Mallory had to take action. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She held the air deep in her lungs. She opened her eyes.
She ran for the spear.
Maybe it was the cloud of evil shrouding the canned goods, or maybe it was just Mallory’s mind playing tricks on her…but as she sprinted into aisle 8, she could feel the temperature drop by good twenty degrees at least. A chill prickled through her arms, and when she exhaled the hot air from her lungs, she could have sworn it puffed out in a little cloud. After just a few steps, she heard something rustling from behind the cans. Leaves, she thought subconsciously. Branches. But as she reached down to grab the Spear of Rad, she realized the rustling sound wasn’t leaves or branches. The sound wasn’t a rustling at all. It was a chorus of whispers.
The canned goods were speaking to her.
Maaaaaaallory, rasped a can of Goya mixed vegetables, touuuuuch meeeee.
Put me in your caaaaaart, hissed a can of Libby’s peeled potatoes. I’m an excellent vaaaaaluuuue.
We’re buy-one-get-one, Maaaalloryyyy, whispered a whole stack of Bush’s baked beans. Come clooooser and graaaaasp uuuuuuuus.
An icy hand closed around Mallory’s heart, and it wasn’t the sudden temperature drop. It was the fact that she could hear the cans beckoning, and that she actually wanted to do as they said. She knew it was wrong—she knew that if she touched a single can, she’d end up like Rufus, or worse. She knew without a single speck of doubt that if she so much as brushed her fingertips against a label, she’d be rendered brain-dead. She would be forever lost. She knew that.
But even so, she wanted to touch those canned goods like she’d never wanted to touch anything in her life. They controlled her desire. They propelled her forward. Mallory felt herself slipping toward the shelves…
Then she tripped on the Spear of Rad, fell down hard, and cracked her head on the sparkling linoleum floor, on the same exact spot above her right eye where she’d discovered a bump just a few days before. “Ow!” she yelled. A hand flew immediately to her forehead, and already, the little lump was burning with a stinging, bruising vengeance beneath her fingers.
On the bright side, though, the pain seemed to clear her head. She could no longer hear the whispers of the canned goods over the red buzzing in her own head. She grimaced as she reached out and snatched up the Spear of Rad. Then she pushed herself to her feet and strode down the aisle, toward the pair of flailing Lewises.
Time to end this, she decided.
The Lewis on the left had control of the pistol, and he drew a bead on the other Lewis’ chest, but the other Lewis caught Left Lewis’ gun hand in both of his own and twisted. Left Lewis screamed, and the two men struggled over the gun. The Lewis on the right pulled Left Lewis’ hand back, then launched it forward, and something in Left Lewis’ hand popped. He let go of the gun, and it clattered down the aisle, sliding to a stop at Mallory’s feet.
Mallory dropped the glorified crowbar and picked up the gun. Yes, she thought. This is better.
She pointed the pistol in the air and fired a shot. A light exploded overhead and rained shards of glass down on Mallory from above. She did her best not to move and to act like shooting out a light fixture was precisely what she meant to do.
The Lewises stopped fighting and both raised their hands instinctively. “Mallory!” they cried in unison. “Shoot him!”
“Isn’t this a familiar scene,” she muttered. It occurred to her then that the safest thing to do would be to shoot both of them. She was not entirely opposed to the idea.
“He’s the clone!” Left Lewis cried, and he whirled around and socked Right Lewis in the stomach.
“I am not!” Right Lewis gasped as he crumpled to his knees. He lunged forward and sank his teeth into Left Lewis’ calf. Left Lewis howled in pain, and just like that, they were back on the floor, grappling and screaming and tumbling about. Mallory squinted at the flailing pair, trying to determine which one was the real Lewis, but it was impossible. Of course it was impossible. They were genetically identical.
And they were both wearing the same stupid shirt.
