Humbug, page 22
Come on, she yelled internally. Just do it!
Another second passed. Then another.
And then the shadow moved away. Footsteps clumped down the aisle towards the fitting area exit.
It was gone.
Taryn let out a breath, long and slow, then sucked in another. She lowered her arm, listening. She couldn't hear her anymore. Had she left?
No, no way.
She knew what happened next. This was the point in the movie when the dumbass female protagonist came skipping out from her hiding place, ready to run for freedom, only to be gored through the chest by the killer's rusty machete. She'd seen enough eighties slashers to know that much.
She lowered one foot to the floor, then the other. Taking her blood-stained hand away from her face, she stuck her tongue in the hole made by the glass shard, plugging it as best she could. The pain was intense and her eyes watered, but at least now she knew what was causing the blood flow. She'd deal with it properly when she got the chance.
I could just stay here, she thought. Just wait it out until help arrives. The police'll be here soon. Someone will come.
But Em. She was still out there somewhere. The Mrs Claus could be on her way to get her right now.
I can't stay here.
Drawing in another breath to steady herself, Taryn pushed back the closest edge of the curtain and peered down the aisle towards the fitting area exit. Nothing. She could see where she'd left a trail of blood droplets on the floor, and where the Mrs Claus had tramped through them, leaving her own bloodied boot prints. The same prints went back down the aisle and out into the main store again.
Taryn slipped out of the fitting room booth and started back towards the exit. She took a step, listened, took another one. Listened again. Nothing. Just the faint static buzz of wall-mounted speakers that should be playing Christmas music.
No heavy footsteps or wheezing.
She came to the fitting room exit and looked round the corner. Just beyond the nearest rack, she could see the store entrance between two display windows, one smashed through by her wiry frame not so long ago. It looked like it was a mile away, but she could make it if she ran. She knew the layout of the store better than the thing in the Mrs Claus costume.
I can make it there. I'm smarter than she is. And I'm faster.
The checkout counter was on her right, open at both ends. Better to get away from the fitting rooms as soon as possible.
She slipped around the corner and crossed along the back of the store, keeping her head below the rim of the counter. It wasn't easy: the counter was low and she was tall. She also had to move on her haunches rather than on all fours in order to keep a firm grip on the glass shard, which was now digging steadily into her hand.
Ash wouldn't have a problem with this, Taryn thought. She could practically walk behind here and not get seen.
She ran her free hand along the shelf behind the counter to keep her balance. It was packed with neatly-folded jeans, bags and hangers. Her fingers trailed over a rock-hard wad of gum and she flinched.
Imagine being disgusted at that now, she thought absently, after all this.
She still couldn't hear the Mrs Claus. Was she still in the store? Distantly, the December wind whooshed and moaned around the mall, making the building rattle and creak like a tired old man. Taryn desperately wished she'd hear a siren cut through that wind, or the voices of police officers calling "Is anybody in here?" while they fanned out across the concourse, guns poised and radios crackling. She'd take any sound right now. Anything other than this deathly near-silence that threatened to expose her position at any second.
She reached the other end of the checkout counter and stole a glance around it. There was the right-hand wall of the store, hidden behind stacks of jeans; there was the display mannequin halfway along it, its featureless face turned towards the center of the store. No movement. No Mrs Claus.
She's gone, Taryn thought. She's gone after Em.
She took a breath and came around the end of the counter, and let out a yelp of surprise when someone screamed out in the concourse.
In the underground parking lot of the Outlet Complex mall, something was happening to the Creature that had eaten Pete Zampetti.
Olivia thought she knew what that something might be.
She'd been watching the Creature since the elf dragged her down into the lot. She'd watched it greedily eat two people in the purple glow of its forehead orb. And after the bag went over her head, she'd listened.
They never found Adam earlier that day, her and Em. They barely even made it out of the mall concourse.
