Marina bent down to help the customer try on the shoes, and David could see the whale tail of her thong underwear peeking out over her low-rise dress pants. I shouldn’t be looking. His cheeks filled with heat and he turned away.
David walked through the grey metal shelves stacked with shoe boxes and pushed open a worn metal door into the service hallway. He pulled out his Du Maurier king size and struck a match. He sucked in the acrid taste of the match with the first drag of his smoke. A cloud of tobacco smoke billowed out in the hall, and David’s shoulders dropped a little lower, the tension starting to ebb away. He held the cigarette in his off hand, as he’d cut his other hand with a box cutter. The store manager, Bob, had just laughed at him and told him he was being a wuss.
David took a deep breath and slid down to the polished concrete floor of the hallway, his long legs nearly stretching across to the other side. He ashed his cigarette in the large coffee can next to him, the smell of smoldering filters causing him to inch a little further away. It was 7 o’clock, still two hours till the mall closed. Bob would be leaving in an hour or so and that would leave just him and Marina to close up the store.
He took another drag of his smoke. About half left. He’d switched to king size last week because he’d have extra time on a smoke break.
The fluorescent fixtures in the hall buzzed, their pale light illuminating the gray hallway. This job was not what he’d imagined when he’d told his mother he’d decided to take a gap year before starting college. He thought he’d save some money, maybe travel. Instead, he spent every evening at the mall working at Agnew shoes, and his pay cheque was always gone in less than a week.
He ground his cigarette butt into the coffee can amongst the dozens of others, the pale filters of Bob’s Players dominated, and reached for the door.
A dark shape flitted out of the corner of his eye. David paused and looked down the long hallway. It was empty, just a few boxes outside the door of The Body Shop next door. He narrowed his eyes and stared a little harder. Nothing.
He’d been to the Southcentre mall lots of times before he got a job there. The walkways were broad, with polished tile and shiny chrome railings around the openings to the first floor. Large skylights throughout the mall made it bright and airy in the daytime, but once it got dark, the artificial lights seemed insufficient to illuminate the huge indoor space and it always got gloomier. He’d no idea about the network of back hallways that travelled throughout the building.
They all looked the same. Gray walls, polished concrete floor, and chipped metal doors behind every store. If you didn’t watch carefully for landmarks, a chipped bit of brick there, a coffee can outside this door, a y-intersection, it was easy to get turned around.
The back hallways were how employees were meant to travel through the mall, nobody wanted to see David pushing a cart stacked with boxes through the concourse, or the food court workers with greasy noodles spilling out of mountains of black garbage bags. But, those passages also became a bit of a refuge. Everyone took smoke breaks in the hallways, so there were other mall workers he’d gotten to know on his walks to the cardboard compactor or to pick up new shipments at the loading dock. It had become like a little secret community.
Still, they could sometimes be strange. Like when he was loading cardboard into the recycler the week before and empty boxes kept toppling over after he stacked them up. After the first time, he made sure they were stable when he stacked them. As soon as he looked away, they fell. It happened two more times before he got creeped out and just abandoned the boxes in front of the huge compactor.
Or like tonight, when he thought he saw somebody skulking down the hall out of the corner of his eye.
He shook his head and walked through the door back into the storage room of the shoe store. The music was pumping. Electronic dance music echoed out of shitty speakers in the back. Bob must have gone home early. No way Marina would switch the station to Power 107 and pump the volume like that if he was still there.
He walked through the opening into the storefront and saw Marina bopping her head behind the cash register and mouthing the words to the song. We like to party, we like, we like to party. She was a few years older than him, thin, with dyed blond shoulder length hair and a hooked nose. She had a boyfriend, who was supposedly “super great” in bed.
“Bob gone?” he’d had to raise his voice over the music.
She ignored him while she finished ringing up the sale on a pair of Brooks runners for a ten-year old and her mother. The girl was bopping to the music with Marina, but the mom looked annoyed, her tensed shoulders making the shoulder pads of her blazer rise.
David smiled ruefully and surveyed the store. Empty, except for about half a dozen boxes of discarded shoes from Marina's customers strewn about the floor. David knelt on the Berber carpet and began to gather the shoes and tissue paper into their boxes.
The store was a small rectangle with slat walls all around, plexiglass shelves holding fake leather display shoes. It was a little too bright, and a little too beige to do great business. Aldo shoes across the concourse did much better. Their shoes were real leather and stylish. Agnew tried to be all things to everybody, and it did a middling job at that. Stylish shoes that were too cheap, running shoes that weren’t stylish enough, cheap shoes that were too cheap. People who didn’t buy shoes from them inevitably walked across to Aldo on their way out.
