Tony, Otis, and I climbed to the top of the playground, and crowded the highest platform as we waited for our chance to go down the spiral slide and run to Mimi’s apartment. For the briefest of moments I considered the chance that I was actually a hospitalized child from Little Mexico, and that I was concocting elaborate nightmares about a world-ending apocalypse and how I had to fight to survive with my friends on the playground equipment where I’d spent most of my time before my accident – sort of like the ending of St Elsewhere. My whole life might be a dream. That seemed plausible enough, until I recalled all of the weird sexual escapades I’d enjoyed in college. I pray no child’s mind is that dirty.
The infected residents of Little Mexico were climbing up the playground, but they lacked dexterity. Several of them were climbing over one another in an attempt to get off the first raised platform beneath us, but they kept tripping and struggling. It would’ve been entertaining to watch if not for the eerie way their skin moved. I could see the tentacles of the Terrameds moving beneath the skin of our attackers, sliding around to the extremities of their hosts’ bodies as if waiting for the sun to retreat behind a cloud again so that they could attack.
Jerry was still waving his wand around as his sister continued to text back and forth with Jason. She told us that Jason was going to break into the other side of Mimi’s apartment to make sure it was clear, and that we should head there now.
I watched the people below, and was disturbed by the way they reacted to what Gabby said. Instead of continuing to mindlessly climb to us, they paused, stared at one another, and then retreated.
“What’s going on?” asked Otis. “Why’re they leaving?”
“They’re not leaving,” I said as we watched the infected move out of the playground and towards Mimi’s apartment. “They heard what Gabby said. They’re going to block our way.”
“What?” asked Otis and Tony simultaneously.
“Look,” I pointed at the retreating infected. I was right. They were headed to Mimi’s apartment to form a barrier.
“So they can understand us now?” asked Otis with a tone reminiscent of a sports fan pissed at a bad call by the refs. “Is that what you’re telling me? They suddenly know English?”
“They must,” I said as if apologizing. “Maybe they tapped into the people’s brains or something. I don’t fucking know. But look.”
We watched as the infected crowded around the door of Mimi’s apartment. There were about ten of them, and they formed a circle as if protecting someone in the middle. The sun’s angle still kept the east apartments mostly out of the sunshine, but the light had begun to creep up to the window. The infected were exposed to the light, and the Terrameds were forced to continue hiding inside of their hosts. I expected the creatures to stay hidden, which was why it shocked me when a tentacle rose up from the center of the infected huddle.
The sun immediately burned the exposed tentacle, and caused the creature hiding inside of the huddle to squeal in pain. A bulbous sac of pus grew instantly along the length of the thick tentacle, and the creature lashed it backward. The tentacle slammed against Mimi’s door, and the sac burst. Brown fluid splashed onto the door and its frame, and the red worms quickly set about the task of spreading the goo.
“What’s it doing?” asked Gabby.
“It’s sealing the door,” said Tony, an edge of panic in his voice. “Don’t you see? They’re going to seal the door!”
“We’ve got to move,” I said, trying my best to sound strong and confident, and not scared shitless like I actually was. “Tony, Otis, we’re going to have to fight our way through them.”
“With what?” asked Tony. “I’ve got a pellet gun. You’ve got a broken sword. And Otis doesn’t have shit.”
“I don’t need shit,” said Otis as he balled up his fists.
“Gabby, you and Jerry need to keep lighting sticks on fire,” I said. “These things hate fire.”
“Yeah, and they’ve got built in fire extinguishers,” said Tony. “Remember?”
“But if they swell up and pop, they’ll bust their way out of the bodies,” I said. “That’ll expose them to the sun.”
“Why don’t we just go through some other apartment?” asked Gabby.
“Because we don’t know what’s waiting for us in them. At least with Mimi’s place, we know the only person in there is going to be Jason. Right? Come on, guys. We can’t waste any more time debating this. We’ve got to move now before that slime starts to harden and we get stuck here.”
“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,” said Tony as the color left his cheeks. “I can’t believe we’re going to do this.”
I took Gabby’s hand, and then leaned in to kiss her forehead. She stood on the tips of her toes to kiss me on the lips instead. “Promise you’ll be careful.”
“Maybe next time,” I said with a wink before going down the slide.
I’m not going to lie, I felt like quite the badass right then. But my moment of heroics didn’t last long. I was headed down a twisty slide, trying desperately to keep from stabbing myself with a broken sword, and the static electricity caused my hair to stand up. As much as I wanted to look like an action movie star in that moment, I looked pretty damn ridiculous.
