Spring Break Outbreak

By L. G. Merrick
Illustrated by Steve Morris

1.

Because of the plague, we totally figure our hotel will email any second to cancel our stay. But finally that last morning, Mugs says, “Yo party people, check this out!” 

It’s a smiling guy standing on a beach. The caption says blah-blah GOVERNOR OF FLORIDA. A breeze ruffles his Official Governor’s Windbreaker (shit’s got, like, the state seal over his heart or whatever), but that breeze does not budge his politician hair. Anyway he’s so happy, he looks positively aggressive.

“I’m pleased to repeat the virus is not a pandemic in Florida. You can see it’s a beautiful day, the beaches are open, and people are having a wonderful time. Florida, as you know, is the Sunshine State. . .” 

He jokes with voters in bathing suits, grabs hands to shake, kisses a lady’s cheek. The caption changes to FL BEACHES, BARS, HOTELS REMAIN OPEN.

Jenna yells “Yeah girl!” and high-fives me.

It’s not a second too soon, because our college is booting everyone out. Get off campus, the dean emailed, don’t come back. He’s in a panic because he’s old. And like, sure, old people are dying — but that’s what old people do. Everyone our age just gets a cold.

Whatever, that afternoon the four of us speed past Boston on 95, whooping and pounding the roof. I roll down the window and yell into the wind, “Florida is the only state where fun is still legal!”

That’s visibly true. The scene’s grim. All the way to the ass end of New Jersey, signs line the highway, those light-up construction deals? But instead of SLOW, ROADWORK, they blink STAY HOME, STOP THE SPREAD. Couple times we try the radio, only for music to get interrupted. Announcers saying DC is locked down. Telling us now there are, like, four cases where people under 25 had tiny colds but suddenly slipped into a coma — in flippin’ Georgia, where we’re not even stopping! 

“The virus is mutating,” intones a dude from the CCD (or DDC, or DVD). “We believe—”

“Total BS,” Mugs says, switching it off. “Four comas is news? You know how many comas there are every normal day?”  

We bitch about the news hyping everything.

“You know what I’m gonna do in Florida?” Mugs says, jaunty all of a sudden, drumming on the wheel. “Roll me a fat-ass blunt and smoke it with both feet in the ocean.”

“Props to Governor Sunshine,” Ballard says. 

Dreamily, Jenna goes, “I bet Florida has good nachos.”

Midnightish we look for gas in Virginia. The first place is closed. The second place is running the pumps but won’t let us in to use restrooms. 

When that happens in South Carolina too, Mugs and Ballard get fed up and pee vengefully on the bulletproof window. The foreign dude inside gets all hyper and yells through his crap microphone. Me and Jenna laugh, even though it’s wrong. We go around the corner into the dark and squat to pee, side by side. 

“No ladies rooms. What’s America coming to?” she says. “Stupidity is the real virus.”

We watch our car maneuver with its lights out, until it’s facing us where we squat. Then it hits us with the brights. We hear those assholes scream with laughter. 

“As soon as I unzipped, I foresaw that,” I laugh.

She laughs too. “Why are we friends with them?”

Back on the highway, it’s Ballard’s turn to drive. There aren’t many cars. When the sun comes up, finally I feel zonked.

But wow, we wake up when we see that NOW ENTERING FLORIDA sign! Thing’s like a work of art, glistening! And the sun does shine brighter, the second we cross the border.

We check into our hotel and right there in the lobby I am thrilled to witness no less than fifteen shirtless dudes parading abs. Talk about a different frickin planet from dreary old Slangam State College. This week is going to be the circus we deserve after suckoid midterms. 

“Hey tiny,” says a tall cheezer dropping his sunglasses to peer over them at me as he passes by.

“You’re tiny,” I say.

“Ouch. That stings in reverse.”

I laugh. He circles back to chat me up. 

Florida is a dang dream. 

2.

The four of us, me, Jenna, Mugs, and Ballard, merge into a couple other really cool groups. These six girls across the hall from us in the hotel, from Hoyden College Minnesota, they are hilarious and Mugs wants to bone their alpha, Kylie. Then this mixed group all the way from Grutnol College in Idaho, super chill. Cheezer is among them, his name is Del, but I call him Cheezer now and he’s dropped Tiny and calls me Mighty. I didn’t bone him yet. 

Cheezer and me both hate the news but it’s right in your eyes if you put on TV for one minute. The coma thing is spreading, but also? Coma victims are waking up, after like an hour, and running around — so who cares? Why is people waking up causing riots in Atlanta? The world is dumb.

So me and Cheezer start a thing. As soon as anyone turns on TV, we lead a chant of “NO BAD VIBES!” over and over until they turn it off. This chant catches on, too, like, we hear it happening in rooms we’re not even in. 

