Feeding Frenzy #9
“Good. Listen, if there’s no one in the break room let’s call it a night and get out of here. Let’s find a pub and get hammered.”
“You’re on,” he said.
They moved through the café, torchlight slithering on furniture shrouded in plastic.
Adam punched in the four-digit code on the panel outside the door that was labelled STAFF ONLY and Jacinta pushed it open with a click.
Light spilled on to the floor beyond and zigzagged up the first few concrete steps. The two of them stood and listened.
“I can’t hear anything,” said Jacinta.
“Come on.”
Light preceded them up the stairs, which turned back on themselves at the half-way point.
The silence seemed to thicken as they climbed.
By the time they reached the fire door at the top, Adam felt as though it was clogging his ears like a change of air pressure.
Neither of them commented on the continuing silence; it was as though they were both too intimidated by it to speak.
Grimly resolved to confirm what they were sure they already knew, Adam once again punched in the four-digit code and Jacinta shoved the door open.
As soon as they were over the threshold, Adam directed his torch towards the break room door.
It was propped open by a folded-over wedge of cardboard.
Light spread itself thinly over the wall of grey metal lockers in the room beyond, murkily picked out the central table and the wooden chairs surrounding it, all but one of which was unoccupied.
Adam had taken four steps towards the room, the light intensifying with each one, when what he had thought was a crumpled coat propped on a chair on the opposite side of the table rustled and leaned forward.
Light lurched away from the chair’s occupant as Adam jumped.
Behind him Jacinta uttered a wordless cry.
With a twitch of his wrist, Adam caused torchlight to swoop from the ceiling and fall like a net upon the feebly moving collection of what appeared to be bones and rags.
Jacinta groaned and sagged against him, but it wasn’t until the withered mass raised its peeling, hairless head that Adam recognised it for what – or rather, who – it was.
“Oliver.” The word emerged as the faintest breath.
Yet the figure, diminutive, emaciated, but still somehow recognisable, seemed to hear it.
It turned its head slowly in his direction, causing its spectacles, dangling grotesquely from one shrivelled ear, to sway and flash in the light.
Adam did not know whether Oliver could see him, because his eyes, if he still had any, were so deeply sunken that his sockets were merely puckered hollows crammed with shadow.
So was his mouth. As the lipless slit widened, darkness seemed to bloom out of it rather than rush in, making Adam wonder whether that was all his stick-thin body contained.
A moment later a papery-white sliver that had once been a tongue, followed by the brittle, breathy remains of a human voice, emerged from the darkness.
“Nearly…gone,” Oliver whispered, each word drawn-out, tortuous.
“Not…real…enough…you…alone…” The effort seemed too much and his head drooped forward as if it had finally become too heavy for the impossibly thin neck to bear.
There was a hollow clunk as the almost fleshless skull hit the table, a final rattling sigh.
“What’s happened to him?” Jacinta said, her voice almost as fragile as Oliver’s had been.
Adam’s thoughts felt numbed, as if his mind was shielding him from a terrible dawning truth. “I don’t know.”
“We’ve got to help him.”
“He’s beyond help.”
“No!” Her cry was raw and shrill, and seemed to have been torn out of her. “He can’t be dead! He just…he can’t be!”
“He is,” Adam said, amazed at his own calmness. “Come on, we need to leave.”
“But what killed him? What killed him, Adam?”
“I don’t know.”
She glared at him, then her face twisted with fury. “Yes you do. It was you, wasn’t it? You’re making this happen!”
“If I am I don’t know how or why. I’m as much in the dark as you are.”
As though she hadn’t heard him she sobbed, “Make it stop! Make it stop!” She began to pummel him with her fists.
He caught her wrists in his hands. “I don’t know how,” he said.
Her sobbing intensified. He released her wrists and pulled her to him, holding her tight. “Come on,” he said, “don’t give in to it. You’re not a running away screaming kind of girl, remember. You’ve got to stay strong.”
He held her until she stopped crying and shaking, until she gently disengaged herself from him. Her face was red and blotchy, her lips pale. “Okay,” she said, “I’m all right now.”
“I think we should get out of here.”
“And go where?”
