Eaters (3 page)

Bob whispered, “It’s an allergic reaction, isn’t it? He told me once that he was allergic to nuts.”

Cheryl didn’t think so. Paul’s appearance was too strange for a common reaction to something like peanuts or a bee sting. She shook her head and said, “Check on Mary. See if she’s gotten through. If not, we may have to drive him to the hospital.”

Paul reached up with one hand and grabbed at his tie, pulling it tight like a noose as he tried to yank it off. The futile effort roused sympathy from Lanny.

“It’s alright buddy…we’re getting you some help. You want us to take that off for you?” Lanny rose from his chair and took a step towards Paul then stopped.

They all looked on in horror as Paul’s face began to look asymmetrical with his right eye arching up higher than the left. His gums seemed to recede before their eyes, making his teeth look long and sharp. Then, he snarled and began raking the table with his fingers.

Mr. Schrumer remained oddly calm. “Paul, if you aren’t feeling well, perhaps you should go to the hospital. Someone could take you—”

Paul made a grunting sound then jumped up, knocking his chair over, and lunged towards Schrumer.

Schrumer yelped, holding his hands up in front of his face to protect himself, but the assault never came. Instead of attacking, Paul ran past him to the trashcan in the corner of the office. He dumped it out and fell to his knees then began rummaging through the wadded up papers and pieces of cardboard until he found a dried up half-eaten hamburger that looked several days old. Using both hands, he stuffed into his mouth, gorging on it like a starving animal.

They were all too dumbstruck at this sudden Mr. Hyde-like transformation to react. Watching this monstrous behavior, Cheryl wondered how Paul Dominski had gone from a perfectly normal jerk-off type of human being to something that looked like it had just stepped off the screen at a half price movie theater on Halloween night.
Was he just sick?
Was he on drugs? Had he lost his mind?

When Paul finished the petrified burger, he rose and came back towards Schrumer. He began sniffing him up and down. Schrumer cringed, folding down into his body as he tried to shoo him away with one hand and clutched his chest with the other. Panting, he looked up with a beet red face, and seemed unable to speak.

It took the potential heart attack scenario (and probably the potential of losing their jobs) to light a fire under Bob and Lanny. They rushed over and tried to pull Paul off of him. Paul bared his teeth, growling like a rabid animal as he flailed his arms and tried to fend them off. The struggle ensued for a few more seconds, but eventually the men were able to secure his arms and manhandle him out the door like a couple of bouncers.

As they fought to get him into the restroom and barricade the door, Cheryl approached Schrumer. She was now fully prepared to perform CPR if needed, but Schrumer seemed to recover. He clasped his hands in front, bounced them off his chin, and began to take deep breaths.

“What the hell was wrong with him, Cheryl?”

“I don’t know,” she said as she shook her head. She’d seen some sick people in her day—her mother dying of pneumonia, her niece on death’s door from the flu—but she’d never seen anyone collapse, seemingly die, then go nuts like this.
What was it she’d heard on the news? Something about an epidemic? Did Paul have it? Were they all exposed now?

She sat down next to Schrumer and patted his hands. “Are you alright? We thought you were—”

“Having a heart attack?”

She nodded.

“No, just an anxiety attack, I’m afraid. Picked the wrong morning to forget my little blue pill.”

“I didn’t know…”

He shook his head as he patted down the pockets in his tan sports jacket. “Nothing you need to know about, my dear. We’ve all got something…” He found the bottle and dispensed a little blue oval. “I’m going to get some water. Why don’t we break for lunch until the ambulance or the police or whoever comes to take away that lunatic?”

She agreed. Thanks to her busy morning, she hadn’t had anything more than a cup of coffee, and the butterflies in her stomach had calmed enough now to reveal the rumbling.

She stopped by Mary’s office and saw her cradling the phone on her shoulder.

“It’s the weirdest thing. It just rings and rings. Nobody answers.”

“We should go online, see what’s going on. I heard there was some flu going around. Maybe they’re overwhelmed with calls.”

Mary shrugged. “I’m thinking of leaving and getting my kid from school. If there’s something bad going around, he should be home.”

Cheryl asked her to stay on the phone for just a few more minutes to try and get through. When she turned to leave, she saw Paul standing in the hallway blocking her path. His hands stretched across to each wall, and he leaned forward, leering at her.

Lanny rushed up behind him. “We couldn’t hold him. He forced his way out.”

She glanced from them back to Paul.

Paul? Was that really him?

As he snarled at her, she saw that his face had changed even more dramatically. His skin had turned gray, and it looked like he’d been tearing at it with his fingers. The flesh was peeling away underneath his eyes, and underneath the flaps of skin and blood, she saw the white of bone.

This wasn’t Paul anymore. It was something else.

He rushed towards her, and she held her hands up in front of her face and screamed. But, instead of attacking, he ran past her…and out the front door.

They watched as he continued across the street, nearly getting hit by a passing utility truck then disappeared in the dense stand of trees at the edge of the park.

Bob walked over and put a hand on her shoulder. “Well…I guess we can tell Mary that the patient has left the building. You okay?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I think so. Just a little startled.”

Lanny hiked up his slacks. “Let’s get some grub. All this drama has made me hungry.”

And that’s that,
she thought. No one’s too worried about Paul…about what just happened…what might be going on in the world. They just needed a Philly cheese steak sandwich and a beer and all would be well. Maybe they thought that Paul had always been just one notch short of going
postal
anyway, and his illness had just tipped the scale.

She waved them off. “Yeah, me too.”

