Tobe nodded and made for it, leaving the argument in his wake. On his way, he peered into the empty office.
Where the hell is the attendant? The note said he’d be back in five.
Ripping two ‘I’ve Seen the Mountain View’ shirts from the rack, he rushed back to Sarah.
Discarding the blood-soaked rag, Sarah pressed a fresh garment against Ressler’s wound. As she did, Tobe glanced back out at Ganson. Sarah caught it.
“Tobe,” she said softly. “He’s beyond help. There’s nothing we can do.”
“He’s suffering.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“Of course not, but…”
“We have to assume he’s contagious.”
Tobe nodded. For now, Ganson was on his own. Tobe didn’t feel good about it—tonight, it seemed every decision he’d made had been motivated by self-preservation, every choice born of fear. But they had no choice.
He looked at Ethan, who was now readying the rope. “This is overkill.”
“He threatened us,” Ethan said. “For Christ’s sake, you should be thanking me.”
Brad shook his head. “He was trying to warn us. Ressler knew lard-boy was fucked up. He was protecting us.”
Ethan snorted. “Protecting us, by waving a gun in our faces? Why the fuck was he carrying a gun in the first place?”
Brad dropped his gaze to the revolver in his hand. As though suddenly realising the object’s inherent potential, he walked to the counter, holding the weapon at arm’s length as if it were a venomous snake he’d seized by the neck. He slid the pistol under the security glass and backed away.
Sarah said to Ethan, “If Ressler hadn’t waved that gun, that man outside would now be inside.”
“Maybe so,” Ethan said. “But why risk it? I have some questions for when he wakes. Aren’t you curious as to what the fuck is going on?”
“Yes… assuming he has the answers,” Brad said.
“Like you said, Ressler knew lard-boy was fucked up.”
“Stop calling him that,” Tobe said. “His name is Ganson.”
“What?”
Tobe glanced at Scottie, and then back to Ethan and the others. “Ethan, I’m not convinced Ressler needs to be tied up, but you’re right about one thing—he has some explaining to do.”
“What are you saying?” Rachel said.
“Scottie, show them.”
From a pocket in his jeans, Scottie retrieved the plastic sleeve containing the driver identification and held it out. “Ressler lied about his identity. Look.”
Rachel peered at the ID and frowned. “Ganson is the truck driver? Why would he lie?”
Ethan shrugged. “Who knows? Who cares? He threatened us in order to cover it up. He’s dangerous. Like I’ve been saying, we gotta restrain him.”
“He lied, sure, but none of this means he’s a psycho killer,” Sarah said.
“No,” Ethan replied, and his blue-green eyes flashed. “But he could be.”
“It can’t hurt to keep him in check,” Tobe said. “At least until help arrives.”
Brad blew air through his teeth, ran a hand through his hair. “This is too much,” he said. “Maybe we should leave.”
“Leave?”
“Yeah, leave the both of them and get the hell out of here.”
Tobe shook his head. “We can’t leave, Brad. We’re obligated.”
Scottie nodded, glanced up at the domed CCTV cameras set into the ceiling. “Forsaking these men before the police or paramedics arrive would be morally wrong. More than that, it’d be unlawful.”
“The police don’t know we’re here,” Brad said. “No-one does.”
“Someone will come along soon,” Tobe said. “Until then, we’re stuck here.”
“Not all of us,” Tory said.
Wary, Tobe looked at her. “Sorry?”
“Not everyone has to stay,” Tory said. “Two of us can leave right now.”
Leave right now? Two of us? She could only be referring to herself and Ethan. Was she threatening to ditch them?
Tory grinned, exposing those long, slender teeth again. “You guys can stay. Ethan and I will go for help.”
“Tory—”
“There’s a car outside, remember?”
Of course! The car—Tobe had seen it in the darkness between the convenience store and the workshop.
“The attendant’s car,” he said to Tory.
“I guess it’s his.”
“And you want to steal it?”
Tory glared at him. “You think he’s coming back?”
