by Darcy Coates
She held it there for a moment, watching as its dead blue eyes stared up at her, then she choked. Something thick and cold was filling her lungs. Carol retched, bent over the sink, and vomited a mouthful of water. She tried to draw breath, but instead of air, liquid filled her lungs.
The doll continued to gaze from under the water, and between gasping, vomiting sobs, Carol thought she saw its lips curve into a slight smile.
She pulled it out of the water and threw it aside. It created a harsh, wet slapping noise as it hit the tile floor, and finally Carol was able to replace the icy water in her lungs with oxygen. At the same time, a stinging ache began across her arm and chest—almost as though she’d been thrown against the floor.
She sank into a crouch beside the sink. It took nearly ten minutes to fully clear her lungs and slow her heart. The doll watched her from across the room the entire time.
At last, when the shaking in her limbs had eased enough that she could stand, Carol went to the doll and carefully lifted it. The eyes had too much awareness in them, and Carol was suddenly struck by the impression that the toy was smarter than she was.
She crossed to the cabinet and retrieved the first-aid kit. Inside was a needle, and Carol took a second to brace herself before pressing the miniature weapon into the doll’s arm, just below its shoulder.
It stabbed through the plastic as though the hard shell had suddenly become soft. At the same time, a sharp, cutting pain sliced into Carol’s arm. She withdrew the needle, her whole body shaking, her mind in shock, and carefully placed the doll back onto the edge of the sink before finding a towel to press against her bleeding arm.
I can’t throw it out. If I throw it out, it will be damaged—maybe destroyed—and what will that do to me?
Carol pressed her hands over her face to muffle her quick, harsh sobs.
It’s going to be okay. Carol drew in deep breaths then picked up the doll with shaking hands. I don’t have to throw it away. I can lock it in a cupboard. Somewhere no one ever looks. It will be safe there. And, more importantly, it can’t hurt me.
“I just don’t get it,” Carol’s father muttered. He was sipping his morning coffee and ostensibly talking to her mother, but Carol felt him sending glances towards her every few seconds.
Her mother kindly nudged a box of cereal in Carol’s direction. “What your father means, sweetie, is we don’t understand why it has to be that one. We could get you a nicer toy if you want.”
“No.” Carol sat at the dining table, her doll propped on the bench beside her. It was dressed in clean clothes and with its curls washed and brushed, though its blue eyes still held the frosty, strangely human glint.
Her father’s mouth twisted. “I don’t like the way it looks. Can’t you leave it in your room while we have breakfast?”
Carol gave her parents a thin, miserable smile. “I can’t. She doesn’t like being alone.”
30
Left Behind
Vivian started awake. A very faint light on the horizon was bleeding away the stars, which meant it would be at least an hour before her alarm went off.
She rolled over to see her husband, Alan, still asleep next to her. His hair needed a trim, and it fell into his face, making him look like a shaggy dog. Vivian brushed the hair away from his eyes, but he didn’t stir.
Something had woken her, but she couldn’t remember what. Some sort of noise… like an alarm.
Vivian pushed herself out of bed and wormed her toes into her slippers before they chilled in the cold night air. She pulled her dressing gown over her clothes and slipped out of the bedroom.
She glanced into her twins’ room as she passed. Kara slept in the left bed, her wall covered in boy-band posters and her bedside table scattered with makeup. Tara, on the right, was surrounded by pictures of horses and veterinary paraphernalia. Sometimes Vivian wondered how much easier Christmas shopping would have been if their interests aligned even slightly.
She moved downstairs to where the grandfather at the back of the hallway ticked quietly. As she entered the kitchen, she caught a glimpse of her neighbour, Mr Richards, standing in his lawn.
Wearing only his socks and underwear, he was looking down the street at something beyond Vivian’s view. She watched him for a moment then filled and turned on the kettle. If it had been anyone else, she would have called to him or gone out to check that he was okay. But Mr Richards had yelled at her daughters while they were playing in the street the previous month, and Vivian still hadn’t fully forgiven him.
As she waited for the kettle to boil, Vivian fished a bag of coffee out of the cabinet below the sink. She normally liked to grind the beans fresh, but the grinder was too noisy to use while her family was still asleep, and Alan became grumpy if he was woken too early.
The kettle reached its boil, and Vivian went to it. As she passed the kitchen window, she couldn’t stop herself from glancing outside to see if Mr Richards was still there.
He was, and so was the elderly lady from across the street, Evie, along with the teenage grandson who was staying with her.
Vivian stopped short, one hand on the kettle, as she frowned at them. They weren’t talking. They weren’t even standing close to each other. But they were facing the same direction, and their chins were tilted upwards as though they could see something in the sky—something that they found too captivating to look away from. Is there a lunar event this morning? A comet, maybe?
They weren’t moving, and Vivian had no desire to go outside, so she turned to the back of the house and went into the laundry room. She emptied the previous night’s washing into a basket and refilled the machine, though she didn’t turn it on. She left the basket beside the back door for when it was light enough to hang it, and returned to the front of the house. This time, her curiosity was too strong to be denied, and she went to the window.