Olivia remembered Adam saying something about the security office being near the back of the building, so when she saw the elf scuttle along the second floor railing above the Christmas trees, its blood-red eyes practically glowing with fiendish malevolence, she snatched Em up and ran in the direction her husband had gone. That led her to the ground floor stairwell door, which opened out at the mall's single elevator. Here, Olivia Price made her second mistake of the day (her first being not keeping an eye on the car when Adam took Em to the gas station restroom): instead of going straight for the stairs, she called the elevator and waited.
Looking back now, she wasn't quite sure what was going through her head at the time. Sure, all the lights were on in the mall and the elevator was clearly working. Adam must have come this way because, unless he'd made an insane life choice and gone for a quick game of Space Invaders in the Star-cade instead, there simply wasn't anywhere else to go. She hadn't seen a security office, and Adam hadn't met them coming back. He had to have gone for the stairwell, and following him there wasn't the wrong thing to do. But in hindsight, her decision to hang around in the stairwell lobby waiting for America's Slowest Elevator to trundle its way down from the second floor was suicide.
The stairs were right there. Why didn't she take them?
Because elevators were familiar. She rode them all the time, and not once had she been stabbed inside one by some psychopath in an elf costume. That's the kind of thing that happened in the shadows of a mall's rear stairwell.
The elevator had actually reached the ground floor, signaling its arrival with a carefree ping. Elevators didn't give a rat's ass whether you were being chased by someone who liked to slash tires in the snow, someone who might equally enjoy hurting your only daughter; elevators had one job to do, and caring wasn't part of it.
The doors had slid open and Olivia had bundled Em inside, putting on her best "everything's going to be A-OK, sweetie" voice, beaming smile n' all.
And that was when the elf burst through the stairwell door and bundled itself in after them, shrieking with laughter and waving the knife it'd stolen from the sandwich place. Olivia screamed and did the only thing she could think of in the moment, probably the only thing any mother would do in the same situation when her child was under threat: she threw herself at the elf, knocking it bodily against the side of the elevator car, and yelled, "EMMA, RUN!"
Emma Price did run, though she wasn't quite sure why Mommy was shouting like that. After all, the Elf was happy, wasn't he? Only happy people laughed the way he was laughing right now. He and Mommy were playing a game, like wrestling. She'd walked into Mommy and Daddy's bedroom once when they were wrestling, but neither of them had been wearing any clothes and Mommy's face had been in the pillow; Daddy looked like he was winning so Em had cheered "Go, Daddy, go!" and he'd been so mad.
So she ran, leaving Olivia to wrestle the elf. The doors closed and the elevator descended, and Olivia Price fought for her very life every second she was inside that elevator car. It was the most terrifying and bizarre physical tussle she'd ever engaged in, something akin to fending off a spindly pre-teenager, but one who was hopped up on LSD and swinging a blade. How Olivia didn't get disemboweled in that cramped space, she'd never know; how she actually managed to knock the knife out of the elf's gloved hand, she wouldn't know either. But just as the elevator reached the underground level and pinged jovially (still not caring what was going on inside it), one of the child-thing's flailing elbows caught Olivia in the chin and snapped her head back against the doors. She rebounded off it and took one dazed step forward, and the elf sucker-punched her in the face. There was a dull crack as her right cheekbone split. Then the doors opened and she toppled backwards through the gap, hitting the concrete floor of the underground parking lot hard. The air went out of her lungs with a gasp that sounded theatrical but was very much real; in the same moment, her phone wriggled free from her pocket and smashed on the concrete by her hip. Later, she decided if she'd tried getting back to her feet right away, the elf would have been on top of her in a flash and her intestines would have been piled on the floor next to her. The shock of the sudden fall saved her life.
Instead of cutting her open, the elf coiled its fingers round her hair and started dragging her backwards across the floor. She would have screamed but she had no breath with which to do it. She batted feebly at the thing's hands, wheezing wordlessly as her back scraped across the damp concrete.
Run, Em, was the only coherent thing going through her mind then. Run, run. Daddy will find you.
