Anything Can Be Dangerous

by Matt Hults

  What he saw made him scream.

  It was a man-shaped accumulation of bags; or rather, the corpse of the store clerk mummified in plastic. Greg saw tiny bits of the man’s uniform shirt and purple skin under the semi-transparent wrappings, a patch of dark hair, the vague definition of a face.

  It was strong, too. Try as he might, he couldn’t break free.

  Instead, he turned the attacker’s momentum against it, throwing himself into the creature’s chest, driving it backward as hard as he could. They tumbled in reverse, half-falling, half-running, until they crashed into the array of refrigerated soft drink containers along the back wall of the room, shattering one of the glass doors.

  The two of them collapsed to the ground, and Greg was released. He rolled away and sprung to his feet, simultaneously flinging aside the remains of the bag draped around his neck. The creature struggled to get up, too, but it had become snagged on the soft drink racks like a fish on a hook. It lurched back and forth, arms outstretched, straining to reach him.

  Greg turned and ran for the door—

  But stopped short when he found the front windows of the building covered by bags.

  He slapped both hands to his head at the sight, clenching his eyes shut and shaking his head in denial.

  This can’t be happening! It just CAN’T!

  But when he heard movement behind him and pivoted to see the clerk-wrapped thing on the floor beginning to stand up, he fled for his life. He shot through an open door to the right of the register and found himself in a small storeroom area. Along the back wall of the room he spotted another door marked EXIT.

  Greg dashed outside, squinting as his eyes readjusted from the gloom of the store to the mid-morning sunlight. He found himself at the back of the building, near a dumpster, and even though he spotted a number of overstuffed garbage bags heaped in the container, none of them seemed to possess a malevolent life-force.

  He didn’t question it.

  Rounding the dumpster, he crept to the front of the building and peered around the corner. The bags were still plastered to the windows, crinkling softly as they caressed the glass. He expected to find the entire parking lot—the entire town—overrun by more plastic-enveloped cadavers, but the fueling area and the streets and shops beyond appeared mercifully vacant.

  On the count of three, Greg sprinted to his car.

  He reached it unmolested. Got in. Started the engine.

  As he sped away from the station, he looked in the rearview mirror and saw that the bags no longer clung to the station windows.

  They were trying to follow.

  8.

  He drove south on Central, ignoring the speed limit and running red lights. Mia’s place was only fifteen minutes away, and Greg decided to check on her first and sort out the rest of this nightmare later.

  He passed several payphones along the way, but shuddered at the thought of getting out of the car again. There were other vehicles on the road, too. Not many, but some. Greg considered flagging down one of the passing motorists, but unless the other driver had also been attacked by a plastic-wrapped dead man, he guessed they’d have a pretty hard time believing his story.

  Six blocks from the highway he slammed on the brakes, bringing the car to a screeching halt in the middle of the road. Ahead, roughly five miles away, the skyline of the city loomed into view. Multiple columns of black smoke rose from different locations among the skyscrapers, billowing darkly into the air against a perfect blue sky. There were shapes moving within the haze, about mid-level with the buildings, and after another moment, Greg saw that they were helicopters.

  “Oh, God,” he whispered.

  He knew he wasn’t crazy now. This was too big, too broad.

  He was watching the smoke, tracking the endlessly circling aircraft, when he had an idea. “One of those must be a media chopper,” he thought aloud.

  With a shaking hand, he flipped on the radio and dialed through the entire bandwidth, searching for a news broadcast, a bulletin––anything. Nothing but static.

  “Dammit!” he cursed.

  How could this be happening? What could’ve caused it? How would it end?

  Then another, more terrifying question entered his mind: had his mother known this was coming?

  The idea chilled his blood. It would explain why she’d been so obsessed with seeing the lethal potential in everyday items. And if it were true, it would mean that she hadn’t been crazy. Maybe she possessed some sort of precognitive sixth sense that had forewarned her of this day without specifically identifying the threat. After this morning, such an idea didn’t seem so far fetched.

  But vampire bags? Jesus!

  He was still frozen on that topic when three large lawn bags slapped against the side of the car and windshield, startling him from his thoughts.

  They slid around the seam of the glass and side panel, probing the door seal, searching for a way in.

  He let off the brake and slammed on the gas, bringing the car up to speed. He planned on using the aerodynamic design of the vehicle to work in his favor and let the outside airflow blow the bags away. But they held on! He didn’t know how, but they clung tight to the door and windows, inching across the glass.

  He went faster, entering another business district doing double the posted speed limit. The bag on the windshield, a black Hefty, was fanning itself out, trying to block his view of the road.

  How could it know to do that? his mind raged. How intelligent are they?

  “Fuck off!” he screamed.

  He flipped on the wipers and let out a wild cheer when the bag got swiped clear from the glass and thrown off the side of the hood. He craned his head around to watch it flip-fall in his wake, eventually flattening on the pavement.

  He faced forward again just in time to see a police car pull out in front of him.

  “Oh, shit!”

  It came out of an alleyway between two buildings, emerging into his path half a heartbeat away.