The most enormous club on the strip is the wildest. It’s called Club Candela, and its animated sign flashes 15 DJs Every Night! / 12 Dance Floors! / Indoor + Outdoor! / 18 Bars! / !!!!!!!! / 5,000 People Party HERE Every Night!!!  We go the first night, and for the fourth night we agree to go back, the whole merged Slangam-Hoyden-Grutnol group. Awesome.

“Samantha’s super sick, back in our room,” Kylie tells us on the line to get in. “Like shivering, and she conked out.”

“Oh no, she’ll miss the fun!” Jenna says. “Is it a coma?” 

“Lotta people sick in my motel,” says some rando with an adam’s apple like he swallowed a coffee mug, “I heard Florida might shut down.”

“BS,” Mugs says. He always says BS. I love it.

Rando does not back down. “Governor’s in a coma. And there’s a problem in Tampa.”

I go, “A problem? Wow, that’s specific.”

Cheezer tells him, “No bad vibes, jackass.”

I lean back into Cheezer for a second. I think, Maybe tonight’s our night. Maybe on the beach!

A cop car roars into the parking lot and two boys in blue jump out and run our way, agitated. Something’s up, but you never know with cops — here to protect, or hassling dicks? Luckily just then security waves us in.

Holy shit it’s super fun.

We zoom around, trying to find the dance floors we liked best last time, one for trance, one for hip-hop, one for Eighties. One has a foam cannon that goes off at midnight, we agree we need to be there. Somebody says cops shut down the door — like, what if we were the last ones allowed in? It boggles the mind. People are going crazy. We see a pallid dude totally passed out on a couch, another on a floor. We see a dazed girl babbling to herself, and she won’t stop touching her face.

“That chick’s on ecstasy,” Mugs says. “I’ll see if she has extra.”

Kylie says, “That’s how Samantha looked.”

I get Jenna alone. 

“Jenna, can I ask you something?”

“Yeah!”

“You ever have sex on the beach?”

“The drink, or the sex? And yes to both.”

This girl kills me. “Okay listen! I’m trying to make a decision. When you did, did you get sand in your cooch?”

At one point Kylie parts ways with Mugs, obviously to make him work harder for it, but as soon as she does, some doof who shelled out for a VIP table macks on her, and she veers off from all of us to escape, onto the deck that juts over the sand. Not that you can see ocean at night. It’s just a deck into black space and you can hear the ocean, if the music lets you. And I’m at the row of doorways onto it wondering if I should stick with Jenna, who wants to stick with Ballard, but I’m looking and thinking I might hang with Kylie, she’s impossibly cute, I can see why Mugs digs her (and incidentally, he’s all as-if-casual wandering across the deck too, like, in a minute he’ll be all, oh, what a coincidence Kylie, we’re both out here). Like, I’m indecisive, but all my options are gold. And I’m just feeling lucky, when some jerk climbs up the deck railing, from the beach below.

Actually, this creep hurls himself over the top of the railing, and smashes down face-first on the deck. People gasp.  

My first thought is good, you deserve that for sneaking in, instead of waiting in line like we all had to. Then I realize his weirdo, loose blue outfit is a hospital gown.

Then he jumps to his feet, fast, looks around and — and he’s wrong. I actually freeze. I never saw an expression like his. Like, wrath doesn’t cover it. And this all happens in a millisecond, everything is happening so, so fast, like behind him another guy comes over the railing, then two girls, then five or six more people. Some but not all wear hospital gowns, but all face-plant spastically and flail back up — and I keep thinking, oh, look at that asshole. That first guy, as he glances around. . .

The crowd backs away. Except Mugs, who’s always buddy to anyone who needs a buddy, going, “Dude, you hurt?” 

. . .the expression on that face isn’t wrath, if you ask me, because wrath means having a big reason to be angry. This is different. This is not really an emotion. Instead it’s like — nature. No reason to it. No emotion. Just nature. A fact. Like a hurricane is a fact. 

Except a hurricane is basically ordinary things, rain and wind, which you know about. The look on this face is nothing ordinary and it will never blow over. I am sure, it’s a hunger that will whirl and whirl and never slow down, because it isn’t hunger for food, it’s hunger for — hate. I see that. It hates, and it wants more hate, and more, and it hates everything, including itself. 

That’s who this guy is on the deck. Hate. 

Same with all the other people tumbling over the railing.

The first guy is very close to Kylie. She is wary, stepping back slowly. He snarls and grabs her head and twists it back and forth. She drops her drink. He twists her head like he’s trying to wriggle a cork out of a bottle. And when it won’t come off — he bites off her nose in a splash of red, and keeps biting her face.

Now, I fucking run.

I run back into the club. 

