by Platt, Sean
“I know.”
“You don’t know!”
“I know, Carly. We saw it, too.”
“You were here?”
“No, we were … It doesn’t matter. Forget the body. We need to get the hell out of this place.”
Thom felt it, too — like a hand at his back. As a kid, knowing better, he used to fear monsters under the bed. He was too old for such fears, and Rick would have mocked him endlessly if he’d caught Thom in the grips of his delusion.
Although, “compulsion” was maybe a better word. Little Thomas knew just fine that no dead and ghostly hand was going to reach from under the bed to grab his ankle right before his second leg rose to the mattress, but still he couldn’t help but wonder, What if?
It was always best to move quickly just in case.
His feet moved, but Carly’s were dragging.
Their hands parted, and Thom moved to more firmly grip his improvised bat.
“It was right here,” she said.
“The biter? Or the bitten?”
“The bitten. Although …” Carly started to wander. Just a few racks away, but still.
“Carly. Come on.”
“The biter ran after the guy who’d been hitting him after he lost interest in this one.” She pointed at the bloodstain. “I thought I heard him fall down the escalator.”
Carly was at the escalator. Thom couldn’t see the bottom from where he was, but her body language said there was nothing down there, either.
“What happened to them?” she asked.
“Does it really matter?”
It was like she couldn’t hear him. “Why are the bodies gone? I’m sure this one was definitely dead and the other almost had to be. Even if she was somehow still alive, I don’t see how far she could possibly …”
Carly looked around the store with an investigator’s gaze. Then she returned to the bloodstain and knelt down next to it, looking close but not touching.
Thom tried not to see the large chunk of what must be flesh near a wrinkle in one of the befouled dresses. He tried not to smell the air, which reeked of copper.
“What’s going on here?” Carly asked him.
But he never got a chance to answer.
Ten
Radioactive With Abnormality
Thom wanted to scream but couldn’t.
Something was suddenly crawling through the rack next to Carly, unseen and apparently in no hurry.
For a terrifying moment, his mouth refused to work. He couldn’t form words; he couldn’t scream for Carly to watch out; he couldn’t even make his muscles obey, to reach down and pull her back.
For one one thousand, two one thousand, Thom could only gape while his heart slammed tribal rhythms into his chest.
He couldn’t stop looking at the thing. Human, but not human at all. The body belonged to a teenage boy not much older than Brendan, and from what Thom could see, all the right parts were where they should be. The kid looked like he’d slammed his forearm against something sharp because it had bled through his torn sleeve and dried, but otherwise he could have been an upperclassman at his son’s school, no different from any other.
But through that abject normality, something was practically radioactive with abnormality.
The eyes were ordinary — green, Thom thought — but there was no light in them. The mouth was like any other, but it hung open like meat hanging off of a bone. The breathing was all wrong, too; it sounded like something about to expire all alone. The reek on its breath was decay wafting from below the killing floor of a slaughterhouse. This boy, Thom knew, was not a boy at all.
Then a thought occurred to him, and it came in the blink of an eye before action consumed him.
A boy? Carly’s story didn’t mention a boy.
But then sense and strength returned, and he pulled Carly away from the creeping thing that was no longer a boy if it had ever even been one at all. She only saw it once fully upright, and by then it was a demon in the sewer — looking up at her, curious, temporarily bound by the rack it’d been crawling through.
It studied them with a growl. A hideous rattle that portended bones broken loose inside. A phlegmy sound. The rolling, roiling feel of a semi-solid, like Jell-O in the throat.
Carly screamed. She startled, toppling racks, just managing to stay on her feet. Screams came from elsewhere as well, human and horrible. Thom had to assume there were others hiding, seeing this, not having thought to run or finding themselves unable.
“THE DOOR!”
Because there was another one coming.
The screams had rung some sort of dinner bell. The new creature’s scalp was so bashed in, it looked like a bowl of freshly made salsa. Thom thought it might be the biter Carly had mentioned, but right now nothing mattered less in the world.
That door up ahead was the only thing in the universe worth anything to him right now. Carly had taken his point and was preceding toward it, careless of what she had to leap or crash through to get from A to Z.
Someone — a normal man, by the look, rushed the salsa guy from behind. He had a handgun, apparently flouting the mall’s clearly posted concealed-carry restriction. Thom watched the man shout to nab the creature’s attention, then fired three slugs through its chest.
He pulled the trigger a fourth time but elicited only dry clicks.
The slide had locked open but still the would-be savior kept pulling the trigger, now frozen in place.
You should be dead, Thom thought of the thing, bleeding pre-clotted blood onto the patterned carpet. He shot you through the lungs and heart.
But the creature didn’t even slow. It wasn’t fast, but the gunman was so thoroughly baffled, he hadn’t even tried to run. The next bit happened fast, Salsa Head leaning in and biting the man’s nose off, leaving a hole like a fright mask.
Then they were down. On the floor. It didn’t take long for the screams to cease.
Carly was now the one dragging. Thom let himself be led to the door, which she opened like a thwarted nightmare. The sun was bright outside. An exact contrast to the black-as-night feeling inside. The teenage thing was shambling behind, neither slow nor stopping.
