Otis screamed obscenities while Mimi kept asking what’d happened. She yelled a few obscenities too, just for good measure.
Tony walked away from our circle, and put his hands on his head as if this was all more than he could take. Jerry was still holding his wand over our heads, waving it around like he was trying to drop pixie dust on us, and Gabby stared at me with uncertain eyes as she said, “The lights…” I didn’t hear the second half of what she’d said because of how loud Otis was cursing.
“What about the lights?” I asked.
“They were on her,” said Gabby. “The lights were pointed right at her. I thought these things didn’t like the light.”
“Maybe it’s just sunlight,” I said.
Gabby looked up at the sunny sky, and then back at me. “What about when it gets dark?”
“To the woods,” said Jerry, but we all ignored him.
“We need to be somewhere safe by then,” I said.
Gabby set her arms over her belly as if shielding the baby. “Where’s that? Where can we go?”
“I’ll figure something out,” I said.
She grumbled and cocked her head to the side to make sure I saw how ridiculous she thought my statement had been. “Yeah, sure you will.” Clearly the two of us still had issues to work out. She took charge, like usual. “Tony, we need to get to the mountains. How much gas do you have in the truck?”
“Half a tank, but I’m telling you, Gabby, the roads are going to be packed. We barely made it here. I can’t imagine what the highway’s going to be like.”
“Then we’ll take the back roads,” she said. “Or even better, we can drive down to the bike path. It goes all the way up to the foothills. There’s no roads or anything there. Your 4x4 can handle it.”
“Why are we headed to the mountains?” asked Otis.
“Because there won’t be many people up there,” said Gabby. “These things are coming out of people and animals, right? Well then, if we can make it up to the mountains then there’ll be less of them.”
“Why not go to the reservoir,” said Tony. “We could get a boat and head into the middle of the water to wait until they get this under control.”
“Really, Tony?” Gabby mocked her brother. “You want to hide from jellyfish monsters in a boat?”
“Yeah, okay,” said Tony. “You’re right, that’s a bad idea.”
“What about heading east?” asked Otis. “We could go out in the middle of Colorado, where there’s nothing but farms. That could be just as safe as the mountains.”
Gabby shot down his idea down too, “Hey, genius, Denver’s between us and the middle of Colorado. Do you really think we should try to haul ass through the city?”
“No, you’re right,” said Otis, and I enjoyed how he cowed to Gabby. I was used to seeing him in a position of authority. It was fun to see him relinquish command so easily.
“I know I’m right,” said Gabby. “We need to go west, away from the city. Away from the people.” She pointed west, towards Tony’s apartment. “Dave, you’ve got an aunt up in the mountains somewhere, right? You took me up there once.”
“Yeah, but I don’t think we should go there.”
“Why not?” asked Gabby.
I tried to think of an excuse. I didn’t want to explain the real reason. My aunt and I have a complicated relationship. “She usually leaves town this time of year.” That wasn’t true, but Gabby had no way of knowing it.
“So?” she asked. “I’m not hoping for a family reunion. I just want to find someplace we can go to get away from the city”
Jerry added, “Away from the lights. To the woods.”
Everyone else ignored him, like usual, but something about his determination drew my attention. Gabby started putting together a plan, but I interrupted her. “Hold on a second. Jerry, why do you keep saying that? Why do we need to go to the woods?”
“He does that,” said Tony. “You know how he is. He gets stuck on something and then just keeps repeating it.”
“Yeah, but he was right about these things hating the sun,” I said. “Maybe he heard something on TV about the woods. Is that what it is, Jerry? Did you hear something about it being safer in the woods?”
My question, and the sudden attention directed at him, upset Jerry. He clenched his eyes shut and began to tap his fingers erratically on his arms. “The negativity’s there. The birds don’t pop. Birds on power lines… they pop.”
“Well, whatever we decide, we need to decide it now,” said Otis. He didn’t have any patience for Jerry’s rambling. “It won’t be long before one of those things comes after us. Or one of us turns into one of them.”
