Walking Alone

by Bentley Little

  “There’s nothing to find out.” She shut off the bed stand light, grabbed her side of the blanket, rolled over and faced away from him.

  He knew better than to press her, and he lay there, staring upward, listening to her breathing as she gradually fell asleep.

  ****

  Zac had suggested to Aviva that they make Thanksgiving as awkward as possible so their friends would get the hint and leave early, but Donald and Cat kept things far more awkward than he or Aviva ever could, and the couple showed no indication that they were even thinking about leaving before Sunday. They all liked the food, however, and got through the meal itself with minimal unpleasantness. And the morning they devoted to watching TV was spent in silence, which meant no sniping or fighting. So, under the circumstances, it was probably the best that could be hoped for.

  There was a lull in the afternoon, however, when the Twilight Zone marathon switched from the classic half-hour shows to the more boring hour-long episodes, and the atmosphere in the house began to grow increasingly uncomfortable. Aviva had advocated for an alcohol-free holiday, but Zac knew he wouldn’t be able to survive without a little lubrication, and wine had been served with the meal. Cat had drunk more than her share, and afterward had discovered the liquor cabinet, where she’d liberated an unopened bottle of scotch that they’d received as a housewarming present years ago. She was getting downright belligerent toward Donald, though the rest of them were either ignoring her or trying to change the subject.

  A commercial came on for Black Friday savings at Wal-Mart. Zac glanced over at Aviva, meeting her eyes. She shook her head no.

  He remembered seeing on the news last year that there’d been a near riot at a Wal-Mart store over a limited number of price-slashed flat screen televisions. Several people had been taken to the hospital, and although that had been in some midwestern state, there’d been similar incidents right here in Southern California.

  He had worked at J.C. Penney as a college student. He had been in the trenches. He knew what Black Friday was like.

  But that was the old days. Before things had gotten so crazy. Before…

  He pushed the image from his mind. He didn’t want to think about it.

  Cat was the one who broached the subject. “Have you heard from Leslie?”

  “Cat!” Donald warned her.

  She was too tipsy to be dissuaded. “It’s the elephant in the room. We’re all thinking it.”

  “No,” Zac said in an attempt to cut her off.

  Aviva was looking down at the floor.

  “I don’t know how you guys bear it. The not knowing? I mean, if my daughter ran off—”

  “That’s enough!” Donald told her, and apparently his tone was sharp enough that it cut through the haze of alcohol. She stopped talking, blinked, then sank back into her chair.

  “I’m sorry,” Donald apologized.

  Zac waved him away.

  He glanced over at Aviva, still staring at the floor. That was the story they’d settled on, the one they’d told to friends and family: Leslie had run away from home. It had been unbelievable: Leslie was such a nice girl, so responsible, such a good student, and the three of them were so close. But it was believably unbelievable: yes, she was a good kid, but that was the kind of thing that happened sometimes, and maybe she’d fallen in with a bad group of friends or maybe she’d cracked from the pressure of college.

  The truth…

  He could hardly bear to face the truth—and Aviva refused to face it at all. It never left him, though, and those images were always in his mind, permanently etched onto his cerebral cortex.

  Another commercial came on, this one for Black Friday bargains at The Store. There was a new generation Samsung tablet on sale for fifty dollars, even though it was supposed to retail at three ninety-nine, and a plasma TV being offered for a hundred bucks.

  “You know,” Zac commented. “Those are some damn good deals.” From the corner of his eye, he saw Aviva’s head snap up, but he refused to look at her.

  Donald shrugged. “I’m not sure it’s worth it to fight those crowds.”

  “Oh, it’s worth it. Friend of mine saved himself over a thousand dollars last Christmas,” Zac lied. “Just from one Black Friday sale.” He knew Donald and Cat were strapped for cash and he was trying to hit them where they lived. “The Store’s just a mile or so away. If you’re looking for gifts to bring back to the family, you should check it out. Doors open at five. You’d be in and out before breakfast.”

