The pushed away branch wet from the afternoon’s rain slipped off Vic’s palm and whipped him in the face. The quickly formed welt on his cheek was the least of his worries.
‘I know these woods you piece of shit!’ a downright furious voice shouted from behind.
Not far enough, Vic thought.
He could no longer hear the mammoth crashing through the undergrowth so thanked his lucky whatevers that he was the quicker one, even in unlaced boots and barely fastened jeans.
Legs for days they always said. Thank fuck.
In the back of his mind Vic always knew it was a danger of bedding married men, but it felt distant and unreal. He’d told himself not long ago he was done with the practice after the last fling ended. For the first time in his adult life, he’d felt alone in his apartment. There was an echo that had never been there before.
But Gene was too much to pass up.
Big enough to handle a man, tender enough to never go too far. And when Gene’s oaf of a husband berated him for a full two minutes in the coffee shop before storming off muttering unpleasantness Vic decided there wasn’t much choice in the matter. In no time at all he was at Gene’s table, flashing his best smile and running a hand through his green-dyed buzzcut in a sequence of tried and tested gestures.
What an afternoon it had been. They both would have happily carried on for days until someone needed sustenance or died. Then during a break in the festivities there was a slamming car door followed by muttering practised apologies. The following minutes were some of the worst of Vic’s life.
His shirt was torn open from a half-failed dive over a garden fence, his lungs burned so fiercely he vowed if he survived, he’d never again equate sex with exercise. The bellowing cuckold was either slowing down or going the wrong way.
Not out of the woods yet, he thought with an adrenaline infused snicker. But what’s this?
Without slowing, Vic peered through the bare branches to his right. In the distance he could see the outline of something. An outline peppered with lights. Part of him knew what it was but that part was buried deep in childhood. For long seconds and flagging strides he glanced from the silhouette to where he was going, over and over.
Sod it, gotta go somewhere.
With a dug in heel, he turned at speed then flew through the increasingly dispersed woods with renewed vigour. The closer he got the louder the familiarity until he stopped dead at the treeline. Before him was Clement Dale Mall, the absolute centre of all things cheap and cheerful from his youth.
Well, his parents’ youth.
Vic’s memories were ones of his dad beaming throughout their time there, but to the kid who became a homewrecker it felt a bit old, a bit empty, a bit sad. He remembered going there less and less, his dad’s smile getting thinner with each trip, until one day—as a delivery driver handed him a parcel—Vic realised it’d been over a year since they’d so much as mentioned the place.
For years he’d assumed it shut down, taken out by online shopping just as it had taken out the independent shops way back when. But there it was in the final light of day. Gloomy, tarnished, frankly doing a fine impression of being abandoned. Except for the lights.
All throughout they shone. A strange hue yes, but steady and strong, not the flickering light of fire. It invited him in, whispered of safety in numbers and the comfort of a fresh shirt.
The car park seemed smaller than he remembered and before he knew it, he was at the entrance. The glass frontage was soaped over, said soap having turned some off-putting green-brown colour, but he wasn’t perturbed. Even when he tried the doors and found them locked. Sure, he was on the run from a murderous bear in an expensive suit, but he was also set on his path now. A character trait he had never managed to excise.
Vic peered through the grot and could make out the hazy lines of the main thoroughfare. A minute later he spied indistinct blobs of people that milled about as one does in such places. He jogged around the perimeter of the mall for an entrance, soon smiling to himself at the propped open fire escape with its veritable mountain of cigarette butts.
The farther Vic walked down what he surmised was a staff only hallway, the lower his confidence fell. The mottled grime of the frontage was almost everywhere. Mildewy folders spilled out months of yellowed sign-in sheets, crumbling Formica shelves barely held on to their moorings, a glass screen vending machine was filled with the bloat of a hundred putrid snacks. What wasn’t sticky, slimy, or rotting, was broken.
Except the lights. The white fluorescents shone as eye-achingly bright as the day they were installed.
Vic’s lizard brain was shaking its abstract head vigorously, demanding he turn around. Every squelching step sent a shiver through the soul. The hall looked like it had been dredged up from a swamp.
But there’s people in here, I saw them.