Otis was more schooled in the art of being a badass. Instead of going down the twisty slide to fight the horde, he leapt over the side of the playground and came thudding down beside me as if the fifteen foot leap was nothing more dangerous to him than stepping out of bed. His gargantuan feet pounded the sand, and he cracked his knuckles before looking at me and saying, “Let’s go kick some ass.”
Tony came down the slide behind me, cursing as he did.
The infected stood their ground, staring and waiting for us to make the first move. Gabby yelled down to me before tossing a flaming stick, and by some miracle I actually caught it with my left hand.
“Time to get nasty,” I said, and got ready to toss the torch at the horde.
Otis caught my arm. “Whoa, man. Hold up. If you burn them, they’re going to pop. We don’t want them to cover the whole building in that slime.”
“But if they pop, then they’ll be exposed to the sunlight. And the slime takes time to harden. If we can get them out of the way now, then we can make it through.”
Tony fired at the infected, and struck a middle-aged man in the forehead. When we looked at him he explained, “That’s Ray. He’s a jerk.”
“So you shot him?” I asked.
“I wanted to see what happened. Don’t look at me like I did something wrong. You’re over there talking about burning them. All I did was tag him in the face with a pellet. He deserved it.”
Ray’s face began to balloon up. His forehead swelled, causing his eyes to sink and the corners of his mouth to raise as if he was trying to smile as wide as he could. The skin split like the overstretched seam of a pair of spandex shorts, revealing a pus-filled sac beneath. The sac burst, pouring fluid down over the front of the wounded host.
We all muttered our disgust as the worms spread out over Ray’s face. The crowd of infected parted to allow Ray to move towards Mimi’s apartment. He slammed his head to the door and started rubbing himself along the wall as tentacles flayed out of his wound.
“Give me the torch,” said Otis, and I obliged. He faced the infected and said, “Let’s do this, motherfuckers.”
Otis rushed at the crowd, initiating the battle none of us had much chance of surviving. I followed behind, and Tony fired at the infected while commanding his siblings to hurry up and make more torches.
Otis smacked his flaming stick against the side of an infected man’s face, causing a sac to quickly form. Otis allowed the infected to attack him, undeterred by the man’s chaotic flailing. Then Otis performed a feat of strength that propelled him to a new level of respect in my eyes. He grabbed the infected man by the crotch with his right hand, and his armpit with the other so that he had a good grasp. He lifted that poor resident of Little Mexico up into the
air and tossed him out into the courtyard, flinging him a good five feet where he crashed down face first into the dirt. The infected man’s head exploded in a mess of discharge, blood, brains, and tentacles. The sunshine burned the Terramed as it struggled to hide.
I couldn’t marvel at Otis’s achievement for long. I had my own battle to fight. I ran at them with my broken sword, slashing away like I’d seen far too many samurai films and was doing my best to emulate their technique – which is exactly what was happening.
Lucky for us, the Terrameds infecting the residents of Little Mexico still hadn’t mastered the use of their new host’s bodies. They did their best to fight back, but it was like we were charging into a senior citizen’s home demanding the residents duel to the death with us. We were dominating the infected, at least for a moment. I hacked and slashed into several shambling people, causing them to balloon up and explode before I pushed them to the ground where the sun began burning the exposed Terrameds.
Gabby tossed down a few more torches, and Tony quickly snatched them up. He was hacking at the infected with the torches, parting them, and clearing a path to the apartment door.
The creatures soon realized they were being bested. Some of them retreated, but a few chose a new tactic. A burly Mexican faced off with me, licking his lips as he gazed at me with beady, brown eyes. He opened his mouth as if to speak, and then a barbed tentacle shout forth like a reptile’s tongue. It nearly caught me in the eye, but I ducked out of the way in the nick of time. The Terramed’s appendage retracted immediately, before the sun had a chance to burn it.
The rest of the infected saw how their brethren had chosen to attack, and mimicked him. The infected who’d retreated now came back, eager to try out the new tactic.
I heard Tony yelling at one of the infected, “Back off, Ms. Rodriguez. Don’t make me burn you.”
“Burn that bitch,” said Otis, unsympathetic to Tony’s apprehension to burn someone he used to know.
“Oh man, Ms. Rodriguez, I’m real sorry. I liked your empanadas. They were tight.” He plunged a burning stick into the woman’s mouth as it began to open. Her lips and cheeks swelled before her face popped, revealing the skull beneath. A gush of slime splashed onto Tony. I got a certain amount of joy at seeing him finally get dirty. Through all of this, he’d managed to stay pretty much clear of the squid goo that’d soaked Otis and me.
“Ah man!” Tony shouted as he cleaned muck from his face. “Oh, this is nasty. She popped like a zit. A shit-filled zit.”
