by Sam Sisavath
He did his best to hide his discomfort as he took the steps one at a time, but he thought the cowboy might have picked up on it. When Mason and Sandra started to outpace him, Blaine forced himself to move faster.
Two figures looked down at them from the second-floor railing. They were both wearing hazmat suits and carrying M4 rifles, and he could tell by their shapes that one of them was a woman. The hips were a dead giveaway. Their weapons looked new. In comparison, he remembered the scratches and dents on Will’s and Danny’s rifles.
By the time they reached the second floor, Blaine was winded but fought through it and kept moving anyway. Sandra had stopped and was waiting for him, and she reached out a hand and he took it. She squeezed and smiled at him. “Our secret,” that smile said.
“Beaumont’s a big city,” Mason was saying, his voice echoing off the second-floor storefront windows and the big glass skylight above them.
A thick pool of sunlight poured down on top of them like an ocean, illuminating almost all of the second floor.
Including the bodies.
Dozens. Hundreds.
Thousands.
At first Blaine thought he was staring at a cemetery covered in dead bodies, but then he realized they were still alive when he saw their chests moving slightly underneath their clothes. They looked like coma patients, stuck somewhere between sleep and death, with grotesquely thin frames, gaunt faces, and cheeks hollowed from malnutrition. Some looked frailer than others, and some were no more than just skin and bones, reminding him, in so many ways, of ghouls.
A woman lay less than six feet from the tips of his dirty sneakers. He couldn’t tell her age; all he could see was a skull underneath loose flesh that fell over her face like a flimsy, thin piece of see-through film. They all looked like that, and it was impossible for him to tell adults from children, old men from boys. Their hair looked like dried-up leaves exposed to the sun too long, and he was reminded again of freshly buried corpses.
The sight of them—and the sheer number of them—took his breath away. They were spread out across the entire second-floor structure, and he could spend all day counting without ever getting to the end.
He looked behind them, and there were more spread out on that side of the floor.
There were so many there was absolutely no space to walk once they stepped off the escalator. Even the two people in hazmat suits watching them couldn’t move very far without stepping on an arm or a leg.
“Beaumont has over 100,000 people squeezed into an eighty-five square mile radius,” Mason said. “They turned most of the population, but not all of them. The rest are here.”
“What…is this?” Sandra asked, her voice almost a whisper.
“It’s a farm,” Mason said. “A blood farm. Don’t ask me how they do it, but they put these people in some kind of coma. They don’t wake up. Ever. Then they…well, you know what they do.”
“They feed on them?”
“Ding ding, give the lady a cookie.”
It wasn’t until Sandra said the word “feed” that Blaine noticed the teeth marks along the arms of the woman in front of him. Not just her arms, but along the sides of her neck as well. He imagined there must have been more, but her clothes covered up the rest. He turned slightly to look at an old man wearing shorts next to the woman and saw similar markings along his arms and legs.
We’re their food. This is what happens to food. You store it, then you feed on it when you’re hungry.
I think I’m going to throw up.
Next to him, Blaine could almost feel Sandra’s entire body trembling slightly.
“They’re alive?” Blaine asked.
“They’re breathing, yeah,” Mason said. “As to whether they’re really still alive?” Mason shrugged. “Hell if I know.”
“No one’s ever woken up,” the cowboy said behind them.
“So they just feed on these people…over and over?” Sandra asked. “And you let them?”
“Let them?” Mason almost laughed. “I guess you could put it that way. We just do the grunt work. Keep the place secured during the day while they sleep. At night, well, we try to stay out of their way.”
“And what happens then?” Blaine asked.
“What happens to what?”
“To the rest of you when night falls?”
“Nothing. They leave us alone. That’s the deal.”
Sandra looked over at Mason, then back at the cowboy, then over at the other two in the hazmat suits. “And you’re fine with this? All of you? Leaving these people to be…victimized over and over every night?”
They stared back at her with blank faces, though Blaine detected a slight movement in the woman’s face behind the gas mask just before she looked away.
Sandra focused her stare on Mason. “How could you do this? To your own kind?”
If she had expected Mason to retreat, Sandra would have been disappointed.
Instead, Mason glared back at her. “It’s a new world, honey. We’re doing what we have to in order to stay alive.” Mason drew his Browning automatic and held it at his side, then looked at Sandra before shifting his dark black eyes over at Blaine. “The question is: what are the two of you willing to do in order to survive?”
*
“He’s desperate for us to join him,” Blaine said, later, when they were back in the Sortys employee lounge.
Sandra nodded. She sat on the sofa, rubbing her hands together as if she were cold. “Why, do you think?”
“Maybe he’s running out of people. There’s only five of them. Mason, the cowboy, the third guy, and the two on the second floor. It explains why they didn’t risk attacking Will and the others. Not enough people to start a fight they don’t know they can win.”
There was a window above them, too small to escape through. Not that Blaine thought they could have gotten far anyway, without weapons or a car. There was a reason Mason had put them back in here. They weren’t going anywhere except through the door, and there was a guard outside named Lenny. He was the third man from Cavender’s.
