Gasping, Greg seized the red metal cylinder and spun to face the flames.
CO2 vapor plumed out ahead of him as he emptied the extinguisher into the blaze, and soon he saw that the entire hallway outside Mia’s apartment was completely covered by fire-charred bags. Melted plastic dripped from the ceiling and walls like sludge from a ruptured oil tanker, coating the floor with a molten pool that billowed stinking black smoke.
He looked from the hot liquid to his bare feet.
Then turned to the dead man.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
Not wasting a second, he seized the cadaver with both hands the way a sanitation worker might lift an over-sized garbage bag off a street curb and heaved it into the mass of melted plastic blocking his path.
Steeling himself for what he planned to do next, Greg backed up several paces. He picked up the fire extinguisher—using the act to buy himself another second of mental preparation—then ran forward, leaping onto the corpse’s chest like jumping on a stepping stone.
A horrible crack! issued from beneath his feet as his weight came down on the dead body, and again when he launched himself forward, finally landing on the floor at Mia’s doorstep. A quarter-inch-deep pool of hot plastic welcomed his feet.
Screaming, Greg used the empty extinguisher to knock in the door, calling Mia’s name as he charged inside. The plastic stinging his feet tried to cling to the carpet with each step, tugging at his skin.
He searched the two-bedroom space from front to back, prepared to shred any plastic bags he encounter with his bare hands if need be, but nothing assaulted him as he dashed from room to room.
“Mia!” he shouted through the smoke. “Where are you?”
He found her huddled in the corner of the kitchen closet, a ten-inch butcher knife clutched in her hands.
Greg mewed at the sight of her.
Dressed only in panties and a torn “Vote for Pedro” t-shirt, he saw a frightening number of reddish-purple streaks that crisscrossed her exposed skin. The capillaries in her right eye had burst, changing the previously unblemished white around the iris blood-red, as if that eye had glimpsed a vision of Hell.
Tears blurred Greg’s vision, but suddenly, miraculously, she gasped and uttered his name.
“Greg… Oh, God, Greg!”
He took her in his arms, holding her tight.
“They came at us from everywhere,” she said. “Lucy must’ve got up before me and found them… my roommate… her screams woke me up.”
“Don’t think about it,” Greg told her, still holding her.
“They… they sucked her insides out through her mouth!”
She sagged forward, leaning harder against him. Hot tears soaked through his shirt, heating the skin over his heart.
“But they didn’t get you,” Greg reminded her as he ushered her toward the living room window that accessed the fire escape. “You fought them, and you won. But you have to keep fighting for me, Mia. We have to both keep fighting if we’re going to get through this!”
At that, Mia looked up at him. The hurt was still there in her features, the grief of losing her friend, but it had become a background to the tone of resilience he heard in her voice.
“What the hell is going on?” she asked. “What’s happened to the world?”
“It isn’t the world that’s changed,” Greg answered. “It’s the plastic.”
Once again he thought of the discovery he’d made back at the highway.
“The bags are all new,” he explained. “So far, all the ones I’ve seen have been clean and spotless. No rips, no smears of garbage.”
He told her about the Amoco station and the dumpster outside, how it had been practically overflowing with bags yet none of them had been possessed like those inside the store.
“But why not?” she asked.
“Because they were old,” he replied. “They didn’t come from the same batch of plastic that created these new ones…”
He stooped down and picked up an empty box of kitchen wastebasket liners, as well as a vacated case of storage bags.
“Look,” he said, pointing to the fine print on each package.
—Made with 35% recycled resin—
—25% Post Consumer Content—
“It’s the resin,” Greg said. “Whatever it is, it’s in the recycled resin. That’s why there’s so many of them, why they’ve infected multiple products!”
“So what do we do?” she replied. “How do you fight such a thing?”
A crash boomed from somewhere deeper in the building and the floor vibrated under their feet. A second later, a fresh wave of smoke entered the room.
“First,” Greg answered, “we get the hell out of here.”
11.
Greg climbed to the roof of a four-story brick building using a steel ladder bolted to the outside wall for the purpose of gaining access to the billboards overlooking the street.
He had a pair of binoculars now, as well as a Polaroid camera that he’d looted from a deserted drug store along the way.
He ran across the roof’s surface in a low crouch, feeling like a soldier in enemy territory. At the opposite side of the building, he concealed his profile behind the massive back wall of the billboard stand.
He peered out, raising the binoculars to his eyes.
The recycling plant across the road looked like a small city or castle, consisting of a massive collection of gray buildings surrounded by a concrete mote of parking lots and roadways. Greg tried to figure out the best way in, looking for the most inconspicuous place to sneak past the fence. He also wondered which structure he should focus on once inside. He was trying to imagine the layout, speculating on where he should go to find the proof he needed to confirm his theory, but it was impossible to decipher the complexity of the place from the outside.
Not that getting in would be easy.
Trucks were coming and going as if it was business as usual, and that only strengthened his belief that this, if not all recycling plants, was the source of the plastic invasion.
The truck drivers had no faces.
Their outgoing cargo was huge spools of sheet plastic.
Greg watched the latest departure, a flatbed semi carrying dozens of brown cardboard barrels—containers probably filled with pellet resin for other plastic making applications—when suddenly he heard something that made his whole body go cold.
An inhuman howl droned out from the recycling plant, originating somewhere within the labyrinthine network of buildings that made up the factory.
It filled the air with a machinelike vibration, and Greg dropped the binoculars as he clamped both hands over his ears to muffle the bone-jarring noise.
After several excruciating seconds the howl died off, replaced by the keen of tearing metal and snapped welds, the sound of damaged aluminum, steel, and iron all crying out in elongated groans and quick gunshot cracks.
Greg saw the roof of one of the larger central buildings suddenly bulge upward and burst open, the steel crossbeams of its frame torn asunder by a quintet of enormous green tentacles. Each had to be over a hundred feet long and the diameter of a tractor tire.
“What the—”
Eight more slimy appendages followed the first group, widening the hole. They fanned out, relaxing across the undamaged portions of the building’s rooftop, dropping limply over the sides. There was a second howl. This one sounded less frenzied than the first, more content, and Greg managed to endure it until all was quiet again. The trucks and workers below never paused in their activity.
Greg staggered away from the edge of the building, almost fell. Trembling, he raised the camera and snapped off as many shots as the film cartridge held, then raced back to the ladder and down to the ground, where Mia waited with the motorcycle.