  “It might not be a bad idea at that,” Donald acknowledged. He glanced at Cat, who shrugged noncommittally. “I’d actually like to get one of those tablets for myself.”

  “You should,” Zac encouraged him.

  “Are you guys going?” Donald asked.

  “No,” Aviva said quickly.

  Zac looked at her, then took a deep breath and turned to face Donald. “Yes.”

  “No!”

  “They’re good deals,” he said lamely.

  “It’s Black Friday!” Aviva was practically shouting.

  Cat snorted. “Bitch out why don’t you?”

  Aviva turned on her. “Stay out of this! You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!”

  Cat raised her hands in passive surrender.

  “Sorry,” Zac offered. He tried to smile. “But, like I said, we’ll be back before breakfast.”

  “Fuck you!” Aviva stormed off, and seconds later they heard the bedroom door slam shut.

  Now it was their friends’ turn to feel uncomfortable, and for Zac that almost made everything worthwhile. He knew he would have to face his wife later, however, and as Cat got increasingly more drunk, and he and Donald silently watched the marathon, Zac began planning what he would say, how he would justify his actions.

  The truth was, he’d felt a little tingle at the second he’d agreed to go with Donald and Cat to The Store, a frisson of excited anticipation. He’d wanted to do this for the past three years, though that was not a desire he’d admitted even to himself. He had not been there when Leslie had…turned. He had no reason to doubt Aviva’s account; in fact, he believed every word of it. But knowing each detail, even from his wife’s exhaustive description, was not the same as experiencing it, and there was some part of him that needed to endure Black Friday himself.

  Besides, he wanted to see Leslie again.

  When all was said and done, it came down to that. He missed his daughter, and he wanted reassurance that she was still alive. He knew she was not the same person she had been, knew from Aviva’s description that she had gone over, that she was one of them, but she was still his little girl, and he longed to see her face, even from afar. Not a day went by that he didn’t curse himself for waiting in the car instead of going with them into the department store. He’d never liked shopping, and it was what he had done a hundred times before, but he couldn’t help thinking that if he had been there, he could have saved her, could have protected her, could have held on to her until the wave had passed.

  Did that mean that he blamed Aviva for what had happened? Maybe he did, a little. And maybe she blamed him, too. Seeing Leslie again would not ameliorate any of that, but he thought, at the very least, it might grant him a little peace.

  Of course, there was no reason to think that Leslie would even be at The Store tomorrow. Or here in Brea. When she’d turned, it had been at a Macy’s in Newport Beach. If she were to show up anywhere, it would probably be at the location where she’d gone over. But who could tell? Maybe she’d made her way back.

  And maybe he could capture her.

  Bring her home.

  That was the real reason he wanted to go. It was a ludicrous idea, but that didn’t mean it was impossible, and he would not be able to live with himself if he didn’t at least make the effort.

  That’s what he told Aviva when he gathered up the courage to go into the bedroom and face her. She didn’t understand. She hit him, she screamed at him, but she couldn’t stop him, and
in the end her terrified anger turned to frightened grief at the thought that she might lose him, too.

  “I’m immune,” he promised her. “You know me. I hate shopping.”

  She had to admit that was true, and it eased her fears slightly, but when he asked her to come with him, she instantly shot the idea down. She was not immune. She loved shopping. And she did not want to be taken.

  Dinner was as pleasant as possible under the circumstances, and they all went to bed early. The Store was opening at five, so he set his alarm for four. Before rolling over and going to sleep, Aviva touched his cheek and looked into his eyes. “Be careful,” she said.

  “I will,” he promised.

  “Stay back. Don’t get too close.”

  “I won’t.”

  Aviva took a deep breath. “And if you see her…”

  “What?” he prodded.

  “I don’t know.”

