Jacked Read online

  Nothing. He slapped the phone, walked around the gym in circles to try and get a better signal, but still got nothing. The display said no signal…searching. Even though Gabe’s cell couldn’t pick up a signal earlier, he had it out again and was doing the same dance as Sid, cursing and stomping his feet.

  “Anything?” Gabe said.

  “Nothing…what the fuck, man? What is this?”

  Gabe shook his head. “I don’t know…I don’t…don’t know.”

  “If one of y’all peckerheads don’t tell me what the fuck is goin’ on, I’m gonna smash y’all together.”

  Sid and Gabe glanced at him, then at each other.

  “I don’t know…it’s…it’s the fucking Twilight Zone out there, man!” Gabe turned and stared out the windows, muttering under his breath.

  Crow slammed his fist into the bench, wiped the sweat from his face with one quick motion, and stood.

  “Relax, man,” Sid said with his palms out. “We don’t know what’s going on. There’s some people hurt out there. They need help, and there’s this shit in the street that looks like—”

  The glass doors swung open, smacked against the door stoppers.

  And the woman stepped inside. Slime dripped from her body, hanging off in drooping green ribbons. Her eyes had gone completely white and emitted a soft glow like a dying flashlight. The flesh of her nude body had bloated and looked ready to tear, the once pink flesh now a sickly pea green. Her mouth opened to reveal her toothless, dark green gums. Even from where Sid stood, he could see the ooze seeping from the gaping holes where her teeth once were. Slime dripped from her tear ducts, her nostrils. A dotted trail of green followed her as it dripped and slid from her cunt and ass crack, her feet stomping hard with each slow step she took, her flesh ballooned and jiggling.

  “Holy shit!” Gabe dropped his phone and backed away.

  The woman’s head spun toward him, and in an instant, a stream of green bile cannoned from her mouth and splashed over his leg. A sound like soda pop fizzing from a shaken can bubbled from her throat, and as Gabe shrieked and stumbled away from her, the fabric of his windpants burned away and the hairs on his leg shriveled and disappeared.

  The woman burped long and loud, grabbed the corners of her mouth and ripped outward. Another gush of vomit shot forward from the widened maw, but Gabe dropped and rolled out of the way. The green liquid splashed over the desk, burned the scattered papers there and sizzled over the computer’s keyboard.

  “What the…what the fuck?” Crow shook his head, locked eyes with Sid. “What is this shit!”

  Crow shot across the gym and Sid followed. Along the way, Sid grabbed a curling bar and held it over his head like a metal club.

  The woman dropped to her stomach and inched toward Gabe with slow, thrusting motions. Her body weaved like an alligator as more slime seeped from her body and lubricated the floor beneath her.

  “Get her away!” Gabe kicked at her, his running shoe colliding with her spongy face, but it did nothing to slow her. “Ahhh…it fucking burns!”

  Gabe kicked again and the woman caught the shoe in her mouth. Her cheeks split even further to make room for the foot, and she had more than half of it down her throat. More vomit sprayed forth, covering the shoe and Gabe’s ankle. The green, frothy liquid burst from the tight spaces between her swollen lips and Gabe’s sneaker. Spirals of smoke floated off the shoe as it disintegrated, and before long, Gabe’s wiggling, spread-out toes were revealed, hairless and red.

  “Fuuuuck!”

  Crow sprinted and threw the toe of his boot into the woman’s chin. There was a wet, squishy sound, and though Gabe’s smoking foot popped free of her toothless maw, she showed no signs of pain. Her fat, marshmallowy body jiggled and her doughy, inflated breasts nearly swung to her back.

  The woman gurgled and tried to stand but Crow stomped down on her head. The scalp split to reveal the skull beneath, the green flesh sloughing off like chewed-up spearmint bubble gum. She let out a wet sloppy sound and reached up with a fat hand. Crow stomped again.

  The impact crushed her head like a wet, rotten log. The boot smashed through bone and was now ankle deep in brain matter that shone bright green like the slime. Her body twitched but she didn’t try and get up again as gouts of green ooze pumped from the ruin that was once her head.