The door that had been so pleasingly far away was now centimetres from his face as Vic tried to reason with himself. Anyone on the other side had to be a customer—however unlikely—or someone connected to the mall at least. The lights were the key. If the building was abandoned, if it was home to a group who might take issue with a gorgeous intruder, then there wasn’t a chance they’d have the place connected to the grid.
Right?
He pushed the door open with a squeal that may have been the hinge or may have been him and was accosted by the strongest smell of damp he’d ever known. He found himself next to the public toilet entrances, opposite a group of benches. The grime somewhere between green and brown was thicker in the main thoroughfare, almost as if it had been painted onto the walls, ceilings and shopfronts. Although the floors were clear in the centre—relatively—but vile on the edges. Every detail picked out in the harshest of buzzing white light.
What the shit happened to this place?
After no more than five steps in Vic saw movement. Up ahead there was a broad-shouldered giant of a man leaning against a window that showcased all manner of power tools. From behind he looked a bit scruffy in his denim jeans and checked shirt. Definitely not the sort of person Vic would choose to interact with under normal circumstances.
Oh, to be under normal circumstances.
‘Uh,’ he squeaked. After clearing his throat, he tried again. ‘Excuse me? Mister?’
The man’s head twitched at the sound, but Vic was distracted by a grinding noise. The head turned his way and the grinding intensified, like someone using a mortar and pestle. From under a frayed trucker’s cap Vic could see he had some kind of skin condition, psoriasis possibly but much, much worse. White eyes locked onto him and widened immediately.
Shit.
With a grinding cacophony the big guy turned around, each movement jerky in a manner Vic could only think of as glitchy as he tried to comprehend what he was seeing. Yet even once his mind had caught up to his eyes very little made sense. Every micron of the man was covered in what could best be described as bark made from bone. Sheets ran down his arms, each finger was encased and tipped, his face was entirely stippled with it other than a thick line of shining bone above his eyes.
‘The hell’re you doin’ here?’ the monstrosity said in a rich baritone, each word accompanied by the clacking of bony lips.
All that was left to do was scream.
And scream Vic did. He felt his throat tearing with the intensity. How long he stood there, he’ll never know, but it was one long lungful. All the while the bone-bark man watched with an approximation of a furrowed brow, his head turned slightly against the aural onslaught.
As Vic caught his breath he spun on the spot, took one step then slapped face first into glistening white flesh. He staggered backwards to see a thing that was possibly once a man but no more. The flabby exposed torso was tinged here and there with gangrene, its face was nothing but pale flesh twisted to the right with a couple of cuts made for raw, unblinking eyes to peer out. From the rest of him sporadic cords of grey matted hair sprung, those from his legs dragging on the floor behind, thick with the mall’s grime.
‘Oh, holy fuck,’ Vic said. Understandably.
The flabby thing was stammering unintelligibly, the bone-bark man was shouting, Vic was running.
He turned a corner, lost his balance on the horrific melange, and fell, careening on his side before slamming into a concrete planter. He lay there winded, desperately trying to draw in ragged breaths of fetid air as tears streamed down his face.
A heavy shuffling sound filled Vic’s ears.
No, no, no.
He looked around the planter and wished he hadn’t.
Standing a mighty three metres high was a demon of raw flesh and dripping mucus. Every move it made was painfully slow but filled with the malice of hell. When its languid eyes found Vic, a terrifying smile broke across its skinned features.
‘Hey,’ it said from the depths.
Victor Reiher was running before the thing had finished wrapping its tongue around the word. He clamped his hands over his mouth and fled, no longer perceiving his surroundings. Noises known and unknown stabbed at his ears, smells he never wanted to experience wafted strong then passed, flickers of horrific imagery flashed by that he begged his breaking grey matter to not try to discern, until he found himself in a corner where the lights didn’t reach.
The noises were plentiful but far away. Above the scraping, the clicking, the tapping and the thumping, was the din of Vic’s blood roaring in his ears. He cupped his hands over his mouth and nose to try and slow his breathing; every crease and crevice of which filled with spittle and snot.
However long it took, the things of nightmare didn’t find him. Nor did they find him in the time needed to regain a modicum of rational thought. That first clear idea was the simplest: get out. Even if the raging cuckold was standing in the parking lot.