“We won’t turn,” said Jerry. “Not with this.” He turned on his crackling wand again, and swung it around like a lightsaber.
“Why?” I asked. “What’s that do?”
“Nothing, Dave,” said Otis. “He thinks its magic. Just let him… Let him think whatever he wants. Let’s focus on what we know. First off, we know these things don’t like sunlight. Second, they’re popping out of motherfuckers without any warning.”
“No, that’s not true,” I said. “There’s a warning, sort of.”
“What do you mean?” asked Gabby.
“When I was at the gas station I felt this… I don’t know, this electric charge. Kind of like when you’re about to get struck by lightning.”
“How do you know what it feels like before you get struck by lightning?” asked Otis. “Has that happened to you a lot?”
“No, but from what I’ve heard you can feel it coming. When I was at the gas station I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and there was a loud pop. It sounded like a light bulb going out. And that’s right before some lady had a squid come out of her. And that news reporter.” I pointed at Gabby’s phone. “Right before it happened to her there was some sort of electrical issue at the station.”
“Okay,” said Gabby. “So you get, like, a two or three second warning before someone starts spitting squids? How’s that help?”
“It’s better than nothing,” I said. “If we stick together, then at least we’ll feel it if one of us starts to turn.”
We heard tires squealing nearby, quickly followed by a car door slamming shut and someone yelling out a name, “Andrea.”
There was a man coming our way from the parking lot. It was a concerned family member of someone who lived in the complex. He was running towards the covered, shaded tunnel that led to the courtyard where we were at.
I saw him enter the shadows, and then there was a burst of movement all round him. Snakes of black shot out of the walls, breaking free of the building to snag him like a fly in a spider web. His screams of shock were almost immediately muted as the powerful tentacles wrapped around his face like a python strangling its prey. Within mere seconds, the newcomer was pulled into one of the creatures’ mouths.
We watched as the creatures chewed at his body until it came apart. His legs came off like they were one of my old G.I. Joe toys (the ones with the rubber band inside them that would rot away. If you owned one, then you know what I’m talking about. I must’ve had twenty legless soldiers in my toy box. Enough to stage a gruesome recreation of Saving Private Ryan.) The creature dragged the pieces of flesh towards the wall, and then we heard the awful gnashing sound of multiple mouths grinding meat.
Mimi kept screaming obscenities and asking if we’d just seen that. Tony yelled at his grandmother that we’d seen it, and that we were trying to figure out what to do. Beaver barked incessantly, and I grabbed onto his harness to make sure he didn’t run into the entrance to try and fight the creature.
Gabby was clinging to my arm like she was my date at a scary movie, but she let go suddenly, as if repulsed by her instinct. She commanded the others to stop screaming, but the panic was hard to quell. Finally, once everyone had calmed down, Gabby said, “They’re in the walls. They’re trapping us here. They know we can’t get out without going through one of
the apartments or through one of those tunnels. Either way, they can get us.”
“They know we’re trapped here,” said Tony. “That means they’re not just mindless killing machines. They’re thinking.”
“Maybe,” said Otis. “Or maybe it’s instinct.”
“No, I think Tony’s right. Look.” I pointed to the entryway where the most recent victim had been torn apart. The tentacles that weren’t holding onto pieces of flesh had begun to slink back into their holes, as if waiting for their next chance to attack. A few tentacles began to slide out of the lower portion of the archway and grab the remnants of their meal, like the man’s shoes, shredded clothes, and severed body parts. The tentacles slid the fragments of the corpse towards the courtyard, and then tossed them in our direction.
One of the man’s boots bounced within a few feet of us. The flesh was shredded near his ankle, and once the boot settled the broken femur was pointing straight at the sky.
There was a lot of screaming between the five of us. I don’t know how you’d react to getting a severed limb thrown at you by a demonic tentacle, but the way we reacted was to scream obscenities and huddle closer together, like a group of frightened cheerleaders in a horror film. After a moment, Otis went from scared to angry, and took a daring step towards the severed foot. For a second I thought he was going to pick it up by the protruding bone and fling it back at the archway. He refrained, and instead hurled insults at the monster.