Only to see the inside crowd surging my way. A wide-eyed mass pressing for the deck. 

I yell, “Stop, it’s not safe!”

And then I realize, they’re running for their lives too. There must be more of those maniacs behind them.

I look to the deck. The mayhem is total. Mugs swings a fire extinguisher at one. Another one tackles Mugs.

“Mugs!”

“Come on!” Cheezer yells, swooping by, grabbing my arm and towing me inside, up a curved staircase.

“Wait! Jenna!”

Halfway up the stairs he lets go. Jenna’s in the middle where the crowds are crashing together, panickers bolting to get out, panickers fighting to get in.

“Jenna, up here!”

Somehow she hears. She breaks through, runs up the stairs to me. Her face is blank.

“Where’s Ballard?” I ask.

Her face stays blank.

The stairs spill us into the VIP bottle-service lounge that Kylie dodged. Private, so you’d think safe, but it has a balcony and they — the hate things — are climbing over that railing too. Flooding in. One gets tangled in the long pink curtains meant to billow artfully beside the balcony and he keeps running, jerking the curtains off their rings, and he runs wrapped in curtains, blinded, a pink chintz mummy spinning, screaming, raking his hands like claws through the air. It’s almost funny, like he wants a laugh — but Cheezer’s eyes are on me.

“Come on, Mighty!”

“Behind you!”

The thing in curtains crashes into him and they go down flailing. Cheezer’s scream is high.

It cuts off, swallowed by growls.

“Jenna,” I cry, grabbing her hand. We dart left.

She is my best friend. I love this girl. We will make it.

We run behind a bar, down a hall, past supply closets, in an employees-only section. The music is only dull thudding here. Somehow the rest is not muffled, the insane screaming melee and the bloody-toothed roar of hate from dozens or maybe hundreds of those things.

We bang through a swinging door into louder air. The floor is flashing squares of light. The Seventies room. The fog machine has made the air a shifting blotch, the blotch is a bright multicolored haze above the yellow and red and magenta light of the floor. “Stayin’ Alive” is the song. And people are dancing. A lot of people. It’s packed. Slow-dancing, like make-out central. It’s hard to see. It’s safe. We’re safe in here.

I clench Jenna’s hand and tow her into the middle of the crowd. She is blank. We can blend in. Or warn people. One by one. Don’t cause a stampede, but get a pack to move with. Safety in numbers.

I tap a girl on the shoulder. 

“Hey. Hey listen.”

Her head tilts to me, limp. She is not slow-dancing. She is dead. 

She is held upright by another girl, whose hateful face is buried in her chest, eating, where ribs have been cracked open, where organs are falling out.

I slip. I hit the light-up floor. The floor so wet. Blood smears look orange when the squares flash yellow, ultra-red when they go red. My hands slide as I try to push up.

A scream escapes me.

The dead girl drops into a lump beside me. 

The feasting girl has dropped her, to look at me. 

I scramble backward, bumping legs.

Half the bodies are dropping now. 

The other half are hate-things turning to see new living meals. Me. Jenna.

“Jenna, run!”

She stands perfectly still and blank and they mob her. I keep diving backward, through legs, in panic so sheer my brain is only white light.

They lunge at me, scrape, grab, scratch. Snarl, descend in wild gibbering. Creatures glossed in blood from scalp to knee, lit red, lit yellow as the squares of the floor dazzle. Their eyes don’t blink, eyes like white holes in the blood masks, white then magenta, yellow, orange. The music is so loud I only feel my scream—

I’m at a door. A swinging door. I’m out the door. In a hall.

I throw a dead body against the door to jam it. 

I race down the hall in tears. Ahead is white. Heaven? No. The Eighties room. I remember white vinyl couches, cool blue lighting, a chromium bar. 

Blood stripes the white vinyl and pools on it. Lasers criss-cross the air like they just don’t care. The song is “Safety Dance.”

There’s one of them in here too. We stare at each other.

One hate zombie, in a half-off hospital gown. 

Outrageous screams filter in, the din of massacre in the other rooms. Between the beats of “Safety Dance” you can hear five thousand murders — but in here, there’s going to be just one. 

He’s coming toward me. Fast. 

Can I move? I cannot. 

His face is hateful under hair so moussed not one strand flutters as he charges. And abruptly I know I’ve seen this asshole before. Wearing an Official Windbreaker. I recognize him, and for a millisecond I fool myself into thinking his rictus is a smile. For a millisecond, I almost believe he has my best interests at heart. He is here to help. He is still the same person now that he was then.

I understand, though, I am about to get eaten. He is the Governor of Florida and there is no reason or emotion in him. His hands reach as he charges. He wants to grab me. Kiss me. Tell me a joke. Hate me forever. So long, Sunshine.

The end