400p v2

 Chapter 1

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I spent the day the world ended thinking about melons. And no, that isn’t sexual innuendo. I literally spent the entire day dealing with a new melon shipment at the sleepy neighborhood grocer I worked at. We had gotten a new shipment that morning, and my boss and landlord, since I lived above the store, decided to take off early, as usual, and leave me with the entire shipment.

“Make sure they’re ripe before you put ’em out, Jake,” were the last words I ever heard from him. Being the conscientious employee that I was, and not at all slacking off, I spent most of the day unpacking the delivery and diligently checking the melons to make sure they were properly ripe— definitely not looking at my phone in the cooler all day instead.

Have you ever really tried to figure out if a melon is ripe? It is a surprisingly complicated process. First, you gotta squeeze them to make sure there are no soft spots. Once you find one that is firm, you gotta knock on it with your knuckle to make sure it’s not too firm, ya know? Then you have to take a bit of a break and look at your phone while sitting in the walk-in fridge, where nobody will find you until your vague sense of loyalty to the owner makes you drag your ass back up to check a few more melons. Very, very complicated.

My coworker, Leanne, didn’t care. She worked the cash register, and whether I spent the day stocking the shelves or goofing around in the cooler didn’t matter in the least to her. Plus, she cared even less about the job than I did. She was an artist, complete with large glasses and plenty of tattoos to prove what a good artist she was. She was actually a really genuine person and great to work with. She put up with my slacker ways without complaint, so I always appreciated sharing a shift with her.

So anyway, the end of the world.

Well, I didn’t know it was the end of the world when it started. The first sign that something had gone wrong was when the music Leanne was blaring out to the entire store from behind the counter—some local screamcore band, it sounded like to me—stopped abruptly.

At the same time the music cut off, my phone went dark in my hand. I picked myself up from the cold floor and stuck my head out of the cooler.

“Leanne,” I called out toward the front of the store, “did your phone just die?”

I waited a moment, but there was no response. “Leanne?” I called again.

Leanne wasn’t the kind of coworker to play a prank. Plus, there was no way she could mess with my phone like that, anyway.

I walked out of the cooler and through the small aisles of the store until I could see the little register she worked at. Leanne was nowhere in sight.

“Leanne . . .” I said to myself. The little TV with our security monitors was placed behind the counter, and from where I stood, I could see it was off, too.

As I stood there, unsure of what to do, the lights flickered, and I heard a bloodcurdling scream from out front of the store. It was not just your regular, everyday kind of scream. This was a dedicated voice-actress-starring-in-her-first-slasher-movie kind of scream. It literally gave me goosebumps. It was so loud and . . . real. It made me realize I had never actually heard someone truly let loose and scream as loud as they humanly could before. Movies did not do a true scream justice.

Like all good commuters wanting to stop to find out what happened on the side of the road when they passed an accident, my instinct was to run out front to see what was wrong. But another part of me couldn’t get the realness of that scream out of my head, and I realized something might truly be wrong out there. I walked forward slowly and stopped at the counter, where Leanne should have been. As I got closer, I could see that a strange gray goo covered the counter and dripped down behind it.

I leaned over the counter and looked at the goo more closely. There was a big puddle of it right where Leanne would have been standing.

“Leanne . . . ?”

Another scream, this one more masculine-sounding, came from out front of the store. I whipped my head around and looked out the storefront windows to see where the screams were coming from.

Outside, past the wooden stands of fruit that I put out every morning, I could see that traffic had stopped. While I lived in a sleepy little town, our store was in the heart of downtown—if it could ever really be called that— and the street in front of our store was pretty busy. Five or six cars were just sitting in the road, unmoving. None of them appeared to be running, and whoever had been driving them was gone.

One car had an open door, and there was a person rooting through it. I blinked several times to make sense of what I was looking at. The person was covered in dark brown fur, and I was staring directly at its bare ass as it bent down to root through the car.

As I watched, it finished whatever it was doing in the car and stood up.

The creature had an enormous set of antlers sticking above its head, and I had a very sick feeling in my stomach that it wasn’t wearing some kind of fancy hat.

“What the fuck . . .” I whispered. The creature seemed to see something that interested it further down the street, then whipped its head to the side and bounded off in that direction.

I looked at the car it had been rooting around in and saw it hadn’t been looking for items to steal, like I had initially thought. Seated in the front seat was a woman. Or what was left of a woman. Her dress was torn, and her throat was bloody where the creature had taken a large bite out of her neck. The creature had been eating that woman!

“What the hell?” I couldn’t stop myself from yelling as I stumbled back and fell to the ground. I felt bile rising and had to swallow several times to stop myself from puking at the sight of the woman’s neck.

“This has to be some sick joke,” I said. The empty store answered back with a resounding nothing.