One of the Lewises launched himself on top of the other Lewis, and the Lewis on bottom caught the other Lewis with his feet. He grunted as he gave his legs a mighty push, and the Lewis on top flew backward, straight toward Mallory. He screamed as he flew through the air, limbs spinning and slipping. He spun around on the slippery floor, making eye contact with Mallory for only the briefest moment…and that moment was all Mallory needed. In that split second, she could see the rage and the murder in his eyes. She squeezed the trigger three times, and three red holes blossomed in Evil Lewis’ chest. He fell to his knees and gazed up with clouding, astounded eyes as blood seeped through his lab coat and pooled onto the floor. “No,” he whispered. Then his body fell limp, his eyes tilted back, and the evil clone was dead.
“Oh, thank God!” Lewis cried, struggling to his feet. His face was covered in bruises and lacerations; his right shoulder had been dislocated, and he walked toward her with a limp. “You saved my life,” he said, tears welling up in his eyes. “I thought you’d left, but…Mallory…you saved everything.”
“I’m a hero,” she agreed, smirking as she gave Lewis a hard pat on his good shoulder. “And now I’m gonna go.”
Lewis grinned, despite his pain. “I guess you’ve earned that right,” he said happily. “Although I was hoping you’d at least stay for a—” But his voice trailed off as he slid his gaze to the shelves over Mallory’s shoulder. The corners of his mouth fell, and the blood drained from his face, leaving his cheeks powdery white.
“What?” Mallory asked, tilting her head. “Are you having a stroke? Do you smell burnt toast?”
“Mallory…” Lewis raised a finger slowly and pointed to the shelves.
Mallory furrowed her brow as she turned. “What—?” But she didn’t have to finish her question. She saw what made Lewis blench.
The clone had knocked a can of green beans off the bottom shelf as he fell.
“Oh…” she said, exhaling sharply. “That’s…not good, is it?”
Before Lewis could answer, a low thrumming began emanating from the shelves. The hum grew louder, and it grew more powerful, until the quick whump-whump-whump became so fierce that more cans began rattling off the shelves and falling to the floor below. A strange red light whispered itself to life, burning into existence like a slow ember somewhere in the center of the aisle, near the canned asparagus and spreading like wildfire until every shelf in aisle 8 glowed red with hellfire and heat. The cans began whispering urgently again, their gentle urgings replaced with a thrilled chatter of ends reached and destinies fulfilled. The temperature dropped another twenty degrees. There was no doubt that Mallory’s breath was now pluming out in a thick, billowing mist. She instinctively reached for Lewis’ hand and found it already open and waiting. Each clutched the other as they waited for the end of the world.
“What happens now?” Mallory whispered, her voice hollow and strange in her own ears.
“I don’t know,” Lewis answered. The honesty pulled at his voice like a boulder.
Then the shelves exploded, answering at least a part of the question.
Cans burst apart and rocketed to the far reaches of the Walmart, and a syrupy tsunami of canned fruit and vegetables rained down from above. Peaches splattered against the juice boxes in aisle 10. Peas pelted the Hawaiian rolls in aisle 1. Corn kernels peppered the ladies’ hosiery. Globs of sauerkraut plopped down on the antiperspirant aisle, destroying all hope of deodorization.
One entire half of the store became the victim of culinary bombardment.
Mallory shielded herself from the food explosion by throwing up her arms, and they were pelted by Spaghetti-O’s and a surprisingly wide assortment of beans. She grimaced at the onslaught, but she bore it with an appropria
te amount of dignity.
Once it stopped, she lowered her dripping hands and peered into the new and awful landscape of aisle 8. Every single can had been launched clear, and the shelves had burst into shards that now littered the floor like shrapnel from some Great War of Capitalism. The frames of the shelves had remained bolted to the ground, but the backs of the shelving units, which had so recently been made of thin metal, now glowed with red and yellow swirling mists. They roiled behind the shelves on both sides of the aisle, but the mists did not break the plane into the aisle itself. And there, on the right side, not far from where the Spear of Rad now lay beneath a haphazard heap of shelf debris, there stood an innocuous wooden door, strong and unsupported, and wholly unaffected by the churning hell-mists that surrounded it.
Aisle 8 had shown itself for what it truly was: a portal to the lair of an ancient and powerful demon.