If they could just get outside, he thought it might not be able to open the door.
Carly threw her shoulder against it, tossing it from ajar to swinging wide.
She fell more than ran outside, Thom stumbling behind her.
But the door didn’t close; the thing was barreling behind them.
Suddenly they were in the open air with a monster on their heels. In the sunlight, the thing was even more grotesque. Thom could see it wasn’t as whole as he’d imagined. It had scalp trauma, too, and a massive flap hanging behind him atop his hoodie like a second skin — literally, Thom supposed.
He couldn’t tell if it was scalp hanging from above or skin from between his shoulders, raised to drape over. The blood, from the rear, was immense. How were they still walking?
Thom’s feet betrayed him. His stumble gave way to a fall. Carly’s legs caught up with his and then they were on the concrete, the slowly advancing boy now bloodying the ground just a few feet away. It looked hungry — mouth open, teeth bared, with a vacant, ravenous expression.
It was closer.
Closer.
Until something new burst through the just-closed mall doors behind them and ran hard at the monstrosity.
Thom thought it was another of them (a fast one, and now they were really in trouble).
But it was his father.
Rick, unlike Thom, had chosen a real weapon — and, also unlike Thom, was prepared to use it.
He held an axe like the one from earlier. The fireman variety: big, long, red, and with a spike on the rear to counterpoint the blade on the front.
Moving like a man thirty years his junior, Rick swung the weapon in a balletic arc. The spike end buried itself in the creature’s skull with a crack that sounded like dropped plaster.
All movement instantly stoppe
d.
The thing became a sack of laundry. It fell in a pile, untidy with the axe like a handle for its brain.
Then Rick looked at Thom and Carly, standing over them like an action hero. “Don’t you two know anything? You have to hit them in the head.”
Ambulatory Corpses
Rick brushed one hand against the other in a gesture of tidy completion, then reached out for Carly.
As Thom followed her up, he noticed her limp for the first time. They’d been in such a shambling rush to get out of the mall that he hadn’t seen. It wasn’t big, but enough to throw off her natural stride.
He took her from Rick and walked to a short retaining wall, where they both sat. He noticed with relief that Brendan had made his way around to the Macy’s exit as well. Must’ve been following their dot on the GPS.
Their respite would be short. Thom had to keep reminding himself that they still didn’t have Rosie and would need to find her — not eventually, but within minutes. Remembering the remaining task on their collective plate would require constant effort. It was beyond tempting to wait for the ambulances, then let themselves get cared for. Carly could get her ankle taped, and some kind EMT could give Brendan hot chocolate and wrap him in a blanket.
But that fantasy fell apart almost immediately.
Why would EMTs be driving around with hot chocolate?
It always looked so nice when they did it onscreen. Life could stand to be more like TV sometimes.
He looked at the mall, and the more-or-less empty parking lot into which they’d emerged. The body of the boy-thing, still with the axe in its skull like a high-fashion hat, was facedown between them and the building. Blood pooled all around it, but there didn’t seem enough for a cranial axe wound. Head wounds were supposed to bleed like a bitch.
So maybe a little less like TV, in this particular case.
With his mind alive with terror and a sense they’d just managed the nearest of misses, Thom made himself breathe more slowly, with a serious attempt at making a return to center. So much had just happened, and all of it so fast. None of it made sense. It would take Thom days to assimilate all he’d seen today, and probably the rest of his life to so much as try and forget it.
Carly winced as she shifted on the wall.
“Did you twist it?” Thom asked.
She shifted and he saw blood. Not a lot, but enough to come through her jeans in a rash of small spots. He reached down and touched the denim. Carly winced again.
“More than twisted,” Thom said.
“The guy I mentioned, with the bashed-open scalp? When we first met, he sort of grabbed me.”
Thom raised her pant leg. She was wearing those micro-socks that vanish into the shoe. Her ankle showed skin whenever she shifted, and that was where Thom now saw a semicircle of flat, slightly arced wounds.
“Did he bite you?” Rick was standing above them again.
When Thom took Carly to the wall, Rick and Brendan had paired off. They’d been chatting with animation, and all Thom could think (yes, even now) was that they were encouraging each other. Bad influences, the both of them.
“Something did,” Carly said.
Rick moved closer. He examined the wounds, then stood with a strange expression. Brendan was watching. Rick noted it, then broke his stillness, waving for Thom and Carly to rise. “Come on. Don’t be a wimp.”
“Rick, she’s—”
“We need to find Rosie, Thom,” his father interrupted.
“I know we need to find Rosie,” Thom spat back.
“Can you walk okay?” Rick’s ears seemed to cock, so Thom cocked his as well.
There were too many sirens. Some were east and some were west, and in each direction Thom thought he might be able to make out two or three separate sources. They were standing on a slightly elevated spot. Down on the road, Thom watched a fire engine and an ambulance pass the building without turning in.
Where were they all headed?
“Yeah. But if someone could bring the car around instead …”
Thom was about to say sure, but Rick was already shaking his head. “We need to stay together.”
