I took out my phone and looked at the signal, but there wasn’t one. I put it back in my pocket and didn’t look at Winter again.
“We can always call for help if we need to,” Jesus said. “We’ve got a full communication centre in our office. But there’s nothing we haven’t been able to handle ourselves yet.”
Winter looked back at him and wrapped his coat tighter around herself. “What if it just keeps raining?” she asked. “What if it’s the end of days and the mall floods with water and we drown?”
“We’ll dig drainage trenches with the excavator outside,” Jesus said. “And if that doesn’t work, there’s a sporting goods store at the far end with kayaks and canoes. We’ll keep you safe one way or another.” He smiled at her and she smiled back.
“But who will keep you safe?” she asked and laughed, and he laughed along with her.
“We probably should figure out a plan in case this storm lasts and we do get stuck here,” I said. There were enough clothes in the fake stores we could stay warm if the power went out, but we’d need to find something to eat. Even the models would get hungry eventually. Then there was the matter of the road. It was probably already flooded in places. I didn’t know how long it would take to drain, and we still had to edit the photos and maybe even finish the shoot. I looked around the mall again.
“Maybe we should set up in here,” I said. “It’s a bit meta, but that could be all right again by the time the campaign starts.”
“I don’t like being in a mall without people,” Winter said. When I looked at her, I saw that Jesus now had his arm over her shoulder. “It’s like a ghost mall. Or maybe we’re the ghosts.”
“It’s not completely empty,” Jesus said. “I’m here.”
“We should fuck,” Winter said.
Jesus stared at her, even though that’s probably what he had been thinking about all along. Zimmer and Lucky barely seemed to notice as they looked around at the mall, probably gauging the photo opportunities. Titania just rolled her eyes.
“Everywhere we go, she always wants to fuck,” she said.
“It’s the best stress relief there is,” Winter said.
“I’m not arguing the point,” Titania said.
“Come on,” Winter said and led Jesus into a nearby store. Whiskey Wear, a men’s fashion shop. He stared at her the whole time like he wasn’t sure if she was real or not. Once they were in the store, she shrugged off his jacket and leapt upon him, wrapping her arms and legs around his body as she kissed him. They fell behind a display of pants and disappeared from sight.
The rest of us waited outside. We all knew it wouldn’t be long. This sort of thing happened all the time on location shoots. When models were stressed or bored, they almost always turned to drugs or sex, and sometimes both. It could wreak havoc with a shooting schedule, but there wasn’t much you could do about it. If the model stormed off because she was too stressed, you no longer had a shoot, after all.
It took even less time than I was expecting, though. Jesus suddenly screamed and came running out of the store. He was naked and still erect. His shoulders and chest were covered in blood. He held a hand up to his neck, where the blood seemed to be coming from.
“She fucking bit me!” he cried.
That didn’t really surprise me because if anyone was the type of person to bite, it was a model. Hell, there were many men who would pay to be bitten by a model. I’m not saying I agree with it or even understand it. It’s just that kind of world.
When Jesus staggered up to us and took his hand away from his neck to check the bleeding, though, I saw this wasn’t any ordinary bite. A chunk of his neck was missing. I could see the raw, open meat before he slapped his hand back over his wound to cover it.
“What did you do to her?” I asked, starting toward the store. It must have been bad, whatever it was, to make her bite him so savagely. What if he’d done something to her face? I didn’t even know if I had all the photos I needed yet.
“How about what she did to me?” He stumbled around behind Titania, putting her between him and the store. She stared at him as he checked his wound again. “Look at all this blood, man. I’m like stigmatic or something now.”
I stopped moving toward the store as Winter came running out of it after Jesus. She was naked and covered in blood, too, although I didn’t see any wounds on her body. So the blood must have been all his.
That wasn’t the only thing that made me stop. There was also the fact that she picked up the clothing racks in her way and threw them to the side, as if she had superhuman strength. Or inhuman. They crashed into other racks or the walls, but she didn’t seem to notice. She didn’t take her eyes off Jesus. She held a broken aftershave bottle in her hand, the end all jagged shards of glass.
And her eyes were black now. Completely black. As if she’d put in some sort of strange contact lenses when they’d been in there fucking.
She was smiling as well, or maybe snarling. It was an expression somewhere in between the two.
“Somebody stop her,” Jesus said. He tried to push Titania toward Winter, but Titania wouldn’t go. Instead, she turned to face him and I saw her eyes were clouding over and turning black, too.
“What is wrong with all of you?” Jesus asked, backing away from her.
“We’re man-eaters,” Titania said with a grin that showed too many of her teeth.
“And the whole world is afraid of us,” Winter said with a laugh as she came on.
I recognized the words. They were parroting what I’d said to them earlier.
Jesus fumbled for his gun, but Titania was on him before he remembered he was naked. She moved with surprising speed, grabbing him and throwing him to the ground. She went down with him, biting at his neck herself. A second later, Winter fell upon him, too, ramming the broken aftershave bottle into his side with a scream matched by his own. I watched, paralyzed, as blood sprayed all over the three of them.
“What are these crazy bitches on now?” Zimmer asked, bringing his camera up to shoot the scene.
