning’s experience refused to relinquish its hold and the cheery atmosphere of the park only acted to further expose his dispirited frame of mind.

  The bag.

  The police never found it. That’s what was truly bothering him.

  After seeing his dog, Tom Jacobson indeed called the police. Greg explained to the responding officer how he found Gracy’s remains slumped beside his garage and that he’d also spotted several drops of blood near the door. He never said that he went inside, though. And he never mentioned the bag.

  Previously, he’d been uncertain what would happen if the police discovered it in his garage, all full of blood, but by then he wanted them to find it, especially after … after it moved.

  He was still having trouble believing it himself, mainly because he hadn’t actually witnessed its advance, but it somehow crossed three feet to his foot. And he knew he hadn’t imagined its proximity to him. He’d felt the weight of its liquid cargo when he booted it away, its warmth on his ankle. There was just no mistaking it; the damn thing had moved! Nevertheless, how could he possibly hope to tell that to the police and expect them to believe it? Answer: he couldn’t.

  So he’d kept quiet, waiting for the officer to find the bag and take it away.

  Only the officer hadn’t found the bag. He’d done a brief search of the garage, noted the traces of blood in his report, but that was it. Gracy’s remains were taken by animal control to be autopsied for possible contagions, Tom got a case number, and, la-tee-da, life was back to normal.

  Or at least it should’ve been. Greg still hadn’t gone back into the garage since the officer left, and he was beginning to wonder if he would ever set foot in there again.

  “Is something wrong?”

  Greg looked up, stirred from his thoughts by Mia’s soft voice.

  “Sorry. What?”

  She gave him a sheepish grin. “Well, I don’t mean to be blunt, but you don’t seem to be having a very good time. Last night … I thought we got along great. Tonight feels different. I know we just met, so if you’re uncomfortable or something, please tell me.”

  “No,” he answered. “God, no. I’ve been looking forward to seeing you all day.”

  She flashed him that fantastic smile.

  “I just … I had a rough morning, and I guess it’s still troubling me a bit. I apologize.”

  “Is it something you want to talk about?”

  He hesitated, but decided to tell her. He felt bad enough making her suffer through the first half hour of their date wondering if she was the source of his distracted behavior, and he wanted to put things right. He didn’t tell her everything, though. He kept the details of his story centered on the shocking discovery of the dog and his surprise at Gracy’s unnatural death.

  “That’s terrible,” she agreed. “I hope they catch whoever did it.”

  “Me too.”

  To his surprise, talking about the ordeal did make him feel better. In fact, it helped put everything in perspective. The bag of blood, the dog’s grotesque carcass; those things still stuck in his mind, but they no longer carried the eerie air that had dampened his spirits since he found them.

  By the time they reached the next ride, his attention was once again focused entirely on Mia. She was happy, and that made him happy, and he slipped his arm around her waist as they walked side by side toward the entry gate of the Ferris wheel. It was a risky move, this being only their second time together, but she allowed it and even leaned her body against him.

  They’d settled into the end of the line when he noticed an empty plastic bag with the fair’s logo on it go tumbling across the thoroughfare not far away, bounding end over end, propelled by the breeze.

  His newfound smile faded.

  The wind was blowing in the opposite direction.

  5.

  “What the hell is going on?”

  Greg had asked himself that same question at least a dozen times since dropping Mia off at her apartment, but he had yet to come up with an answer.

  After he saw the lone bag whisking across the thoroughfare at the park, he’d begun to see them everywhere.

  Not that that’s hard to do, he thought. This is America, after all; plastic is about as commonplace as dirt.

  Such an explanation sounded good when applied to the physical aspect of his sudden aversion to plastic, but deep down he knew that the menacing quality he’d begun to associate with such a mundane material was not only unusual, it was pure fucking nuts.

  He didn’t let it trouble him around Mia, though. He forced himself to block it out. Now that she was gone, however, he found himself dwelling on the topic once again and genuinely fearing for his sanity.

  He turned right, onto Quincy Street, intent on parking in front of the house rather than go up the alley to the garage. Even from a block and a half away, he noticed multiple police cars lined up along the street across from his house, as well as an ambulance parked along the curb. Their red, white, and blue flashers lit up the area like a Fourth of July fireworks show.

  Greg parked in front of his own house and got out, pausing on the sidewalk before going to the door. He saw fellow neighbors standing on their doorsteps, watching the scene unfold, and couldn’t help be curious himself.

