by Louisa Lo
Then, someone said he had had the chance to tune in to a radio while it was still working, and he had heard that the same thing was happening in other cities, even other continents.
Just what the heck was happening?
Chelsea’s thoughts turned to her father. Hopefully he was still in transit and wasn’t caught in any of this craziness. And anyhow, since he was an Earl, and a rich and rather paranoid one at that, whether he was here on official business or not he would have had much better security than she had. It had to be enough. She had to believe that.
Chelsea could no longer see Teenaged Girl. She had melted into the crowd somewhere ahead, joining a group her age. The Janitor was still nearby, and so were Emma and her mom.
Chelsea estimated there were around a hundred people in front of them, and another hundred behind them at this point. She was able to take a guess, thanks to the number of cell phones that the travellers used to light up the ground in front of them. With the road going uphill and downhill through the region, the crowd meandering along the highway shoulder collectively looked like a white glowing dragon. Chelsea turned off her flashlight and pocketed it, not wanting to waste power when she could see well enough with the other light sources.
Chelsea did more than simply listen to the crowd, though. Using the firmest and most authoritative voice she could summon, she called out every other minute and urged people to leave their valuables behind, bury them if they could, lest the trinkets act like a trail of breadcrumbs for the Obsessed to come after the entire group. She wasn’t sure how many people she managed to get through to, but she suspected not a lot. From what she could tell, nobody had bothered to stop and bury anything.
A part of her even understood their reluctance. Human beings tended to not be very logical when it came to “stuff,” even at their own peril. Just look at how many people lined up for a midnight release of some video game, when they could’ve gotten a proper night’s sleep and purchased the exact same thing the very next morning, with energy to spare to actually enjoy playing the darn thing.
With people continuing to pass her from behind, Chelsea supposed she could’ve walked faster, but Emma’s little legs couldn’t keep up at that pace. Her mother didn’t look like she was willing to carry the young girl, wearing spiky heels she wasn’t willing to part with despite the long trek. Luckily, they were knock-offs and weren’t in danger of attracting any brand-name hungry monsters.
Chelsea hoped Emma hadn’t noticed her mother’s actions, or lack thereof. But then, the child that Chelsea once was could always tell when her own mom wasn’t putting her first. Kids really were smarter than adults assumed.
There was nothing Chelsea could do, except to watch out for Emma to the best of her ability.
Chelsea’s stomach growled. It was now long past suppertime—late dinner or otherwise—and it wasn’t like there was going to be a fast food joint coming up anytime soon. She still had her wallet and her black credit card, but a fat lot of good that would do her now.
The wooded area they were in wasn’t familiar to Chelsea, since it was in the opposite direction of her university town. But just like before she had reached the Mall, she was once again in one of those transitional spaces between cities and suburbs, with roads that would only take a quick step on the gas pedal to get through, but a whole lot further when it was done on foot.
Suddenly, the people in front of them were shouting, then they started to run. Had there been an attack? No, it looked like they weren’t running away, but rather running toward something. The feeble cell phone lights, blocked by restless bodies, couldn’t reveal what the commotion was all about. Whatever it was, human curiosity won over self-preservation, and the crowd behind her surged forward.
Chelsea reached out and grabbed Emma’s hand, fearing the little girl would get trampled by the relentless crowd. Emma’s fingers tightened around hers in a death grip as people kept pushing, until they were squeezed from all directions and could move forward simply by lifting their feet off the ground and letting the current of bodies carry them. Chelsea had no idea if The Janitor and Emma’s Mom were nearby. They were close behind when she had checked right before the surge happened, but she couldn’t tell anymore. Her entire being was focused on not falling and taking Emma down with her.
Then she was finally close enough to see what had gotten everyone so excited. Around the next bend was a small building hosting a grocery store, one of those near-extinct Mom-and-Pop shops that also served as the local convenience store, hardware store, and even nursery. There was a sign on its front door that said “Closed.” The store’s interior was lit up by a couple of fluorescent tubes, most likely powered by an emergency generator.