“Lewis,” Mallory whispered, forcing her voice to choke itself out, even though her throat was staunchly against the idea. Lewis made some sort of questioning whine in his chest, which was all he could muster under the circumstances. “I want you to know something.” She gave his hand a squeeze.
He tapped his thumb against her fingers and managed to say, “What?”
Mallory closed her eyes. She leaned her head down so her lips were close enough to his ears that there was no danger of being misheard. “I blame you for everything.”
They stood like that for several long minutes, in total silence, waiting for the ancient evil to emerge from his weathered wooden door. Lewis didn’t try to pull his hand away, and Mallory didn’t bother releasing it. No matter who was to blame, they were in this together, here at the end of things.
But the door remained closed. The mists kept swirling, and the thrumming kept humming, but the door did not open. Mallory didn’t know how long they stood there, hand-in-hand; time didn’t exist here, in aisle 8 of the Anomaly Flats Walmart. It might have been minutes, or it might have been hours, but after a certain amount of time, however long that time was, it became abundantly clear that the door was not going to open.
“What’s happening?” Mallory asked. She supposed that perhaps she should be glad that there wasn’t a writhing, oozing evil slithering out of the old oak door, but somehow, the creature’s total absence was even more terrifying. “Why isn’t it coming out?”
She felt Lewis’ hand tremble within her own. “It’s waiting for us,” he whispered.
Mallory snorted. “It’s waiting for us? To go down there?” She finally released Lewis’ hand, only to find that her fingers had cramped and needed to be pried loose. “Perfect. He can keep waiting. Forever. I’m going to Canada.”
She handed him the pistol. But she didn’t make a move to leave.
“This needs to end,” Lewis said, his voice quiet and trembling, but unmistakably resolute. He turned and looked Mallory squarely in the eyes. “You can end this,” he whispered.
“Me?! No, no, no, no, no. You, sure. We, maybe, though probably not. But me? No way. You want to go down and fight the demon? Be my guest.”
“I couldn’t fight a child in this condition,” Lewis said sadly, clutching his dislocated shoulder and tilting his bruised and beaten face so that the fluorescent lights gleamed off the swollen welts. “Not that I would ever fight a child. But you know.”
“This isn’t my fight,” Mallory snapped. “I may have made the clone, but the beet-demon was licking its lips down there in its stupid dungeon way before I came to town and pushed you into a lake.”
Lewis sighed heavily. “I know,” he said. “But you’re the only one with the strength to end it once and for all.”
Mallory squinted down at him, sniffing at his words for another jab at being sturdy. She decided to let it slide, if for no other reason than Lewis would probably be wearing his skin around his waist soon, and that seemed like punishment enough. But that didn’t mean she was ready to sacrifice her life to try to kill the thing waiting for them on the other side of that door. “You know,” she said, “I’m not particularly convinced Anomaly Flats is worth saving.”
Lewis looked up at her, his eyes sad but firm. “If you really thought that, you wouldn’t be here.”
Mallory crossed her arms. “You think you know so much,” she said, annoyed. And the part that was so annoying was that he was right. She had come back for a reason. Or maybe for a lot of little reasons that added up to one big, stupid, ill-advised ball of reason: she felt guilty; she didn’t want Lewis to die; she didn’t want to be single-handedly responsible for the decimation of an entire town; and she couldn’t deny that Lewis had been right when he said the people of Anomaly Flats were worth saving. They were weird, and they were scary, and some of them had swarms of flies coming out of their throats…but they didn’t deserve to be flayed alive.
She reached down and snatched up the Spear of Rad. “Fine,” she said, testing the weapon by giving it a few stabs through the air. “But if I die in there, I’m going Poltergeist all over this stupid town.”
“Honestly,” Lewis said, pushing his glasses up his nose, “dying should be the least of your worries.”
Chapter 20
Mallory stood before the weathered oak door, holding the spear so tightly in both hands that her knuckles glowed white. She frowned. “Do I just knock, or…?”
“I think you just go in,” Lewis said from his hiding spot behind the end cap.