They had two options that Blaine could see: join up or be killed. Mason had shown surprisingly little interest in harming Sandra, which both comforted and disturbed him. Sandra was not the kind of woman you ignored. At least, not after the first few minutes of being in the same room with her. But Mason revealed zero inclinations toward her, and neither had the cowboy, though Blaine had noticed Lenny stealing a glance at her when he had taken up position outside the door earlier.
Blaine’s mind returned, as it had every other second of the last thirty minutes, to the people on the second floor.
Thousands. There has to be thousands up there…
“We can’t, Blaine,” Sandra said after a while. “I won’t do it.”
“We don’t have any choice.”
“There’s always a choice.”
“They’re probably not going to kill us, Sandra. They’re going to give us to the ghouls. They’re going to add us to those people up there. I don’t want to see that happen to you.”
She looked down at her hands. “I can’t, Blaine. I’d rather die than be a part of this. I don’t ever want to become like Mason, taking the easy road out. But I also don’t want to become like those people on the second floor. Do you understand?”
He nodded. “I understand.”
Blaine took the bottle of Tramadol from his pocket and shook out two, gulping them down without bothering to swallow. Mason had given him back his pills, though Blaine didn’t for a second believe the man was being altruistic. Mason wanted to turn them to his side, and letting him die didn’t figure into those plans.
“How long does it usually take for those things to work?” Sandra asked.
“A few minutes.”
“How many do you have left?”
He looked into the bottle at the dozen or so pills. “Not many…”
“There should be some over-the-counter painkillers around the mall. They won’t be the same, but
…”
“Yeah,” he said, saving her the trouble of lying to him.
They looked over at the door as the doorknob turned. The door opened and a woman entered. They both instantly went quiet, and the woman stopped for a moment, like she had just barged into a room with two conspirators. Which wasn’t far from the truth.
She had short brown hair and brown eyes, and she looked much smaller without the hazmat suit. She wore cargo pants and a T-shirt like the others and had a gun belt around her waist, though it looked too big for her frame. She closed the door behind her, then pulled out bags of Doritos from a brown plastic bag and tossed them over.
“They’re a bit stale, but they’re edible,” the woman said. “It’s as good as you’re going to get around here, despite whatever Mason told you.”
Blaine remembered how the woman had looked away from Sandra’s accusing stare back on the second floor. She was the only one.
“Thanks,” he said. “Do you have a name?”
“Maddie.”
“I’m Blaine, this is Sandra.”
Maddie nodded and turned to go.
“Is it worth it, Maddie?” Sandra asked.
The question stopped Maddie, and she turned to look back at Sandra. Blaine realized she was much younger than he had thought. Late twenties, though she wasn’t wearing any makeup and that made her look slightly older. She was pretty, but in the same room with Sandra, you could get away with calling her homely.
“Is what worth it?” Maddie asked.
“Selling out the human race,” Sandra said. “Is it worth it?”
“It’s either this or become one of the people on the second floor. Or one of them. Honestly, I don’t know which is worse, and I hope to never find out.”
“Can we trust him?” Blaine asked. “Mason. Can we trust what he says?”
“Mason’s an asshole,” Maddie said. “But yeah, you can trust him on this. We lost a couple of guys a few months ago, so we’re short-handed. More and more people with guns are rolling through this place every week. Most of them are smart enough not to risk searching a mall, but you get the occasional idiots, and we have to deal with that.”
“What happened to those guys that came into town before us?” Blaine asked, hoping to sound just uninterested enough to not make her suspicious.
Maddie shrugged. “They’re up the road somewhere. Mason sent someone to keep an eye on them until they leave.”
“So he’s not going to attack?”
“With what? These yahoos?”
Blaine smiled. He decided he liked her.
“If you’re smart,” Maddie continued, “you’ll sign up. It’s either that or keep running and constantly looking over your shoulder. I know what that’s like. It gets old pretty fast.”
“So you’re saying it’s worth it,” Sandra said.
There was an overtly accusing tone to Sandra’s voice that made Blaine flinch, and he saw it affect Maddie the same way. Sandra wasn’t trying to make friends, and he wondered what she hoped to gain here. Didn’t she know they were at the mercy of these people, that antagonizing them wasn’t going to help the two of them one bit?
“It depends on what you want out of this life,” Maddie said matter-of-factly. “You’ll have to decide for yourself.”
Maddie opened the door and left. Blaine caught a glimpse of the tall, broad-shouldered Lenny outside, turning as the door opened, but before he could look in, Maddie closed the door in his face.
Sandra looked quickly over at Blaine and said in a low voice, “Gaby and Josh and the others. They’re still in the city.”
“Sounds that way.”
“Maybe we can get them to help us.”
“I don’t see how.”
“Gunshots, maybe. Draw their attention. The way you drew my attention back at Grime. The way we tried to call them in Lancing. Sound travels these days.”
“We’d need guns…”
“We can get guns,” she said, looking at the door.
“Too risky. Let’s wait.”
“For what?” she asked, looking unhappy.
“Maddie.”
“What about her?”
“I think she’s the key,” he said, though he didn’t quite know how yet.