The elf dragged her into the parking bay opposite the van, where the Chinese man was already cuffed to the pipe. He immediately launched into a frenzied, pleading babble the moment they appeared, sobbing and rocking against the wall. Olivia realized after a few seconds that his wild begging was directed at her, but she had no idea what he was saying. Adam knew some Mandarin but she was no good when it came to foreign languages. Beyond a little High School Spanish, she'd never learned.
The Chinese man kept up his incessant pleas for mercy while the elf cuffed her to the pipe and didn't stop until it ran the knife across his bare forearm. Then he was screaming, and Olivia could still hear him now, long after the elf had got him across to the van and the Creature had snagged his ankle with one of its slithering tentacles; he'd shrieked all the way into its mouth, and finally stopped.
The old woman had been next. She'd arrived shortly before Pete and she hadn't said a word. In fact, the elf had been almost gentle with her when it drew her arms behind her back and bound her bony wrists to the pipe. Olivia tried talking to her, asking what had happened, had she seen a little girl in a purple coat up there, but the old lady just stared straight ahead through her bifocals and didn't respond. She didn't speak when the Mrs Claus dumped the bruised and bleeding Pete Zampetti down beside her; she didn't speak when the elf uncuffed her, helped her to her feet and led her across the lot to the van. She still didn't speak when the Creature's tentacle snaked around her skinny waist and hoisted her high above its gaping maw. Olivia had shut her eyes that time but, just like the Chinese man's screams, she'd never forget how the old woman's brittle bones had crunched and snapped between the Creature's jaws.
It ate everyone, Olivia realized at that point. Everyone in the entire mall. They were all brought down here and it consumed them, one by one.
She hadn't seen the camera footage in the security office, but she knew it was true nonetheless. The footprints in the snow at the mall entrance, the abandoned personal items in the concourse. Just the sense of it she got from being in the Creature's vicinity, like it was reaching into her skull and caressing her brain, influencing her through the same means by which it was controlling the elf, though far less potently. She knew for sure without having to know at all.
The Creature had eaten everyone.
She thought she knew something else about it, too. How it'd gotten into the underground parking lot, maybe.
The brief streak she'd spotted in the sky earlier that day as they were driving along the freeway. That'd been it, hadn't it? She hadn't been wrong about what it was.
The Creature had come down in a meteorite. It crashed through the roof of the Outlet Complex mall and ended up in the underground lot, probably right in front of their parking bay. The elf or the woman dressed as Mrs Claus must have moved the van below the hole in the ceiling created by the meteorite's impact and put the damn thing inside it (to protect it?), and now the elf was using that same hole to move quickly between the underground and the concourse above. In the time Olivia had been cuffed to the pipe, the thing had dropped through the hole several times and brought them a "trophy", which was usually a random body part it'd hacked off a corpse somewhere else in the mall: an ear, a finger; on one particularly horrific occasion, something round and spongy that may have been a woman's breast. Each time, it would waggle it in front of them, grinning from ear to ear, and then skip off into the shadows again.
Of course, after the old woman was gone and the elf dragged the boy down through the hole in the ceiling, most of Olivia's suspicions were confirmed. She'd sat listening with the shopping bag over her head (she didn't know why the elf had decided to do that but it'd lost its mind long ago, so predicting its next move was impossible) as Pete and Jeremy Lewis talked; Pete - who hadn't spoken to her since the elf bagged her head - described how everyone in the Outlet Complex had slipped into the same trance, drifted into the mall and clambered down through the hole to where the Creature was waiting. It had grown fat and round on those people. The elf and the Mrs Claus, who it was also undoubtedly controlling, now took it in turns to search the rest of the mall for any "scraps" that'd been missed the first time round while the other stayed nearby.
Pete Zampetti had been one of those scraps, and he was gone now. Only Olivia and Jeremy were left, and only she was still conscious and watching the new thing that was happening to the Creature.