  “It’s a hell of a thing,” a voice said from behind.

  Greg flinched and turned arou
nd to find Tom standing at his back.

  “I heard it was the boy,” his neighbor said, indicating toward the house. “You know, the slow one. I guess they found him in the basement.”

  “Damn,” Greg muttered. “You mean … dead?”

  Tom frowned, nodding. “Child Protective Services should’ve stuck their nose into that shit-heap years ago. All afternoon I’ve been listening to the kid’s mother calling his name, telling him to come home. Christ, they don’t even keep track of him. Like always, she never actually went out to look for him, either. Just stands there on the steps in her bathrobe, shouting up and down the block. Poor bastard was probably down there the whole time, already gone.”

  Greg rubbed his arms, smoothing the goose bumps that had risen on his skin. “Did you catch how it happened?”

  “Suffocation.”

  Despite the warm, windless night, Greg shivered.

  “Chad Wilks, the neighbor on the right, told me that he saw them working on the kid through one of the windows when he came out. Said he had a plastic dry-cleaning bag stretched over his head so tight it looked like he’d been shrink-wrapped.”

  “Oh, damn,” Greg thought aloud.

  “First Gracy, now this,” his neighbor continued. “Angela always says shit like this happens in threes. If that’s the case, I wonder what’s next?”

  Greg shrugged, but said nothing. Without another word, he ascended the front steps and went inside his house.

  6.

  Sundays were Greg’s lazy days, but try as he might he couldn’t seem to relax.

  At breakfast, he found himself standing in front of the open refrigerator, scanning the food. He’d bought groceries the day before meeting Mia, and he was acutely aware of how many items were stored in plastic bags.

  Grapes, celery, sliced turkey meat, tortillas. There were eleven in all. Eleven bags in the refrigerator alone, with more on the counter, in the cupboards, and under the sink.

  A box of thirty Ziplock bags in the junk drawer.

  A roll of a hundred garbage bags beside the trash bin.

  He closed his eyes, massaging his temples. He had to stop this; it was getting ridiculous.

  He was thinking like his mother.

  The idea chilled his spirit like an ice water bath.

  No. He was nothing like is mother. She was insane, he wasn’t. Crazy people didn’t question their delusions or wonder if they needed help. Besides, his mother had seen threats in all sorts of objects, not any specific one. And if his fixation on plastic was the result of some malfunctioning gene passed on by his mother, why would it start affecting him now? He’d never felt this way before.

  Whatever the case, he wanted it to stop.

  Reaching into the refrigerator’s crisper, he extracted a bag of apples.

  The warning on the side read:

  KEEP AWAY FROM SMALL CHILDREN.

  THE THIN FILM MAY CLING TO NOSE AND MOUTH

  AND PREVENT BREATHING.

  “They got that right,” he said, dumping out the fruit.

  He turned the bag over in his hands, exploring its surface. He stretched it, crunched it into a ball, shook it back to its original shape. There was nothing remarkable about it, nothing to inspire fear, but he held it away from his body as he handled it, as if touching something foul.

  Grimacing, he placed his right hand inside the bag, wearing it like a glove. If he was going to combat this new phobia, he was going to do it now, before it got any worse—

  The plastic clamped tight around his forearm.

  WHOOSH!

  It sucked to his skin as though the air inside had been drawn out by a vacuum and sealed to his flesh.

  “What the hell?” he shouted.

  He clawed at the lip of the bag, digging to find a purchase. His hand inside immediately began to tingle, the healthy pink color of his skin taking on a tinge of purple.

  “Shit!”

  He grasped the edge of the bag and yanked it off, tearing it up the middle, feeling dozens of fine hairs jerked from their roots.

  He tossed the bag aside and stumbled backwards, to the door. Almost weightless, the rent plastic floated to the floor like gossamer strands of spider silk, and Greg was outside before it touched the ground.

  He stopped halfway across the backyard, looking around. The rational part of him––the Greg Shader he’d been up until two days ago––searched the yard in humiliation, hoping no one had seen his frantic behavior. But another part of him was assessing the surroundings, alert for the next sign of danger.

  He heard a rustling noise and whipped around to face it.

  The side door to the garage was cracked open, and the black lawn bag that he saw projected from the interior immediately retracted into darkness.

  “Screw this!” he roared.