  ****

  Zac drove them to The Store in his car. He’d been feeling pretty brave, but his heart started pounding and his palms began to sweat when he pulled into the parking lot and saw the line. The sun was not yet up, the sky dark save for a slight brightening on the horizon, and security lights illuminated a column of people snaking out from the store’s glass front, around the corner of the building, into the side parking lot.

  It looked exactly the way Aviva had described the scene at Macy’s.

  There were extra security guards patrolling the property, alert for any signs of trouble, and it appeared that there were enough of them that if something…happened, they’d probably be able to handle it. That sort of rational analysis didn’t make him feel any better, however, because his gut told him that no amount of uniformed men would have been able to stop what had befallen Leslie.

  He pulled the Toyota into an open space, and the three of them got out, walking around the side of the building to the end of the line. In front of them, a middle-aged man and his teenage son were mapping out a strategy to get first dibs on both a new phone and a new X-Box. Zac imagined Aviva and Leslie having a similar conversation about clothes and shoes outside Macy’s.

  “Why do people from New York say that you stand on line instead of in line?” Cat wondered. “Especially these days when ‘on line’ means ‘online,’ like the computer.”

  “I was always curious about that, too,” Donald admitted. “I mean, we’re not standing on a line here. We are the line. We’re in the line.”

  The conversation was inane, but Zac was grateful for it. Talking kept his mind off what was coming next.

  Moments later, the line began moving. His pulse quickened. Had they opened the doors early? No. He saw as they rounded the corner that the orderly queue in front of the store had disintegrated into an amorphous mob pushing toward the still-closed entrance, growing as it absorbed the line of people feeding into it from behind. His heart was pounding, but he moved in lockstep with the man and boy before him until the line broke apart, all of them spreading out to join the group fanning around the front of the store. Pressure from behind pushed his body into the rear end of a shapely young woman, who glared at him over her shoulder. He glanced around to see who was pressing against him, expecting to see Donald and Cat, but they were nowhere to be found, and the two people behind him were a pair of elderly fat twins whose eyes seemed to be hypnotized by The Store sign lit up on the side of the building.

  This was not starting out well.

  With a sense of growing panic, he searched the faces of the crowd for Donald and Cat. There was no sign of either, and he sidled his way between pressed bodies, calling out their names. “Cat! Donald! Cat!”

  Suddenly, they were there.

  As Aviva had described, he felt a difference in the air, an increase in temperature, as though a gigantic space heater had been turned on. He knew what was happening immediately, and he saw them first from the corner of his eye, purposeful movement cutting through the swelling crowd. One passed by him, elbowing people aside, a tall white-skinned man in a long dark coat, and Zac followed in the man’s wake, slipping between couples, families and individuals until he found himself at the head of the throng, facing the lighted doors of the store.

  Something was shifting in the mood of the crowd. Excitement had turned to aggression, anticipation to something much darker, much more primal. There was no conversation among the people around him, only grunts and wordless exclamations. A fist punched him in the back. He kicked out behind him, gratified to feel his foot connect with another’s leg, thinking: Serves you right, asshole!

  The mob was pushing forward—and then it wasn’t. Then it was. And then it wasn’t. It was as though he were at the forefront of a living, pulsing being, a single creature breathing in and out, preparing to rush forward at the instant the store’s doors were opened.

  A line of green uniformed employees within the lighted store approached the entrance, unlocked the doors and opened them.

  The screams that greeted this act were deafening, and, as one, the crowd surged, dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people all competing to be first through the doors. An old woman was knocked over and abandoned by the wayside. A stroller carrying a crying infant rolled off to the right as the bargain hunters swarmed past it, heedless. Zac himself was swept along by the wave and pushed into the store. Someone yelled at him to “Get out of the way!” and another person pushed him into a washer/dryer that had two men on top of it, fighting to determine who would lay claim to the half-off appliance.

  His eyes scanned the mass of frantically scrambling shoppers.

  And there she was.

  Leslie.