“Watch out,” I tried to warn him that Ms. Rodriguez was far from dead. Her face had exploded, leaving skin flapping like a banana peel, and there were tentacles exiting her open mouth in search of a victim. She went at him like Frankenstein, her arms extended as the tentacles whipped out of her face like a slew of happy dog tails.
Tony ran blindly from Ms. Rodriguez. His eyes had been hit by the slime, and he was trying to clear it away. Ms. Rodriguez chased him, and they made it back over to the playground. I wanted to help, but I was in the middle of my own fight. “Keep running,” I said to Tony.
Tony stopped and asked, “Who, me?”
Jerry came to his brother’s rescue, and I wasn’t sure if it was by design, providence, or purely accidental. Whatever the reason, Jerry chose that moment to come down the slide, and he kicked Ms. Rodriguez to the ground as his brother continued to wipe the gunk off his face.
Otis proceeded with his slaughter, taking advantage of some heretofore unknown wrestling pedigree. He was deadlifting infected and tossing them into the middle of the courtyard where their exposed tentacles withered in the sun. He’d suffered a number of lashes on his face and chest, but he was undeterred – a madman set loose to wreak havoc.
The Terrameds were weaker when housed within a human body. Even when the tentacles were exposed, the creatures didn’t have the strength or precision they’d had when on their own. It was as if the act of controlling their hosts’ bodies hampered their own abilities. I was slicing through the horde with little problem, causing my attackers’ bodies to swell with pus-filled sacs before I pushed them aside. I felt like a superhero, cutting my way through a mob of enemies too weak and unskilled to offer any real obstacle.
For the first time since we’d concocted this plan, I thought we actually stood a chance.
Our opponents’ numbers dwindled, and there was a clear path to the door. Gabby warned us that she was sending Mimi down the slide. Tony went to retrieve his grandma, and I heard her excitedly yell as she slid down, as if she’d been looking forward to taking a slide for a long time, and was going to enjoy it no matter what.
When she got to the bottom she happily embraced her grandson, and then saw the carnage. She focused on the body of her neighbor and asked, “Tony, did you kill Ms. Rodriguez?”
“Sorry, Mimi. I had to.” He hefted his grandmother into his arms.
“She was one of those things?”
“Yes,” Tony said while straining to support his grandmother’s weight.
“I never trusted her anyways,” said Mimi.
I waited for Gabby to come down with my dog, and Tony carried Mimi over to Otis. The way to the apartment was clear, but Otis was struggling to get the door open. The gel that the Terrameds layered over the threshold had already started to harden, and I wondered if the worms had the ability to cause the goo to harden faster if needed. If true, that could present a problem.
Otis put his right foot against the wall and pulled at the door, causing the hardened gel to stretch but not break.
Gabby came down the slide with Jerry’s ionizer wand in one hand and a lit torch in the other. She was wearing the leather bra on the outside of her clothes, although her breasts were too large for it to fasten. She looked down at the massacre around us, and the still squiggling limbs of Terrameds dying in the sun. The infected host bodies were a bloody mess, and it occurred to me that these had been Gabby’s friends and neighbors. I didn’t want her to have to see something like that.
“Don’t look,” I said. “Just focus on the door and don’t look at…”
“Dave, I studied to be a nurse, I’ve seen worse than…” She saw the exploded face of Ms. Rodriguez, and I think a little vomit snuck up her esophagus.
“Stay away from the bodies,” I said. “The squids are still hiding in them.”
“Their bodies are moving,” she said.
“The squids are controlling them from the inside.”
“Like that brain from the Teenage Mutant Turtles,” she said.
See? She gets it, man. Gabby and I made a good team back in the day. Despite how different our backgrounds were, our brains always seemed to end up in the same place. We were the type of couple who no one ever wanted to play Pictionary with, because we won every damn time.
“Krang,” I said.
She replied, “Yeah, that’s it.”
We made it over to Mimi’s apartment, and I told Otis to keep pulling at the door as I used the broken katana to slice through the hardened gel. It wasn’t easy, and I had to chop at the goo several times, but the door finally pulled wide enough to allow us in.
The infected in the courtyard wanted to stop our escape, but their bodies were beaten and broken to the point where all they could do is crawl our way. I told Gabby to give me her torch, and traded her the sword.
Jerry went into the apartment first, followed by Tony and Mimi. I stood guard, eyeing the infected as they crawled our way. Their skin moved because of the tentacles beneath, as if the Terrameds wanted nothing more than to burst free of their hosts and snatch us. I worried that if they got close enough, they’d risk exposure to the sun just to hurt us.
“Hurry,” I said to Tony as he struggled to fit through the door with is grandmother in his arms.