  Though only dressed in boxer shorts and a white tee shirt, he bound across the distance separating his house and the Jacobsons’, going straight for the backdoor. He knocked half a dozen times, pounding harder than intended but not giving a shit.

  He needed help. Now.

  “Tom, open up!”

  When there was no immediate answer, he tried the knob for himself, found it open, and stepped inside the Jacobsons’ kitchen without waiting for an invitation.

  That’s when he saw the cocoons.

  Two human-size bundles of assorted plastic bags lay in the middle of the floor, with more bags entering the space from the living room doorway, slip-sliding closer. Greg stood frozen. He watched the smooth-surfaced material curl tighter around the two forms on the linoleum and felt his bowels loosen when he saw several of the outermost bags begin to fill with blood.

  An extra large trash bag turned toward him as he watched, slipping across the floor like a shiny black slug.

  He turned and ran for his car.

  7.

  Greg drove into the parking lot of the Amoco station three blocks from his house and shut off the engine, trying to calm down.

  What the hell was he going to do?

  He had the five dollars of emergency gas money he kept in the MagBox with the Mitsubishi’s spare key, and the next obvious step would be to call the police. But would they believe him? And even if they did, would they get to the Jacobsons’ in time to see the bags for themselves? For some reason he didn’t think so. It certainly never worked that way in horror movies; the threat always seemed to vanish before the protagonist could get others to view it. But this wasn’t a movie; he had to do something.

  He thought about lying to the police, telling the dispatcher he’d seen a burglar break in through his neighbor’s window. But then they’d be looking for a human suspect and might walk into an ambush.

  His worst fear, though, was that the Jacobsons would be found alive and well.

  It was a horribly selfish notion, one that made him sick to even think it, but deep down it was true. The longer this went on, the more certain Greg was that he’d end up in a mental asylum.

  There was a siren in the distance, and the sound alerted him to how vacant the area seemed. No other vehicles shared the gas station’s parking lot with him, and other than a few cars, barely any traffic moved on the streets. He didn’t like that. Maybe his perception was skewed thanks to the morning’s insane events, but he felt there should be more people out and about by now, even for a Sunday.

  And what about Mia?

  Was she up yet? Or had the plastic bags in her apartment surrounded her in the middle of the night, all at once pouncing on her body, smothering her while she slept and sucking her blood out like a brood of polypropylene vampires?

  He had to call her, had to make certain she was safe.

  He got out of the car and hurried across the vacant fueling area to the front of the store. He needed change for the pay phone and God help the clerk on duty if he was given any shit about his current apparel.

  But there was no clerk on duty.

  An open magazine lay on the counter beside the cash register, but he saw no employees in sigh
t. It was dark, too, and Greg noticed that the overhead lights were off.

  “Hello?” he called.

  There was no reply, but he took a step backward as if his inquiry had been answered by the ferocious hiss of some unseen adversary.

  There was something here, all right, something he knew he didn’t want to face, and he fled from the doorway without a second thought.

  When he turned around, he saw at least three-dozen bags coming across the street. They tumbled end-over-end, blown by a nonexistent wind. Some were clear, some opaque, some brown or black. Most were the size of hand bags found at grocery stores, but one looked big enough to contain a kitchen stove or a dishwasher.

  “Jesus Chri—”

  He was still standing outside the gas station’s doorway when a white plastic bag dropped over his head and sucked to his face. The bag’s lip went tight around his neck, pulled backwards like a garrote wire, and Greg stumbled blindly in reverse, back toward the store. He felt the air being drawn out of his lungs, felt the flesh of his lips and nose and cheeks deaden as the blood beneath the skin was forcibly sucked to the surface.

  Thrashing like a drowning victim, trying to remain upright as he was hauled backward, trying to breathe, he realized that he had but seconds to act or he’d be dead. Thinking fast, he opened his mouth as wide as he could and thrust two fingers into his open jaws, piercing the membranous plastic, making an air hole.

  The strategy worked. The vacuum broke, and the constricting bag relented, allowing Greg the opportunity to grasp the ruptured portion of its body and widen the tear, freeing his face.

  But he was still being dragged backward, the ripped bag still tight across his throat.

  He saw that he was inside the store again, facing the door as it drifted closed on its pneumatic hinges. Then, in a nightmare moment of perfect awareness, he caught a glimpse of himself and the monster behind him in the reflection of the glass.