*
Before night fell, Maddie returned with another plastic bag containing more food and warm bottles of Gatorade that she handed to Sandra. She was already wearing her hazmat suit but had her gas mask clipped to her hip. Lenny wasn’t at the door anymore, but they still kept it locked from the other side.
Blaine was standing under the window, watching the sun descend outside, and with it, the very familiar sense of dread. Mason wasn’t entirely wrong. Constantly having to outrun the darkness was a pain in the ass. The knowledge that each night you survived only meant another day where you had to do it all over again was tiring, and sometimes he just wanted to stop.
“What now?” Sandra asked Maddie.
“You’ll need to stay in here during the night,” Maddie said. “They usually leave this part of the mall alone. Mostly it’s straight up to the second floor to do what they have to do.”
“Why the suit?” Blaine asked. It had been on his mind all day.
“It’s how they tell us apart from, well, you,” Maddie said. “One of them told Mason to wear it, so we wear it. I don’t know where they got the suits, to be honest with you. After a while, you become used to it. It’s actually pretty comfortable, even out in the sun, which is a nice bonus, I guess.”
“You said ‘one of them’ told Mason to wear the suits? You mean one of the creatures?”
“Yeah. There’s one of them that talks to him from time to time.” She watched them closely, as if trying to gauge if they believed her. “It has blue eyes,” she said after a while.
Blue-eyed ghoul!
“Blue eyes?” Sandra said. He could hear the disbelief in her voice.
“Yeah,” Maddie nodded. “Damnedest thing I ever saw. Blue eyes, and it stood tall. You know, like a human. Well, I guess it used to be human, but it still carried itself like one.”
“What does it say to Mason?” Sandra asked.
“It tells him what they need us to do, that sort of stuff.”
“Was it a woman?” Blaine asked.
“What?” Maddie said, her eyes darting to him.
“The blue-eyed ghoul,” he said. “Was it a woman?”
“I don’t know,” Maddie said, and seemed to think about it for a moment. “It’s hard to tell with them. Why?”
“I was just curious.”
She stared at him, disbelieving his answer.
“After tonight, then what?” Sandra asked.
Maddie looked back to her. “Mason will want an answer by morning.”
“And if we say no?”
“Then he’ll probably shoot you. Or hand you over to the creatures. I don’t know. I do know that it’s in your best interest to say yes.”
“We’re thinking about it,” Blaine said.
He said it quickly, before Sandra could answer. He needed Maddie on their side, and the more she considered them potential allies, the better. Blaine didn’t think he had a chance in hell of convincing Mason, the cowboy, or Lenny.
Maddie is the key…
“Think fast,” Maddie said. “Mason will kill you. I hope that isn’t something you’re doubting. He will, and he won’t lose sleep over it for a single night.”
“He had a gun to my temple,” Sandra said. “I don’t doubt that at all.”
Maddie nodded and opened her mouth as if to say something else, but stopped. She turned and left instead. Blaine heard a key turning in the lock, then footsteps fading down the hallway.
Sandra looked over at him. “It would be nice, wouldn’t it?”
“What’s that?”
“To not have to keep looking over our shoulders. Not have to keep trying to outrun the day.”
He nodded. “It would be nice, yeah. But it hasn’t come to that yet. Give me un
til tomorrow.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know yet.”
He could see how tired she looked, how beaten down and exhausted by the last few days. She opened the bag and pulled out a box of animal crackers and two Gatorade bottles, one lemon-lime and the other Hawaiian punch.
She tossed him the crackers. “Your favorite.”
Blaine caught them and sat down next to her. He opened the box and fished out an elephant and took a bite. It wasn’t bad. Sandra opened one of the Gatorade bottles and drank from it. For a moment, they sat quietly and drank warm artificial drinks and snacked on slightly stale animal-shaped cookies. From time to time they glanced up at the fading light coming from the other side of the window.
“Gatorade,” Sandra said. “I used to hate this stuff. Hated it even more when it was warm like this. Now? It’s not so bad.”
Blaine felt bloated after a half-dozen crackers and handed her the box. He didn’t have to look up at the window or glance at his watch to know that night was closer. The room had started to get dark around them, inch by inch, until he couldn’t see half of the employee lounge anymore.
“That thing about the blue-eyed ghoul,” Sandra said. “Do you believe her?”
“Yes. Because I saw one, that night at the house.”
She looked at him, shocked. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I thought we were going to die. And when we didn’t… I guess I just forgot.”
“Did it…say anything to you?”
He shook his head. “I saw it from the second-floor window. It was in front of the house while the rest of them were attacking. Like it was coordinating the attack, I guess.”
“You think it was a woman? You asked Maddie if it was a woman.”
“It could have been. It looked like a woman. But like Maddie said, it’s hard to tell with them.”
Sandra looked back toward the door. “Blue-eyed ghoul or not, I don’t want to think about what’s going to be happening outside that door tonight.”
“Then don’t.”
“How can I not?”
She leaned her head against his shoulder, like she was finally lying down for the first time after centuries of being awake. Blaine wrapped his arm around her body and pulled her tight.
“We have to get out of here,” she whispered softly. “We can’t be a part of this.”