She was relieved when they left and didn’t ask her to join them. There was too much adrenaline still coursing through her veins for her to concentrate on playing bullshit volleyball with them or joining in with the whining about sales figures and quotas.

Normally, she brown-bagged it, but she hadn’t had time to pack anything for her lunch this morning, so she decided to run out for a sandwich. There was a place two blocks away that had hedonistic six-inch calorie bombs that would fill her stomach with enough carbs and fat to put her in a blissful semi-coma for the rest of the afternoon.

She grabbed her purse and walked out the door.

Chapter Three

It had been a little overcast earlier, but it was sunny now. As she walked along the warm sidewalk, Paul’s sudden illness seemed a little less disturbing. He’d always been a bit of a pest, annoying her by stalling her clients’ claims to get his processed faster, and he frequently talked to her cleavage instead of her face. She hoped that he had a long recovery period in a hospital before he came back—
if he came back
. She couldn’t think of anything that would cause his bizarre behavior, unless it was a brain tumor or some rare tropical disease. But that didn’t explain either the rotting, peeling flesh, or the fact that at least for a few minutes, Paul had appeared to be
completely dead
.

She paused in front of the building, looking for any signs of Paul or the strange man that had approached her earlier, but saw neither. Thinking that she’d call Mark and tell him about her interesting day, she flipped up the side flap on her purse and reached for her cell phone. The battery symbol on front was black. After being on for the entire camping trip, it had a nearly dead battery. She walked to her car and hooked it up to the charger, figuring that she’d call Mark from her desk when she got back.

Before she shut the car door, she heard it ring. She leaned back in and looked at the incoming number.
Mark.

She sat in the driver’s seat and answered. “Hi...”

“The Guard called. They want me to come in this afternoon.”

“That sucks. So much for a little more R & R before—”

“I’m not going.”

“What? You have to.”

“Come home.”

“I can’t. I’m working. I—”

“Come home, now.”

“Mark. What’s—”

“This is big, Cheryl. It’s not just some little flu going around. I think we need to get prepared for the worst.”

“Fine. We’ll talk about it when I get home tonight. Right now, I’m starving, and I can’t even think straight. You would not believe what just happened here. Remember that guy,
Paul
, I told you about the other day?”

There was silence on the other end.

“Mark?”

Nothing.

“Hey…if you can hear me…I’ve got to go. Mr. Schrumer just gave us a break before our meeting resumes.”

She looked at the phone. It was dead. She’d lost him.

She set it down and looked at her watch then got out of the car. She figured she had just about forty-five minutes before Schrumer returned to his normal ‘Type A’ personality and got back down to business, expecting everyone to return to the conference room and pretend like it was a normal day.

As she walked back towards the sidewalk on her way to the row of shops that lined the street, she heard shouting in the park. Through the line of pine trees, she saw two police officers struggling to get cuffs on a man lying on the ground. A third one held a gun to the man’s head.

The man was shirtless, wearing cutoff jean shorts and no shoes. His hair was a mass of wild dark curls that bounced around like springs as he resisted the arrest. Even from this distance she could tell that his eyes were bloodshot, and his skin had the same gray pallor as Paul’s had. His mouth kept opening and closing like he was trying to say something, but just couldn’t get the words out. She wondered why they were treating a sick person like a criminal.
Shouldn’t they be strapping him on a gurney to get him to the hospital, instead of trying to haul him off to jail?

Sympathy was not forthcoming as the officer with the gun put his boot on the man’s head. Despite the constraint, the man continued to squirm and writhe, hindering the other officers from keeping his wrists together long enough to clamp on the second cuff.

The man’s mouth kept moving like he was trying to gulp mouthfuls of grass. He stretched his chin out towards a small brown lump nearby, snapping his teeth. Then she noticed a scattering of feathers a few inches away. He wasn’t trying to speak or eat grass—he was after the brown lump. It was the carcass of a bird…a headless sparrow.

Tearing herself away from the odd scene and moving forward, she gave up on trying to understand anything today. She had been so transfixed on the commotion that she almost forgot her mission—procure a sandwich to feed her stomach that was now feeling a bit disturbed. Even if she was feeling a little queasy at the moment, she figured that she ought to pick up lunch anyway, because she was feeling lightheaded from low blood sugar. She could always save it for later…

Unfortunately, it seemed that food was not going to be forthcoming. At the end of the block, she found herself stalled at a crowd of people blocking the sidewalk. Somewhere ahead of them there was the flash of blue and red lights from a police car. She figured it had something to do with the man in the park.

She walked up to a man with a bicycle standing near the rear of the group who was wearing a sporty riding outfit and a long plastic tube on a shoulder strap, “What’s going on?”

“Beats me. I’m trying to make a delivery. There’s a police barricade or something, and I don’t have time for this…”

She didn’t have time for this either.

She decided to shove her way through, figuring that once she was past the crowd, she could skirt around whatever was causing the hold up. “Excuse me…” she said as she tried to use her elbows to gently nudge a path. The people were crammed together tightly, not giving up their position willingly as if they were in line for some big event. Eventually, she managed to angle her torso and clutch her purse close to make herself thin like a needle and pierce her way through.

Nearing daylight at the front, she hesitated as her shoes stepped into something sticky. Each heel clung to the cement like a suction cup, and she had to pull them off with force. She tried to look down to see what sort of muck she’d stepped into, but the close bodies and resulting shadows on the ground prevented her from getting a look.

It took a few more pushes to burst through the edge of the crowd. When she popped out into the clearing, she stopped as quickly as if she’d slammed into a brick wall.