Marina danced in front of him and put her hands on her hips.
“Made my ten percent commission rate!” she said.
“Oh! That's great Marina.”
“How close are you?”
“Uh, I don’t know. Last I checked I still needed about three hundred dollars.”
Her smile fell and she looked at the time. It was seven thirty, the chances of him selling three hundred dollars worth of cheap shoes in the next ninety minutes were next to nothing. He’d only made his ten percent commission rate once so far. Although Marina seemed to hit it every week.
“Well, anything I sell for the rest of the night, I’ll ring in under your code, ok?” She put her hand on his shoulder.
“Thanks Marina, but you don’t have to do that.” He picked up the pile of shoe boxes.
“Hey, what are friends for?” She squeezed his upper arm this time and David’s cheeks got warm. She offered to do this for him before, but always ended up forgetting and putting her own code in instead.
He smiled at her and headed into the back with the shoes. Man, he wished she didn’t have a boyfriend.
A scream from the storefront stopped him, the shoe boxes frozen above his head. For a moment, a part of him wailed that he should run out the backdoor and into the gray hallway. He set the boxes down slowly and crept to the opening of the store where the scream had come from.
There was Marina, a pair of scissors clutched in her hand like a knife, facing the cash register. Her eyes wide and lips drawn back. She was focused on a thing perched on the counter. It roiled with a greasy black smoke from all over its body, tendrils reaching into the air. It was small, no bigger than a child with an oversized featureless head. He couldn’t see any detail in it, the blackness of its body was thick, thicker than any colour should be, it looked almost two dimensional, like it was a hole carved into the air.
When David stepped forward and its head shifted, a broad mouth opened, festooned with rows of grey teeth, every one of them a triangle. They reminded him of the mouth of a shark, except instead of the blood red gums, they were grey, shining with saliva.
Its stance shifted, its paws raising up, becoming bipedal and turning itself towards David. Marina dropped her scissors and ran out the front of the store.
It ignored her, David now in its sights. Somehow, he knew this was the same thing he’d seen in the back hallway. Its presence sucked the warmth from the air, and David felt the overwhelming need to piss.
He turned and ran back through the storage room towards the metal door to the back hallway. If he could get through the door and shut it before the thing got to him, he could get away. He heard a stomping as it pursued him, sounding like something far larger than the small thing it was. Shelves crashed down behind him, and David’s panic burbled inside him, a moan escaping his throat.
He grabbed the door and threw it open, turning to pull the metal door closed. For an instant he saw the thing as it careened towards the door. Its mouth agape, the rows of teeth stretching back into a throat impossibly wide. It crashed through piles of shoes, not slowed by the debris.
The door shut, David leaned against, expecting the thing to crash into it and braced himself.
Nothing.
He waited. Still pushing against the door as hard as he could, tears forming in his eyes.
A rending punctuated the air, and the door shook under David's body. The metal vibrated like someone taking a grinder to it. Shards began to protrude from the door by his knees, cutting his leg. He glimpsed the blackness and grey teeth of the thing.
David yelped and took off down the hall. The pain in his leg an angry wasp, he threw himself against the door to the mall concourse.
Horror had belched forth into Southcentre mall. The black things were everywhere, tearing up the shelves in the record store, and chasing mall patrons through the aisles. He watched a middle-aged woman, her shopping bags looped on each arm stumble to the tile floor, one of the things immediately leaping on her, its gray toothed mouth wide. She didn’t scream, the tendrils of black stretched around her, and the thing's body swelled in size, like it had enveloped her completely.
Other people in the mall jostled him as he made his way through the panicked crowd, their screams an echo of his own.
He followed the panicked people to the main entrance of the mall. The crowd got thicker and people were crying and moaning all around him.
A man wearing a blue windbreaker jostled past a woman in front of him, heading away from the entrance.
“They’re locked, they’re locked.” He mumbled to himself as he brushed past David.
The woman turned to look at David, her eyes wide. “Did he just say the doors are locked?”
There was a coffee shop on the other side of the food court that Marina worked a second job at. It had a separate exit out of the mall in the back room. David immediately turned and headed towards it.
The crowd wasn’t as thick through the food court, but there was definitely one of the things on the far side, judging by the erratic movements of a small group of teenagers in front of Manchu Wok.
A large smear of blackened slime covered the aisle between the smoking section and the rest of the food court. A bag from Agnew lay on the periphery, splashed with the same blackness. In the centre two shriveled figures lay, one large and one small, completely covered with the tar like substance with their mouths agape in a final scream.
