Chills, page 13
Cupping both hands to his mouth, he shouted, “Hold on just a second!”
By the expression on her face, he could tell that she either hadn’t heard him or else she didn’t understand him. She looked scared and angry, as if she thought he was going to desert her. She started banging on the door again the instant he turned around. The sound continued as he started looking for something…anything to use to break the glass. That was the only way he’d get her back inside before she got frostbite or died.
In the center of the mall where the halls intersected, there was an open area. Part of it was cordoned off with a velvet rope lopped between metal posts. This was probably left over from when Santa Claus was at the mall before Christmas. Phil sprinted over to it, disconnected the rope, and grabbed the bar of the metal stand. It was heavier than he expected, and the base dropped and banged his leg as he turned and started back to Kimberly. His ears were thundering with his racing pulse, and he was so panicked he didn’t register that the banging sounds had ceased. His eyes focused on the reflective sheet of glass that looked as smooth as a slab of polished, black marble with Kimberly’s figure embedded in it.
“Stand back!” he shouted, waving one hand at her before he gripped the metal stand like a baseball bat, hefted it, and then swung it back over his shoulder. It took a lot of effort, and as he was bringing it around in a wide sweep, he saw to his horror that Kimberly hadn’t stepped away from the door. She was still standing close to the glass and, strangely, she was perfectly motionless.
But it was too late to check his swing without reefing his shoulders or wrists. The base of the stand made a faint whistling sound as it came around and impacted on the glass. The glass exploded, but the sound of breaking glass was immediately lost beneath the shrill whistling roar of the wind as it funneled in through the opening. Shards of glass exploded outward and tinkled onto the tile floor as a blast of snow blew into Phil’s face.
“Get your ass in here!” he shouted through the opening, but he could barely hear himself above the roaring sound that cascaded around him. He was still holding on to the metal stand with one hand, but he lost his grip, and it clattered to the floor when he saw that Kimberly wasn’t moving.
She stood there, a dark, motionless figure framed against the storm.
“Kimmy?” he said, shouting to be heard.
But Kimberly still didn’t move.
After a few terrified heartbeats, Phil realized that she was dead…frozen solid. Her eyes were wide open and staring straight ahead, like she was focused on something behind him. Her mouth was open, caught in a frozen O of shock and surprise that she was dead.
Phil found it all but impossible to accept this was really happening as he started backing away, his feet squeaking on the floor tiles. He was shivering, and his hands fluttered at his side like birds trying to escape. His throat was bone dry, and his breath came in short, ragged bursts that sounded like a laboring steam engine.
“No…no…no…” he kept saying as he moved steadily backward. He was terrified by what he saw, but he couldn’t look away. The dark emptiness of the mall seemed to collapse in on him, crushing him, engulfing him as he struggled to comprehend what was going on.
“This can’t be happening… This can’t be happening,” he kept saying.
He and Kimberly hadn’t really found a dead security guard in the mall office…and Kimberly hadn’t gotten locked out of the mall somehow and frozen to death.
None of this was happening.
None of this was real.
It had to be a dream—a nightmare—and he would wake up soon and discover that it was the morning before the inventory, and he was having such a nightmare because he was sleeping during the day so he’d be ready to work overnight.
“This can’t be happening… This can’t be happening.”
The words became a chant in his mind, because at his core, he wanted desperately to believe that he still lived in a safe, orderly world. That he and all of his friends were safe. That no one had or was going to die tonight. He couldn’t accept that the mall cop and Kimberly were both dead. They were alive. They had to be, and he was safe and secure in his narrow, little world.
“But it is happening,” he said out loud.
His voice was lost below the whistling wind and the hissing snow that was sweeping in through the broken door and rapidly covering the floor.
Finally, something inside him snapped, and he couldn’t take it any longer. He somehow found the strength to tear his gaze away from the statue that had once been Kimberly. Spinning around on his one foot, he started running as fast as he could back to the music store. All along the way, he was making small, panicked sounds in the back of his throat, but he didn’t have the strength to scream.
~ 31 ~
The entire crew, other than Kimberly and Phil, were gathered around the workbench in the backroom, drinking what was left of the coffee in the Box o’ Joe, and picking over the remains of the donuts when Phil burst in and shouted, “She’s dead!”
Everyone turned and looked at him. All of them, except Meg, who didn’t know Phil that well, waited for the punch line, but then everyone saw the look of stark terror on his face. They knew he wasn’t that good an actor. Something was seriously wrong.
“Who’s dead? What are you talking about?” Bessie asked, using a low, controlled voice in hopes that everyone else would remain calm.
“Kimberly is… She got locked outside… I don’t know how… Maybe she was trying to get to her car or…or she went out for a smoke or something, and…I don’t know…but when I…when I found her…I—I broke the door window to let her in…but I was too late…too late… She was already dead.”
No one knew what to do or say until Bessie, taking control of the situation, walked up to him and placed a firm hand on each of his shoulders. Shaking him and forcing him to look her squarely in the eyes, she said sternly, “Tell me exactly what happened.”