Looked like somewhere along the walk they had officially left the city and gotten into small-town territory.
The store stood like a mirage for the weary travellers, with dusty windows covered in Coca Cola posters from the Sixties, and an attachment to an antique gas station added to its surreal quality. By the time she got close enough, somebody had already smashed through the windows with an ice machine. People had poured into the store and were already busy taking potato chips, chocolate bars, water bottles, and pop, consuming them and fighting with each other to get more at the same time.
Emma’s Mom jumped right into the fray and joined the looting, struggling over a bag of instant noodles with another woman. The Janitor took a large carton of orange juice from the fridge, pried it open and drank straight from it, his eyes closed in gratification, not paying heed to the two men who were trying to pry it out of his hand.
Chelsea hesitated. Since childhood, the importance of not appearing to be taking from the people—at least not openly and brazenly—had been drilled into her. That was Nobility 101. It’s one thing to have someone like her being seen as the airhead of her social class, but the monarchy itself couldn’t survive if it was seen as greedy and amoral. The battle to keep the status quo in this modern world had more to do with public opinions than the strength of arms.
But her stomach was growling, and worse, she was so thirsty she couldn’t think straight. And then there was Emma to think about. Besides, the owners of the store were nowhere to be found.
I could have Daddy send them a check when this is all over.
With that in mind, Chelsea took Emma to a self-serve slushie machine in the corner which hadn’t been noticed by anyone yet. She pulled the lever and filled up two cups, and handed one to Emma. The other one she poured down her throat unceremoniously, the resulting brain freeze worth every last bit of pounding in her head.
Thanks to a couple of greeting card racks in front of the slushie machine conveniently dividing the area from the main part of the store, Chelsea was able to observe the crowd in their feeding frenzy without drawing attention to herself or Emma.
Two hundred people. One tiny store. It all added up to a lot of fighting in close quarters, with many from the outside pushing to get in. The bag of instant noodles Emma’s Mom had her eyes on was now torn open, its contents crushed into three or four pieces, with twice as many people wanting to get a hold of them. It was screaming, hair-pulling, shirt-grabbing chaos.
The Janitor, surprisingly, was doing very well. The man had to be in his sixties, based on his weathered face and the wrinkles all around his eyes, but he was lean and hale, which was likely a side effect from the physical nature of his job. He pushed, shoved, and elbowed people out of his way, but never hard enough to solicit a very negative response. And he kept managing to spot new sources of food before anyone else could, whether it was on a higher shelf or hidden amongst inedible items, like the complimentary chocolates in little kid toys. Was it an inherent trait of being a tenacious and resourceful member of the cleaning staff, or was Chelsea witnessing some sort of precise combat and survival skills at work? She should know. Growing up her daddy had put her through a bunch of self-defense courses, and she thought she recognized some of those subtle movements as well-disguised tactics. Employi
ng his medium height to perfection, the man was aggressive one moment, non-threatening and evasive the next.
All from a supposedly-harmless janitor? Huh.
For Chelsea, though, the recognition of those tactics was one thing, the application was quite another. She had neither the skills nor strength to carry out a similar strategy. The closest she’d ever gotten to combat was during shoe sales. But, boy, had she gone through a few heroic battles over discounted Pradas.
As soon as she thought about that, her paradigm shifted. What happened during a shoe sale? They put last year’s crap up front for the first wave of shoppers, hoping they would be too geared up by the competition to notice what they were really trying to bring home. The real goodies were usually further at the back for the more discerning customers, the ones who were not too lost in the thrill of the hunt to clearly see the deals, or rather, the lack thereof.