As I stared in shock out the window, a large gray spider scuttled along the building across the street from me. It just . . . fucking ran along the side of the building. A large. Gray. Fucking. Spider.

It was the size of a damn car. What the hell was going on?

One thing was for certain: I did not want to encounter whatever ate that lady or a giant goddamned spider. If I just stood here like an idiot, I was going to be food any moment now, no matter how unreal everything seemed.

I rolled over and began to crawl across the concrete floor of the store to the front door. The owner had installed a pretty good security system since crime had been on the rise lately. He had installed a thick steel gate that we pulled down at night to secure the front of the store. If I could pull that down and lock it, I would at least have something between me and whatever the hell was going on.

I could hear more screams and yells from outside the store. From my prone position on the floor, I carefully pushed open the door and tried to reach the steel gate, but I forgot about the bell that rang whenever the shop door was opened.

As soon as I pushed the door open, the stupid motherfucking bell let out its obliviously happy little chime. A chime I had heard for years and never had a problem with. A chime I thought I was on good terms with. And now it went and did this to me? The little asshole!

I looked up quickly to see if anything heard the bell but didn’t see anything out of the ordinary (like giant fucking monsters). I couldn’t help looking back at the woman in the car, her body now slumping to the side and slowly sliding onto the street. Her blood was pooling on her dress and dripping down the car seat.

“Ughhhh,” I groaned, trying desperately not to puke at the sight.

Before I could lose my nerve, I quickly stood and then jumped up to grab the gate. As I got ahold of it and pulled it down with me, the sound of the gate rang out into the empty street.

A creature’s head poked above one of the stalled cars right in front of me. It looked like a little green person, almost like a twisted and evil-looking Christmas elf. As it saw me, it gave a grin that was way too wide and full of way too many sharp teeth to be natural.

“Fuck!” I yelled as I yanked down on the steel gate. Before I could get it down all the way and lock it, several more of the creatures poked their heads up from the nearby cars. Another one stepped out from behind the car right in front of the shop—no more than five feet from where I was struggling to get the gate closed.

As I threw my weight against the gate, the nearest little creature leaped forward and dove under the steel gate. Faster than I could react, it latched onto my leg with its nasty little teeth and bit into me.

“Aghhh!” I yelled, falling backward and letting go of the gate inadvertently. The gate zinged right back up, making an even louder sound than it made when I pulled it downward.

“No!” I yelled again, feeling the little monster’s teeth grind deeply into my calf. I fell back against the concrete, and pain jolted up my back and spine as I landed. I saw the rest of the little monsters leaping toward me with their manic, sharp-toothed grins, ready to eat me as well.

Panic overtook me, and I started feeling a strange burning sensation in my chest. Was I having a heart attack, too? In my early twenties? Was I just being royally screwed by the universe and this was all just a sick way to kill me? Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a soft golden glow begin to shine in front of me, and just as the rest of the little monsters were about to make it past the gate, everything just . . . froze.

The little monsters were completely still—some even mid-leap in the air toward me. The creature on my leg stopped grinding its teeth into the muscle. The sounds of screams and yells in the distance had stopped.

I looked down at the glow and saw it was coming from a card hovering and slowly rotating in front of my chest. I squinted at it in confusion. What was going on? The entire world had gone insane! Why was there a card floating out of my chest?

As the card rotated, I saw that it looked like an old-fashioned tarot card. It

was very ornate, and on one side was writing in cursive. Before I could read it, the card rotated. The other side had what looked like a picture of a man with his hand outstretched, surrounded by a golden bubble.

I felt . . . something inside me connect to the card in front of me. I also felt a strange urge that told me I needed to do something quickly or whatever was going on was going to end soon. The sense of urgency I felt overcame my shock, and I reached down and grabbed the little monster latched onto my leg and pulled his mouth open like he was a rabid dog until I could free myself.

Looking up at all the frozen monsters coming at me, I stood quickly and threw the little monster away. The creature was easy to lift since it seemed to be frozen in place like all the others and wasn’t fighting back. I then jumped up, grabbed the gate above me, and yanked it down again. The landing jarred my injured leg painfully, but I gritted my teeth and slammed the gate down.

As I did, I felt whatever had infused me and frozen the creatures suddenly run out. The card that had been floating in front of me stopped glowing and sank back into my chest. Ignoring how utterly freaky that was, I secured the gate and locked it behind me.

As I clicked the lock closed, several bodies slammed against the gate right near my head, and I jerked back in shock. My injured leg couldn’t hold me and I collapsed to the ground again, pain shooting through my entire body as I fell.

Pressed against the steel gate were the creatures, panting and trying to fit their fingers through. Disgusting saliva dripped from their mouths and tongues as they slammed their heads against the gate in an attempt to reach me. Their rabid eyes stared at me in anger and hunger.