“You go in,” she grumbled under her breath. She tapped the pointy end of the spear against the door three times. It made no sound whatsoever. “If I save the town and destroy the all-powerful, indestructible demon, can I go?”
“Not if,” Lewis said, trying to sound encouraging and failing all the way. “When. When you destroy the indestructible demon.” He thought about this for a second, and then he added, “I’m not sure ‘indestructible’ is an appropriate adjective for a demon that you’re going to destroy.”
“That’s what worries me,” she said.
She reached out, grabbed the knob, and pulled. The door swung open on its hinges, perfectly silent. She peered into the darkness of the doorway; a set of stone steps wound around to the left and down, down, down, along a curving stone wall that was sparsely lit by small torches spaced unevenly down the staircase. Mallory glanced around the doorway, which was set into the shelving unit. Behind the shelves was another unit, and another aisle, and there was no way the stone steps actually went back into that space. But looking through the door, there was no mistaking it; the ancient evil’s dungeon went back much farther than the Walmart shelving unit should have allowed.
It was very disorienting.
Adding to the unease that permeated the air was the fact that the torches on the wall looked eerily familiar. “If this leads to the Check Into Cash, I’m letting the whole town burn.” She turned and raised an eyebrow at Lewis. “I don’t suppose I can just nick the bastard and run?” she asked.
The scientist shrugged. “It’s been a while since I read the manual. But I’m pretty sure you have to drive it all the way through his heart.”
Mallory shook her head and gazed sadly down at the crowbar. “Drive it through his heart. Got it.” She took a deep breath and stepped through the doorway into the darkness.
There was an unmistakable chill in the air. Mallory drew her arms up against her chest as she crept carefully down the stairs, holding the point of the spear out and trying her best to peer around the curving staircase into the darkness below. “This is stupid, this is stupid, this is stupid,” she whispered. Her voice did not echo, like she’d thought perhaps it would. And then she noticed all the other sounds that weren’t there; the torch flames didn’t crackle, the walls didn’t drip, and her footsteps didn’t make so much as a single scrape. It was as if someone had muted the volume on the entire world.
But she could still hear herself whispering, a
nd that gave her a strange sort of comfort.
“Stab the heart, run away,” she instructed herself. “Stab the heart, run away. This is stupid, this is stupid, this is stupid, this is stupid. Stab the heart, run away. This is stupid, run away.” But instead, her feet kept moving forward, easing themselves down the stone steps.
Before she knew it, Mallory was standing at the foot of the staircase, in the lair of the ancient evil of Anomaly Flats.
“Hello?” she whispered. She didn’t know why she whispered it; she didn’t want to hear a response from whatever else might be down there, and she wasn’t particularly keen on announcing her own presence to it. But her entire body seemed to be operating on autopilot now, and she couldn’t really fault it; this was nothing if not uncharted territory.
Her heart dropped into her shoes when she heard a voice from the back of the chamber say, “Hello.”
It seemed like a good a time as any to vomit in the corner.
So, she did.
“Are you all right?” the voice asked as Mallory wiped her arm across her mouth. It was a man’s voice, and it sounded unreasonably sincere. She found a strange sort of vindication in the fact that the ancient evil was, indeed, male.
“Fine,” she said sourly, returning her full attention to the Spear of Rad and holding it defensively in front of her chest. “Do me a favor and impale yourself on this crowbar, will you?” She tried to keep the quaver out of her voice, but she was under no illusions that she was actually managing to do it. She could feel her throat vibrating with every syllable.
“I’m afraid I can’t,” the voice said, slow and syrupy-sweet as honey. “Though I’m not sure I would if I were able.”
“What do you mean?” Mallory asked, squinting into the darkness. She couldn’t see anything beyond the halo of light thrown by the torch bolted to the wall above the bottom step. She had a feeling that the chamber went much, much farther back. She waved the point of the spear in a slow arc before her, in case the ancient evil decided to pounce. She didn’t know if the movement of the spear would help, but she also didn’t know that it wouldn’t.
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