Chapters (22)
“We have to do something,” Basil said. “We can’t just crawl under a sofa and hide until the sun comes up.”
The first thing that hit them was the cold—a blast of frigid air that snatched the breath from their throats. Then came the stink, so strong it made Amy’s eyes water. It was like a train of rotten meat passing in the dark. It was so close and so enormous, it chased all thought of being cured from Amy’s brain and left just one thing in its place: fear. Basil stopped rolling the chair and listened. Then he leaned down.
“Can you run?” he whispered into her ear.
Amy was too scared to answer. Of course she couldn’t run. She didn’t think she could even stand.
Basil looked around, frightened for the first time. “I can’t push you fast enough.”
They could hear it now—footsteps, dozens of them, hundreds of them, all of them shuffling forward in lockstep. Basil hauled Amy from the chair and dragged her down an aisle, stashing her underneath a Petrichor dining table, away from the filthy rotting leviathan bearing down on them, making the floor shake, filling the air with its stink.
“Whatever happens,” he whispered over the vast, soft, rotten noises that were getting louder, “don’t help me. I can handle this. Just wait until they’re gone, and then get out of here.”
He walked back to the Bright and Shining Path, holding his cell phone above his head, a signal in the dark. Something in the shadows surged toward him. As it emerged out of the darkness Amy saw that it had hundreds of legs with filthy bare feet, packed so closely together they looked like they belonged to a single creature. She realized she was seeing an army, stretching off into the store. They were dressed in loose striped shirts and pants, their heads bowed forward, each man’s forehead resting on the back of the neck of the man in front of him. They were standing so close that they looked like a great segmented centipede made of dead flesh. They stopped just a few feet in front of Basil.
Basil tried to look brave. He stood tall in the center of the Path, legs apart, silhouetted by the light of his phone. But then he saw them—he got a good, careful look at them—and whatever he had expected to see, it wasn’t this. His expression faltered and he fell back on his training. “Orsk is closed for the evening. All of you are trespassing on private property.”
For the briefest of moments, nothing moved.
Then his cell phone went into sleep mode, extinguishing the last glimmer of light from the Showroom, and the penitents fell upon him.