Half the neighbourhood seemed to be out of their houses. She recognised many of them, though a few were unfamiliar. They all faced the sky with slack jaws and intent eyes.
Vivian crossed her arms over her chest. Suddenly, it didn’t seem so important to let Alan have his extra hour of sleep. She ran up the stairs, no longer trying to keep her footfalls quiet, and pushed into her bedroom. The bed’s blankets had been cast back, and the room was empty.
“Alan?”
Vivian moved to the bathroom, but her husband wasn’t there. She turned and saw his slippers were still tucked neatly under the bed.
Rising panic threatened to choke Vivian as she ran to her twins’ room. She wrenched open the door and bit back a choked cry. Two identical beds sat empty. Two very different pairs of shoes lay on the ground, both waiting for their owners to wake up. The twins were gone.
Back down the stairs, Vivian called for Alan, then Kara and Tara, in a final, desperate bid to find them still safely inside. When they didn’t answer, she tightened the dressing gown around her torso and pushed through the front door.
The street was packed. Everyone in her neighbourhood seemed to have gathered on the road at five thirty in the morning, all to stare at the sky.
Vivian looked up. She couldn’t stop herself. She had to know what had captivated them and compelled them to stand in their underwear and dressing gowns in the freezing cold morning.
The sky, still dark and spotted with stars, seemed exactly the same as normal. Vivian searched for any kind of aberration or change without success, then she turned back to the crowd.
She found Alan easily. He was tall and stood nearly a head above his neighbours. She couldn’t see Kara and Tara, though; they weren’t with their father, and the gathering had become too dense to find them easily.
Vivian pushed through the crowd to her husband and shook his arm. “Alan? What’s happening? What are you doing out here?”
He didn’t move his eyes from the sky. He didn’t even blink. But his mouth opened, and he said, in a voice that was very much unlike his usually cheerful tones, “It’s time. Get ready.”
&nb
sp; “Alan?” Vivian shook him more frantically, but she couldn’t break his attention. To her shame, she found herself crying, and she rubbed her sleeve over her damp cheeks as she ran through the crowd.
Back inside her home, Vivian grabbed the kitchen phone off its hook and dialled the emergency help line. She shifted from foot to foot as the phone rang—and rang and rang and rang.
“Come on,” Vivian muttered, gripping the phone tightly in her sweating palms. “Come on, answer!”
The incessant ringing noise mocked her. Vivian couldn’t stop herself from picturing the police station, its rooms emptied of officers as they filed outside to stare at the sky. She dropped the phone and ran back to her home’s front door, intent on finding her daughters and dragging them back inside, if nothing else.
The street was empty.
Vivian clapped a hand over her mouth. She stepped onto her front porch and stared up and down the length of the road, where barely moments before, hundreds of souls had gathered. The sun had just barely breached the hill on the horizon, and its golden light spread across the road. Vivian rotated on the spot, staring at the empty street and the empty houses as she found herself facing the idea of being the last person left on earth.
31
Underhouse
Xavier bit the torch between his teeth as he pulled the gloves on.
His mother stood nearby, hands clasped, looking anxious. “I’m just worried you’ll get stuck.”
He dropped the torch into his hand and laughed. “Gee, relax. I haven’t gotten that fat.”
“You were a kid last time you went down there…”
“There’s plenty of room.” He pecked her cheek then bent down by the door that led into the crawlspace below their home. “You worry too much.”
Before she could argue any more, he lurched forward, through the small doorway, and into the cool, dry air of the section below their house.
Despite his jovial reassurances, the space did feel a lot tighter compared to when he’d made the trip when he was ten. Back then, there’d been room to crawl; now his chest was too deep to allow him anything except scrabbling forward on his belly.
The wooden beams were filled with cobwebs, long abandoned by spiders who had either starved or moved on to greener pastures. The ground was a heavy layer of dust that plumed up every time Xavier shifted. He wriggled far enough into the hole that he could no longer hear his mother’s nervous breathing, then he turned on the torch.
He’d lived in their small, rural property his entire life, but it was still disconcerting to try to remember the house’s layout without the familiar walls and furniture to guide him. He closed his eyes and tried to visualise the route to the workroom, where a new wire needed to be threaded under a wall. The workroom was near the left side of the house, so he turned that way, creeping across the dust and breathing through his nose to keep his tongue clean.
Xavier judged he was somewhere near the back of the lounge room when a large, lumpy shape by the wall drew his notice. It was a backpack, so long neglected that it had accumulated its own layer of dust. Xavier shimmied closer. He recognised the black fabric and red dragon design emblazoned down one side. Memories brought a smile to his face. He was tempted to open it, to search through the familiar contents, but reluctantly, he turned away. He had a job to do first.
In the distance, a small sliver of light marked his destination. A matt of black cables looped down from between the wooden beams, then back up to disappear into the floor several feet away. Xavier wriggled to them then tapped on the wood.
“You all right, love?” his mother called from the room above. He didn’t want to open his mouth and let the dust inside, but he knew she would panic if she didn’t get an answer.
“Fine.”
