Anything Can Be Dangerous (3 page)

By the time they reached the next
ride, his attention was once again focused entirely on Mia. She was
happy, and that made him happy, and he slipped his arm around her
waist as they walked side by side toward the entry gate of the
Ferris wheel. It was a risky move, this being only their second
time together, but she allowed it and even leaned her body against
him.

They’d settled into the end of the
line when he noticed an empty plastic bag with the fair’s logo on
it go tumbling across the thoroughfare not far away, bounding end
over end, propelled by the breeze.

His newfound smile faded.

The wind was blowing in the opposite
direction.

5.

“
What the hell is going
on?”

Greg had asked himself that same
question at least a dozen times since dropping Mia off at her
apartment, but he had yet to come up with an answer.

After he saw the lone bag whisking
across the thoroughfare at the park, he’d begun to see them
everywhere.

Not that that’s hard to
do
, he thought.
This is
America, after all; plastic is about as commonplace as
dirt.

Such an explanation sounded good when
applied to the physical aspect of his sudden aversion to plastic,
but deep down he knew that the menacing quality he’d begun to
associate with such a mundane material was not only unusual, it was
pure fucking nuts.

He didn’t let it trouble him around
Mia, though. He forced himself to block it out. Now that she was
gone, however, he found himself dwelling on the topic once again
and genuinely fearing for his sanity.

He turned right, onto Quincy Street,
intent on parking in front of the house rather than go up the alley
to the garage. Even from a block and a half away, he noticed
multiple police cars lined up along the street across from his
house, as well as an ambulance parked along the curb. Their red,
white, and blue flashers lit up the area like a Fourth of July
fireworks show.

Greg parked in front of his own house
and got out, pausing on the sidewalk before going to the door. He
saw fellow neighbors standing on their doorsteps, watching the
scene unfold, and couldn’t help be curious himself.

“
It’s a hell of a thing,” a
voice said from behind.

Greg flinched and turned around to
find Tom standing at his back.

“
I heard it was the boy,”
his neighbor said, indicating toward the house. “You know, the slow
one. I guess they found him in the basement.”

“
Damn,” Greg muttered. “You
mean … dead?”

Tom frowned, nodding. “Child
Protective Services should’ve stuck their nose into that shit-heap
years ago. All afternoon I’ve been listening to the kid’s mother
calling his name, telling him to come home. Christ, they don’t even
keep track of him. Like always, she never actually went out
to
look
for him, either. Just
stands there on the steps in her bathrobe, shouting up and down the
block. Poor bastard was probably down there the whole time, already
gone.”

Greg rubbed his arms, smoothing the
goose bumps that had risen on his skin. “Did you catch how it
happened?”

“
Suffocation.”

Despite the warm, windless night, Greg
shivered.

“
Chad Wilks, the neighbor
on the right, told me that he saw them working on the kid through
one of the windows when he came out. Said he had a plastic
dry-cleaning bag stretched over his head so tight it looked like
he’d been shrink-wrapped.”

“
Oh, damn,” Greg thought
aloud.

“
First Gracy, now this,”
his neighbor continued. “Angela always says shit like this happens
in threes. If that’s the case, I wonder what’s next?”

Greg shrugged, but said nothing.
Without another word, he ascended the front steps and went inside
his house.

6.

Sundays were Greg’s lazy days, but try
as he might he couldn’t seem to relax.

At breakfast, he found himself
standing in front of the open refrigerator, scanning the food. He’d
bought groceries the day before meeting Mia, and he was acutely
aware of how many items were stored in plastic bags.

Grapes, celery, sliced turkey meat,
tortillas. There were eleven in all. Eleven bags in the
refrigerator alone, with more on the counter, in the cupboards, and
under the sink.

A box of thirty Ziplock bags in the
junk drawer.

A roll of a hundred garbage bags
beside the trash bin.

He closed his eyes, massaging his
temples. He had to stop this; it was getting ridiculous.

He was thinking like his
mother.

The idea chilled his spirit like an
ice water bath.

No. He was nothing like is mother. She
was insane, he wasn’t. Crazy people didn’t question their delusions
or wonder if they needed help. Besides, his mother had seen threats
in all sorts of objects, not any specific one. And if his fixation
on plastic was the result of some malfunctioning gene passed on by
his mother, why would it start affecting him now? He’d never felt
this way before.

Whatever the case, he wanted it to
stop.

Reaching into the refrigerator’s
crisper, he extracted a bag of apples.

The warning on the side
read:

KEEP AWAY FROM SMALL
CHILDREN.

THE THIN FILM MAY CLING TO NOSE AND
MOUTH

AND PREVENT BREATHING.

“
They got that right,” he
said, dumping out the fruit.

He turned the bag over in his hands,
exploring its surface. He stretched it, crunched it into a ball,
shook it back to its original shape. There was nothing remarkable
about it, nothing to inspire fear, but he held it away from his
body as he handled it, as if touching something foul.

Grimacing, he placed his right hand
inside the bag, wearing it like a glove. If he was going to combat
this new phobia, he was going to do it now, before it got any
worse—

The plastic clamped tight around his
forearm.

WHOOSH!

It sucked to his skin as though the
air inside had been drawn out by a vacuum and sealed to his
flesh.

“
What the hell?” he
shouted.