Tobe considered that. No, I guess I don’t, he thought.
Where the hell is he?
Rachel narrowed her eyes at Tory. “If there’s a car, why can’t all of us go?”
“Are you kidding?” Tory shot back. “Tobe just said we’re obligated to stay! And maybe we are. But there’s no need for all of us to hang around, and only two can fit. It’s a coupé.”
Conjuring an image of the small, two-door Honda, Tobe nodded. “She’s right. It looked like a two-seater. No room for all of us.”
Rachel hadn’t lifted her glare from Tory. “Where would you go?”
“Somewhere… anywhere,” Tory said. “We’ll find help.”
“And you’ll return?”
Tory raised her eyebrows. “What does that mean?”
“It means this is a group decision. If we send someone out, the group decides who. Scottie and I might go.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Girls, please,” Ethan said. “What’s the problem?”
“I don’t have a problem,” Tory said.
Ethan looked to Rachel, and then scanned the rest of the group. “If this is a trust issue for you guys, then you can have the car. Rachel, you and Scottie go, like you said.”
“What?” Tory said.
Scottie shook his head. “No,” he said. “There’s no problem here. You and Tory go for help, Ethan. We trust you.” He ignored both Rachel’s glare of incredulity, and Tory’s widening grin.
Ethan chose to ignore them both, too. “I’m sure we can squeeze in a third,” he offered. “Rachel can come with us.”
“No,” Scottie said. “I’ll go.”
“No,” Tory said. “It should be Tobe.”
Tobe baulked. What? He met Tory’s gaze. Held by it, he searched her eyes. No predatory gleam, but this time, something different.
He couldn’t define it.
A wave of unease washed over him, and Tobe broke the gaze. Something was off. Rachel apparently didn’t trust Tory, and maybe with good reason—he was uncertain about her, too. Was Tory toying with him just now? Had she been toying with him all night?
Tobe glanced at Scottie, who’d obviously sensed the growing tension and with Ethan’s help, had defused it. Smart, as always. More than that, it made sense, too, that someone should accompany Ethan and Tory. Of everyone, Tobe guessed he was the most likely candidate: Sarah had to stay, so she could assist Ressler, and Brad would want to stay with her. The car wouldn’t accommodate four, which ruled out Scottie and Rachel as a pair. In a pinch, as Ethan had alluded, they could probably cram in a third person.
Of all of them, he had the most local knowledge. It had to be him.
He looked to Rachel and nodded, hoping to appease her. He then transferred his gaze to Ethan. “I’ll go with you. But what about Ganson? We still have to get past him, and all that blood.”
Ethan shrugged. “We’ll deal with it.”
“We have to find the keys,” Tobe said.
“They’ll be in the office,” Tory reasoned. “They have to be.”
“The office is locked,” Rachel said. She was curt.
“So we bust it open!” Tory said, and sighed.
“Bust it open?”
“There’ll be tools in the workshop,” Brad said, “Something to jimmy the door. Tobe… if you’re up for it, you and I can head out together.”
If nothing else, it was a course o
f action, and maybe a good one at that. It dawned on Tobe that not only might the car keys be inside the office, but a landline, too.
A phone would solve all their problems.
Tobe nodded. Given the circumstances, breaking into the office was justifiable. “Brad and I will head out to the workshop. You guys deal with Ressler, find out what you can.”
Looking uncertain but agreeable, her hand pressing the T-shirt to Ressler’s head, Sarah said, “If you’re going to do this, we need to stabilise him first. If I can’t rouse him, you won’t learn anything.”
Tobe turned to Ethan. “How are you going to do it? Tie him up, I mean?”
“I figured I’d hog-tie him, right here on the ground.”
“No,” Sarah said. She checked Ressler’s pulse and lifted his eyelids to inspect his pupils. “I want him upright. It’ll reduce any intracranial pressure.”
“Is it safe to move him?” Rachel said.
“I don’t believe there’s a spinal injury. He lifted his leg, waved his arm, remember?”