Hell, I’d leap into his arms with a smile.
The next was how. Not the man’s strong suit by his own admission, but when you’re beset by monsters, charm won’t get you anywhere. As soon as he looked around for an idea, he spied a mall map not far from the shadows. It’s interior bulb still worked but the plastic was grimed like all other things.
Vic took stock of what he had to hand: boots, jeans, body.
Shit.
Phone!
He pulled it out and took the least shaky picture of the map he could manage. After the software had done its thing and tarted up the photo, Vic set about zooming in to plan his escape route. Turned out at some point in his manic flight he’d gone up a level.
He knew the front door was a no-go but reasoned other fire exits should be—hopefully—unlocked. The path he worked out looked good; short as possible with some obstacles to clear that the three thingsshould have problems dealing with. His lizard brain tried pointing out there were probably more creatures, but Vic shoved it deep down by retracing the path over and over to make sure he wasn’t misreading the grimy map.
Stick to the path, no distractions. Get out, get safe, then you can have a breakdown.
Vic took a few sharp breaths as he psyched himself for the off. He stood, shook out his limbs, and was ready. The moment his muscles tensed to push off it occurred to him he didn’t have to run down the short alley he was in.
Just asking to trip on the first corner.
Twitching through a flood of adrenaline, he sidled up to the turn and peered around. He was three shop-lengths away from a set of inactive escalators. All was clear. He heard shuffling, and other sounds he had no words for, but they were mercifully distant.
Thought was the enemy. Thought led to fear. Fear would lead to a grisly, disgusting end.
Vic was two long strides from the escalators before his rational mind had caught up with proceedings. With an outright refusal to let it get in the way his lizard brain leapt at the handrail, sending Vic hurtling downward at a velocity that brought back memories of a misspent youth.
At the bottom of the escalators stood a monstrosity on four legs.
Humanoid but with two metre or more length limbs that were nothing but poles of bone tapering to points. Oily yellowed skin hung in curtains from the torso, swaying nauseatingly with every movement as the thing turned a head that was naught but black hair.
Fuck this.
Ignoring the sight, the muffled sound emanating from it, the unknown substance dripping from its flesh, Vic jumped. He landed a boot on the abomination’s back, eliciting a grunt, then hopped down to the floor to break into a sprint.
He turned at a crossroads where the skinned demon plodded, he leapt over a planter and ran along a bank of benches to avoid a mass of calcified limbs sticking up from the floor. He slid on his back to pass under a hanging swarm of gnashing mouths full of shattered teeth.
When he saw the bone-bark man cross its arms in his path he dodged around it and shot out a hand to grab a light pole. Using the pole to anchor himself, Vic swung around the final corner without losing speed or footing. His elation turned to despair in a heartbeat. He found himself racing towards an open lift shaft.
No!
His efforts to stop tripped him up. The grime on the floor was untouched, slippery as an oil slick. Vic skidded all the way to the yawning shaft, saved only by virtue of his statuesque height; his legs slamming into the wall on one side, his head on the other.
The world blurred. Something walked his way with a tack-tacksound. Everything hurt. Limbs and lungs burned.
Tack-tack.
Vic began to cry as he pulled his legs close, curling into a foetal position. The last of his fight had left him.
Tack-tack.
A grisly, disgusting end after all.
‘Dry your eyes hun,’ an astonishingly warm voice said.
Vic continued to cry. His body shook.
‘Think he broke,’ a voice said through clacking lips.
Clacking lips?
Opening his eyes, Vic saw the bone-bark man standing where he’d been dodged, arms still crossed.
‘Don’t be such a pessimist Boyd,’ said the warm voice from just above Vic’s head.
Against his sanity’s wishes Vic turned to see. Grey feet with loose skin and spines of bone were a metre from his curled-up self. He turned upwards and saw a curvy-bodied woman, her loose grey flesh pierced at the knees, elbows, shoulders and knuckles just like her toes. Each bony point dripped a dark, viscous blood, leaving a trail that carried on beyond what was apparently called Boyd.
The almost human was smiling down at him, her eyes ever so slightly disappearing behind her cheeks for a moment until the skin shifted and everything lined up.
