The story below is a work of fiction.
My gym reopened. Waiting in my car, in the parking lot. Should I go in. What if it’s a trap. Owners now lead a COVID-19 cult, worshipping a pestilence god only found in Dungeons & Dragons campaign manuals, luring human bodies back through their doors to trap and infect them for eternity. There are people in there, though, acting like quarantine never happened. All dudes.
What if it’s an illusion. The moment the door shuts behind me, everything wavers and turns into an utter hellscape like that one scene in Event Horizon. Sickening steamy green miasma pouring through the vents, oozing down into acidic puddles. An entire high school soccer team forced to grind their ass cheeks raw against the astroturf like dogs for a moment of relief from their choleric bowel movements, while monstrously large coronavirus molecules roll after them. Those dozen Indian fellows who come in early in the morning to shoot hoops, formerly gregarious with their inside jokes, now clamor desperately to break through the chained door to the court before the reanimated corpses get to them. That one guy who always wore a breathing mask on the treadmill is now a tribal warlord, giant axe strapped to his back, cracking a whip at a troop of hapless elderly walkers who just wanted to do a half mile before buying new sheets at the Macy’s down the street. A techno-demon, his bottom half a mess of circuit boards and live wires, lurks in a shadowy corner and telepathically activates his vampire paramedic horde, who then emerge from interdimensional portals, armed with oversized novelty syringes. They plunging the syringes into any living thing they can find, infecting them with a highly potent mutagenic-hallucinogen. Gym bros, forced by a mysterious pathology, to constantly do warm up sets on the bench press, never adding the weight they want. Maybe they suffer the most.
I’ll wait until a woman goes in. Or leaves. Women–the half of us with a safe enough testosterone level to avoid stupidity overt risk-taking. But what if she’s part of the illusion. I’ll never know. The safest, most logical course of action is to ram my car straight through the glassy front entrance so I’ll be able to back up quickly enough to escape. If I don’t see a woman in five minutes, that’s my Plan B. One of them comes up and is about to open the door but her phone rings. Of course. Husband doesn’t know where the baby wipes are. Her hand slips from the door handle. The discussion agitates her. He’s divorcing her for burning the waffles too many times or rolling her eyes at his sports talk when the guys are over.
Someone exits but it’s a dude. What the hell. I start my car back up; Plan B it is. I’ll wait until she wanders off in her conversation before crashing through but I’m thinking I’ll need to ask her for some hand sanitizer before I head in.
Artwork stolen from Ally Burke.