  “Crazy fuckin’ bitch,” Crow said. He pulled his foot out and quickly kicked off the boot as it smoked and sizzled. His sock was still intact and slime free. He glanced at Gabe who whimpered and glared at his injured leg and foot, then at Sid. “Either of you have any idea what the fuck—”

  The doors blew open again. The little boy, as green and bloated as his mother, stumbled in and dripped goop onto the floor. He opened his mouth and gurgled as a gush of slime spilled over his chin and splashed at his feet.

  “Motherfucker!” Sid rushed at the slimy kid with the curling bar held high. The metal clanged when it slammed onto the top of the kid’s head, denting it like a car bumper. The boy’s cottage cheese eyes blinked rapidly as the slime gushed into them and over his face from the bash-wound. He puked a stream of gunk toward Sid as he dropped to his knees.

  Sid spun out of the way, narrowly avoiding the acid spray, and in the same motion swung the bar and clocked the kid on the back of the head, sending him crashing face-first to the floor. Sid swung again and again like he was chopping firewood, turning the kid’s head into a mess of green brain, flesh, and bone.

  And then they heard them.

  Outside. Gurgling and moaning and regurgitating. They swarmed toward the gym like piranha toward a deer carcass, each of them nude and hairless, their flesh swollen and as green as mold on rotting fruit.

  “The doors!” Crow shouted, leaping over the woman’s corpse. “We need to lock the fuckin’ doors.”

  “Oh god…jesus fucking Christ…” Gabe managed to hop to his feet and limp toward the desk. “The keys, Sid…where the fuck are they?”

  Crow collided with the doors just as the first wave of people hit them. Sid ran up beside him and lowered his shoulder, and together they pushed. The horde was weak and didn’t push back very hard, but as more and more of them joined, the weight of them became almost unbearable.

  “I don’t know, man…in the drawer…on the wall…just hurry the hell up!”

  “What is this shit…?” Crow’s muscles bulged and looked ready to tear his skin as he pushed with all his strength. The horde was shoved backward. A few of the obese bodies up front fell and were immediately trampled as the others behind them surged forward. Flesh squashed and slime oozed out of broken skin.

  Sid grunted as he slammed his shoulder into the door again and again, he planted his feet and shoved with both hands. But he couldn’t relieve the pressure of the pressing horde. The slimy bodies pushed harder with every passing second as more of them joined from the rear, shambling up from the slime river.

  “I got ’em!” Gabe avoided the two bodies as he shuffled forward. “Push harder. Doors gotta be completely shut before I can lock ’em.”

  A green arm slithered in through the space between the two glass doors. The fingers looked like overcooked breakfast sausages, the nails melted away leaving oval-shaped indentations that bled slime over the fingertips.

  “Push goddamnit! Push!” Crow leaned in and shoved. His veins inflated, muscles hardened. Spittle rained from between his clenched teeth. “Come on!”

  Sid screamed and clenched his teeth until he thought they would shatter, his sneakers squeaking across the floor as he pushed with everything he had. He begged his body to supply him with an adrenaline injection. The door moved, just a bit. Sid and Crow both roared as the doors were pressed closer together, a millimeter at a time. “Help us, goddamnit!” Sid screamed at Gabe.

  Gabe rushed forward and collided with the doors, a hand on each one as he pushed.

  The two doors met on the outstretched, distended arm, bit into the soft flesh down to the bone. The green-tinted meat slid off in filets
and slapped the floor as they fell. Both men grunted as the arm was grinded between the metal edges, bone crushing and tendons snapping.

  “Shit…fuck it!” Gabe reached up, grabbed hold of the arm, and wiggled it back and forth like he was trying to break off a twig from a tree branch. The bone splintered and cracked and more strips of meat plopped to the floor. “Oh jesus!” He ripped the arm free and tossed it away like a fried chicken leg quarter pulled fresh from hot grease, wiped his palms over his shirt.

  The doors shut as more bodies slammed against the glass. The puffy flesh of the horde flattened against the other side of the glass, smooth and slimy. The light green skin was crisscrossed with darker veins, a disease pattern like green stretch marks.

  “The keys…lock the fucking doors!” Sid growled.