‘Bet you regret coming in eh hun?’ she said, her teeth and lips not quite moving in sync. ‘Let’s get you up.’
Vic slumped on an ornate bench set around a defunct fountain; his glassy eyes lost in its vile few centimetres of stagnant water. As things plodded, slopped, squelched and prowled around he thought Boyd’s assessment of his mental state might’ve been accurate. The monster that looked almost human had led him to the centre of the mall and sat him down. After a simultaneously mushy and hard pat on the shoulder, it—she? —wandered off speaking of something needed.
Vic barely heard. He wasn’t taking much in. The only explanation he had that made any sense was that he died. Most likely at the hands of the poor cuckolded sod.
‘I’m awfully sorry about earlier,’ a weak voice said from behind. Far beyond fright Vic turned his head just enough to see the flabby gangrene-tinged chest of one of the monsters. No mouth, but its voice clear as day. ‘I-I-I don’t move so well these days.’
Vic stared at it as vacantly as he did the water.
The thing’s eyes looked everywhere but at Vic. It shuffled.
Awkwardly?
‘Myron old boy, don’t you fret.’ The grey lady had returned with a shopping bag that shone painfully bright under the lights. The only grime on it was where it was held. ‘Let the poor lad come to then there’ll be some understanding.’
Vic couldn’t look at her. The flesh and the spines were one thing but the disconnect between voice, teeth and lips was peeling a layer off his brain with each sentence.
As she sat down with a rippling of flesh from backside to head and down again, she placed the bag in front of Vic with utmost care. ‘There’s not much in the way of choice these days, but I got the best left.’
Something about her voice got through the fog. Vic blinked twice and tried to focus on the bag. He could see fabric inside. With the carefulness of a bomb technician, he reached in and pulled out a t-shirt two sizes too big. A royal blue V-neck with “The Long Table” emblazoned on the chest. It was old. Quite faded. But it didn’t have a trace of the damnable muck.
‘Why do I know that name?’ Vic whispered.
‘They were quite popular,’ the woman said with sadness in her eyes. ‘Once.’
As he pulled the shirt over his head a memory triggered with unerring clarity. He turned to the woman and knew a piece of the puzzle.
‘Mrs. Martel?’ he said even though it made no sense. The woman who was suddenly a little less of a stranger clasped a spiked hand over her mouth. Tears welled around her eyes then slipped behind her flesh. Vic’s eyes wouldn’t stop widening. ‘I. I went to your diner when I was a kid.’ Holy shit it’s her. ‘My dad always made it the last stop before leaving. “Pointless going to Clement Dale if you don’t go to Olive Martel’s Long Table,” he always said.’
The no-more-a-monster wiped at her eyes, careful not to catch a spike on saggy flesh. ‘Your father sounds like a good man.’
It was Vic’s turn to offer a sad smile. ‘He was.’
His eyes darted from face to face with dawning realisation. He didn’t know how any of what he saw was possible, but in each face there was the faintest glimmer of a memory; someone standing at a till, stocking shelves, aiding customers into making the right choice on their purchase.
‘What happened?’ he whispered.
A long, slow voice rumbled to the left. ‘Stupidity.’ It was the skinned demon, a mournful look on its gargantuan features. ‘Beyond stupidity.’
‘Sammy’s right.’ Boyd clacked as his grinding limbs situated his bulk on the fountain’s edge. ‘We were offered something too good to be true.’
Vic squinted at the trucker cap he had no intention of studying when last they met. ‘Henshaw’s?’ he said. ‘Did you work at the tool shop?’
Bone furrowed. ‘I owned the tool shop. Still do.’
‘All of us were shopkeepers in this place,’ Olive said. ‘Sammy was assistant at Viewfinder. Myron ran the jewellers.’
‘P-P-Proud member of the R.B. Poulsen Group,’ Myron interjected in his jarringly soft tone.
‘Shay over there ran Walk On. That lady could find you the perfect set of shoes for any occasion.’
Vic followed Olive’s finger to the one who walked on all fours. He cringed. ‘Sorry about, y’know, jumping on you.’
With a shrug that sent her curtain of flesh cascading she said in a muffled voice, ‘It’s not a bother, although you could do better than such heavy boots.’
