“Okay,” she said, making an exaggerated whistle and motioning wildly. “Have you had any customers since I left?”
“Yeah, Mr. Jermyn came in, just like he does every day,” replied Wes as he got up off the floor. “Bought his two lottery tickets and bottle of root beer, just like he does every day! What is going on?”
“Where’s Maria? Or Dwight? Have you seen Dwight?” Wes rubbed his elbow where he had fallen. “No, neither. Why are you spazzing?”
Kim looked up at the large digital clock that was above the far counter that held all the tobacco products. It was only a quarter after seven. Thru-Drug closed at ten. The last three hours would not be able to pass fast enough.
“You saw that fat guy, right Wes?” she said in a quiet voice.
“Yeah…” Wes replied, slowly.
“Angie saw the old lady with me. Maria saw an old man. Only…
only I saw the little boy.”
“What are you talking about?”
Kim gave her head a hard little shake. “I need to go find Maria and Angie. Shit, and Dwight. Just… just don’t leave here, okay? Please?” Wes’s face was unreadable. “Gotcha, Kim.”
Going back the way she had just come, down the aisle of medical supplies, Kim found she was hugging herself. She had put on a long-sleeved black thermal underneath her red Thru-Drug polo, and while she had been fine earlier, she was sweating now. Of course, her gesture was one of psychological comfort not temperature. Realizing how shaken she had become, she paused to pull out her hairband and tie her long black tresses back up in a tighter ponytail. Flicking a loose strand behind her ear, Kim took three more steps to scan down the second perpendicular aisle, hoping she didn’t see anyone surprising.
Anyone, no. Anything…
Something was on the floor, a mess of some kind. It was a few aisles in, between pet supplies and children’s. Something spilled? Kim’s sense of job duty and her innate human instinct to investigate the curious led her to walk forward. Not even twenty feet away, right along the end display of dog collars and matching leashes. Right on the floor where anyone could step in it.
The smell hit her first, thick and warm. A pile of feces had been strewn out, the perpetrator squatting, leaving his mess, and then playing in his own shit. Defecating on the floor in the middle of the store would be bad enough, but that someone would then paint and mold their steaming delight seemed an abomination. The worst offense was the art itself, some abstraction or symbol that struck Kim more horrid than the stench.
She backed away, gagging and eyes watering from the fetid stink, or perhaps from what the befouled lump had been shaped into. A sea of nightmare images washed through her imagination, each one more atrocious than the one before it. This wasn’t the product of ill customers or Halloween pranksters. Some primal, instinctual part of Kim recognized the sigil scrawled in shit and felt her soul desecrated by the sight of it.
Running, stumbling, falling. Kim made her way back to the front of the store. She crawled the last few feet around the corner to bring her head up and find Wes engaged in a conversation with Maria. Wes joking, Maria drinking her diet shake. Kim’s voice wouldn’t come, the sounds from her throat nothing more than choked bleats. She coughed, once then harder.
Get up! she told herself. Holding back an urge to be sick, she pulled herself up by the metal shell that held shopping baskets.
“Holy shit! Kim, what happened?”
Wes rushed over to her, Maria close behind. Kim yanked her eyes off them long enough to gaze at the doors. Something was in the Thru-Drug, something sadistic and perverse, something diseased and hungry. She could feel it now, behind her eyes and low in her stomach.
As she came to these conclusions, a scream tore out from the back end of the store.
“Joyce! Was that Joyce?” asked Wes.
“Ohmigod, what’s going on?” yelped Maria.
Kim looked back to the doors and let out a small groan. Angie stood there now, having appeared out of nowhere, looking nothing less than an incarnate of hell. Her glasses shattered, but the frames still hanging on to her pallid face, her hair was streaked back with filth and her eyes had been gorged out. In the hollow sockets, a visceral blackness oozed like hot tar, the same bubbling and running from her mouth. An arm raised, one that looked irreparably broken, and Kim saw that the liquid blackness squirmed under the skin of her extended digits as well.
Maria had spun at the Kim’s sound of terror, and she too had screamed. However, Maria had then taken off as fast as she could scramble past the cash register counters. Angie’s head snapped with the motion and her arm tracked Maria’s movement. Glittering shards, obsidian-like and sharp, projected themselves from Angie’s stretched arm and toppled Maria into a display of cleaning supplies. The pharmacy tech howled in agony as Angie very calmly glided over to her, those wet black orifices never leaving Kim and Wes. Her neck cracked, head twisting one hundred and eighty degrees to watch them behind her. Retrieving a bleeding, sobbing Maria and dragging her shuddering form along the floor, Kim trembled when she registered that the projectile spikes had been Angie’s own fingers.
“Angie, hon?” Wes tried as she came upon them. “Can you hear me?
Please, you in there?”
No response, no show of any emotion. Still gripping Maria by the collar, Angie tilted her head in the direction of the back of the store. It was slow, but quite deliberate. Neither Kim nor Wes moved. A slight crease in the brow. Angie peered at the space between them and the door and, without warning, violently vomited a massive amount of the seeping darkness. The others screamed, and Kim began to pull Wes away when the discharge started to reform into the symbol she had seen back farther in the store.
Herded by their captor, Kim and Wes did their best to help Maria along. One of Angie’s fingers had punctured the back of her left thigh and walking was near impossible. Mostly carrying her down the aisle, Kim couldn’t help but eye the medical supplies that lined the shelves, but she didn’t dare pause to retrieve anything. Not that it would matter. She had seen the sigil scrawled in shit and felt what it represented. None of them were going to survive tonight, and if anything, she should try for any item on the shelves that would allow her to take her own life as quickly as possible.
Maria continued to bleed and weep, blubbering an occasional prayer while Wes just stared blankly, the shock too much for him to fully absorb. Kim wondered which of them would get slaughtered first.
Rounding the last corner in the store, they found Joyce cowering under a shelf of boxed wine. She was shaking uncontrollably, eyes wide and staring off. The large puddle underneath her form drove home her fear.
Kim’s heart lurched, and she surged forward only to then follow the older woman’s line of sight to the doorway of the stockroom. Kim fell to her knees, a scream lost in the madness she was seeing, and found by Maria behind her.
Once it had been all of them. The old lady, the fat man, the little boy, the elderly man… even a teenage girl and a toddler. Once. Now they had stripped down to their barest, truest forms and all congealed together like animal fat cooling in a frying pan. A single, quivering bulbous entity, it hummed with a black cellulite frequency not meant to be experienced. From holes and digits, midnight rivulets of living corruption writhed and undulated. One had clasped onto the corpse of Dr. Homme by the leg, her skull smashed in, and was drawing it closer to its mass. Dwight was already half-consumed, his legs already devoured and his flabby torso hanging upside-down up of its center. The stockboy’s dead eyes were already twitching with black flecks.
Wes deposited Maria over by Joyce, then helped Kim up as Angie moved almost gracefully over to the hulking monstrosity. With her good hand, she reached into her pocket and pulled out a boxcutter, a tool used so often when on receiving duty. Liquid black eyes turned to examine them all in turn as she extended the blade, Wes’s mouth opening as if he were going to protest whatever action she had in mind. But Angie was no longer “in mind,” and the employees watched aghast as she deeply split open Dwight’s unconsumed belly. The horizontal gash began to bleed, and Angie cut again and again until he looked ready to be disemboweled, a few bits on entrails hanging out. Then, her act completed, she stepped back and lowered head almost reverently.