“Fucking fuck,” I said to them as I scooted my ass back into the store with my arms as quickly as I could. “You are not real,” I told the creature. “This is some crazy nightmare. The melons were full of psychedelic drugs from some crazy melon-smuggling drug dealer. I am in the cooler right now, tripping out of my mind.”

The creatures did not seem convinced by my arguments and continued to frantically scrabble at the steel gate. I closed the door to the shop behind me, ringing that goddamn traitorous bell once more, and then collapsed back on the cold concrete before beginning to hyperventilate.

I had never been one to have panic attacks, but I couldn’t stop myself from gasping over and over. I tried to slow my breathing but couldn’t stop myself. I kept gasping more and more. Images of the little monster attached to my leg, images of the woman in the car, and images of the giant fucking spider stopped me from being able to relax enough to take a deep breath.

I kept gasping, my panic rising more and more until suddenly everything went white and I passed out.

2460p

 

 

Chapter 2

 

I woke up some time later. I wasn’t sure how much time had passed. Unlike in stories, the memories of what happened didn’t rush back to me all of a sudden. I woke up remembering exactly what the fuck had happened.

Monsters, dead people, something biting my leg! I remembered it all.

Before I could start panicking again, I looked up at the entrance of the store and saw that the little monsters had disappeared. However long I’d been passed out had been long enough for them to lose interest in me, apparently.

Of course, as soon as I realized they were gone, it occurred to me that we had a back door to the shop. It shouldn’t have been open, but I was pretty sure I didn’t lock it after getting the melon delivery this morning. I almost didn’t bother locking it because I liked to take my breaks in the back alley behind the store sometimes.

I was overtaken by an image of that swarm of little monsters—or worse, a big one—figuring out how to open the door and rushing at me through the aisles of the store. It felt so real that I looked behind me, quickly expecting to see something coming for me, but thankfully, nothing was there.

I listened intensely but couldn’t hear anything—not even the screams from outside the store. That didn’t seem like a good thing. I mean, the screaming was bad, but the lack of screaming somehow seemed even worse.

Grimacing, I stood and hobbled my way to the back of the store. In the back was the cooler I had been wasting the day in, a walk-in freezer with glass windows, a breakroom with a sad couple of chairs, a table, a fridge, and a television, and a small metal door leading out to the back of the store. A small metal door that I saw was still closed, thankfully.

I rushed over and locked the door immediately. It was a thick door and had a relatively new lock, so it should hopefully keep out anything trying to get inside. At least it could keep out most normal things . . .

I wanted to go collapse in one of the chairs in the breakroom and try to figure out what the hell was going on, but if I did, I might not get up for a while and the bites on my leg were starting to burn in a way that was a bit concerning.

I hobbled my way to our little drug section and grabbed some bandages and a bottle of rubbing alcohol. I took those with me to the employee bathroom. When I tried to turn on the light, nothing happened, but enough light came in through the big windows at the front of the store that I could see if I left the door open.

I put my leg up on the little employee sink and looked at what that little . . . thing had done to me. The creature’s teeth had pierced through my jeans and sunk into the meat of my calf, but it didn’t seem like it had bitten my shin bone or lower down on my Achilles tendon, which was probably a good thing. The material of my jeans was torn, and bits of it were jammed into the bite marks, where blood slowly dripped out of the wounds.

I started to swoon from lightheadedness as I looked down at such gruesome wounds on my leg, but I could not afford to pass out right now. I might never wake up.

Summoning my resolve—something I didn’t even know I really had before—I unscrewed the rubbing alcohol, and before I could second-guess myself, I poured a good amount of it down my calf.

“Arggggggg!” I let out a muffled yell. I tried to stop myself from alerting anything that might come eat me but wasn’t able to stop myself completely. That hurt so fucking badly!

Refusing to stop, because I knew I wouldn’t be able to continue if I did, I reached down and pulled my jeans up to my knee. The feeling of the material being pulled out of the wounds almost made me pass out, but I pushed through and doused my leg in another round of alcohol. Part of me marveled at the resolve I was displaying, but most of me was simply trying not to vomit all over my wounded leg in fear and disgust.

Grimacing, with tears running down my cheeks, I cleaned the wounds as best as I could. After dousing the bite marks over and over with alcohol, I turned on the sink, very thankful to see I still had running water for now. I rinsed out the wounds several times with fresh water.

After that, I bandaged them up and then hobbled over to the breakroom area and collapsed into one of the chairs.

There, I stared into space. I couldn’t even think clearly. I just stared at the empty room in complete silence. The little breakroom TV that was always blaring some inane daytime TV show was black.

 

800p