Chelsea pressed a finger to her lips, indicating for Emma to stay quiet, and Emma nodded back at her. Drawing as little attention to themselves as possible, they crept toward the rear end of the convenience store, carefully hopping over tangled bodies locked in struggle. The back door was ajar, revealing a small storage area, which had a locked entryway on the other side presumably leading outside. A paint-smeared ladder leaned over a stack of nondescript cardboard boxes with a price gun set on top of them.
A price gun was used to put the price tags on merchandise, right? Hopefully, edible merchandise?
Once they got to the back, Chelsea quietly closed the door. The front part of the store, with its share of crowded, sweaty bodies, was quite warm. Here in the storage room, the temperature was closer to the outdoors; the air was cooler but fresher.
Chelsea rounded on the cardboard boxes. She spotted a pair of scissors nearby. Using one tip, she started cutting through the packing tape.
Please don’t let it be detergent, mouthwash, maxi pads, cigarettes, or condoms. Give me something I can eat.
The first box contained items that were even more useless than the ones she had just listed in her head. It contained the latest editions of an assortment of gossip magazines. The one at the top of the box had an unsmiling picture of her hurrying to her car. She had been unsmiling because at the time she had just been harassed within an inch of her life. Inside a library, of all places. The magazine’s headline proclaimed: Lady Spendalot Does It Again. Is She Going Down the Same Destructive Path as Her Mother?
It was a fluff piece about Chelsea having just acquired a new Hermes handbag that week, which was technically the truth. Except they failed to mention that she had bought it to celebrate having scored a GPA in the top five percent of her freshman year, and being granted the opportunity to take a few coveted third-year courses starting this fall. No, good grades didn’t sell papers. Spoiled little rich girls did.
And yes, her nickname in the press was Lady Spendalot, a pun of her formal title, Lady Spence.
Chelsea quickly shut the flaps of the box, not wanting Emma to see the negative portrait of her, however unlikely the little girl was to make the connection between the polished princess on the glossy magazines and the soot-faced person right in front of her.
The second box held much more promise. Half of it contained those liquid diet-supplement drinks that had more sugar than a full meal, and the other half held vegetable crackers with more MSG than vegetables. It was fine, though. Fats and carbs would serve them better than healthier options under the circumstances.
They dug in before anyone could take the food away from them. The crackers washed down nicely with the liquid supplements. In total, Chelsea downed four tubes of supplements, barely registering—or being disgusted by—their fake chocolaty flavor, and three boxes of crackers. Emma had almost half of that. Not bad, given their relative difference in size.
There was enough left for Emma’s Mom and then some. Although, how to get it to her without having the whole crowd descending on the storage room Chelsea had no idea. Outside the sound of looting had subsided. People most likely had already consumed what they could and there was nothing left to fight over. There was a pause in the air, as if collectively, everyone asked in silence: Now what?
At least they would probably be safe here for a while, Chelsea thought to herself. It wasn’t like there was any brand-name stuff in the convenience store for it to be an Obsessed magnet. And they were in the middle of nowhere, far from the glamor of the big city.
She had clearly offended some unknown god of irony, because no sooner had she thought that, the sound of breaking windows came. Horrified screams filled the front of the store, along with the noise of shelves crashing to the floor.
Among the noises there was a low chanting in the background that was disturbing at the deepest and most instinctive level, though she couldn’t say why. It was too soft to make out the exact words at first, at least not until multiple voices joined in the chorus, their combined strength chilled Chelsea to the bone.
“Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty…”
Chapter Five
Projectiles
After telling Emma to stay put, Chelsea mustered the courage to open the door to the front of the store by a crack. Then she slipped through it—and gazed upon a scene of total panic and chaos.
There were around half a dozen Obsessed in the store. Their disheveled and ragged bodies were, in some way, no different from the humans’ except for their clear disregard for their own unattended injuries, and the predatory grins on their faces as they yanked, tore, and bit shiny stuff off the people around them.
So while it was true that the modest sanctuary didn’t have anything brand-name, the same couldn’t be said of the people currently occupying it, despite Chelsea’s previous warning of this exact scenario.
