by Patrick Ness
The stores along the High Street are all locked. The sun is brighter now, and Seth has to shield his eyes against the windows to see inside. Some – the doughnut shop, the Subway Sandwich, something called Topshop – seem to have been cleared out, just empty racks and barren shelves, packaging strewn across the floor, naked mannequins lined up against the wall.
But they’re not all empty. The thrift store looks full, should he ever need a tea set and a bunch of moldy paperbacks, as does a place that seems to sell only wedding dresses, but he can’t really see that as a practical option for an outfit, even in hell.
And then his heart quickens as he looks through the glass of the outdoor supply store next to it.
“No way,” he says. “No way.”
He can see backpacks inside and camping gear and who knows what else that might be insanely useful.
Suspiciously useful, he has a moment to think, but he pushes that thought away, too. There were outdoor stores all over the world. There just were, so why not here?
The glass door is locked, and he looks around for something to break it with, finding some loose bricks in one of the tree stands. He picks one up, but even in this empty, empty place, the prohibition against what he’s about to do is so strong, all he does is toss the brick up and down in his hand a few times. He’s played baseball and basketball in gym class, the first boring him nearly to death, the second being almost kind of fun in a run-around-and-shout kind of way that other people took seriously enough that it meant he didn’t have to get too involved. But he knows he can at least throw something, even if not particularly skillfully or especially far.
But still. A brick through a store door.
He looks around again, and once again, he’s alone.
“Here goes nothing,” he whispers.
He rears back and throws it as hard as he can.
The shattering sound is loud enough to end the world. Seth instinctively ducks down, ready to make excuses that it wasn’t him, that it was an accident –
But of course there’s no one.
“Idiot,” he says, smiling, embarrassed now. He stands again, the feeling of having done something, anything, making him actually swagger a little up to the now gaping door.
Where a flock of screeching darkness comes hurtling out past his head at blindingly fast speed. He falls to the ground, protecting his head with his hands, shouting in wordless terror –
And as quick as it came, it’s passed, the world silent again except for his racing breath.
He looks up and sees the flock gathering itself into a panicked ball as it disappears over the roof of the shuttered-up bookstore.
Bats.
Bats.
He laughs to himself before getting up, kicking away the broken glass that still stands in the door, and crouching his way inside.
It’s a cave of treasures.
He grabs a backpack off a display. Next to it, he finds a whole wall of flashlights, which excites him at first, but there are no batteries to be found anywhere. He takes a large one anyway, long and heavy enough to feel like a weapon even if it never produces light. He finds a bunch of dried-up food rations nearby, too; terrible-looking stuff, freeze-dried pot roast, soup with inflatable dried vegetables, that sort of thing, but it’s better than nothing, and he also finds a little stack of butane camp stoves to cook it all on, hoping they won’t blow up in his hands the first time he tries to use one.
The store seems more tightly sealed than his house, and there’s less dust covering everything. A row of first-aid kits is practically clean, and he stuffs one in the backpack, then pauses. He takes another kit and opens it. It’s got the usual: bandages, alcohol swabs, but there, right at the back, he finds a packet labeled CONDUCTIVE TAPE. He tears it open with his teeth. A bundle of bandages falls to the ground.
He doesn’t even need to pick it up to see that the underside is covered in metallic foil.
He reads the empty packet again, but CONDUCTIVE TAPE is all it says, along with some pictorial instructions for how to stick it to your skin. Nothing to say what it’s for or why you’d use it or why the hell you’d ever wrap so much of it around your body.
“Conductive tape,” he says.
Like it’s so obvious it doesn’t need an explanation.
He leaves it there on the floor, not wanting to pick it up again, and heads for the clothes racks at the back of the store.
They’re so full he laughs out loud. They’ve even got underwear. Granted, it’s thermal-insulated so probably a little hot for summer, but he’s out of the baggy sweatpants and pulling on a pair before he thinks to mind. The cool cleanness of them feels so good he almost has to sit down.
The rest of the clothes seem to be mainly for mountaineering and hiking, but there are T-shirts and shorts and an expensive all-weather jacket that he takes. He exchanges the old sweatpants for what are essentially just more expensive sweatpants, but at least these ones don’t make him look like a transient. There are also more kinds of socks than he can count.
It takes him a while to find shoes that fit, having to wade through an ammonia-smelling pile of bat guano to get into the stockroom and find a pair his size. But soon enough, he’s fully equipped. He grabs up everything and heads out into the sunshine.
Where he’s immediately drenched in sweat because it’s far too hot to be wearing such heavy clothing.
For a moment, though, he doesn’t mind. He just closes his eyes against the sun and takes it all in. He’s not naked, he’s not in dirty bandages, and he’s not completely filthy with dust. He’s wearing clean clothes and new shoes and for the first time since he died, he feels almost human.
The supermarket at the end of the High Street is deeper and darker than the rest of the stores, but through the glass frontage, Seth thinks he can still see shelves filled with something. He shifts the pack on his back and realizes, stupidly, that he’s overloaded it with clothes and other supplies. No place to put any groceries. He sets it down and starts to take stuff out that he can come back for, but then something against a wall catches his eye.