But then Portland knocked him aside as she came out of nowhere, throwing herself through the group of us watching and down onto Jesus with the others. She took his penis in her mouth, and for a second I thought she was trying to give him a blow job during all the chaos. Then she ground her teeth together and Jesus let out an even worse scream. Portland tore her head away from him and took his penis with her. I could see it in her mouth, blood oozing from it. She snapped it down like a crocodile swallowing a big hunk of meat. Her eyes were as black as the others’ and I understood then what was happening.
The black powder from the bones. It had done something to them. It had turned them into these crazed creatures.
I ran forward and kicked Portland in the face. She somersaulted backward off of Jesus and sprawled face down on the floor. I had to stop them from killing the security guard; I didn’t think that would be covered by my insurance. I grabbed Winter by the hair and threw her to the side. She screeched, making a sound more like an animal than a person. She lashed out at me with the bottle and raked my side, and I felt the glass cut me through my jacket.
Jesus managed to push himself to his feet, even though Titania was still clinging to him and biting at his neck. She wrapped her arms and legs around him like he was giving her a piggyback ride. He managed a half-run, but for some reason he ran back into the store. Maybe he was blinded by all the blood in his face.
Portland and Winter leapt to their feet and chased after him, ignoring me and the others. They brought him down just inside the store, tackling him and crashing into a trio of mannequins modelling clothing. Jesus screamed again as he fell under their weight, and then the mannequins toppled over on them, hiding the scene from sight.
“This is crazier than usual,” Zimmer said, checking his camera to make sure it hadn’t been damaged when Portland had hit him.
“We should do something,” Lucky said, staring at the shaking mannequins. “We should call sec
urity.”
“He is security,” I pointed out.
“I mean the other security guy,” Lucky said.
But Morrison came up the hall toward us at just that moment. He was walking rather than running. He was also holding his head with one hand, which I didn’t take to be a good sign.
“That model of yours hit me with a fire extinguisher and then she ran off,” he said. “And I think she took my gun. Is this some sort of girls gone wild shoot?”
“We need to call the police and get out of here,” I said. “Not necessarily in that order.”
“We need some backup all right,” Morrison said. “Where’s Jesus?”
Jesus cried out again, but it was a sound like he was coming now. An ecstatic cry, not one of pain or fear. We all looked back at the store in time to see Titania rise from the pile of mannequins. She was drenched in blood and grinning. She held up both her hands and it took me several seconds to realize what she was holding. Jesus’s head. For some reason Jesus was smiling. She brought his head to her face and kissed it, like he was a lover she hadn’t seen in some time.
And I swear he kissed her back.
“I think we should probably take our chances with the storm now,” I said.
We all ran back the way we’d come. I looked over my shoulder several times, but I didn’t see the models chasing us. They must have been busy with Jesus. I tried my phone but still couldn’t get a signal. We all tried our phones but none of us could get signals. Maybe it was the storm. Maybe it was something else.
“Are we all on drugs right now?” Lucky asked as we went.
“Maybe we need more drugs,” I said.
“We need to get to the security office,” Morrison said, pointing down the hallway where he’d led Portland earlier. “We can call the police on our comm gear.”
“I think we may need the army,” I said, but we followed him down the hall anyway. We passed a fire extinguisher lying on the floor, and I kicked it out of the way. It was surprisingly light and bounced off the wall and back into our path, nearly tripping me as I leapt over it.
“It’s just another prop, so it’s empty,” Morrison said. “Otherwise she probably would have crushed my skull with it.”
I looked around for his gun, but it didn’t look like she’d dropped it anywhere in the hallway. So either she’d hidden it somewhere or she still had it.
Morrison led us past the washrooms and through a blank door at the end of the hall. We stopped there, because we were in the security office. But it wasn’t what we had expected. There were screens all over the walls, and electronics gear on tables. Some of it was probably surveillance gear, and some was probably the communications gear Morrison had mentioned. It was hard to say for certain because someone had smashed everything in the room. The screens on the walls were all shattered and everything else had been hammered and beaten so heavily I couldn’t even recognize what anything was. A tool box was open in one corner of the floor, hammers and screwdrivers and wrenches scattered around it.
“It doesn’t look like we’re calling anyone for help now,” I said.
“We can call them, but I don’t think they’ll hear us,” Morrison said, looking around. “She must have come in here after she knocked me out. But why would she do this?”
“Because they don’t want us to escape,” I said.
“But why not?” Lucky asked. “They must want out of here just the same as us.”
“Because they’re hunting us,” I said.
Morrison stared at me but didn’t say anything. I understood. He hadn’t seen what the rest of us had.
“So what do we do now?” Zimmer asked me. I was in charge of the shoot, after all.
“Now we get in the van and drive until we get stuck,” I said. “Hopefully they don’t like getting wet and won’t follow us into the rain. They’re still models, after all.”
We went back out into the mall but we stopped right away. We could see the models had come this way by the trail of blood that led past the hallway and out to the plastic curtains at the edge of the mall. A big long smear of blood, as if the models had dragged something past and outside.