Vic couldn’t help but let out an exhausted laugh.
‘We’ve adapted to this new life. It was either that or. Uh. Or give in.’ Olive was trying not to look at the mass of endlessly gnashing mouths. ‘You’ve seen some of those unfortunates who couldn’t carry on.’
‘Thatwas a person?’ Vic said far louder than he’d intended.
Olive nodded solemnly, the flesh of her head wobbling back and forth, her eyes and teeth disappearing and reappearing. ‘Hung herself, poor dear. Couldn’t cope. But we don’t die. None of us had the mobility to retrieve her so she just hung there for years, slowly turning into that.’
‘This the fool that broke in?’
Vic looked for the source of the new voice, surprised to see a completely human face—pale and greasy from the dearth of sunlight, with piercing green eyes—connected to an equally normal body. Bar the arms fused to his torso.
And his legs, holy shit.
Both were bundles of splintered bones bound with cords of blood-red flesh.
‘He sounds delicious,’ a voice piped up from behind the fused one.
Vic looked around to see a large woman standing close by the normal-at-first-glance guy. She was covered in large, yellow bone-spikes, each with a tarry substance at their base. She had tried her best to clothe herself, but the spikes truly did erupt everywhere. For all the unpleasantness it was her head that made Vic wince; like a clay bust yanked backwards by the nose, her face stared at the bright lights, eyes watering incessantly. Her hands had fused into wide flippers, and in them rested an assortment of organs that Vic took long seconds to notice were coming from the first speaker’s back.
‘Um, thank you?’ he said as his eyes traced the visceral ropes connecting organs to owner.
‘He’s not bad Dana. Not bad at all.’ A hand at his waist opened. ‘Name’s Elliot.’
‘Victor.’ He shook the hand as best he could. ‘Vic to most. And, um, I didn’t break in. The fire door was open.’
‘Reminds me, I need a smoke.’ A voice half-drowned in static said. The speaker was so short and wide they could be mistaken for one of the planters. ‘You joining Boyd?’
Boyd’s head ground from side to side. ‘Not right now Goran.’
‘We were convinced by a well-meaning man who wanted the mall to survive modernity.’ Vic flinched; the newcomer’s having caused him to forget Olive sat so close. He saw her reach out to hold his hand then think better of it. A pang of sorrow bounced around his chest. ‘Ralph Travert managed the whole place. Saw the writing on the wall long before any of us: less and less people, even loitering teens, declining sales, and so forth. He once said he was beginning to understand how the mom-and-pop stores felt when Clement Dale came to town.’
‘The owners wanted to sell,’ Elliot said with a strange sadness. ‘But Ralph convinced them to give him time to turn things around. For almost the whole two years they gave him he went through every idea he could think about, but nothing worked. Until the day he was given the number of the Dealer.’ A discontented rumble emanated from the crowd. ‘He never told us how he got the number, just that it was longer than a phone number can be. Whoever—whatever—was on the other side made a pact to keep the lights on, to keep us all going, so long as we accepted the deal through Ralph.’
Elliot sighed and cast a hateful glance towards the fluorescents.
‘It took him a while to get anyone on board. It sounded like nonsense,’ Olive continued. ‘Then one day we all saw Goran nodding and shaking Ralph’s hand, then Sammy less than an hour later. Within days both shops were booming, and Sammy’s boss was suddenly “reassigned” by the higher-ups at Viewfinder.’ She stopped, staring into her spiked hands. ‘After that it was a slow procession of us accepting the offer. It was great. Really great. Reinvigorating business and vim. We lived the good life for years.’ Olive looked to Vic; anguish writ large on her sagging features. ‘Then we started to get sick away from the mall. Before long we couldn’t leave the building. Day by day our bodies twisted. The dirtier the mall, the worse we looked.’
Well. Shit.
‘Where’s this manager guy?’ Vic said scanning the grisly faces.
‘Retreated to his office years ago.’ Boyd simmered with rage.
‘You ever go talk to him? Try and get out of, uh, whatever this is?’
‘No, we thought we’d spend fuckin’ forever like this because it’s such a blast’, Boyd said with machinegun fire snaps of his bony lips.