  Gabe lunged toward the doors, missed the lock a few times before finally sliding the key in, then turned the lock and backed away.

  The doors bulged inward and rattled but they held. Moist, milky eyes glowed as the…things peered in and pressed their bodies against the building.

  Gabe inspected his hands, front and back, as his bottom lip trembled. His skin was slightly pink, but didn’t look nearly as severe as his leg and foot.

  Sid released the door, his palms and fingers aching, cut and bleeding from gripping the metal bar. A man, or what used to be one, smashed his face against the glass and vomited, the bubbling liquid spraying across the pane and sliding down.

  “Holy shit…h-holy shit…” Sid felt his own gorge rising but was knocked back into reality as Crow started shouting.

  “Barricade the fuckin’ door! That shit won’t hold for long…there’s…shit, man, where the fuck’re they all comin’ from?”

  The people circled the gym, looking for a spot to peer in through the glass. As if every person Sid had seen in the street had come for the gym. No, at least double that.

  But these aren’t people, Sid thought. Zombies. Fucking zombies.

  It was the only thing he could think to call them. He’d seen countless movies, read books and comics, played video games centered around the undead. Just like everyone else these days. And just like everyone else, he knew the “zombie rules.”

  “The other zombies are attracted by the horde,” he said. “We need to get away from the glass. M-maybe if they don’t see us…they’ll move on.”

  “Zombies? Don’t be fuckin’ stupid,” Crow said. “Help me barricade the motherfuckin’ door. Now!”

  Crow had stacked five 45-lb weight plates and was carrying them toward the doors. He slammed them to the floor and pressed them flush against the entrance. The eyes of the things outside watched his every move.

  “Grab as many weights as you can. Hurry up, we…oh fuck me…” Crow’s eyes widened as his head swiveled and he took in the surrounding glass of the gym.

  More zombies. The soft, squishy bodies pressed up against the glass all over the building. Every inch of glass had moist, gelatinous flesh mashed against it. Pudgy hands gripped cheek meat and tore outward to make way for the gallons and gallons of green bile rushing out of their bodies, giving each of them a ghastly, jagged smile.

  They didn’t slam their fists against the glass, didn’t beg for brains. They just stood there, against the windows, and vomited. Stream after stream hit the glass and sizzled as it ran across the surface. The slime dripped and stretched from every orifice, beading from their pores.

  “They can’t get in here,” Gabe said. “The glass…it’s too thick. They’ll never get through it.” He was talking to himself, nodding, softly chuckling under his breath as he inspected his hands, leg, and foot. The sizzling had stopped, but his skin looked red, irritated.

  Sid continued to grab as many weight plates as he could manage at a time and stacked them up beside Crow’s at the front double doors.

  Gabe rubbed the back of his head and stared at the crushed heads of the woman and boy. Their spasming limbs had now ceased all movement, but the gunk still leaked out, slow and thick. The brains looked like green eggs and ham stamped with the tread of Crow’s boot. These were the same woman and boy who just moments before had been driving along in their van. Until the slime got them.

  The slime. All of this has to do with that fucking slime.

  “Am I gonna turn into one of them now?” Gabe stared into Sid’s face with quivering eyes. “Sid, do you think? Do you think I’m infected with this shit?”

  “How the fuck am I supposed to know, man?” Sid continued to stack plates alongside Crow. His arms and shoulders burned but he kept moving.

  “Fuckin’ zombies. Holy shit.” Crow had moved onto benches and was stacking them one on top of the other. The two doors were nearly concealed completely now, only the tops of the zombies’ slick, bald heads still visible.

  “I’m gonna…I’m gonna go to the bathroom. Okay? I’m gonna go to the bathroom and wash this shit off me. Right? Maybe there’s still time to wash it off. Do you think so, Sid?”

  Before Sid could answer Gabe was already sprinting toward the locker room.

  The sounds of vomiting, splashing, and sizzling surrounded them. All Day Fitness was made almost completely of glass. Everything but the back wall, but even that was covered with mirrors, reflecting the zombies and making it look like they were completely surrounded.