David gagged as his foot came down in the corner of the blackness when another mall patron bumped him as he tried to make his way around. The cheap plastic sole of the Agnew dress shoes Bob made him wear slipped and he landed on his knee in the muck, his hand and leg managing to arrest his fall further into the black slime.
The black puddle was warm and smelled of stale vomit and gasoline. It burned in the old cut in his hand and the new one on his leg. He shuddered as he got to his feet wiping as much of the goo on his dress pants as he could, but it clung to him like viscous sap.
He navigated the remaining tables to Second Cup and saw Marina on the other side of the sliding security doors, locking them.
“Marina.”
She looked at him, her eye makeup black smears down her cheeks.
She took a step away.
“Marina, open the door.”
The people from the food court surged past them, another of the things was savaging a group of teenagers in front of Sbarro about fifty feet away. The screams of the kids ringing out through the air.
She shook her head at him, fresh tears in her eyes as she turned away. He banged on the security door.
“Marina!” His heart sank into his chest as she rounded the corner and went into the backroom. A small bundle of roiling blackness emerged from the tables near the coffee bean dispensers and followed her.
“Marina, wait!” He pounded on the doors in fury, trying to catch the attention of the thing following her as she left him behind. He screamed in elemental fury and rage. The thing didn’t come out of the back towards him. There was a jostle of the step ladder that he could see propped up in the small portion of the lighted backroom, and then nothing.
David turned to the chaos unfolding around him in the mall. The big crowd at the locked front doors was trapped in a clump and being picked off in small numbers by the things looping past them like the sharks their mouths resembled. Small groups had gathered together in other spots, the things seeming to prefer the single mall patrons caught out alone. A Sears perfume saleswoman by the frozen yogurt stand, her warbled cry ringing out as several of the things swarmed over her. A man in a No Fear hat, his fists up like he could fight them. A thing gathered his attention in the front while two more took out his hamstrings from behind, their teeth slicing through his flesh.
They seemed intelligent, and the chances of David escaping here on his own weren’t good. He made his way to the nearest door to the labyrinthine back hallways. He might be able to make his way to an exit that way, and if the things were hunting people, then the hallways might be the safest place.
He stepped over another pile of goo, its tendrils lurching towards him as he made his way past. His hand reaching out to them, the leftover goo under his own fingernails stretching out like long bony fingers. Panic seized him as he drew his arm back, the hand felt strong. It felt alive, his fingers crushed into a fist as he looked at his hand, the goo seemed to have faded, but the skin had taken on a grayish tone. Fuck.
David tucked his hand under his other arm and hobbled to the doorway beside the chocolate shop at the end of the food court, his bloody leg aching with a throb in tune to his heartbeat.
He flung the door open, the smell of rancid food flowed out, the floor shiny with grease from the restaurants that backed onto it. It was empty, the fluorescent lights flickering onto the empty hallway and a few milk crates. A large black garbage bag sat beside the nearest store doorway, something leaking out of it to make a trail of liquid down the centre of the hallway.
David walked down the hall, his steps careful and his eyes wide. His heart thumped a staccato rhythm in his ears. He wasn’t entirely sure where this hallway led, it was across the mall from Agnew. He knew that most of the back passages led to the cardboard compactor and the loading dock. That would be his destination, there were large rolling doors that opened for the delivery trucks that brought boxes of stock to all the stores in the mall.
The hallway took several turns, and he knew he had travelled away from the food court, the smell in the hallways was more of cigarettes and cardboard than from food waste.
The hall branched in two different directions at a t-intersection. One direction led to a set of stairs going up, and the other was a gradual slope down, the lights only partially lit giving it a gloom that started up the fear in David again. The stairs would certainly not be right, the trash compactor was on the first floor, so he needed to move downwards.
The gloomy hallway seemed like the right direction to his head, but his heart screamed no as he began to limp downwards. The pain in his leg was searing, and he looked down at his cut as he walked. His pants were ripped where the shards of the metal door had sliced into him. It was bubbled over with the black goo.
He tried to grasp at it with his clean hand, but it was like a hard scabrous rock had sealed itself onto his leg. Pain shot up his leg when he tried to pick it off with his fingernails. He froze when he saw the black mass begin to pulsate. It throbbed in time with his pounding heart, his hand joined the rhythm.
His gray hand had become black, the goo seemed to come back and cover all of his skin, elongating his fingers into sharpened claws. He undid the button on the cuff of his dress shirt and saw the blackness had spread halfway up his forearm. Oh god, what was happening to him? Maybe if he could get to the hospital he would be ok?
