Rick nodded.
“It wasn’t until I was halfway here that I saw that Sheriff Conklin was running along with me,” Fred continued. “When we got to the parking lot here, there were more of them. I panicked and ran in here. Conklin went the other way, toward the Blockbuster. I haven’t seen him since.”
Rick told him what he had found near Main Street. Fred’s features were grave, as if already prepared for the news. Still, he appeared a bit surprised. “I wonder how he got back to Main Street?”
Rick didn’t have an answer to that mystery.
Fred looked at him with his empty gaze, the confirmation breaking through. “All dead. All of them…”
Lee took over the narrative. “When Fred came in he was screaming about monsters, I thought I knew what he was talking about. We’d been seeing these Clicker things and we were inside watching them. They never really came that close to the mall, just sort of wandered around in the parking lot and went off into the woods. After a while it got real quiet. We all went out to take a look and that’s when Fred started running toward us with his rifle from the beach screaming about monsters. Missy, Barbara, Charley, Anne and myself headed toward the store. I saw Annette and got her into the store with us.” His features furrowed, as if trying to remember important details. “There were still people all over the place, kids jumping into their cars to rush over to see what all the excitement was.”
“I kept telling them not to,” Fred broke in, his features still blank and grave.
“By then a young couple, a couple of kids, had come through and yelled that there were these things, just as Fred described them, raising holy hell,” Lee continued. “I grabbed Missy and herded her into the supermarket as a bunch of people were on their way out. We stood in the store near the magazine racks that overlook the big plate glass windows and looked outside. By then the place was mostly deserted, people had left to go into town to see what was happening…” Lee shrugged. “I don’t know what happened to them. I pray for them, but I think they’re dead. All I know is when I saw those things, those that were left—me, Missy, Fred here, Annette, and Charley and Anne along with Dr. Jorgensen and Barbara, who’d just gotten here—we all went to the back where the freezer was. Fred found a metal bar to lock the door from the inside, and we just sat in there and waited. Till now.”
Rick took this all in. He had his run-in with Sheriff Conklin around…four? Five? He tried to remember what time yesterday he met Janice. He’d left the house around one for his walk, met Jack at—
Jack! Where was he? Rick went over to Glen Jorgensen, who was inspecting Bobby. He looked up at Rick as Janice smiled up at him. “Bobby seems to be doing fine,” she exclaimed happily.
“Yeah,” Bobby said. “Dr. Jorgensen said I was almost as fit as a fiddle.”
“And he’s absolutely right,” Rick said. To Doc Jorgensen: “Have you seen Jack?”
Glen shook his head, trying not to display his thoughts for Bobby to read. “Afraid not.”
Rick was alarmed by this fact. The last he’d seen Jack Ripley was when Conklin had taken him to jail. Janice told him that Jack later left to find Glen Jorgensen in the hopes of the physician talking sense into the lawman. Had he ever gotten to Glen’s? He posed this question to Dr. Jorgensen as the physician joined him, Lee, and Fred near the door. “Yes, he did get to my place,” Dr. Jorgensen said. “Only I didn’t want to upset Bobby back there.”
“Did something happen to him?” Rick’s stomach felt empty with dread.
“Hold on, hold on, one thing at a time.” Glen Jorgensen looked amazingly calm for someone who had seen and been through so much in the last twenty-four hours. “I was upstairs in my little attic study when I saw the beginning invasion. Jack did come and I somehow guessed he was coming to see me. I went downstairs to open the door and…” He related the story of ushering Jack upstairs, their vigil at Glen’s attic window, their conversation, and Glen’s theory of the origins of the Clickers.
“We saw the Dark Ones converge and start coming up the street, finally coming to the house, but they never came to the door or tried to get in. We watched everything from my window and telescope. Finally we ventured out about two hours ago when the storm lifted. By then they were heading back to the ocean.”
“So they did go back into the ocean, then?” Rick asked.
“Oh, definitely. I watched them. They started diving into the water pell-mell as dawn became light. I think they have an aversion to the light due to their living in the ocean. When they came up yesterday, remember, there was a raging storm, and the clouds were extremely dark. Almost black. Remember?”
Lee and Rick nodded.
Glen continued his narrative. “Anyway, when I knew they were all gone, we went outside. We got into my truck and headed straight here. I didn’t want to risk going to the shore even if there might have been survivors; would have been too risky for me if a few of the Dark Ones had stayed on shore and hidden away in houses. Then if I was killed, what use would I be to any survivors? Anyway, we came here and started hunting around in the stores and finally came here, into the grocery store.” He grinned, looking at Fred. “I was walking up and down the aisle, calling ‘is anybody here?’ when Fred opened the door of the freezer. I’ve been here for the last few hours.”
Rick couldn’t stand the excitement. “And Jack?”
“Jack wanted to take the truck and try to head south by the secondary roads,” Glen said. His features became grave. “He said he knew where there was an Armory Post near Fort O’Brien. We had been talking about Fort O’Brien last night. It was the site of the Lost Village incident in 1605.”