The monsters were few in number compared to the two hundred humans in the store and the surrounding area, but they moved quickly and ruthlessly. A few dozen victims had already fallen.
There was a girl bleeding from her earlobes, her earrings torn right from her flesh. An older woman was curled into a fetal position on the ground, moaning and holding her wrist where a watch would’ve been. One of the Obsessed was thoroughly fascinated by a man’s funky belt buckle, a collector’s item of sorts, but couldn’t quite figure out how to unfasten the piece of leather. So he just kept yanking at it, jerking the man’s middle off the ground repeatedly. Chelsea could only imagine what type of injury that motion was doing to that poor man’s back.
The entire time the Obsessed continued to chant endless rounds of “pretty, pretty”, as if it was a perverse worker’s song, or a call to other brethren.
Wait, other brethren? Oh, dear heaven, what if there were more coming their way?
It would appear that even Emma’s Mom hadn’t heeded Chelsea’s advice to leave all of her valuables behind. The woman had on a Mont Blanc anklet and an Obsessed was chewing it off her leg. She howled in pain as the monster ripped her pant leg at the seam—along with her flesh—in order to free the thick stainless-steel anklet.
Then someone grabbed Chelsea by her middle from behind and lifted her up, fireman style. She screamed and kicked out her legs, but was unable to connect with any flesh and bone. Her attacker carried her and ran. There was the slam of a door and the sound of a lock being secured, and suddenly Chelsea went from staring at the ground to being upright again. Disoriented, she found herself back in the storage room, with Emma blinking at her with wide, fearful eyes.
She took in a deep breath to scream again, but a palm covered her mouth. “Hush, dammit! You’re going to get us all killed.”
Chelsea stared at her kidnapper-turned-rescuer in disbelief. It was The Janitor.
“Maximilian Ruiz. I was a Sergeant in the Army, m’lady.” He went to check the sturdiness of the door, then pressed his ear to it.
While he did that, Chelsea digested his words. Like many other minor nobles, she was raised with some basic knowledge of the military, even though she had never been close enough to the throne for serving i
n it to become more or less an unofficial requirement. Not being an active serviceman anymore, Ruiz could’ve just introduced himself with his full name. He didn’t have to tell her his rank when he had been in the military.
His mentioning of his rank was meant to assure her that he had the expertise to deal with this crisis.
His calling her m’lady, on the other hand, was telling her that he might’ve recognized her.
“You-you know who I am?” Chelsea asked.
“I kept my mouth shut on the way here, but, yeah, I know.” Sergeant Ruiz turned and nodded at her. He might not be a young man anymore, but his eyes were alert, his movement confident, and there wasn’t a single extra pound on his body. “I’ve been around long enough to recognize faces beyond a little mud and blood. And I’ll stay true to my oath.”
“Your what?”
“My oath of enlistment when I joined the Army.”
Then Chelsea understood.
Since the States were part of the Commonwealth, Ruiz would have sworn his allegiance directly to the British monarch, and by extension, her heirs. If the States had gone through with its Independence all those centuries ago, the oath would’ve been given to its own Constitution. But as it was, Ruiz was obligated to serve and protect Chelsea, whether or not he thought she was just a dimwit who was going to endanger those around her. If he had became a janitor after his time in the military, spending his days picking up the trash of people who thought they were better than him, then he couldn’t have too high of an opinion of Chelsea’s kind—and of Chelsea in particular, given how she had been portrayed in the tabloids.
She might not have his respect, but at least she would have his protection. It was a lot more than she could have hoped for just minutes ago.
The chanting beyond the door stopped.
Chelsea blew out a sigh of relief, but Ruiz shot her a look of warning, frowning as he pressed his ear against the door again. Chelsea figured they were probably safe here. She certainly had no more brand name and shiny stuff on her, and neither did Ruiz or Emma.