“I don’t know. Anywhere where stuff like this isn’t happening. Let’s think about that later.”
Hand in hand they went back down the concrete stairs, across the dark and silent shop floor and down the escalator to ground level.
From here it was no more than a couple of dozen paces to the main doors, but ahead of them, between the bays of bookshelves jutting out from the walls, was an obstacle course of central pillars and free-standing displays, piles of unshelved books and cardboard boxes in the process of being emptied.
The closest of these snatched the light from Adam’s torch and soaked it up, so that what lay beyond them remained in shadow.
The glazed doors and huge display windows at the front of the store was nothing but a sheen of black.
Adam probed with the thin beam of his torch into every alcove, every nook, every cranny, every possible hiding place.
The way ahead opened before them and crumpled back into shadow in their wake.
They came parallel with the last (or first, if you were entering the store) bay of bookshelves.
Now they had the information desk on their right, a long counter studded with tills on their left.
The main doors were ten yards ahead, the darkness beyond their panes so impenetrable it was as though someone had given the front of the store a coating of thick black paint.
Adam swept the torch in a wide, slow arc, from right to left. The football-sized pool of light sidled across the information desk, trailing brownish shadows, and was on the point of moving away from it when someone rose up from behind it like a slow jack-in-the-box.
“Adam!” Jacinta cried, at the same instant as Adam spun back on his heels and pinned the figure with torchlight.
It was Nigel. He was grinning through the loops of bandage he wore around his face.
That, at least, was Adam’s first impression, before he realised that the bandages were in fact strips of peeling skin.
And the reason Nigel was grinning was because he no longer had any lips.
They had sloughed away, leaving his teeth exposed.
“Adam,” Nigel said. There was a gruffness to his voice, but it had deteriorated less than Oliver’s.
It was Jacinta who answered, her voice flinty, breathless. “Nigel, what’s happened to you?”
“I’m coming apart,” Nigel said, reaching up and peeling a length of skin from his own head with a sound like tearing paper. “I’m unravelling. I’m not real enough. But I’m one of the last.” He sounded almost proud.
“Not real…” repeated Jacinta. She looked at Adam with something like the beginnings of realisation, or a denial of it. “Tell me this isn’t happening.”
“It isn’t,” Nigel said. “It’s all pretend. So there’s nothing to worry about. For me, anyway.” He staggered, then righted himself, pushed something across the counter with a scrape and jingle of metal. “Here.”
“What is it?” asked Adam.
“Keys. To let yourselves out. I’m going to…I need to lie down now…Not feeling too…” Without another word he sank back, almost gracefully, behind the information desk.
Adam moved across to pick up the keys, Jacinta clinging to the back of him like a frightened monkey.
Neither of them said anything. The time for rationalising and theorising was past; now it was all about going on, surviving from one second to the next.
Adam felt as though his thoughts were floating somewhere above his head.
They were vague things, just out of reach, but they tugged him along like a puppet.
He moved across to the main doors, placed a palm on the cold glass.
Even here the darkness outside was impenetrable.
He tried to pierce it with the light from his torch, but the white disc that the glass reflected back at him looked like the dying sun of an already dead world.
He paused a moment, hoping an alternative to what he was about to do might occur to him, but none did, so he thrust the key into the lock, twisted it and shoved the door open.
Darkness. Silence. Nothing to feel or taste or smell.
It was neither hot nor cold. Adam couldn’t even seem to push his perception of the ground beneath his feet further than the basic fact that it was a surface to bear his weight.
Behind him Jacinta said nothing. Like him, she had probably come to realise how pointless speaking had become.
He took her hand and they started to walk.
Their feet made no sound. Adam could not hear his own breathing, couldn’t even be sure that time was passing any more.
The torchlight began to fail around the same time that Jacinta’s hand began to dwindle in his.
Adam held on to both for as long as he could, but eventually, inevitably, both his source of light and his companion slipped away and he was left with nothing but his own clenched fists.
At least they were real; at least he was.
But for how long? Best not to think about that, best not to think about anything.
He went on, moving forward, ploughing through the darkness, or something not even as substantial as that.
He was left with nothing now but his own desperate hope that if he searched for long enough, eventually he would find something as real as he was.
The End