Matt Hults - Anything Can Be Dangerous

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 forward, 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.

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.