Phil stuttered and stammered as he told her and all of them about what they had found in the security office and then what had happened to Kimberly. Jared and Tyson still suspected he was pulling some lame-ass practical joke, but there was no denying that Phil was losing it…had already lost his grip.
“Where’d this happen?” Tyson asked. He was having enough of a struggle controlling his own reaction after what had happened to him in the bathroom, but he wanted everyone, especially Jared, to see that he could be calm and take charge when things got tough, too.
“At the east entrance…down by Hatch’s card store…” Phil was panting heavily. “We were…we were in the security office…and she freaked out when we found the…the dead security guy.”
“And you’re positive he was dead?” Bessie asked.
“Jesus, yes! I touched him. He was as cold as stone.”
“And Kimberly? You’re sure she’s dead, too?”
Wide-eyed, Phil nodded.
Everyone exchanged worried glances, but no one seemed to have any idea what to say next. The wind was howling louder outside, slamming in heavy gusts against the building. Something had definitely blown loose on the roof, because the creaking and rattling sounds were getting louder.
“We’re fucked,” Tyson finally said so softly no one heard him until he raised his voice. He cleared his throat and, louder, said, “You hear me? I said we’re fucked.”
When everyone turned and looked at him, he could feel his confidence drain away. The memory of what had happened to him in the restroom was still bright and sharp in his mind. He realized that, as much as he wanted to believe it had all been in his imagination, it hadn’t been.
Something really weird was going on here, and he was suddenly convinced they were all going to die.
“We’re not fucked,” Jared said firmly.
He made intense eye contact with Tyson and then flicked his eyes in Ashley’s direction. She was standing off to one side, eyes wide, her hands pressed against her cheeks.
Somehow, Tyson got a grip on his rising panic and realized that this was no longer a question of who was or wasn’t in charge. It was about all of them remaining as calm as possible so no one else would freak out, maybe like Kimberly did, and end up rushing outside and dying, if that’s what really happened. Tyson still had his doubts.
“We have to get out of here. All of us,” he said, fighting hard to keep the panic out of his voice. “Whatever’s going on, I don’t like it…not one bit.”
“We don’t even know for sure if Kimberly’s dead,” Jared said. “I think the first thing we gotta do is go down there and see if that’s what really happened.”
“You calling me a liar?” Phil shouted. He was still so keyed up he was trembling, and he clenched his fists as he took a threatening step closer to Jared.
“I’m not calling you anything,” Jared replied evenly. “I’m just saying that we should all go down there and check it out first.”
“All of us?” Meg said with a tight tremor in her voice.
Jared looked at her and nodded.
“Yeah. We’re not gonna do something dumb like split up. We’re gonna stick together because that’s the only way we’re gonna figure out what’s going on and what the fuck we’re gonna do about it.”
“Language, please,” Bessie said, raising her eyebrows and giving a quick nod in Ashley’s direction.
Ashley scowled and muttered to herself, “Like I don’t swear,” but whoever might have heard ignored her because of the much bigger issues they were facing.
“I’m sure as shit not going back there,” Phil said, shaking his head. “No goddamned way!”
“I can stay here with Phil,” Meg offered.
Tyson cleared his throat to get everyone’s attention and then said, “I don’t think going back there is gonna do us any goddamned good.” He paused, satisfied that he had everyone’s attention. “I say what we gotta do—one of us has to go get help.”
“In this weather? You’re out of your mind,” Jared said, shaking his head.
“The landline isn’t working, and our cells are fucked.”
“Mine was working a while ago,” Meg said, but she shivered at the memory of the voice that couldn’t possibly have been Alan’s saying that he, Sally, and Richard were coming to pick her up. Her eyes shifted to the backroom door as if she expected their car to come crashing through the cement block wall.
“Try it again,” Bessie said, but there was a hopeless tone in her voice that was confirmed when Meg switched her phone on, held it to her ear for a few seconds, and then shook her head.
“Nothing,” she said as she slid it back into her pocket.
“So what do we do now?” Jared asked as he looked around at the crew. It felt odd not to have Kimberly there with them, and he, like everyone else, hadn’t accepted the reality that she might actually be dead.
“Fine,” Tyson said after a moment. “I’ll go.”
“Go where?” Bessie asked.
“To the police station to get help.”
“The fuck you will,” Jared said. “Your car’s buried under a mountain of snow, and I doubt the plows are doing much. Even if you get your car out of the parking lot, you won’t get half a mile down the road before you skid out and end up in a ditch.”
Even before he finished saying that, Meg felt a deep chill. Her mind went spinning back to what had happened exactly a year ago tonight. All day long…all week long, she had been trying to ignore or avoid or deny the anniversary of the incident, but she couldn’t help but remember how, over the holiday break, she had been working part-time at the town library. By the time she got off work shortly before sunset, it had already started snowing—exactly like today! Her boyfriend, Alan, and their two best friends, Sally and Richard, had said they’d pick her up.
But they were late.
