Under the Florescent Lights

This is a work of fiction. No real people, places or events were used. Copyright ã 2011 Plot Roach.

Under the Florescent Lights

By Plot Roach

I have to do everything myself. It doesn’t matter if it is paying the bills, putting off the landlord for another week until we can scrape together the money to pay for another’s month’s rent, or handling the icky things like the cat box and sick family members. No matter what task is at hand, it’s up to me to finish it.

I worked in a mall job for nine years as a manager, and while SOME of my employees would do as I asked, most would just muck around until they were finished with their shift and I had to finish the task or face my supervisors and provide an answer for why the project was never finished. It also didn’t help when they were sloppy workers, and I had to constantly go around behind them and straighten up their work. Okay, I’m anal. I get that. But I also know that people go to stores that look nice as opposed to sloppy junk stores that remind them of the mess that they have to face daily at home. That’s the whole point of shopping, right? Going out and pretending that your life is better when seen under florescent lights and brightly scrubbed floors. Thinking that if you can take even a square inch of this perfection home, you can make your life better in some miniscule way.

I put this theory to work at home when I was forced to leave the workforce and raise two kids. I earned more than my husband, and it was a real loss to our finances when we had to depend on his paycheck alone. But he couldn’t be bothered with raising the babies and I was forced to make the necessary cuts in our daily lives to make life bearable, if only under the fluorescents of our dollar store light bulbs.

So I kept the house in pristine condition, raised the kids as best as I could and fought the demon known as debt, sometimes winning a small battle, but never winning the war. My husband spent all day in the trenches of retail (a place I missed greatly for at least there I could pretend that my life was my own), only to return home and play war games on the computer. He acknowledged the children only when their play got out of hand and disturbed his ‘down time’, and only noticed me when I handed him a plate of whatever fare passed for a hot meal that night. I found myself languishing in a type of silent hell, thinking that nothing could get worse than spending a lifetime in this purgatory.

That was when the demons at the door became real, slavering things.

I don’t really know how it all started. And to tell you the truth, when one of them is clawing at your door and trying to eat your face off, it doesn’t really matter where it came from as long as you can hide from it. I heard the news reports of small towns vanishing, leaving nothing but a mystery behind. Then it spread to neighboring cities and the first amateur photographs and videos hit YouTube. They showed sinewy black creatures that looked like panther-human-hyena hybrids snatching an unsuspecting human child and dragging it off into the darkness.

In my need to make sense of the world, I told myself that it was all just some publicity stunt for a new horror movie. Maybe people were just ‘seeing things’. And even if it was real, it couldn’t possibly reach me in my polished little apartment, with my attempt at a perfect little home.

The news alerts flashed across the bottom of the screen during the kids’ morning cartoons, suggesting that everyone stay inside and barricade the doors. I made sure to stock up on the essentials with what little money we had set aside. One night my husband came home pale and shaking, he had seen someone pulled from the streets and into the sewer with one mangled black tentacle. It seemed that the creatures were evolving.

We boarded up the windows and the doors. We counted our supplies and I arranged every pot, pan and bottle in the house to catch as much tap water as possible before the utilities went out. It was only a matter of time, I thought. And all that time, my husband hid from the world, playing his war games until the electricity went out. I, on the other hand, continued to tell myself that it was only a matter of time before our lives would return to normal. I ushered the children into the back of the apartment and double checked our supplies. All this under the safety of the florescent lights, which went out on the third day.

We heard noises from the neighbor’s apartments and even a few from the main hallway. People were being dragged off to their bloody deaths as we waited like rats in a cage.

I woke one day to realize that my husband and the children had eaten through our entire supply of food. “What are we going to do now?“ I asked . “That was supposed to last us weeks if carefully rationed.”

My husband merely shrugged and sat at his dead computer, eating the last of the cornflakes dry out of the cereal box. My children cried.

When the noises stopped I waited a full day before venturing into what was left of our apartment complex. Behind broken doors and windows were the bloodstains of the former residents. I stepped over the carnage and tried not to think of them as human beings anymore as I raided what was left in their pantries. For good measure I took the contents of their medicine cabinets, not knowing what we could use, but hoping that it might come in handy anyway. I stumbled upon a handgun hidden in a box of instant oatmeal and found a handful of bullets under the oats themselves. All of this I dragged back to our apartment, hoping that we could make it through the days and nights until help could arrive or the beasts moved on to the next city.

I never should have brought the handgun back with me, for as soon as my husband found it he began talking loudly and gesturing like one of his damned game characters.

“Be quiet” I hissed, trying to calm the children who were crying loudly. “You’ll bring the beasts right to us.”

“But we have a gun, now. We can defeat them.”

“And do you think a few bullets will do anything to a mass of creatures who can take out a city?” I asked.

“It will keep them back until the government arrives.”

A sadness filled like heart like wet sand. Filling all the cracks and nooks with no chance of ever having room for hope again. “Don’t you think that if the government was going to help, they would have done so before now?” I asked. “We’re expendable. No, it’s worse than that. We’re not powerful, not rich, not needed at all for this society -or what’s left of it. We’re poor, we depend on the country’s handouts for food and medical care. And if they cut us back on small crap like dental coverage and medicine, what makes you think they’ll stick their neck out for welfare trash like us?”

“But we…” he never finished the sentence, for the creatures were at our door. All the shouting had brought them to us. And now they wouldn’t stop until they got what they came for. My husband started shooting through the door, not hitting anything, but making the reinforcements weak. There was a silence, as the creatures ran for cover. But I knew that they would be back.

“See? I sent them running.”

But already I could hear them scrabbling on the floor above our apartment, they were digging through the ceiling and would reach us at any moment.

“How many bullets do you have left?”

“I used them all.”

“Not all of them.” I said. “I saved just enough back.”

“Enough for what?” he asked.

“What do you think?”

“But we can’t. Someone might come and help us.”

“Did anyone come to help the neighbors?” I asked. “That time will never come. So now we need to-”

“Don’t say it. You’ll scare the kids.”

“NOW you’re worried about scaring the kids?”

I gave him the bullets, one for each of us. And he loaded the gun. He pointed it at our eldest son’s head as the boy was distracted with a toy on the floor. It was a multicolored plastic ball. My husband aimed, but the shot went wild as he pulled the gun to the side at the last second. One bullet wasted. One of us would have to live until the creatures tunneled through. “I’m sorry”, he said. “I just couldn’t-”

I pulled the gun out of his hand and shot him in the head. The next shot went to my eldest son who began crying as soon as the first shot had misfired. If I could have saved him the fear of knowing I would have, but I had to work fast. The creatures were right above us and I didn’t know when they would break through. Next came the toddler. I had a fleeting thought of smothering him with a pillow, and saving the last bullet for myself. But I didn’t know how much time I had left and knew that I couldn’t let him be dragged off and feasted upon while still alive. I aimed and pulled the trigger. The noise deafening, I couldn’t hear the creatures, but knew that they were still there, spurned on by the noise. I threw the empty gun to the side and picked up a shard of glass. I didn’t think I had it in me to attempt to slit my throat and bleed out. Just my luck I’d only make myself weak and easier prey.

So I wrapped a section of it in a washcloth, tying it off with the rope cording of my sweatpants to make a handle of sorts. It might shatter on the first impact, or they might kill me before I could even wield it. But I had to try. With my family dispatched, I prayed for forgiveness and a swift end. I readied the blade and the fluorescents flickered to life, highlighting the blood and the bodies of my family as the first of the creatures broke through the ceiling. I yelled at the top of my lungs and rushed forward.

I have to do everything myself.