“They went back to the pit,” Zimmer said. “They’re already at the van.”
“Then we go the other way,” I said. I headed back into the mall. “We find a place to hide until someone comes for us or the storm lets off enough that we can make a run for it.”
We ran through the mall for a time, but we had to stop every few hundred feet so Zimmer and Lucky could rest. They were burdened down by Zimmer’s cameras and their bags of gear. I considered telling them to leave it, but I knew their gear was worth a small fortune. I didn’t want to have to pay for it if the insurance company walked away from this mess.
The trail of blood led into the men’s wear store where the models had killed Jesus and disappeared in the mess of mannequins still on the floor. We went past it and kept going. For a moment, I thought maybe we were safe.
Then we heard the call for help as we went past a lingerie store a few stores down. It was called Lucky Lady, but as it turned out there was nothing lucky about it for us.
We stopped and looked at the store but saw no one. We looked at each other and I could see everyone else was wondering the same thing: had we really heard someone call for help or had we just imagined it? What if we had been affected by the strange powder in the pit as well? Who knew what it could be doing to us, to our minds.
Then one of the change room doors at the back of the store swung open and we heard the same weak call for help again. So faint I couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman.
“Is there anyone else in here?” I asked Morrison, but he just shrugged.
“There’s not supposed to be anyone here,” he said, looking around. “But people keep sneaking in. Could be some urban explorer kid, or maybe a bone hunter.”
“Let’s help if we can then,” I said. “The more of us there are, the more of a chance we stand against the models.”
We went into the store and walked slowly past the bins of panties and bras, and the mannequins on stands wearing more panties and bras and nighties and that sort of thing. We kept an eye on that open change room door the entire time. I came around a rack of flannel pajamas and saw the body lying there on the ground. It looked like a bloodied, misshapen man, curled up in the fetal position. I couldn’t see his face because his arms were covering his head. But I could see the bloody ruin of his groin. It was Jesus.
But that was impossible, because I’d seen the models tear Jesus’s head off.
“Help me,” the man on the floor said again, but this close I could hear it wasn’t a man’s voice at all. It was a woman’s voice.
“We need to get out of here,” I whispered and backed away, even as Morrison stepped forward to look down at the body.
“Jesus?” he asked.
The man on the floor chuckled in that woman’s voice and sat up. As soon as he dropped his arms away from his head, I saw that it was Jesus but it wasn’t. It was Titania, wearing Jesus’s skin like a suit. She was wrapped up in it, but it fell from her shoulders as she got to her feet. She was wearing a red bra and panties, but they were mostly covered in blood and shreds of meat.
“Jesus isn’t here anymore,” she said with a smile, and I saw more bits of flesh caught in her teeth. “It’s just us goddesses of a lost world.” More of my words.
Then two of the mannequins threw themselves off their stands and onto Morrison, screaming. Because they weren’t mannequins at all – they were Portland and Winter posing as mannequins. We hadn’t noticed because we were too intent on the body. And now they carried Morrison down to the floor.
“Oh no!” he cried. “No no no no no!” And then Titania stuffed a pair of panties in his mouth and down his throat, choking him.
We didn’t even try to save him. I don’t feel bad about it. You wouldn’t have tried, either. No one ever does. We ran back out into the mall and headed for the exit one more
time. I knew now the models had tricked us and made the trail to force us deeper into the stores. Deeper into their hunting ground. Maybe they were trying to force us all the way to the food court, where they would finish us off.
Our only hope was to get back to the cargo van and then ... and then I didn’t know what.
We had to stop even more often as we ran now, as Zimmer and Lucky were obviously getting tired from carrying their gear all this time.
We paused by the lottery kiosk to catch our breath, and I looked back for any signs of pursuit. We couldn’t see the models, but I heard Morrison cry out again.
“Yes!” He screamed this time. “Yes yes yes yes!” Whatever the models were doing to him, it sounded like he was enjoying it. But I knew that couldn’t be the case, not after what I’d seen. And I knew I didn’t want to find out the truth first-hand.
“You have to drop everything,” I said to Zimmer and Lucky. “We can’t keep stopping. We have to get out of here.”
“I’m not going to leave my cameras just lying around a mall,” Zimmer said. “Especially a fake mall.”
“If we don’t leave it, we’re going to be the ones lying around the mall,” I said. “In pieces.”
“All right,” Zimmer sighed and turned to Lucky. “Give me the tripod, at least. It’s my favourite tripod.”
Lucky opened one of the shoulder bags he was carrying and took out a tripod. He handed it to Zimmer, who took it and then smashed Lucky in the leg with it.
Lucky cried out and fell to the ground, grabbing at his knee. Zimmer stepped over him and pulled the camera bags free of his grasp. Lucky reached up for him, but Zimmer stepped away before he could grab hold. Zimmer shouldered the bags and looked at me as he started to walk toward the plastic curtain at the end of the mall.
“That should buy us the extra time we need now,” he said.
I looked down at Lucky, who was writhing on the ground in pain. He clutched at his injured knee with one hand and reached up to me with the other. “Don’t leave me here,” he said. “Not like this.”
Has The World Ended Yet? Page 12