Rick had no idea what he meant by that, and he pressed on the subject of Jack. Glen shrugged, as if at a loss for what happened. “I told him it was a stupid idea, that we would be better off in here, but he insisted. I was afraid my truck was the only vehicle we had, but Fred told me he had a car out in the parking lot in good working order and Jack seemed to take that as a yes. I was still holding the keys to the truck in my hand and he snatched them from me and headed outside. I went after him but Lee and Fred held me back. I was furious.” For the first time Rick saw the anger surface in Glen’s face, his eyes clouding over in anger. And then just as quickly, the physician got himself under control. He shook his head ruefully. “Jack got into the truck, told us he would be back with help, and took off. That was two hours ago. We haven’t seen him since.”
There was silence for a moment among the men. From behind them in the farther recesses of the freezer, the women were clucking over Bobby and amongst themselves.
Glen broke the silence. He motioned toward the middle-aged woman. “Annette had a mild case of shock and I treated her for it. Had her lie down and take a nap. She seems stable enough now to move her. Everybody else here is fine.”
Lee picked up where they were thus far. “We were planning on going back to Glen’s and holing up in his attic again where we could see everything, being he’s got a radio, guns and the medical facilities if somebody needs it. He went outside to check things out when you pulled up.”
Rick turned to Glen. “Guess we’ll probably have to put off going back to your place for another day.”
From beyond the big steel door of the freezer, the Dark Ones began crashing through into the supermarket.
* * *
They sat huddled against the back wall of the freezer as the Dark Ones burst through the supermarket. From inside the freezer it sounded like the store was being torn apart by a tornado; the sound of shelves being knocked down, canned and boxed goods being spilled to the floor and plundered, reached their ears from within the locked confines of the freezer. The destruction grew closer, and for a good ten minutes the sound of a serious destruction—rumblings, tearings, crashings and the wet sounds of ripping and chewing—reached their ears, peppered with guttural roars. Rick assumed they’d hit the meat department and were consuming T-bone steaks, ground beef, and chicken. The sound of destruction and pillaging m
oved from the meat department and spread to other parts of the store.
Through it all, they remained quiet. Rick stood against the wall, Janice at his side, holding her while she held onto Bobby, who had his arms wrapped tightly around his mother’s waist. Glen Jorgensen, Barbara Schob and Lee Shelby were on either side of them, Melissa Peterson cringing against the noises outside. Lee put a comforting, fatherly arm around her and she drew close to him. The others sought comfort from each other in their own way, Charley and Anne clinging together as couples will do, Fred and Annette standing by the corner, both of them equally rigid. Nobody made a sound or moved a muscle. The Dark Ones didn’t appear to realize that they were in the meat locker, and to make the slightest noise or move about to cause their own commotion might alert them. Rick had explained his reptile/dinosaur theory to them briefly while they assembled in the rear of the meat freezer. They understood the concept clearly. They remained as quiet and still as a mouse about to be attacked by a snake.
And beyond the locked door of the meat locker, the destruction of the supermarket by the ravaging Dark Ones continued.
Chapter Twenty-Six
They’d started up from Boston two days ago on October 21 and the weather had been great; clear skies, brisk winds, temperatures in the mid-sixties. By the time they reached Vermont it was raining, and Brenda told Gladys that maybe they should pull over and spend the night in Lewiston, Maine once they crossed the state line. The radio said the storm was going to be bad and Gladys was inclined to agree. The two women and their sons had taken a vacation from their jobs at Blue Cross to spend a week at Brenda’s mother’s cabin in Maine. They needed it; both of them were mid-level executives in the company, and were the two most successful African-American women in the organization. Brenda and her son came up to Maine every season, and Gladys had never been and wanted her son to experience what life was like in the great outdoors. All the boy really knew was the streets of Boston, which she didn’t want him experiencing any more than he had to. He was twelve going on thirteen and in the seventh grade. Both women had taken their sons out of school this week for the trip, hoping to bond closer to their offspring and each other.
Both boys had been friends for a year now, and hung out together all the time. Brenda and Gladys, on the other hand, had been friends for the last three years, lovers for the past nine months. If the boys knew what their mothers did while they went off and did the kind of things pre-teenage boys did together, they never brought it up.
They’d stayed in Lewiston in separate rooms, boys in one, women in the other. The boys stayed up all night watching cable TV while the women sat up and talked and made love.
The morning of October 22 had dawned bright and sunny, and they rose late. They took in breakfast at a Denny’s on Interstate 95 and as they were leaving to go back to the hotel and pack, Brenda motioned to the sky overhead. “Looks like it’s clouding up again. Maybe we should check the weather report before hitting the road.”
Gladys agreed.
By the time they reached their hotel the sky had been spitting big, fat drops of rain. Gladys turned on the radio and flipped across the FM band, finally finding the weather. “The storm that brought nearly five inches of rain along the coast of Maine yesterday and last night is expected to return today, bringing hurricane conditions along the entire eastern seaboard that should last till tomorrow…”
Gladys turned off the radio. “Maybe we should stay here another day. After all, we have at least two weeks.”
That much was true. Gladys was Brenda’s boss at Blue Cross. When your boss was also your lover you could get away with anything.