“Okay, here we go, love.” A wire appeared in the slice of light around the existing cables. Xavier rolled onto his side to grab it, then pulled it down and wriggled to where it needed to be returned to the house, one room over. His mother hurried out of the workroom and into the bedroom, her footsteps shaking down tiny streams of dust to mark where she walked. Xavier waited until she was in position before threading the wire through the hole.
“Got it!” she cried, and the cable was tugged from his hands. “Come back out now, love, and you can wash off all that grime.”
That sounded like a damn good idea to Xavier. It took him a moment to manoeuvre into the right position, then he began dragging himself back towards the exit.
A lumpy shape, not unlike the discarded backpack, lingered near a support pillar to his left. Xavier had initially intended not to look, but his curiosity was too great, and he found himself turning towards it.
A boy, long dead, lay among the dust. The mouth lolled open, showing a withered, blackened tongue, but the eye holes were empty. Blood had run from the cut throat and stained the front of his T-shirt, which had blacked with age then been softened into grey by a coating of dust.
What was surprising, though, was that the body hadn’t decayed. Xavier had expected Chad to turn skeletal in the decade he’d been there. Instead, he had withered and dried—almost mummified. Xavier knew better than to touch it, but he suspected the skin would be firm and leathery if he did.
Thinking back to the summer he’d killed Chad, he remembered the days being almost unbearably hot. He supposed that was likely the cause; the air had been so dry, it had dehydrated the body rather than decayed it. That would explain why there hadn’t been more odour. His mother had only remarked about it twice and never actually gone looking for a cause.
Seeing his bully’s face again after so much time, Xavier felt neither triumph nor guilt. The husk was so far from human that he barely felt anything at all. Still, he allowed himself a very slight, very small smile as he continued towards the door leading back outside.
32
Toxic
Rita groaned and pressed her palms into her temples. The descriptions of melted skin, blinded eyes, and third-degree burns wouldn’t ever leave her, she was sure.
It had seemed like a cushy job when she’d taken it: be the receptionist for a remote branch of Kamadero Manufacturing, one of the country’s largest chemical processing plants. The building was only used for infrequent business meetings. Most days, Rita was lucky to see another human being. Coming from the service industry, she’d thought the desk job felt like a full-time holiday. It only took half an hour to reply to emails and phone messages each morning, and Rita liked to divide the rest of her time up between browsing social media, watching online videos, and playing whatever addictive game was hot that week.
At least, that had been her routine until that Monday, when she’d been given the task of compiling statistics for the company. From what she understood, the job had been delegated multiple times before it had landed in her lap. Rita had no underlings to foist the task onto. She was stuck compiling spreadsheets from the medical reports of forty-eight individuals who’d been involved in a malfunction at one of the warehouses in Mexico. From what she’d gleaned, a distributor hadn’t followed storage guidelines, and the results were horrific. The company was simultaneously trying to keep tabs on the victims and minimise its liability.
She was eternally grateful that no photos had been included in the files. The descriptions were bad enough. She created a new line on the spreadsheet, entered the patient’s name, and began copying their report. Blistered burns over thirty-five per cent of the body. Lost eyesight. Permanent scarring of the facial, neck, and arm tissue. The details were followed by a long list of measurements and severity markings.
Rita exhaled and leaned her neck back to stretch its muscles. Her desk faced the front door of the building, which was a long, hedge-lined driveway leading to the parking lot. An elderly woman, bent double by age and wearing a shawl over her head, shuffled along the drive towards the office. Rita sat up a little straighter. She’d been told the documents were confidential. She was pretty sure it was only a legal precaution, but she still scooped up
the piles and hid them in the drawer at the bottom of her desk.
When Rita looked back at the glass doors, the woman was gone. Rita blinked at the empty pathway. There were no nearby buildings the woman could have gone to, no paths spearing off from the driveway. She’d simply vanished.
The chair creaked as Rita rose out of it. She moved to the door and peered through, searching the path, the hedges, and the lawn surrounding it, but the area was empty.
Did I imagine it? Are the medical reports actually sending me crazy? Rita shook her head and turned away from the doors. The large room felt too quiet for comfort. She switched the radio on and exhaled as it started playing some eighties tunes. I need a break.
She went to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. The kettle’s light blinked on, and it started to heat as Rita put a mug on the bench and fetched the milk from the fridge.
The microwave’s front was faintly reflective, and Rita glanced in it as she passed. She saw her face, her hand holding the milk carton, and the wobbly shapes of the kitchen appliances. And, farther behind her, the cowled figure of an elderly woman hunched against the far wall. A sharp gasp froze in Rita’s throat as she swung around and dropped the milk, but the room was empty.
Her hands shook, and her heart thumped painfully as she stared around herself, scrutinizing the room, then finally looked back at the microwave. She could still see her drawn, tense face in the mirror-like surface, but the woman was gone.
Rita’s feet were wet. She looked down to see the floor was coated with milk from the carton she’d dropped. She ran a trembling hand over her face and went to find a towel.
There’s no way the woman could have gotten into the building, she told herself as she mopped at the milk. The front door desperately needed oiling and squealed whenever it was opened. She would have heard it, even over the boiling kettle and the radio…