That’ll do.
It takes him nearly fifteen minutes to get a rusty shopping cart separated from the petrified row of them, but eventually it comes, its wheels even mostly turning if he forces them hard enough.
It’s easier to throw a brick the second time, though once inside, the store is much darker than he thought. The ceiling is low, and the aisles block any view of what they might be hiding in their depths. He thinks of the bats again. And what if there was something larger in there than a fox? Did England have big predators? There were mountain lions and bears in the forests back home, but he couldn’t remember a single dangerous thing anyone ever mentioned as living in England.
He listens to the silence.
Nothing. Nothing at all beyond his breathing. No hum of electricity, no sound of things rustling. Though, he supposes, the smashing of the doors could have silenced anything in here.
He waits. But still there’s nothing.
He starts to push the unforgiving cart down the aisles.
The produce section is completely empty. The bays yawn open, with only a few shriveled husks of unidentifiable fruits and vegetables at the bottom, and as he goes from aisle to aisle, his hopes start to sink a little. The shelves do have stuff on them, but they’ve gone much the way of the things in the kitchen cabinets. Dusty old boxes that crumble upon touch, jars of once-red tomato sauce now blackened within, a section of egg cartons that have clearly been ripped apart by a hungry beast.
But he turns a corner and there’s good news. Batteries, lots of them. Many are corroded but some are okay. It only takes a few tries before his big flashlight is working.
Torch, he thinks, shining it down a long dark aisle, seeing piles of flour scattered across the floor. The English call this a torch.
He balances the torch on the shopping cart and picks his way through the rest of the supermarket, finding some bottled water but not much else. E
ventually, he realizes there’s going to be nothing much of use anywhere – not the loaves of bread shrunk to nothing inside their wrappers, not the unplugged freezer chests filled with a black mold that smells like rancid olives, not the packages of cookies and crackers that are so much dust – nothing except the two aisles with most of the cans.
Again, many of them are rusted beyond use or so bulging with bacteria that Seth can practically hear it growing inside, but moving the torch up and down the shelves, he finds plenty that look normal, if dusty. He fills his cart with soups and pastas, with corn and peas, with even, he’s delighted to find, custard. There are so many cans, in fact, he’d have to make several trips here to even make a dent in them.
So, enough to feed him. For a while.
For however long he might be here.
The darkness and silence of the supermarket, even with the comfortably heavy torch in his hand, suddenly feels like too much. Too oppressive, too heavy.
“Quit it,” he tells himself. “You’ll go crazy if you think like this.”
But he puts his weight behind the cart and gets himself back out into the daylight.
He’s tiring again, he can feel it, and the hunger is a real thing now, almost as bad as yesterday’s thirst. He spies some green up around a corner from the market and remembers the little park there, sliding down a hill into a small valley with fountains and paths.
He pushes the cart, grunting at the effort, until he’s at the top of the park. It’s grown up like a jungle, unsurprisingly, but the basic shape is still there. There’s even a little sandbox area nearby. It’s about the only place here free of weeds.
“This’ll do,” he says, and lets his backpack fall to his feet.
He follows the directions on the camp stove, and five minutes later, there’s enough butane left in the small canister to heat up a can of spaghetti he opened with a far-less-rusty can opener he also took from the store. It’s only when the spaghetti is boiling that he realizes he didn’t take any knives or forks. He clicks off the stove and has no choice but to wait for it to cool.
He takes a bottle of water from the cart and holds it up to the sun. It looks clear, clearer than the water from his tap anyway, but even though the seal is unbroken, the water is still half-evaporated away. He cracks it open, the bottle giving a little hiss as he does so. It smells all right, so he takes a drink and looks down at the park below him.
It’s familiar, yes, despite the wildness, but what does familiar mean? he wonders. This place looks like a version of his childhood home stuck in time, but that doesn’t mean it’s actually the same place.
It feels real enough. Certainly to the touch, and definitely to the nose. But it’s also a world that only seems to have him in it, so how real can it be? If this is just a dusty old memory that he’s trapped in, maybe it isn’t really even a place at all, maybe it’s just what happens when your final dying seconds turn into an eternity. The place of the worst season of your life, frozen forever, decaying without ever really dying.
He takes another sip of water. Whatever this place might be, they’d never come all that much to the real version of the park. Sandbox and small play area aside, the steepness of the hill prevented it from being much fun. A big brick wall across the bottom of the main incline made even skateboarders avoid the challenge, so it must have been more a place for High Street workers to take a smoke break.
But there is the pond still, at the bottom, kidney-shaped but surprisingly clear-looking. He would have expected a film of algae across the top, but it actually looks cool and inviting on a hot summer day. There’s a rock in the middle that was usually covered with ducks preening themselves. There aren’t any today, but the sun is so bright, the day so clear and warm, that it somehow seems like ducks might swoop in at any moment.
He looks up, half thinking that his thoughts might create them. They don’t.