  Greg hit the breaks, swerved the car hard to the left. The tires squealed. He missed the cruiser’s front bumper with scant room to spare, and the stink of burnt rubber assaulted his nostrils. Then he was spinning the wheel right again, struggling to correct his course, but it was already too late. Even before the car began to spin, he could tell he was going way too fast to pull out of such a sharp turn, and now the momentum had him. It was like being on ice.

  The car shrieked across the street, skidding in a full 360-degree circle, then collided with the curb along the opposite lane, hitting hard enough to flip over. It all seemed to happen at light-speed. Greg’s head whacked the ceiling with the initial impact, and the next thing he knew, he was hanging upside-down, held in place by his seatbelt.

  His vision blurred like a bad video feed for a moment, but then cleared when he remembered the bags clinging to his door. He had to get out. Fast.

  His hands groped the side of his hip, sliding along the Nylon strap, unable to locate the belt release, and a full lifetime seemed to pass before he realized he was looking on the wrong side.

  “Fuck!”

  He reached to the right, found the belt buckle, unlatched it, and dropped to the roof of the vehicle. The passenger side window had shattered in the crash, and Greg scrambled out through its frame as fast as he could. His legs wobbled under him when he first stood, but after several steps he regained his balance.

  He looked up and saw the officer coming toward him, marching up the middle of the road. He never imagined he’d be so glad to have nearly sideswiped a policeman while speeding like a maniac, and the thought of it actually made him laugh. Then he remembered he was only in his underwear and didn’t have his license with him, and that made him laugh harder.

  But his amusement died as the officer pulled his gun.

  Not because of the weapon itself, but because of the wrinkly, milky-white plastic head staring at him from under the man’s uniform hat.

  “No …”

  The thing strode forw
ard, forty feet away and closing, walking with a stiff and irregular gait Greg had failed to notice offhand. Now it seemed appropriate.

  The thing raised its sidearm as it lumbered closer but didn’t fire any shots. Maybe it couldn’t see well enough to aim properly, or maybe it didn’t really know how to use the weapon in the first place. Whatever the case, Greg wasn’t going to wait around to find out. Instead, he spun in the opposite direction, and—

  And here was the sight he’d expected to see back at the Amoco station.

  Dead people. Dozens of them. Wrapped in plastic and walking right toward him.

  Like a scene out of Night of the Living Dead, they shambled forward, moving up the sidewalks and street with limited prowess, in uncoordinated numbers. But there was purpose in their jerky movements, a visible determination in the folds of the polymer material that covered their faces.

  And blood. Sucked from their victims and dripping from swollen stomachs.

  Greg ran.

  He dodged left, around the wreck of his car, and sprinted between two buildings, into a back alley. There he found a steeply slanted concrete retaining wall on the east side of the alley, marking the base of a wooded hillside. Greg hit the wall running and clambered up eight feet to the top like he was walking on air. And he didn’t stop. He tore into the forest, grunting and cursing as he clawed aside leafy branches and tangled networks of vines.

  The climb measured less than fifty feet all together, but the pace at which he took it left him gasping at the summit. He found himself at the rear of a residential neighborhood, its parameter marked by row after row of neat cedar fences. Greg scaled over the first barrier at the same feverish pace he’d ascended the hill, not allowing himself to catch his breath until he collapsed safely on the other side.

  He slumped back on his ass the moment his feet touched the ground, falling to a rest atop a plush carpet of healthy green grass. His lungs burned as if breathing acidic vapors with each inhalation, while his legs had almost no feeling at all. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d pushed himself so fiercely.

  He took slow, deep breaths, attempting to calm himself. At the same time, he knew he had to keep moving. Those things could be coming.

  He wiped stinging beads of sweat from his eyes in preparation to get moving again when he saw something that stopped his breath in mid-draw and made him freeze where he was.

  Minus his labored breathing, the day remained eerily silent.

  He was in someone’s backyard, seated several feet from the edge of a rectangular in-ground swimming pool. It was a good size one, too, at least twenty feet wide by forty feet long. On the far side of the pool, closest to the house, Greg noticed a wide portion of the concrete walkway looked wet, making it appear darker than the rest of the walk encompassing the pool. The watery trail continued up the path toward the house, soaking the steps and floorboards of a broad deck before vanishing through an open sliding glass door, into the shadowy interior of the home.

  Greg tensed as something moved inside. Something big.

  Before he even had time to speculate on what it was, the pool’s aqua-blue solar cover slid out the open door, onto the deck, spilling forth like a gigantic amoeba.

  Greg gasped.

  The portion he could see covered nearly half the deck and it still wasn’t totally free of the house. Of course it had to be the same size as the pool, but part of him imagined it being much larger, massive, filling each room of the house with its horrible bulk. The thing had no eyes, no mouth, no real features whatsoever, yet it displayed the same mannerisms of a predator searching the yard for prey, moving as if testing the air for a scent, listening for a break in the silence, or watching for any sign of movement.

  There was blood on it, too.

  Greg could see the crimson smears coming off its belly as it oozed further into the light, then caught sight of three or four darker shapes held within it, trapped behind its almost-transparent skin. None of them were moving.