This was probably some sort of government experiment that escaped. Somebody will know what is happening and be able to deal with it. He’d seen a movie once where a train crashed and some government experiment got loose and terrorized a town. A plucky small-town sheriff and some kids managed to figure out what was going on and get the whole situation taken care of. This didn’t feel like a movie with a happy ending.
He swallowed slowly. A deep dread filled David while he looked at his deformed alien hand. He’d seen at least four people die in the last ten minutes, and it was likely there were a lot more people dying out in the mall. The chances of him making it out of Southcentre mall alive weren’t good. Even if he did, this stuff infecting him was really fucking bad.
He hobbled his way down into the dim hallway, holding back the tears burning in his eyes. He tried to keep the direction he needed to take roughly in his mind. The corridor seemed to go on for longer than David thought it was possible, as he took turn after turn. Then it seemed to curve to the right for a while until he thought it must have gone in several complete circles before it straightened out again. He took another turn, and another.
A few minutes later David had to admit he had no idea where he was going and was completely lost. He hadn’t seen a door into the back of another store for several minutes, and the hallway seemed to have changed into unpolished concrete and rough grey brick. The good news was that his leg had stopped hurting, and he was moving at almost a half jog. He was adamantly NOT looking at either his arm or leg.
There was no way he was even under Southcentre mall anymore, he’d walked for what must have been an hour, although he admitted to himself he had no way of knowing how much time had passed. Ok, if it isn’t around this corner I’ll turn back.
He turned the corner, determined to turn around if he didn’t see something familiar. And there was the massive garbage compactor, like a giant metal mouth filled with cardboard. It waited to be fed the piles of boxes that littered the ground around its faded metal chin.
The door to the loading dock was closed, the metal roll shutter all the way down. Relief flooded David, he was almost out. He would live.
David reached down to the roll shutter and heard a skittering behind him. He froze, fear washing over him like plunging into icy water. His heart began to pound and the throbbing of his hand and leg went in time.
He turned and a black thing crouched amongst the empty boxes, looking like a hole of blackness sliced into the air. Shards of gray metal were embedded around its head, like it had forced itself through a metal door.
The throbbing in his hand had spread to his whole body and his fear began to feel like rage. Rage at being left to die, rage at being trapped in his life, rage at his life ending before it had even started.
“Oh, you little fucker.”
The thing’s mouth opened wide, the rows of grey shark teeth spotted with the blood of whatever other victim it had killed in between their last meeting. Its hindquarters lifted, like a cat ready to pounce.
David turned back to the roll shutter, the panic inside overcoming his anger and clawed at the handle. He felt an overwhelming weight land on his back and nearly drive him to the ground, but he caught himself with his black hand. The fingers spread out wider than possible and gripped the concrete floor. He pulled at the shutter with his other hand, realizing at the same moment it wouldn't budge as there was a large brass lock looped through the door at the bottom.
The weight was driving him down and his knee hit the floor, but instead of feeling the concrete he felt the purchase of his foot, and saw the blackness had spread through his entire leg and it bent the opposite direction at the knee, ending in a great taloned foot, the goo sliding off of it like black smoke, revealing a deeper darkness beneath that looked like the things sliced blackness.
The rage came back, flowing through his body in time to the thudding of his heart, he howled in terror and fury. He reached back with his black hand and plucked the black thing from his back where it was trying to chew through his shoulder, his own red blood dripping from its gray slathering mouth. It twisted impossibly, biting down on his black arm, but tendrils spread from his own hand reaching around the thing's throat and squeezing with a terrible pressure. It bit down again, and he almost laughed at the weakness of its attack on his black arm. He grabbed it with his other black arm and noted with a distant thought that the blackness seemed to have spread.
The thing was feeble. It couldn’t break his grip. He had overcome its paltry strength. David thrust it into the cardboard compactor, holding it in place with his writhing black arm, then pressing the green button to activate it with the other.
Groaning to life, the machine began to close its great metal teeth upon the cardboard and the thing within its mouth. He kept a firm hold on it with his black arm so it wouldn’t escape before the implacable jaws crushed it...
With a calm detachment, David watched the thing struggle as it was crushed, his black arm with it. A great pressure worked its way up his arm, then a pinch. Then it was gone.
He peered at the stump, already the tendrils were beginning to swirl and twine together. The more they swirled together, the blacker they became. The lights seemed to be dimming and a grayness draped over the room. He padded towards the roll shutter and twisted off the brass lock. The door clattered upwards.
A gray world greeted him. Flashing lights of emergency vehicles hurt his eyes, but called to him. The smell of people and fear was heavy in the air.
He was hungry.
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