Chapter 9 Emma
NINE
Emma
If someone had told me I’d be starting my day stuck inside the world’s least charming art project, I wouldn’t have even blinked.
But I hadn’t planned on the purple ooze or the glitter.
Or the way it instantly turned the tile floor at Vale Provisions into a Slip ‘n Slide for idiots with no sense of self-preservation.
Beth, Carol, and Deva rounded the corner first, all of them skating instead of walking, arms windmilling as plastic bags and shopping baskets skidded past them in slow motion.
I tried to step lightly, but the slime grabbed my sneaker and spun me halfway around.
I pinwheeled past a cluster of customers who were busy shaking globs of glitter out of their hair.
One woman shrieked as a hunk of lavender goo dropped from her ponytail onto her shoulder. The entire store pulsed with a weird hush, punctuated only by the sound of shoes squeaking and the occasional wet plop as another victim joined the ranks of the freshly splattered.
All this, and we hadn’t even gotten through the front half of the shop.
Beth lurched into me, sending a puff of fine glitter right up my nose. I sneezed hard enough to see stars.
“Where’d Susan go?” Deva asked, wiping purple off her earring with a sour sigh. “No way she set that up and just wandered out the front.”
I spotted Summer, hunched under her jacket in the middle of an aisle. Her phone was clenched in one hand, somehow free of goop, even though purple dripped from her jacket. Her raised eyebrows and the deathly pallor on her face showed she was probably rethinking her entire employment contract.
“Where’s Susan?” Carol glared at the girl.
Summer didn’t say a single blessed thing. She just raised her arm and pointed—stone-faced, mute, finger trembling—directly at the front door.
Not a word. Just that.
Every customer in the place stared at us. Deva shot them a withering look. “Don’t get involved unless you want magical herpes, people.”
I shuffled forward and hooked an arm around Beth so we could two-step our way toward the door.
Halfway there, the next disaster struck.
A bang erupted from somewhere above, up in the ductwork or maybe hidden on a shelf. Beth shrieked and ducked, and all at once the room drowned in a choking black cloud, thick as tar and reeking like burnt licorice and rotten eggs.
It hit my face like a slap.
In two seconds, my eyes watered, my throat sealed shut, and I was down on my knees gagging. The world narrowed to smoke and Carol’s red sneaker inches from my nose.
I could barely see my hand in front of me, let alone the way forward.
“Down!” Deva hacked out, and I saw the other ladies hit the floor next to me. “Smoke will rise.”
Beth coughed so hard that I thought she might lose a lung. “How the hell—” she rasped. “Who does this? Is she trying to kill her regulars?”
Carol’s hand materialized on my shoulder out of the fog. “Group up! Huddle!” She yanked us together, wrapping her arms around both me and Beth with more muscle than I’d ever given her credit for.
I could taste the smoke on my tongue, bitter and acidic, like chewing on a burned sock. I yanked my sleeve over my mouth, but it didn’t help.
Carol reached into her pants pocket and fished around until she came up with a marble-sized white ball. She flashed a manic grin despite how her cheeks were streaked with purple. “Watch this,” she croaked.
She slammed the ball down on the ground.
For a second, nothing happened.
Then the thing shimmered, expanded, and inflated into a see-through bubble bigger than a beach ball. The surface rippled and stretched, then steadied.
“Stick your heads in,” Carol wheezed, already plunging her own face into its surface.
I didn’t overthink it. I just did as I was told.
The moment my head broke through, fresh, clean air rushed into my lungs. Not just clean. It was maybe the best air I’d had since I was eight years old, hiding from Henry’s stink bomb in the backyard. For a heartbeat, breathing wasn’t a cruel joke.
Beth and Deva shoved in on either side, the four of us mashed together with only a thin, wobbly shell between us and the black, burning haze outside.
Amazing.
I could actually see again. The bubble’s surface gave everything a slightly warped, fishbowl effect, but that was a small price to pay for not dying of smoke inhalation in the corner of a discount herbal remedies shop.
“Move!” Carol called, and we let her lead the way, bubble and all.
The hardest part was that we had to shuffle in tandem, crab-walking through fallen cardboard boxes and over streaks of rainbow goop. My foot rammed something, and a candle with “Renewal” on the label bounced off the tile and tumbled into the distance.
We must have looked utterly deranged.
We zig-zagged for the front, but Carol veered suddenly left. I smashed up against Beth, who elbowed me in the side but didn’t complain.
I realized why Carol had changed course as soon as I saw the old woman sprawled near the endcap of herbs.
She was probably seventy-five, tiny and hunched, dressed in a pink jogger set and clutching her bag in one hand. Her legs splayed out awkwardly, shoes flailing on the glitter-slick floor, making her look like a turtle stranded on its back.
The worst part was that she was crying.
“Oh, for god’s sake,” Deva muttered. “Steer left, get her in with us!”