“That thing’s mocking us,” said Tony.
I glanced backward, and then said, “No, I don’t think so. I think it’s trying to get us to run that way.” I pointed in the other direction, towards the other arched, shaded entryway on the north side. “I bet there’s another one of those things waiting for us there.”
“That settles it then,” said Otis. “It’s not just instinct. They trapped us. They’re working together.”
“Looks like it,” I said as I came to grips with our predicament.
“We’re fucked,” said Tony as if on the precipice of conceding defeat. “What’re we supposed to do?”
“Everyone, if you’ve got a phone that can get online, get it out,” said Gabby. “Start looking to see if anyone’s figured out a way to fight these things.”
“No,” said Jerry, suddenly incensed. “Turn the phones off.”
“Jerry, stop it,” said Gabby. “This is serious. Okay? We’re trying to figure out a way to save ourselves. You need to calm down.” She used a soothing, even tone that she’d learned from dealing with her autistic brother’s tense episodes through most of their lives. However, this time it didn’t seem to work.
Jerry flipped the switch on his belt that powered the homemade wand he’d devised from pieces of his grandmother’s air purifier. He started to wave it as he walked in a circle around us. He continued to mumble something about negativity as Tony, Gabby, and Otis tried to use their phones to get online and search for any clues about how to deal with the creatures.
“I can’t get online,” said Otis. “I’m not getting a signal.”
“I am,” said Tony. “But it’s going slow. There’s probably a billion people searching for the same thing we are.”
“I guess that depends on if there’s still a billion people left alive,” I said as I looked around at the quiet apartments. Why weren’t there others running out into the courtyard? Was everyone dead? Had they all turned into those things? I tried to remember what the newscaster had called them. Terrormeds, was that it? Or Terrameds?
“Here, I found something,” said Gabby. “It’s about how the military is trying to…” she paused while reading.
Otis asked, “Trying to what?”
“Give me a second,” said Gabby as she quickly read through the report. “They’re trying to figure out how to kill these things. Bullets can, but it takes a long time. It’s like trying to shoot a jellyfish to death. You can do it, but it’s not efficient.”
“What’s an efficient way to do it?” asked Tony.
“Give me a second,” said Gabby. “That’s what I’m trying to find.” She scanned the report. “They say it’s no use smashing them. They can squish themselves down super thin. That’s how they can squeeze into the walls. You have to cut them up into as many pieces as you can.”
“Good call grabbing the sword, Jerry,” said Tony as he gave his brother a pat on the back.
“What about burning them?” I asked, hoping that was an option.
“Um, hold on,” said Gabby. “It doesn’t say anything about… Oh wait, here. It says that when the larger tentacles sustain damage they balloon up with a gelatinous secretion as a defensive mechanism, the same way an octopus can release ink. If you try to burn them, they’ll release this defensive fluid to put out the flames, and apparently it works pretty well. That gunk is flame retardant.”
“Great,” said Tony. “So we need to go at them Game of Thrones style. I can dig that.”
“Slow your roll, Khaleesi,” said Gabby. “They say to stay away from them unless absolutely necessary because these things can survive almost any attack. In order to kill them, you have to take out their brains, and they can move them around all over their bodies. Oh, that’s nasty.”
“They can move their brains?” asked Tony.
Otis hit me in the shoulder and said, “That must be what we saw. Remember? When that squid came out of that lady.”
“Right,” I said. “It was pink, and there was a purple flap of skin over it.”
“Yeah, that’s it,” said Gabby. “And apparently it’s really hard to get to the brain without getting caught in the tentacles.”
“What about rocket launchers?” asked Tony.
Gabby looked at her brother like he was an idiot. “Where are you going to get a rocket launcher?”
“I’m not talking about us,” said Tony. “I’m talking about the army.”
“How about we focus on us for now,” she said. “Let’s save the rocket launcher debate for when we’ve got rocket launchers.” Her derision was biting.