He’s hot in his over-warm hiking clothes, and the pond looks so inviting that he has a fleeting impulse to jump in, have a refreshing swim, have something even like a bath and just allow himself to float, suspended in water –
He stops.
Suspended in water, he thinks.
The terror of it, the sheer awful terror that never seemed to stop. Fear was bearable when you could see an end to it, but there was no end in sight out in those freezing waves, those pitiless fists of ocean that cared nothing for you, that tipped you over and down in a kind of callous blindness, filling your lungs, smashing you against rocks –
He reaches around to where his shoulder blade snapped. He can remember the pain of it, can remember the irrevocable snap of the bone breaking. He feels a little sick at the thought, even though his shoulder here, in this place, works fine.
Then he wonders where his body is.
In whatever world this isn’t, out there where he died, where is he? He wonders if he’s washed ashore yet. He wonders if they even know to look for him in the ocean or on the beach, because he wasn’t supposed to be there, no one was supposed to be there at that time of year. Freezing winter on an angry, rocky coast? Why would anyone be near the water, much less in it?
Not unless they were forced.
Not unless someone forced them.
He feels another pain in his stomach, an unease at the memory of his last moments on the beach that makes him feel even sicker. He screws the cap back on the water bottle and forces himself to return to the spaghetti, now cooled enough to eat. He makes a mess of it, tipping it into his mouth and slopping it onto one of his new T-shirts, not caring much.
He wonders how his parents found out. Would he have been gone long enough to be missed before his body was found? Would they have been surprised by policemen showing up at the door, carrying their hats under their arms and asking to come in? Or would they have been worried by his absence, growing more worried by the hour, until it became clear something had gone wrong?
Or if time worked the same here as it did there – though the warm summer here and the freezing winter there put that into question, and he had no idea how long that first purgatorial bit on the path had lasted, but still – he might have only died late the day before yesterday or even early yesterday morning. It’s possible they haven’t even noticed yet. His parents might think he’s at a friend’s house for the weekend, and between Owen’s clarinet lessons and his mum’s running and his father’s decision to start redoing the bathroom, they might still be unaware that he’s gone at all.
They never had noticed him all that much. Not after what happened.
In fact, maybe, secretly, they’d have some guilty happiness that it wasn’t Owen who had drowned. Maybe they’d be a little relieved that Seth was no longer a walking reminder of that summer before they moved. Maybe –
Seth sets down the empty can of spaghetti and wipes his mouth with his sleeve.
Then he wipes his eyes with his other sleeve.
But, he thinks, it’s possible to die before you die.
There’s no one walking through the park, no one in this world at all who can see him sitting on the edge of the sandbox, but he lowers his face down to his knees, as he can’t help but weep once more.
“I mean, for God’s sake, just look at them,” Monica said as they lay on a hill out of the sight line of their cross-country coach, watching the cheerleaders practice on the football field. “How can anyone’s boobs be that perky without surgery?”
“It’s the autumn chill in the air,” H said, ironically quoting something Mr. Edson, their English teacher, had said that morning. “Makes everything firm up.”
Monica slapped him upside the head.
“Ow!” H protested. “What’d you do that for? You’re the one who said to look at them!”
“I didn’t mean you.”
It was the second week of their senior year, early September. By mutual agreement, they’d taken a well-known shortcut on their running route, hiding in almost plain sight near the practice finish line, and giving themselves twenty minutes befo
re they were expected back. Remarkably for this time of year, the sun was shining in a clear blue sky, though the wind coming in off the ocean gave the air an extra snap.
Days like this you could almost call beautiful, Seth thought.
“The chill firms them up?” Gudmund asked H, stretching back on the grass incline. “Is that why you have a permanent boner all autumn?”
“All year more like it,” Monica mumbled.
“As long as you kids stay safe,” Gudmund said.
Monica gave him a look. “Like I’m going to have his baby.”
“Hey!” H said. “That’s not nice.”
“There they go again,” Seth said.
They all looked back over the field, and sure enough, Boswell High’s own blonde and brunette terrors were back at it. Though that wasn’t fair, Seth thought. Most of them were actually pretty nice. They all watched, though, as Chiara Leithauser, one of the less nice ones, left the pack and started walking back toward the main school building.
“Where’s she going?” Gudmund said.
“Forgot to give Principal Marshall his after-school hand job,” H sniggered.
“Oh, please,” Monica said. “Chiara’s serious about that chastity shit. Won’t even let Blake Woodrow put his hands on her bra.”
Gudmund shrugged. “Good for her.”
Monica laughed, but when he didn’t reply, she scanned his face closely. “You mean that, don’t you?”
Gudmund shrugged again. “At least she’s got principles. What’s wrong with that? Somebody’s got to counterbalance all us amoral types.”
“That’s what we can tell Coach Goodall when he catches us,” Seth said as they caught sight of the cross-country coach across the field, looking annoyed at his watch, wondering why his senior runners were quite so overdue from their first long training run.
“There’s nothing wrong with anyone having principles,” Monica said. “But there is something wrong with using them to beat four kinds of crap out of everybody else.”
“They’re only her opinions,” Gudmund said. “You don’t have to listen to them.”