  Gabe had been right though. The glass was thick, bullet proof. And whatever muscle these things had once possessed seemed useless now, soft like fish bellies. But they still didn’t pound on the glass, didn’t seem to be in any kind of hurry to get inside. They just stared in at Sid and Crow with their creamy eyes. And puked.

  The puking never stopped. Green vomit splashed over the glass, hissing as it ran down the surface.

  Crow stood right in front of one of the windows, staring out at a woman with her massive, cabbage-colored breasts smashed up against the glass. She spat a stream of vomit at Crow’s head and it splashed against the hard surface, sprayed back into her own face.

  “They’ll get in here. Sooner or later.” The muscles on Crow’s back twitched as he placed his hand on the glass. “I can feel the heat from here. That shit they’re spittin’ up, the shit that got on your friend’s leg. It’ll eat this glass away. And then we’re fucked.”

  “You don’t know that,” Sid said. He stayed where he stood, refusing to get any closer to the things on the other side. “We don’t know shit about them. Maybe we can stay here, stick it out until someone comes for us. I mean…someone’s gotta be doing something about this. Maybe Gabe was right…maybe this is some kind of toxic spill. Our little shithole town can’t be the only place this is happening.”

  “Toxic spill? What did you see out there? You said something about slime…what the fuck is out there, man?”

  “I don’t know. We saw it in the street, just running through like a fucking river. And this woman…that woman,” Sid said and pointed toward the splattered corpse. “She was in her van, and the slime…it melted the tires and started eating at the metal. She got out and the shit sucked her in. I thought she was dead, her kid too, but the slime, man. That fucking green shit turned them into those things.”

  As Sid spoke, Crow’s face contorted more and more into a hard scowl. He shoved past Sid and stomped toward the front door, climbed onto one of the benches stacked there and peered through the window toward the street.

  The zombies near the door peered up at Crow. They didn’t grow agitated, didn’t start to frenzy. They just watched him. And one at a time, they spewed acid over the glass.

  “Fuck me.” Crow stepped down, ran his hands over his face and head. His eyes went unfocused as he stared at the floor and furrowed his brow.

  “What do you think it could be? That stuff out there?” Sid tried not to look at the fat faces glaring at him from outside.

  Crow didn’t answer, just stood there, thinking. His muscles twitched as he curled his hands into fists. He slowly walked past Sid and back into the weights area.

  Every face was aimed tow
ard them, and Sid felt his sanity begin to cook away. He didn’t know if he could take all of them watching him like that. Like they were staring into a microwave and waiting for their food to cook. Their toothless, torn maws exploded with vomit again and again. Their skin looked like avocado meat on the verge of spoiling.

  “The windows. We can cover the windows up. So they can’t see us. M-maybe they’ll leave if they can’t see us anymore, right?” Sid paced back and forth, Crow watching him with that smirk still hooking his mouth.

  “We’re fucked, kid. Might as well get used to it.” He ripped his shirt off and tossed it aside, stepped up to the window and observed the things out there. A deep chuckle rumbled from his chest as he rubbed his palms over his hairless, sweat-beaded scalp.

  ***

  “It doesn’t hurt anymore. I think maybe I washed it off before it got too bad.” Gabe sat on a bench and inspected his leg. The skin was still pink, but it didn’t have the green tint like the people outside. “I think I’ll be okay.” He ran his fingertips over his leg and foot.

  The sun was already up by the time Sid used up all the mats. He had only managed to cover a portion of one side of the gym. Crow and Gabe had seemed oblivious to what he was doing—lost in their own heads—and did nothing to lend a hand, but he didn’t say anything as he taped up the mats. He had only found a small amount of tape at the front desk, but it was weak shit and had already run out.

  The zombies continued to smother the glass with their vomit. Continued to press their spongy flesh against the windows and stare in at them.

  The slime coating their bodies began to dry and flake in the sunlight, like snot turning into boogers, and hard clumps of the stuff fell off as they moved. Some of them started to peel away from the crowd and waddle their way back across the parking lot.

  Sid nearly cackled with joy. They’re finally moving on, he thought. We’re gonna be okay.

  But as some of the fat bodies left, others arrived. Freshly dipped and soaked to bursting with slime. Streams of vomit hit the glass as the zombies stared in at Sid and gurgled.