‘Can’t,’ Sammy’s heavy tongue managed. ‘It’s death.’
Vic turned to Olive in confusion.
‘The lift to the Guest Services Lounge makes us sick the closer we get,’ she said.
Don’t. Don’t you dare say it.
‘I could go?’ Vic said.
Fuck’s sake.
The energy changed instantly.
‘We can’t let you do that,’ Olive said.
‘The hell we can’t,’ Elliot nearly shouted. ‘He’s offering, isn’t he?’
‘We don’t know how much danger he’d be in. Who knows what’s become of Ralph?’ Olive glared at the others. ‘Let alone what would happen if the contract gets broken, or if Vic kills him.’
Wait what?
‘What’s the worst that could happen?’ Dana said shrilly. ‘We die? Thank heavens!’
‘I’m not killing anyone!’ Vic shouted. ‘I’ll speak to him. Find out what is. Try to get him to see reason.’
‘He’s gonna be some slavering, bloodthirsty monstrosity with zero humanity,’ Boyd snapped and clacked. ‘You wanna reason with that?’
Vic glared back at the bone-bark man. ‘That’s what I thought you lot were,’ he said cooly. ‘Listen. He must be in the same situation as you right? Trapped, malformed, wanting it to end? Let me help.’
Just before you die, I hope you realise it’s all your fault. You could’ve walked away. What were they going to do?
Vic stood outside a utilitarian door in a strangely grime free foyer. He’d almost hyperventilated himself into unconsciousness on the ride up the lift, but now was the truly pants-wetting moment. He raised his hand, waited for it to stop trembling, then knocked on the door lightly. ‘Mr. Travert?’
He hated how his voice sounded in the moment, too reminiscent of the squeaky voiced teen outside the headmaster’s office.
From inside there was a heavy sigh. ‘Enter,’ a tired voice said.
With a trepidatious breath Vic walked into what once would’ve been the most generic of offices. Cheap, unpleasantly patterned carpet at odds with the almost opulent lounge area; a cat based motivational poster; a pair of grey metal filing cabinets. But taking up two thirds of the room was what had become of Ralph Travert.
A mountain of flesh bloated and bulbous. He was nearly the width of the room—body andhead. Where any part of him touched a surface, it had fused, including the desk which was almost entirely enveloped by his gut. Vic tried to keep his gorge down but quickly failed, bolting out of the room to hurl into a bin.
When he was done with the last remaining bitter gobs spat inaccurately across bin and wall he walked back in with a queasy look and started to mumble an apology. Travert shook his titanic head as much as he could. Which was barely.
‘I understand.’ He gestured as best he could with his eyes. Vic turned around to see a sink with plenty of lotions, soaps, and sprays. Above was a sizeable mirror. ‘I’ve been watching myself turn into this for I don’t know how long.’
Face scrunched, lips pursed against more vomit, and trying desperately not to breathe through his nose, Vic straightened up and met one elongated eye. ‘You don’t seem surprised.’
Another, heavier sigh.
‘I see and hear everything within the mall.’ Flat teeth the size of Vic’s hand ground together. ‘Another “gift” from that ultra literal demon.’
‘Then stop all this. Can’t you?’
Both eyes focused on him, connected by a bulbous frown. ‘You need to understand. For a long time, a very long time, business was good. Even when things were starting to become worrisome, we were making money hand over fist.’ Ralph stopped to take a halting breath. ‘I did call him. It. The Dealer. I called and it said a person was only as good as their word. It said reneging on a deal was tantamount to treason.’
The manager shifted its weight causing the whole room to groan.
‘Well, it’s fair to say you lot aren’t in business any longer. I’d say it’s time to end this, don’t you?’
‘We’re still going, the lights are on,’ Ralph said to himself like a mantra. He seemed to be assessing his body, looking up and down his arms, sneering at his monumental gut.
‘Come on Ralph.’
‘The lights are on.’ Ralph’s massive pupils took up Vic’s vision. ‘The shops are open.’
‘Someone hungthemself,’ Vic couldn’t understand how anything else needed to be said. But there was plenty more. ‘And she’s still alive for fuck’s sake. Someone else is a puddle of limbs. Good people are living unending lives of pain for what? So you don’t go back on a deal? You got fucking played Ralph!’