He clawed at the lip of the bag,
digging to find a purchase. His hand inside immediately began to
tingle, the healthy pink color of his skin taking on a tinge of
purple.

“
Shit!”

He grasped the edge of the bag and
yanked it off, tearing it up the middle, feeling dozens of fine
hairs jerked from their roots.

He tossed the bag aside and stumbled
backwards, to the door. Almost weightless, the rent plastic floated
to the floor like gossamer strands of spider silk, and Greg was
outside before it touched the ground.

He stopped halfway across the
backyard, looking around. The rational part of him––the Greg Shader
he’d been up until two days ago––searched the yard in humiliation,
hoping no one had seen his frantic behavior. But another part of
him was assessing the surroundings, alert for the next sign of
danger.

He heard a rustling noise and whipped
around to face it.

The side door to the garage was
cracked open, and the black lawn bag that he saw projected from the
interior immediately retracted into darkness.

“
Screw this!” he
roared.

Though only dressed in boxer shorts
and a white tee shirt, he bound across the distance separating his
house and the Jacobsons’, going straight for the backdoor. He
knocked half a dozen times, pounding harder than intended but not
giving a shit.

He needed help. Now.

“
Tom, open up!”

When there was no immediate answer, he
tried the knob for himself, found it open, and stepped inside the
Jacobsons’ kitchen without waiting for an invitation.

That’s when he saw the
cocoons.

Two human-size bundles of assorted
plastic bags lay in the middle of the floor, with more bags
entering the space from the living room doorway, slip-sliding
closer. Greg stood frozen. He watched the smooth-surfaced material
curl tighter around the two forms on the linoleum and felt his
bowels loosen when he saw several of the outermost bags begin to
fill with blood.

An extra large trash bag turned toward
him as he watched, slipping across the floor like a shiny black
slug.

He turned and ran for his
car.

7.

Greg drove into the parking lot of the
Amoco station three blocks from his house and shut off the engine,
trying to calm down.

What the hell was he going to
do?

He had the five dollars of emergency
gas money he kept in the MagBox with the Mitsubishi’s spare key,
and the next obvious step would be to call the police. But would
they believe him? And even if they did, would they get to the
Jacobsons’ in time to see the bags for themselves? For some reason
he didn’t think so. It certainly never worked that way in horror
movies; the threat always seemed to vanish before the protagonist
could get others to view it. But this wasn’t a movie; he had to
do
something
.

He thought about lying to the police,
telling the dispatcher he’d seen a burglar break in through his
neighbor’s window. But then they’d be looking for a human suspect
and might walk into an ambush.

His worst fear, though, was that the
Jacobsons would be found alive and well.

It was a horribly selfish notion, one
that made him sick to even think it, but deep down it was true. The
longer this went on, the more certain Greg was that he’d end up in
a mental asylum.

There was a siren in the distance, and
the sound alerted him to how vacant the area seemed. No other
vehicles shared the gas station’s parking lot with him, and other
than a few cars, barely any traffic moved on the streets. He didn’t
like that. Maybe his perception was skewed thanks to the morning’s
insane events, but he felt there should be more people out and
about by now, even for a Sunday.

And what about Mia?

Was she up yet? Or had the plastic
bags in her apartment surrounded her in the middle of the night,
all at once pouncing on her body, smothering her while she slept
and sucking her blood out like a brood of polypropylene
vampires?

He had to call her, had to make
certain she was safe.

He got out of the car and hurried
across the vacant fueling area to the front of the store. He needed
change for the pay phone and God help the clerk on duty if he was
given any shit about his current apparel.

But there was no clerk on
duty.

An open magazine lay on the counter
beside the cash register, but he saw no employees in sight. It was
dark, too, and Greg noticed that the overhead lights were
off.

“
Hello?” he
called.

There was no reply, but he took a step
backward as if his inquiry had been answered by the ferocious hiss
of some unseen adversary.

There was something here, all right,
something he knew he didn’t want to face, and he fled from the
doorway without a second thought.

When he turned around, he saw at least
three-dozen bags coming across the street. They tumbled
end-over-end, blown by a nonexistent wind. Some were clear, some
opaque, some brown or black. Most were the size of hand bags found
at grocery stores, but one looked big enough to contain a kitchen
stove or a dishwasher.

“
Jesus Chri—”

He was still standing outside the gas
station’s doorway when a white plastic bag dropped over his head
and sucked to his face. The bag’s lip went tight around his neck,
pulled backwards like a garrote wire, and Greg stumbled blindly in
reverse, back toward the store. He felt the air being drawn out of
his lungs, felt the flesh of his lips and nose and cheeks deaden as
the blood beneath the skin was forcibly sucked to the
surface.

Thrashing like a drowning victim,
trying to remain upright as he was hauled backward, trying
to
breathe
, he realized that
he had but seconds to act or he’d be dead. Thinking fast, he opened
his mouth as wide as he could and thrust two fingers into his open
jaws, piercing the membranous plastic, making an air
hole.

The strategy worked. The vacuum broke,
and the constricting bag relented, allowing Greg the opportunity to
grasp the ruptured portion of its body and widen the tear, freeing
his face.

But he was still being dragged
backward, the ripped bag still tight across his throat.

He saw that he was inside the store
again, facing the door as it drifted closed on its pneumatic
hinges. Then, in a nightmare moment of perfect awareness, he caught
a glimpse of himself and the monster behind him in the reflection
of the glass.