  She had changed, and although he’d been prepared for that, the extent of it shocked him. Rather than the tight jeans, hip t-shirts and sneakers she’d favored since junior high, she was decked out in a designer dress and high heels that he recognized as being Black Friday bargains from last year. Never one to wear jewelry previously, she now had on bracelets, earrings, necklaces, brooches. Her face was almost unrecognizable. Haggard and pale, lined and scarred, it was almost skull-like, and the dullness suggested by her slack open mouth was belied by the hyped-up fanaticism in her too-sharp eyes.

  He called out her name. Yelled it. Even amidst the noise of the rush, it should have been loud enough for her to hear, but she remained completely oblivious, not even glancing in his direction as she sprinted past him toward women’s clothing. He hurried after her. “Leslie!” he called. “Leslie!”

  Did she even remember her name? That was the thought that occurred to him because she actually glanced for half a second in his direction, her attention diverted by his shouting, and there was a complete lack of recognition in her eyes.

  Others like her were sprinting past the ordinary shoppers, standing out from the crowd with their pale skin and expensive costumes, with their speed and single-minded focus. What were they? Zac wondered. What had they become?

  Someone screamed near the rear of the store. He heard shouting behind him as shoppers got into a fight.

  He followed Leslie, who was pushing her way through groups of women battling over sweaters and swimsuits, taking the path of least resistance between shelves and circular racks until she found what she was looking for: a bin of purses that were eighty percent off. She was the first one there, and when another woman came up behind her to sort through the choices as well, Leslie used her elbow to hit the woman in the throat, causing her to fall to the floor, gasping for breath.

  Zac reached his daughter, grabbed for her, but she’d already picked out the two purses she wanted and was speeding away from him toward the jewelry counter. He saw where she was headed and also saw an opportunity to cut her off before she got there. Dashing into the main aisle, he was almost run down by a group of men and women screeching incoherently. Donald and Cat were running with the pack, their arms filled with bargains they had grabbed. In their eyes was the same acquisitive fanaticism he’d seen in Leslie. He even imagined that the color had left their skin, although he was not s
ure that was actually the case.

  He ran down the aisle, cut through the lingerie section and reached the jewelry counter before Leslie, throwing himself in front of her, as he tried to block her way. Waving his hands in semaphore style in an effort to get her attention, he shouted, “Stop! Leslie! It’s me! Dad!”

  She ran over him in her single-minded pursuit of jewelry bargains, knocking him to the floor, her foot slamming into his chest, breaking multiple ribs as her high heel stomped on his sternum.

  The pain was excruciating. It was suddenly impossible to breathe; there was no air in his lungs, and when he tried to draw in a breath, it felt as though he were being stabbed with a serrated knife. He tried to get up, but the pain was too great, and then another woman kicked his side. He would have yelled if he’d had the breath, but he let out only a small ineffectual croak.

  People were all around him now, pushing and shoving in their efforts to reach the jewelry counter. A fat woman was tripped or pushed and fell down on top of him, followed almost immediately by a small elderly Asian man.

  It was over, he realized. He was down, and he wasn’t getting back up. He was going to die here.

  What’s more, he had lost Leslie. He couldn’t see her and didn’t know where she was. He felt the weight of the crowd press down on him, and realized that Aviva would never know that he had found their daughter. He wished he had called her immediately, wished he could reach his phone now, but people were piling on top of him, squishing him, smothering him, and he could do nothing but wait for the end.

  Would this be on the news? he wondered. Would there be security footage of the rush into the store? Would PR people and police refer to it as a riot, the way they always did the day after?

  Maybe Aviva would get to look at the security tape. Maybe she would spot Leslie.

  The three things he remembered at the end: his daughter at six, telling him that she wanted to be an astronaut when she grew up; Aviva when he’d proposed to her, the way she’d cried, even though she’d known it was coming because he’d accidentally let the cat out of the bag the day before; the way the Sears store always smelled like popcorn when he was a child.