  Greg leapt to his feet and burst into a sprint, racing past the deep end of the pool in a terror-inspired fervor, toward the front-left corner of the yard. He heard the hiss of the solar cover gliding over the railing of the deck as he crossed the walkway that ran parallel to the house, but he didn’t look back in fear of going mad. Instead, he sprinted to a central-air fan unit where the house met the fence and jumped on top of it, using it like a booster step to launch himself over the top of the fence. The barrier only stood six feet high on the pool half of the property, but the land dropped off in the next yard, and Greg suddenly found himself nine feet in the air.

  He hit the ground with a growl of pain but rolled with his fall, got up, and kept going. He shot across the street at the front of the house, passing through two more yards before reaching the next street. There a car and a minivan sat in the middle of the cross streets, mangled together in a head-on collision. Greg didn’t notice anyone in the minivan, but a withering, twisting mass of plastic bags filled the interior of the car, and he continued running at full speed across the street and through the next set of yards without slowing.

  He had to find some transportation.

  9.

  Greg eventually needed to slow his pace, but he kept moving, still cutting through yards, heading south. He was at least five blocks from the pool house now, although the distance did little to separate his thoughts from the sight of the blood-splattered solar cover and its indiscernible contents. He’d been ultra cautious in his selection of which yards to travel through since then, and he visually scanned each new area with paranoid apprehension. The size and value of the properties he encountered here were rapidly decreasing, and he guessed that he was nearing the highway.

  Minutes ago, a helicopter had roared past, skimming the rooftops. Greg wasn’t positive, but he thought it might’ve been a military aircraft. Since then, all had been quiet—save for a faint, smoky-smelling wind that rustled the treetops.

  He squeezed through the branches of a dry hedge and emerged in the weedy back lot of a dilapidated three-story apartment building surrounded by trees.

  He wasn’t familiar with this end of town, and he hoped he was still moving in the right direction. He had no idea how to hotwire a car, and he didn’t trust knocking on the doors of homes that could be crawling with plastic bags, so he’d been hoping to find a ride once he reached a major artery of traffic.

  He jogged around the side of the building.

  Just as he did, a balding middle-aged man with a mustache and goatee flew around the corner at precisely the same time, followed closely by a half-naked woman wearing only the charred remains of a short yellow bathrobe. They saw Greg and both screamed, eyes wide with fear and surprise. The man skidded to an abrupt halt, slipping on the grass, and Greg didn’t see the gun in his hand until he heard the loud crack of the shot that exploded against a tree trunk less than two feet from his head.

  Greg slid to a stop himself, slipped, regained his balance, spun around, and dashed back the way he’d come, leaping through the hedge even as the woman screamed, “Wait! Come back!”

  Rather than answer, he turned left and raced down a shallow creek bed, putting a solid three blocks of ground between himself and the couple before slowing to a quick walk. By then, his lungs burned in protest again.

  He climbed up the creek bank and found himself on a cracked and littered street that terminated about fifty feet away in a cul-de-sac rimmed by a duplex and several other old houses. Beyond it, Greg could see the land rose at a sharp grade, coming to a height that brought it level with the roofs of the houses. Through the trees, he spotted the telltale noise barrier created to help reduce the roar of traffic coming off the highway.

  He tried to tell himself it was doing a hell of a job, because he couldn’t hear any noise at all, not a single engine, but he knew the terrible truth: there were no cars on the highway to hear.

  Nevertheless, he had to check.

  He located a dirt path probably made by teenagers to access t
he barrier wall, then walked another six blocks west before coming to a spot where he could get on the other side. Twice he heard gunfire from separate areas of town, but neither bout lasted long.

  The highway looked like something out of a war movie.

  He’d been wrong with his initial thought that there were no cars here. In fact, there were scores of them. They were scattered across all six lanes, spaced out as far as he could see in both directions. Some stood alone, while others had clustered in groups. They were smashed into the lane divider, the noise barrier, the lampposts. Ravaged scraps of metal and rubber lay everywhere. Half of the ruined vehicles had flipped over, some on their sides, creating the largest, most chaotic display of mechanical wreckage Greg had ever seen.

  A few smoldering fires lingered here and there among the ruins, but the few vehicles that had gone up in a blaze were now nothing more than blackened, burned-out hulks.

  He thought of the poor unsuspecting motorists, all cruising along at seventy miles an hour, off to the mall, or church, or coming home from a weekend getaway. How many of them had had plastic bags in the back seat, or the trunk, or the glove compartment, unknowingly traveling with a killer waiting to strike?

  Greg let his eyes move from the river of twisted metal to a billboard along the roadside. It was a huge picture of a giant hand cupping a small and fragile sapling pine tree. The caption read:

  The Future Must Grow; Recycle Today!

  The bags are the ones doing the recycling now, he thought. They’re recycling us.

  And suddenly, something clicked in his head.

  Astonished, he looked up at the recycle billboard again then glanced around to the nearest wreck. Two cars down, he found a Chevy Avalanche half imbedded in the rear of a fourteen-foot U-Haul truck. Strewn around the open passenger door were three brown paper bags of fresh groceries that had split open on the pavement.