“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.