“I can protect them, Grandpa,” Brendan said, coming alongside them. He was getting so tall. Already longer than Carly, and now Thom saw that his son’s height was climbing closer to Rick’s. “Dad, let me have your pipe.”
Thom realized he was still holding the thing, and with some degree of surprise. He remembered doing a lot of things inside that had required at least one hand (opening doors, pushing racks aside) and was pretty sure a few had required two. Like holding Carly’s hand while opening doors and pushing racks aside.
Was he wrong about that? He wanted to audit his moves action by action, to follow the fencepost’s path through recent history. Maybe he’d tucked it under his armpit.
“Dad.”
“No, Brendan. You are not playing guardian so your grandfather can play valet.”
“He’s right, Brendan. Like I said, we stick together.”
Rick was on Thom’s side, but something about the exchange still managed to snap his final straw. He just said no. Why did Rick think he got the final word on where his grandson went and why?
“Where the hell did you go?” Thom demanded, staring at Rick.
“What?”
“Where did you go? You were supposed to be eating yogurt. The three of you. Sticking together.”
Rick looked incredulous. “In case you didn’t notice, something happened between then and now.”
“Oh, please, Rick,” Carly said, remembering that she was supposed to be pissed. “You ran off before anything even started! You decided you wanted to run toward the commotion rather than away, just like always, and who cares if you promised not to?”
“I don’t think I promised that today,” Rick said.
“Don’t get technical with me.”
“You were watching us, Carly. When I got up, I just assumed you’d see it. When you didn’t stop us, I assumed it didn’t bother you.”
“And don’t gaslight me, either! You know I didn’t see you go, because you didn’t just leave. You snuck away!”
“Is it my fault you weren’t paying attention?”
Carly’s head tilted from one direction to the other with her shifting expression, moving from listening to scowling, as in Don’t start this shit with me.
“Okay, okay,” said Brendan, their unlikely peacemaker. “Fighting won’t change anything.”
It was the wrong tactic, only reminding Thom that he was pissed at Brendan as well.
“Fighting won’t change anything? Is that why the first thing you did when we saw that crazy woman in the hallway—”
“Which crazy woman?” Rick asked.
“The first one!” Thom snarled, putting such rancor on the words that Rick should, unless he was stupid, know quite clearly that the answer had no follow-up.
“I was trying to help, Dad!”
“Did I tell you to help? Didn’t I tell you it was a job for the guards?”
“Oh, come on, Dad. You saw how much the guards helped.”
“What does that mean?” Carly asked.
“Nothing,” Thom said.
“Don’t treat me like a child!” Carly yelled. “I asked you a question!”
“Okay. Okay.” Now Rick was the one waving his hands for a ceasefire. “Doesn’t matter. Let’s all just calm down.”
“Calm down?” Carly spat.
“Yes, calm down.” Rick sounded more rational and more lucid than he had in years. As if combat was calling the elder out of retirement. “Let’s not get all pissy with each other just yet. That comes later.” He glanced down at Carly’s ankle. “A lot comes later.”
“What?”
“A little kindness is in order,” Rick continued. “This is everyone’s first zombie apocalypse.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Despite what they’d been through and despite the fact that their quest wasn’t over yet and they remained
one fragile person short, Thom still found a moment to bury his face in his open palms.
Carly shook her head. “Please, Rick … don’t start.”
But Rick looked incredulous. “Are you kidding me? What needs to happen before you’ll believe me?”
“Believe you?” Thom said.
“Yes, me! How long have I been warning you?”
“Dad …”
“Just … just forget it, Rick,” Carly said.
“Do you think this is just people going nuts for shopping? Treating the mall like it’s an even Blacker Friday?”
“No, Dad, I think a few sick people …”
“Sick!”
“I believe you, Grandpa,” said Brendan, moving closer toward the knot.
“Oh, great.” Thom shook his head, exasperated.
“You know what?” Rick took a beat to cast a subversive glance at his son. “Take my axe.”
Thom stood and snatched the axe before Rick could hand it to Brendan. He was inches from his father’s face, two men staring one another down as if seconds away from the first punch in a bar fight.
“Oh, so you want the axe?” Rick asked. “You want to be a man?”
“What’s that mean?” Carly asked.
“It means he’s not happy enough that his grandson went after one of those things instead of staying back like I told him to,” Thom answered. “Your influence, Dad. Your doing.”
Brendan was insulted. “Hey, that was my choice! Someone was being attacked and I wanted to help!”
Rick slapped him on the back. “Good for you, son. Not enough bravery in the world. Not enough heroes.”
“He’s fourteen!”
“Damn right — he is fourteen!”
“You’re not the only one with wisdom here, you know,” Thom told his father. “Maybe I’ve got some, too. Maybe I know a thing or two. Maybe — just maybe — I’ve gotten along so far in life just fine doing things my way instead of yours.”
There was a moment in which Rick seemed like he might attack the premise (perhaps Thom wasn’t getting along fine; he might just be wrong about that), but then the argumentative expression left his hard, rough-skinned features. And again he looked at Carly’s ankle before returning his attention to Thom.