The elf had left the doors of the van open for a reason. Maybe it wanted them to see.
Less than five minutes after Jeremy passed out (Olivia had no way of knowing what time it was in the underground lot so she could only guess at its passage), the Creature started trembling all over. Its bulk now seemed to fill the entirety of the van's interior, and as it trembled, the van did too, creaking from side to side on its deflated tires. Perversely, it reminded Olivia of how vehicles looked in TV shows when two people were having rampant sex inside them
when the van's a-rockin', don't come knockin'
and she had to physically shake her head to dispel the image. The Creature's trembling became more and more pronounced - violent, even - and Olivia thought it was swelling up further, filling every last inch of space inside the van with its gruesome, membranous form. The orb on its forehead flickered intermittently, spilling purple light across its hideous, distorted face, illuminating the twin rows of vicious, gore-speckled teeth overstuffing its jaws. Two, then three of its tentacles wormed out from under its body and coiled around sections of the van's exterior for support. Its lower jaw began to extend again, just like it'd done before Pete, the old woman and the Chinese man went inside, and Olivia imagined how a scream erupting from that gaping maw would reverberate around the underground lot and up to the concourse above, and that sound would be utterly horrifying to anyone who heard it, a hideous, wailing, agonized shriek from another world.
In the food court two levels above where Olivia sat, Ash Buckley collapsed to the floor with her palms pressed to her temples, and screamed.
Olivia thought the Creature was actually going to explode - was almost sure of it, in fact - when it abruptly ceased shuddering. The van stopped creaking. To Olivia's right, Jeremy began to stir. Somewhere elsewhere in the mall, she thought she heard someone scream.
Suddenly, the orb on the Creature's forehead filled with violet light, washing the dank parking lot in a blaze of brightness. Olivia flinched away, unable to shield her eyes with her cuffed hands. Through slitted eyelids, she caught a glimpse of the Creature's lower jaw contracting; the tentacles released their grip on the van's rear doors and bumper and slithered back under the Creature's body, which itself had begun to shrink again, like a basketball deflating slowly. If it had been screaming, it wasn't doing it anymore.
"Wha… what's going on?" mumbled Jeremy.
Olivia didn't reply, or look at him. She was watching the Creature. It had adjusted its position slightly inside the van, shifting its bulk a little to the left, where it sagged against the vehicle's metal body.
Yes, she was certain now.
"What's going on?" Jeremy repeated. This time she did glance at him and saw he was staring wide-eyed at the Creature. The light from its forehead orb flashed in the lenses of his glasses, even as it faded out again. "Did it… did it eat someone else?"
"No," Olivia said. She realized she still had some vomit on her chin and rubbed it against her sweater. "Something else."
"What else?"
With a bang, the elf dropped through the hole in the ceiling and landed on the roof of the van. It leapt down to the floor, bounced nimbly on its youthful legs, and scurried round to the rear of the vehicle. The handle of the bread knife stuck out of its pocket.
"What's wrong with it?" Jeremy said, whispering now that the elf had returned. "Is it dead?"
"No."
"Dying?" he suggested, hopefully.
"I don't know. Maybe."
The elf peering into the van for a moment. Then, flinging its arms in the air, it began dancing on the spot, jigging from foot to foot, giggling maniacally. Inside the van, the Creature was now completely still and flopped to one side, although a little purple light still pulsed on and off in the now-drooping orb.
"Hey, lady," Jeremy said. Olivia looked at him again, slightly taken aback. Then she remembered: he doesn't know my name. He met her gaze over the top of his glasses. "What's happened to it?"
She stared back at him for a moment, computing the words. She looked towards the van and the Creature, and the elf. Still dancing. Celebrating.
"I think it just gave birth," she said.
Taryn thought, was that Ash?
The scream had come from somewhere above her, maybe in the food court. Ash had been going that way.
"Shit, Ashley, you better not be dead," she whispered.
Dead. Did I actually just think that?