The man who was more a room stared for long seconds at the first fresh face he had seen in so long. Tears welled in the corners of his stretched eyes, broke containment, and ran down the tautened contours of his cheeks in salty streams.
Travert let out a sigh of vile breath that smelt like old compost. His huge head slumped, barely observable chin ploughing into a mound of flesh and matted chest hair. ‘The safe.’
‘What about it?’
Another sigh, then a whiney moan. ‘The contract is in it. Back left of the office—my left.’
‘What?’ Vic said with dawning disgust.
‘I think it was ten years ago, maybe more, probablymore, that I enveloped it.’
What followed was a harrowing two minutes of pushing through an ocean of oily, fetid fat. Patches fused to the walls or floor periodically blocked Vic’s path, but Travert said to do what he must. Vic pushed hard until the patches tore away, wincing at the accompanying groan. When he finally arrived at the safe his mind raced, the combination given to him momentarily lost amongst the disgust. He screwed his eyes tight and breathed through his mouth as he tried to force his memory back into gear.
Another rancid couple of minutes later and Vic extricated himself from a nightmare in need of repression. Gasping for air, and covered in grease, he held an ornate piece of paper in one hand. Ralph Travert looked at him with as much disgust as Vic felt.
‘We should burn it,’ the bloated man said through curled lips. ‘Then there’ll be no question it’s destroyed.’ Vic stared at the man. ‘Right cabinet, middle drawer, far at the back.’
Vic did as he was told and pulled out an embossed brass tin. Inside were two lighters and the driest tobacco he’d ever felt. Nodding along to his own ideas he left the office just long enough to grab the bin and tip out the vomit. After stuffing it full of papers and the contract, he fished out a lighter.
‘Give it to me,’ Ralph said. ‘I can manage if you put the bin under my good arm. I don’t know if you care enough, but if you want to say anything to the others, I’d be quick. Can’t imagine we’ll survive this.’
When the lift doors opened the mall was filled with groans of pain and moans of relief. The more monstrous the shopkeeper, the worse it seemed to be as they all twisted slowly back to humanity. For a moment Shay looked at Vic as her old self; stunning modelesque beauty, long legs, tanned skin and flowing jet-black hair. Then the moment passed, and she was dead on the floor.
He ran to find Olive as Sammy crumbled from a demon into the most nondescript man to have lived. He passed the overweight, well-dressed corpse of Myron and reached out to Dana as her head retracted back into place, but she was already gone.
‘Fuck.’
‘Victor?’ said a pleasantly warm voice.
‘Olive?’ He looked up from Dana, her modesty covered by an incredible amount of vibrant red hair. Olive stood next to him with the saddest smile. Her grey skin was brown; her features wrinkled with age but attached to the bone. ‘How?’
‘Oh, yeah!’ a man boomed, his voice somehow alien for not being couched in clacking bone. ‘Boyd Henshaw is back!’
Neither Vic nor Olive spoke as the middle-aged man marched for the exit with axe in hand. Both flinched as he struck the door and kicked it open.
‘It’s been horrific folks,’ he said to the mall at large then with a quick doff of his cap he rejoined the real world.
‘How?’ Vic repeated.
‘We were the last.’ Olive was rooted to the spot. ‘We refused for so long.’
Vic cracked a broad grin and jumped to his feet. ‘Well then let’s get the ever-loving fuck out of here.’
He reached out to Olive, but she recoiled. ‘I don’t have a life to go back to. I’m dead out there. Boyd will adapt. But I-I-I don’t think I can.’
Vic walked to her side and offered the crook of his arm. ‘Yes, you can.’ He did his best to offer his warmest look, the sort he couldn’t practise, the sort that looked fake if put on to win hearts and open legs. ‘I don’t know how we’re going to get you legally alive again or whatever, but I do know staying in this place is the worst idea you could have. And you always struck me as clever old girl.’
Olive Martel stared at the night outside, worry worn into every wrinkle. The slightest of breezes caressed her face and pulled her mouth into a gasping smile. With twinkling eyes she looped her arm through Vic’s, pinched his wrist in retaliation and took her first step towards the exit in years.