Beth leaned into the bubble, and the surface bent outward, stretching enough for Deva to reach through and grab the woman’s free arm.
Deva’s hands were already streaked with purple, but she managed to latch on and haul the woman’s head inside the bubble.
She inhaled like someone coming up from deep water.
Her face was the color of a boiled beet.
“Who—what—” the lady stammered.
“Shopping’s fun, right?” I told her, as if this was just Black Friday at Target.
We kept moving, bubble wobbling and squeaking along the shelves, black smoke boiling behind us. Somewhere deeper in the store a shelf collapsed, sending boxes tumbling.
Out of nowhere, two more customers staggered into view, eyes wet and streaming. Both women, one in a flowered skirt, the other rocking a Mystic Hollow real estate agent blazer, looked ready to pass out.
“Stick your faces in here!” Beth hollered, shoving the bubble toward them.
They needed no convincing. In a moment they’d wriggled halfway through with us, arms and purses tangled. We had to be some sort of world-record attempt at how many people you could fit inside a magical air pocket.
Carol aimed the bubble for the side door, which was closer than the front. The bubble tensed, then squished, folding us in tighter.
“On three,” Carol hissed.
“One,” I managed, with a mouthful of Beth’s bangle pressed into my cheek.
“Two!” Beth grunted.
“Three!” Deva roared, and the four of us hit the door at once.
For a second, nothing happened. The rubbery bubble shell pressed against the door like a balloon against a dartboard.
Then, with a wet pop that sounded like a champagne cork in a disaster movie, the bubble shot the whole lot of us out onto the alley beside Vale Provisions.
We hit the concrete in a heap.
The bubble burst in a flurry of air and a spray of purple droplets, leaving us sprawled in the alley, lungs gulping at real oxygen. I coughed until my ribs ached.
The three women we’d rescued barely paused. They scrambled to their feet and ran. Not a backward glance, not a thanks, just hair streaming behind them, and noses running.
We barely had time to process our own survival before the air behind us vibrated with the mother of all detonations. It rattled the glass in the alley, ringing in my ears like a dinner bell.
The side door flew open.
For half a second, I expected Susan to barrel through.
But my life just wasn’t that simple.
Instead, a stampede of hot dogs burst through the doorway.
Except they were shaped like actual dogs. With little hot dog bodies, stubby paws, and snouts complete with dripping black noses and rows of unsettlingly sharp teeth.
And they could bark. And bite.
The first one spotted us and let loose a mutt-like howl, then charged.
There was a split second, maybe two, when nobody moved.
Then Deva, whose brain worked faster than mine when it came to not dying, pointed up at the rusted fire escape bolted to the wall beside us.
She didn’t hesitate.
She leaped up, grabbed the ladder with both hands, and yanked with all her might.
Metal screeched, the ladder dropped, and we had a way out, assuming we moved faster than a small army of meat-based ankle biters.
“Up! Now!” Deva screamed, already scrambling onto the first rung.
Beth and Carol were right behind, but I, idiot that I am, turned to look back over my shoulder.
That was my mistake.
Because the lead dog was only two feet away, meat-tongue lolling, jaws wide.
I shrieked and hauled myself up, totally abandoning dignity in favor of survival. My foot hit the first rung, and I put every ounce of desperation into climbing.
Dog teeth snapped right where my heel had just been.
A hot dog hound clamped down on my shoe. I bucked upward, heart in my throat, and the thing lost its grip with a wet, meaty pop.
Someone’s hand yanked me up. The world’s strongest deadlift courtesy of Beth, who must have had superhuman adrenaline.
We collapsed onto the fire escape’s first landing, a tangle of limbs and purple streaks and wild heartbeats.
For a second, none of us said anything.
Below, the pack of hot dog dogs patrolled the alley, barking, circling the base of the ladder, occasionally leaping up to snap at the metal. Several had attached themselves to a cardboard box, ripping it to shreds.
“That…” Beth gasped, “was not what I expected today.”
Carol flopped on her back and groaned. “It’s like an Oscar Mayer war zone.”
Deva wiped sweat from her jaw, hair sticking to her cheeks. “I’m putting this on Susan’s Yelp review.”
My hands shook. I tried to brush glitter off my pants, only to realize it had fused to the purple stuff and now looked like a rhinestone accident.
I peered over the edge of the landing, and the hot dog hounds glared back at me with the blank-eyed hunger of true monsters.
“What do we do now?” I groaned.
Carol shrugged, lying flat and breathing in big gulps of alley air. “We wait until they lose interest, or until the next batch of experimental food products comes bursting out the door.”
No one laughed, possibly because none of us doubted it.
The hot dog army wasn’t going anywhere.
I sank to the metal grating and let my head hang, the aftershocks of adrenaline pricking my skin.
My new plan for the day: breathe, survive, and never shop in Mystic Hollow without backup again.