“If it’s safe to lift him,” Tobe said, “he’ll be easier to treat while seated. I’ll get a chair from the staffroom.” He moved to leave, but a low moan caused him to spin towards the entry. The others did, too.
Ganson.
The huge man—still slumped at the door, still alive and suffering beyond Tobe’s ghostly reflection in the glass—moaned again. It sounded like a cat’s mewl—pitiful, lonely. Coming from such a massive frame, the sound was jarringly out of place.
Goddammit.
Getting past the blood was one thing. They still had to deal with Ganson.
A terrible thought occurred to Tobe, and in the pit of his stomach, a heavy weight settled, squirmed.
They had the gun. They could ease Ganson’s suffering.
No, Tobe.
Not his voice. Not his thought.
Tobe turned to Scottie, as he always did when he knew not what to do.
Scottie was looking at him. “No,” he mouthed, as though he’d read Tobe’s mind.
He had read it.
Tobe hesitated. The heaviness in his stomach was at that moment trumped by an even more crushing weight upon his shoulders. It was though the naked truth of their situation had been suddenly revealed, and Tobe fought a sting of tears. How could they be expected to make such decisions, carry such burdens? How could he? Tobe wasn’t a leader, wasn’t a doctor or a cop or a professional trained to deal with shit like this, to handle this kind of pressure. He was a lowly, twenty-four year-old storeman, barely sure of his own path in life—and by that standard, ill-equipped to decide another’s fate. To ignore Ganson was to prolong his suffering; to euthanize him would come at significant emotional cost.
He doubted they possessed the indifference for the former, or the courage for the latter.
And yet maybe they had both. Already, they had embarked upon one path of their making; one determination of fate. As they readied to deprive Ressler of his liberty, Tobe wondered what they had become. What he had become.
“Get the chair, Tobe.”
Tobe listened to his friend, the voice of reason, the only voice he ever truly trusted, and headed to the back of the store, and the staffroom.
7
Tobe wiped his eyes and snapped on the light, and with that action, all thoughts of Ganson and Ressler evaporated.
My God…
The organism.
It had grown.
Preoccupied by the events of the past few minutes, he’d all but forgotten about the mold. The crimson tangle had more than tripled in size, stretching and branching in all directions. The central stalk, the one that had grown through the window, had swollen to the girth of Tobe’s forearm. Two further arteries, each half as thick, had climbed through the same opening. These had either split from the main stem—outside, on the other side of the window—or were separate organisms. The latter seemed unlikely, although he couldn’t be certain. The finer tubes splitting from all three stems had sprouted dozens of newer, smaller strands. Now, from the window down, the entire wall was awash in red mold, although again, to Tobe it looked less like mold than a magnified network of veins and capillaries. The speed at which this spreading mass had developed was stunning, impossible. How long had they been out of the room? A few minutes?
Some of the threads, glossy and smooth, yet bearing that slight, pale mottling, had reached the floor and had begun to creep across the tiles.
Earlier tonight, when he’d first entered this room, Tobe had thought he’d heard movement by the window.
Had there been movement just now?
He couldn’t be sure.
A thick, pungent smell wormed into his nostrils. Earthy and cloying, Tobe was reminded of a garden after rain, the atmosphere as heavy as that inside a greenhouse. Scottie’s earlier warning about toxic air must have been at the forefront of his mind, because Tobe realised his breaths had become shallow. If the staffroom had been poisonous before, it would be infinitely more so now.
Barely breathing, Tobe hesitated. He tensed under the grip of claustrophobia.
Without taking his eyes from the crimson monstrosity, Tobe grabbed the nearest kitchen chair and returned to the store.
8
Tobe dumped the vinyl-backed chair in the middle of the room and backpedalled away.
Together, careful not to slip in his blood, Brad and Ethan hefted Ressler’s limp form. Ressler moaned, half-awake. They sat him in the chair, and with the rope, Ethan bound him to the steel frame.
Tobe watched from afar, his head spinning. He thought hazily that these were not the actions of normal, law-abiding citizens.