“Does it say why the hell these things are appearing inside people all of the sudden?” asked Otis.
“No one knows,” said Gabby. “At least according to this. It just started happening all over the place, at the same time.”
“It’s the ham guys,” said Jerry, and I assumed he was muttering nonsense as he waved his wand around.
Everyone else ignored Jerry as well. All except Mimi, who yelled at him to stop acting like a fool with that wand of his. I almost shrugged off his odd statement, but something about it gave me pause.
Gabby, Otis, and Tony continued searching online for news, but their connection had stalled. I went over to Jerry, intrigued by his rambling, and asked, “What do you mean about the ham guys? What ham guys?”
“The, uh, the coats. You know, the scientists,” said Jerry, but he was more interested in continuing to wave his wand around than talk to me. I grabbed his arm to earn his full attention.
“What scientists?”
“The Germans,” he said before wincing from how tight I was holding his wrist.
“Guys,” I said to get the others’ attention. “I think Jerry’s onto something.”
“About what?” asked Otis.
I explained, “I heard a news report this morning about an experiment in Hamm, Germany. Something about…” I tried to remember, but I hadn’t paid much attention to the report at the time. “I don’t know. It was some experiment that had something to do with gravity.”
“No, no, no,” said Jerry. “Metamaterial that pulls…” He stopped, and I wasn’t sure if that was all he had to say, or if his attention had wandered.
“Pulls what?” I asked.
“Positive char…” Jerry stuttered, and was distracted by the attention from all of us. He had to close his eyes as he struggled to say, “Positively charged ions.”
“That’s what this is for, right?” I asked as I pointed at his wand.
He nodded.
&n
bsp; “The air purifier?” asked Gabby.
“It doesn’t just clean the air,” I said. “It’s an ionizer. I think it creates negative ions.”
“Dude, you lost me,” said Tony. “What’s that? Negative, huh?”
“Negative ions,” I said.
“What the fuck are those?” asked Tony.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I saw it on the air purifier’s case at Mimi’s.” We all turned our attention to Mimi, which was a surprise to her. She’d been quietly contemplating the apocalypse in her near-deaf state, biting nervously at her already short fingernails.
“What?” she asked. “Why’re you all looking at me?”
Tony knelt in front of her wheelchair and shouted so that she could hear him, “Mimi, we need to know about the air purifier that Jerry broke.”
“What about it?”
“Was it an ionizer?” he asked.
“Lion sizer?”
Tony repeated himself, louder and slower this time, “Was it an ionizer?”
“Oh, yes. It was. Why?”
“What does that mean? What’s it for?”
“It’s good for you,” said Mimi. “I saw it on TV. The more negative ions you have around you, the happier you are. It’s true. Don’t look at me like I’m crazy, Gabriella. It’s proven by science.”
“I’m not looking at you like you’re crazy,” said Gabby, but her brother hushed her before he continued to ask their grandmother questions.
“Mimi, if it makes negative ions, then what makes positive ones?”
“Electronics,” said Mimi. “All of your stupid cell phones, and cars, and TVs, and all that stuff.”
“That’s why Jerry kept waving that wand when we were using our phones,” said Gabby. “He was trying to counteract them.”
“So those Terrameds are attracted to cell phones?” asked Tony as he glanced back at the archway where the creature was waiting for us.
“Maybe they’re attracted to positive ions,” I said as I tried to piece together what was going on. “Or maybe the negative ions stop them from appearing in people.”
“So wait,” said Otis. “Every time we use our cell phones, or drive a car, or watch TV we might have a fucking octopus pop out of our face?”
“I guess so,” I said.
“Do we have to throw them away?” asked Tony like he was being asked to do the impossible.
“We should at least turn them off,” said Gabby.
Everyone looked down at their phones (except me, because mine was dead as a doornail) as if being asked to put a loved one out of their misery. One by one, they powered down the devices that’d come to dominate modern life.
“To the woods,” said Jerry, again repeating what he’d been trying to tell us all along.
7 – The Playground Trap