toward town along the shoulder of the highway. It was a wet, chilled morning under a lethargic November sky that had rolled out of bed and thrown on an old, gray, grease-stained T-shirt.
John said, “Did you hear? They never found Franky.”
“Wonderful.”
“What do you think happened? You think that bug thing took over his brain?”
“Hey, why not?”
“You think he’s gonna turn up again?”
If you’re asking yourself why the men with guns chasing us couldn’t just use the magic door and follow us right to Walmart, it’s because for most people, the doors are just doors. Same as for most people, the spider monster in my house would have been invisible, just as it was for Franky. Same as how if you’d been in the bathroom with me all those months ago when I saw that shadowy shape outside my shower, you’d have seen nothing. You might have sensed something, just as in your everyday life you might sit in a dark house and feel like you’re not alone, or have a nagging suspicion that something slipped around a corner just a moment before you looked. The feeling can usually be expressed by the phrase, “Of course there’s nothing there.
To be clear, if you’ve actually seen a ghost, that doesn’t make you like us. A ghost sighting is usually nothing more than your brain trying to put a familiar face on something that does not have a face at all.
John and I, on the other hand, can see what most of you can only sense. We’re not special, it’s just the result of some drugs we took. Just for future reference, if you’re ever at a party and a Rastafarian offers you a syringe full of a slimy black substance that crawls around on its own like The Blob, don’t take it. And don’t call us, either. We get enough bullshit from strangers as it is.
25 Hours Prior to Outbreak
English should have a word for that feeling you get when you first wake up in a strange room and have no freaking idea where you are.
I was cold, and every inch of my body was in pain. I heard a crunching, like the jaws of a predator grinding through bone. I pulled open my eyes. I saw a dragon standing proudly atop a hill before me.
The dragon was on a TV screen, beneath it was a video game console with a tangle of cords snaking across green carpet. I blinked, squinted at the sun burning in through a cracked window. I turned, hearing my neck creak as I did, and saw John sitting at a computer desk in the corner, staring into the monitor and holding a bottle full of a clear liquid that I’m sure you wouldn’t want to try to put out a fire with. I sat up, realizing I had been covered up with something in my sleep. I thought for a moment John had thrown a blanket over me but closer inspection revealed it to be a beach towel.
John glanced back at me from his computer chair and said, “Sorry, I used my spare blanket when I got that leak in my car.”
I looked around for the source of that animal crunching noise. I found Molly laying behind the couch, with her head crammed inside an open box of Cap’n Crunch cereal. She was eating as fast as she could, trying to use her paws to keep the box in place.
“You’re letting her do that?”
“Oh, yeah. Cereal is stale anyway. I don’t have any dog food here.”
The dragon sat frozen on the television, the intro screen for a video game John had apparently been playing while I slept on his couch.
“What time is it?”
“Around eight.”
I stood and felt my head swim. I rubbed my eyes and almost screamed in pain from the wound there. My shoulder felt like it had taken a bullet and it seemed like a pair of elves were trying to escape my skull through my temples using tiny pickaxes. It wasn’t the first time I had woken up at John’s place feeling like this.
My phone screamed. The display read, AMY. I closed my eyes, sighed and answered.
“Hey, baby.”
“Hi! David! I’m watching the news! What happened?”
“Shouldn’t you be in class?” Amy had failed a pretty basic English class last semester because it was a morning class and she kept sleeping through it.
She said, “They cancelled it. Oh, it’s on again. Turn to CNN.”
I talked around the phone to John, told him to switch over the TV. He did, and watched as an early morning shot of the chaos at the hospital filled the screen. The name of the city was displayed along the bottom. National news.
John turned up the sound and we heard a female reporter say, “… No history of drug use or mental illness. Frank Burgess had been with the department for three years. Authorities are combing the area for Burgess but police say the number of wounds he sustained in the standoff make his turning up alive, quote, ‘highly unlikely.’ Meanwhile, the hospital remains under quarantine due to unspecified infection risks that have only added to the anxiety in this shell-shocked community.”
They cut to a shot of our enormously fat chief of police, giving a sound bite in front of a bank of microphones.
To Amy I said, “Man, our chief of police is getting huge.”
Amy said, “They said thirteen people were hurt and I think three people died but there could be more. Did you guys hear about this last night? When it was all going on?”
A pause on my end. Too long. Finally I said, “We heard about it, yeah.”
“Uh-oh.”
“What?”
“David, were you there? Were you guys in on this?”
“What? No, no. Of course not. Why would you think that?”
“David…”
“No, no. It was nothing. Guy just went crazy, that’s all.”
“Are you lying?”
“No, no. No.”
She said nothing. She and the therapist knew the same trick. Filling the silence, I said, “I mean, we were
“I knew it! I’m coming down.”
“No, Amy. It’s nothing, really. It’s over. We just happened to be in the area.”
I heard John say, “Hey! It’s me!” I turned to the television.
Sure enough, John’s face filled the screen. The reporter’s voice-over covered the audio, saying, “… But for every hour Burgess remains at large, fear and paranoia are bound to keep growing in this small city.”
On TV, John’s voice faded in: “… And then we saw a small creature crawl into his mouth. I wasn’t two feet away, I saw it clearly. The thing wasn’t from this world. I don’t mean alien, I mean probably interdimensional in nature. I think it’s obvious from what happened tonight that this being possessed some powers of mind control.”
I closed my eyes again and groaned.
Amy said, “I’m coming down. I’ll take the bus.”
“Forget it, your classes are more important. If you fail English again I think they can kick you out of the country. I think it’s in the Patriot Act.”
“Gotta go, honey. I’m late for class.”
“You said you didn’t—”
“We’ll talk about it later. Bye-bye.”
I killed the phone and looked for my shoes.