They were committed now, each and every one of them.
Ethan drew the rope from Ressler’s torso down to his legs, interweaving it with the legs of the chair, knotting with the confidence of a man who knew his craft. As he did, Sarah worked around him. She discarded the second bloodied T-shirt and retrieved a clean gauze pad and bandage from the First-Aid kit. With these, she carefully wrapped Ressler’s wound. Tory and Brad looked on.
While the four of them were occupied, Tobe whispered, “Scottie, Rachel, you need to come with me.” He held a finger to his lips.
They followed without question.
At the staffroom door, Tobe turned back to them. “Cover your noses.”
He pushed the door open and Rachel gasped. Scottie said nothing, though his eyes glistened, wide with intrigue.
The organism’s tendrils resembled the splayed legs of a gargantuan spider.
Tobe shuddered, giving Scottie and Rachel a moment to take it in. “I have to tell you something,” he said. “Earlier tonight, when I first came in here, I thought it moved.”
“What?” Rachel said, the back of her hand pressed to her nose and mouth.
“It moved. I’m pretty sure—now, anyway—it was growing. Judging by the rate of expansion these past few minutes, I think if you stood here a while, watching it, you’d see it grow. See it move.”
Rachel shook her head. “It’s not moving now,” she said. “Maybe it knows we’re watching.”
Her sarcasm didn’t faze Tobe. Hell, even to him it sounded crazy. It did, however, set off another chain of thought. Could the organism be sentient? Could it know it was being observed, freezing like a deer in the headlights?
Lights.
“Turn off the light,” Scottie said.
“What?”
“Turn it off.” Scottie raised his flashlight. “And close the door.”
As instructed, Tobe closed the door and moved his hand to the wall switch. His fingers trembled. With a flick, he plunged the room into shades of charcoal and slate, the darkness broken only by a razor-thin line of white along the floor, beneath the door. No light pressed at the window. Tobe’s eyes adjusted and various objects—the table and chairs, the fridge and the bench—swam out of the grey.
He heard no movement.
Not at first.
…click…
Cl
ick-click.
The sound came from the wall, over near the lightless window.
Tobe thought back to the accident, seemingly hours ago, and the sound of the van’s engine as it cooled, ticked. He thought also of the strange popping noise they’d heard, when they had gathered on the road and looked up to find star-trails in the sky. This clicking was different, but similar. His skin crawled.
The clicking became a kind of soft, sliding whisper, the caress of skin on skin.
No, not that.
It slithers…
Inside the room, something slithered. Not something, because he knew what it was, but still fingering the wall switch, Tobe could no longer keep a rein on his imagination; he needed light, needed to see, and moved to flip the switch when Scottie’s flashlight, trained at the wall, flared.
Where the beam struck the organism, Tobe saw a flash of dark red flesh, deeper, and more vibrant than before, almost ink-like, but then trapped in that beam the colour bleached. He got the impression of ice crystals forming, but instantaneously, as though viewed in rapid time lapse, and it seemed Scottie’s flashlight projected not a beam of light but one of cold, and it had caused the organism to freeze—
—like a deer in the headlights.
Did the veins contract? More to the point, had they been pumping, as though with blood?
“Oh my God,” Rachel said. “It doesn’t like the light. It’s shying from the light.”
Tobe nodded, his movement feeling sluggish, stuttered. “It grows in the dark,” he whispered.
“But not in the light,” Rachel said. “Or at least, the light slows its growth.”
Unable to hold off any longer, Tobe hit the lights. He shivered and turned to Scottie. “It can’t be a plant… I mean a fungus,” he said. “The way it reacts… it has to be some kind of animal.”
Scottie pushed his glasses up his nose. Had he disconnected momentarily?
“Scottie?”
Scottie blinked. “I wasn’t certain about this before,” he began, “but now I’ve seen how it reacts to stimuli…”
“What are you talking about?”
Scottie hesitated, as though searching his mind for a memory. “There’s a kind of mold I researched once, for one of my stories.”
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