Tony clonked his grandmother’s head against the door. She yelled out, “Ow! What the hell are you trying to do, decapitate me?”
“Otis, you’ve got to pull the door open wider,” said Tony.
“I’m pulling as hard as I can.”
“Here, watch out,” said Gabby as she started to chop at some of the stretched goo to help allow the door to open wider.
The infected were getting closer by the second, and their faces were swollen with the swirling tentacles beneath their skin. The Terrameds were bunching themselves up near the faces and shoulders of their hosts, preparing to launch at us when they got close enough.
I moved towards them, waving the torch like a hero in a silent film warding off evil, dramatically sweeping the flame left and right, hoping to scare the creatures. They slowed, but continued their advance as if willing to suffer the bite of the flames.
“There, try now,” said Gabby as she moved aside to let her brother through.
Tony and Mimi made it into the apartment, and Gabby came over to pull at the back of my shirt. “Come on,” she said.
“You go. I’ll be right behind you.”
“You’d better be.” She handed me back the sword.
Otis continued to hold the door open as Gabby squeezed through. She needed almost as much space as Tony and Mimi combined.
“You’re next,” said Otis as he continued to hold the door. The red worms had gathered at the cut seams in the muck, and were trying to seal the gaps. They’d massed near the entrance, working as fast as they could. I tossed the torch at the nearest infected, and then grabbed the door.
“You first,” I said to Otis.
He didn’t argue, and I held the door for him as he ducked and crawled through to avoid the dripping slime that the worms were producing. The nearest infected behind me crawled over the lit torch, and the Terramed inside of the host squealed as the flames licked at the creature’s body. The slime that it was covered with quickly extinguished the fire, and the infected was within a few feet of me as I started to head through the door.
I heard the infected host’s skin split as the tentacles burst forth. Two barbed tentacles wrapped around my leg, attaching to my bloody hoodie that Gabby had wrapped over my wound. I fell down in the threshold, and splashed in the pooled muck.
The sun’s position allowed its light to shine on most of the building’s façade, leaving no respite from its direct warmth for the tentacles to hide in. They were exposed, and suffering for it. I looked back at them, and saw that the delicate skin of the tentacles had begun to burn and smoke already. All it took was a quick jerk of my leg and the tentacles began to rip as the infected and the Terramed alike screamed in pain.
“Dave!” Gabby screamed from inside.
“It’s okay,” I said as I got back to my feet. I went into the apartment, and then limped towards Gabby.
Tony had taken Mimi and Jerry out the back door, and left it open. I could see the parking lot, and a van with its engine running, waiting for us. Otis waved for me to follow. He yelled, “Come on!”
I couldn’t believe we’d made it. I’ll be the first to admit that making it out of Little Mexico was a far cry from escaping the apocalypse entirely, but it was a hell of a good start. I felt that if we’d made it this far, we might just stand a chance of surviving whatever else the apocalypse had in store for us.
Gabby was to my right, standing with her boyfriend, Jason.
The sight of him embracing Gabby stole whatever sense of elation and hope I’d formerly enjoyed. I experienced a sense of loss that I hadn’t expected, as if this stranger had come to steal my family away. Any hope I’d entertained about the possibility of a reconciliation with Gabby, and a renewal of the relationship I’d squandered, was ended by Jason’s arrival. The baby I thought might be mine, suddenly felt lost.
Jason was tall, athletic, and handsome. He was exactly the type of man a girl like Gabby was supposed to be with. Someone as pretty as her shouldn’t end up with a loser like me. That goes against social norms, and witnessing their reunion was a kick in the gut that reminded me of all the reasons I didn’t deserve someone like Gabby. I nodded at him and offered a weak, “Thanks for coming to get us.”
He just stared at me, holding Gabby. She was facing me, with one of his arms over her chest, and the other over her belly.
My overwhelming sense of jealousy and sorrow was replaced by dread and unease.
I began to notice everything that was wrong with the situation. The vent above Mimi’s chair was hanging open. There was slime on the carpet. Jerry’s wand was on the floor beside Gabby as she stood there like a statue. Jason was preventing Gabby’s movement.
And they were both staring directly at me.
Jason started to speak, “D… Day… Dave.”
The walls shuddered as Terrameds moved through them. They burst through the wall near the back door, blocking our way out, and sending various pictures of Mimi and her family tumbling to the floor.
Blackened, burned tentacles snaked around from behind Jason and over the front of Gabby’s stomach. One of the tentacles was missing its tip, revealing the architect of the trap I’d fallen into.
“Cum Dumpster, you son of a bitch.”
12 – A Heroic Sacrifice