So they’d stayed. They watched the clouds roll in across the horizon, ordered out for pizza late in the afternoon, watched TV with the boys as the storm thundered outside. The boys went to their room at eight to play
Damon’s portable Mortal Kombat game, and the women took a bath, ending their foreplay in bed where they made love again for hours.
Gladys was up early on the morning of October 23 getting dressed when Brenda woke up. She rose slowly, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. “Is it still raining?”
“No,” Gladys said from the bathroom. “It’s stopped but it’s still cloudy outside. Weatherman says it’s not supposed to start again till later this afternoon, so if we wanna get going we better go now.”
“Girl, you better believe it.” Brenda headed for the shower to get ready.
They were on the road by eleven. They had another four hours to go by Brenda’s estimation, and she tried to make the best of it. Halfway up Interstate 95 they were forced to take a detour down a secondary road due to flooding. Brenda cursed under her breath as she maneuvered the Blazer over the bumpy road.
In the back seat, Damon and Terrence played Mortal Kombat, exclaiming with delight whenever one of them chopped the other one’s head off or ripped his guts out. God, but kids were little psychopaths nowadays. Gladys gave her a warm, understanding smile, as if reading her thoughts and agreeing with her. Brenda smiled back. In just a few hours they’d be at the cabin and they could unwind, but for now she had to keep her mind on the driving.
An hour into the drive they hit Route 1, another secondary road and another detour. They pulled over and consulted the road map; Interstate 1 skirted the coast and went through Harrington, Jonesboro, Fort O’Brien, and Phillipsport. Mother’s cabin was ten miles north of Phillipsport, a two-hour drive according to this map. She put the map in the glove compartment and turned onto Route 1.
An hour later it began to rain. By the time they reached Phillipsport it was coming down hard. Brenda had to turn the windshield wipers on high and turn the headlights on. The wind made the rain beat down even harder, blowing great sleets of water on the road. She slowed down, cruising slowly down Route 1, just skirting Phillipsport. Gladys was looking out the window when Brenda yelled “shit!” and begin to slow down.
They were approaching another roadblock. The detour sign stated that the next ten miles of Route 1 was closed due to flooding and to proceed through Phillipsport and take Route 191. Gladys rested her hand on Brenda’s thigh. “We’re almost there.”
“I know,” Brenda said. “This is just getting to be a real pain in the ass.” She made the exit and headed through Phillipsport.
“Do you know your way to Route 191?” Gladys asked. The Mortal Kombat game made a bleating noise and an eruption of cheers rose from the backseat. Gladys turned to the backseat. “Shut up back there.”
“Not really.” Brenda answered. They were approaching a large shopping center, a big-city, suburban open mall. A few cars dotted the parking lot. Brenda swung the blazer in and drove through, headlights picking out a Blockbuster Video Store, a Barnes and Noble, a Lucky Supermarket. The usual strip mall fare. “Maybe we can get directions here. Besides, I’ve gotta pee.”
They pulled up to the supermarket, headlights flashing in its darkened interior. “Looks like the power’s out in this place,” Gladys said, looking outside curiously. It was nearly three o’clock and it was already almost dark. The lights in the parking lot weren’t on at all.
Brenda pulled the car up to the parking stall closest to the store and killed the engine. She swung to the back. “Okay guys! Pit stop. Last time to pee before we hit the road again.” They got ready to clamber out in the rain.
* * *
It had been quiet outside for the last few hours and they all stood at the door and put their ears to the wall to listen. The muffled patter of raindrops hit the roof above them and they could make out the sound faintly outside. There were no other sounds.
They’d spent their time in the freezer huddled together in the rear of the compartment. There was a brief sharing of stories and experiences as to what brought them here. Fred, Melissa and Lee’s stories were already known, as was Glen’s. Barbara had stopped by on her way home from Glen’s to Shelby’s Drug Store to pick up a bottle of Excedrin. She’d been having such horrible headaches lately and they were the only thi
ng that gave them any kind of relief. Lucky for her, she’d been at Shelby’s Drug store when the Clickers came marching up the promenade.
Annette Berger had been walking back to her car after a trip to Blockbuster. She’d seen the Clickers come and ran into the video store. She’d watched in horror as the large crustaceans swarmed over the parking lot, heading into the woods. Finally she set foot outside with a few other people and was about to head to her car and go home when the other things had come. Had Lee Shelby not been herding Melissa, Barbara, and Fred out of the drug store and down to the Lucky’s, who knows what would have happened to her. She saw them, changed direction and darted in the doors after them. Charley and Anne Denning had been grocery shopping when all the commotion broke out; they joined other gawkers at the magazine rack and watched in horror as the large, crustaceans made their way into the shopping center.
After that was out of the way the conversation broke up again into various circles; Rick found himself in a conversation with Glen and Lee about Glen’s theory of the creatures. Fred talked with Charley and Anne about hopefully getting out and escaping through one of the back routes he knew of—they could take Route 73 to a dirt road in Cumberland County that would take them right to the Interstate. Melissa stayed with Janice and Bobby, who were joined by Barbara and Annette. Annette had just come around from her slight shock. Glen examined her briefly, smiled and patted her shoulder. “You’re doing fine,” he said. “How do you feel?”
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