Page 15

Jane’s voice cuts through the muffled haze cradling his brain, where it feels like cotton balls have been stuffed close to bursting. His sister wrings her hands, taking small birdlike steps closer. “What are we going to do, Thomas? How are we going to get out of here?”

He shakes his head numbly as Ashley’s sobs threaten to shake items loose from the tall shelves stretching down the store’s aisles. There’s a new scuff in the gleam of the linoleum floors, marked by his shoes when he ran for his life only moments before.

When he ran from something made of rot and crooked bone.

“Thomas?” Jane repeats in a teary wobble.

He sweeps a hand up his face and back through his hair. “I don’t—Jesus, I don’t know.”

“I couldn’t get a clear look at it,” Jackson says while keeping one hand resting firmly on his dog. His wide eyes flit across the linoleum floor, tracking Billy’s blood as it dries. “It was too dark and it was—it was so fast. It was so fast,” he says.

“I don’t understand,” cries Ashley. “I don’t understand what’s happening—”

A dull thump sounds then, hushing the woman’s ragged sobs. When it happens again, Thomas looks to the far wall of the store, where the refrigerated section begins with rows of sodas and energy drinks.

Kimi slips silently from Ashley’s side, her gaze trailing up the length of the white walls. “What is that?” she whispers.

Chittering trickles in through the cracked-open windows. Then the bone-colored talons that speared clean through Evan curl over the window’s ledge from outside, sharp and dipped in shiny blood. Thomas can practically feel them tracing up his spine, counting each vertebra where it connects to delicate nerves and muscle.

His legs suddenly feel like the swirling piles of leaves outside, dead and woefully untethered. When the claws retract, another thump lands, this time directly overhead. Despite the near-painful blaze of the overhead lights, he stares up at the ceiling with the others, listening as it walks across the roof.

“Could it get in from up there?” Jackson asks, just as Winnie lets out a single shrill bark at the air before retreating behind him.

“There’s an access door on the roof, but it should be locked,” Kimi answers in one breath. The small pocketknife trembles where it’s angled up in her hand.

Thomas swallows hard as his heart beats in time with the footsteps overhead. “Should be?”

Above them the steps take off into a sudden run, beating across the roof until thready silence dangles over them. It is Winnie who breaks it first, whining like a toddler as she knocks into Jackson’s side with her large head.

“Do you think it’s gone?” he asks, staring upward at the lights.

Kimi lowers the pocketknife. “I don’t hear it anymore,” she says. “I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing.”

Thomas rubs at his eyes, seeing spots dance across the closed lids. The store feels too big around them, the ceilings far too tall with space those claws might choose to preoccupy with harsh, determined slices. It occurs to him then that two people are now dead in the span of what has simultaneously felt like the length of a song and a maddening life sentence.

“What the hell is going on?” he bursts out, though whether the question is directed at himself, the surrounding strangers, or some laughing god, he has no idea.

As if in answer, a voice cuts through the darkness outside.

At first, they all step farther back from the doors in near unison. But then the voice calls out again, a cry that is so terribly human and barbed with a pain that exists purely to grip hold of stomachs and twist.

Jane is the first to peer out the glass, tugged forward like a puppet on a string. “The lot looks empty,” she says, though that desperate cry materializes again until full words are formed.

Kimi’s eyes widen. “Is that—”

“Evan,” Ashley gasps.

They clear the space to the glass in seconds.

“Help me!” Evan wails out. “Somebody, please help!”

Ashley’s face contorts as she runs to the barricaded door, awkwardly bending her pregnant body over the table to try to see out into the night. Evan cries out again, loud and terribly clear from beyond the radius of the lone streetlight.

“Evan! Evan, baby,” Ashley shouts, flattening her hands against the glass. “Oh God, we have to do something!”

Thomas shoves past her, climbing up on top of the table and cupping his eyes against the door. It takes his eyes several seconds to adjust, and even then, all that is visible from this distance is the start of Evan’s blood trail at the edge of the parking lot, leading off into the woods until darkness swallows it.

“There’s no way,” he whispers, fogging up the smudged glass.