She waited and waited until it got dark. When Alan still didn’t show, and none of them answered their cell phones, she had gotten angry and started walking home. When she was about halfway there, shivering in the snow and the gathering dark, Alan pulled up and asked—no, he told her to get in the car. By this time she was furious at being stood up and, wanting to play the martyr, had continued walking, ignoring his increasing anger. Finally realizing she was going to be stubborn about this, he’d driven off, taking off much faster than was safe for the road conditions.
It wasn’t until she got home and had warmed up and begun thinking about forgiving Alan—it was, after all, snowing quite hard, so he could have been delayed—that she got the news. Alan’s car had been T-boned by a town snowplow, and all three of her friends were dead at the scene.
She cringed, imagining the same thing happening to Tyson or anyone else.
“No,” she said in a broken whisper that was barely audible above the tearing sounds of the wind outside.
Everyone turned and looked at her. She knew the expression on her face must have been something to behold, but she repeated herself, louder, “No!”
“No what?” Tyson said.
“No one’s going out in the storm. It’s not safe. You have no idea—” His voice caught, but she forged on. “You have no idea what’s out there.”
The image of those three indistinct figures outside the store window grew intensely sharp in her memory, and the words “We’re coming to pick you up soon” echoed in her mind, filling her with nameless, bottomless dread.
“What? What’s out there?” Tyson said. “It’s just a little bit of snow. But some bad shit is going down here, and we need to get some help.”
As if that was the end of it, he walked over to where they hung up their coats. All eyes were on him as he grabbed his leather jacket and slipped it on, zipping it up snug against his throat. Then he fished the stocking hat and leather gloves from the pockets and put those on, adjusting them as he started walking toward the back delivery door.
“You’re fuckin’ nuts,” Jared said. “I guarantee you won’t get out of the parking lot.”
Tyson snickered and said, “You’re always there for me, ain’t you, Jared.”
Jared started to say something back, but then he caught himself.
“What?” Tyson took a threatening step back toward Jared. His gloved fists were clenched at his sides. “You want to be the hero? You want to go out there instead? Maybe show off for your girlfriend?”
For the first time tonight, Jared was flustered. He blushed as he cast a quick glance at Meg to see how she reacted to that, but she seemed not to notice or register Tyson’s slam.
“Oh, don’t pretend you ain’t on the pussy trail,” Tyson went on, grinning now because he knew he’d hit a raw nerve. “You been sniffing around her all night like a goddamned dog in heat. I ’bout expected to see you start humping her leg before the night was through.”
“Would you mind…please?” Bessie said, cutting him off. “There happens to be a child here, and I can’t say I appreciate you boys talking like that in front of me, either.”
Looking chastised, Tyson backed off, but he and Jared stared at each other intensely for several seconds more. Finally, Tyson spun around on his heel and walked toward the exit door.
“Don’t worry,” Jared said to no one in particular. “He’ll be back before we know it.”
Tyson ignored him as he patted his pants pocket to reassure himself that his keys were still there, then he grabbed and twisted the lock on the door. The tumbler clicked, but when he pressed down on the bar to open the door, there was resistance from outside where snow had built up. Leaning forward, he placed both of his gloved hands against the door and pushed until the snow began to yield, slowly. The wind whistled as a shower of snow blew inside, sprinkling Tyson’s head and shoulders and blowing across the floor.
“Jesus! Hurry up and shut it!” Phil shouted as he clutched his arms to his chest and shivered.
“You want some help there?” Jared asked.
Without waiting for an answer, he moved to the door and, standing next to Tyson, added his weight to the effort. The piled-up snow was forced back incrementally until Tyson, out of breath from the effort, stood back and glanced at Jared. He was about to say “Thanks,” but decided not to, thinking Jared hadn’t helped to be nice; he had done this to help Tyson look like an asshole when he failed to get his car out of the parking lot.
Without a word, Tyson squeezed through the wedge of the open door and was outside. He was staggered by the powerful wind and snow that slammed into his face. He had thought he was ready for it, but the chill instantly reached bone-deep. He started to close the door behind him, but Jared stayed there, holding it open a crack so he could still see outside and watch Tyson’s progress.
~ 32 ~
The wind blew a blast of snow into Tyson’s face. Feeling cold, isolated, and quite foolish, he considered turning back right then and there, but there was no way he was going to admit defeat this soon…especially not with Jared in the doorway watching. The least he had to do was get to his car, clean it off, and then—even if it started, which was not guaranteed—go back to the store. There would be no humiliation if he tried and failed. He couldn’t deny that it would be foolish to try to drive in these whiteout conditions.
The insides of his nostrils stung when he inhaled as he hunched over and walked up the short alleyway toward the parking lot. It was amazing how fast the world had changed. Everything seemed closed down as though muffled by a heavy blanket. The streetlights closest to him glowed with a feeble purple haze that looked like huge dandelion puffs suspended in the night. He could see only the first couple of rows before they were lost behind the blinding curtain of snow. Several indistinguishable shapes of snow-covered cars were buried under wind-blown snow. At first, it was impossible to tell which one was his, but he remembered that he had parked directly under the streetlight with a huge sign with the letter “U” on it, indicating the parking lot area.
“That’s gotta be it,” he said when he saw a rounded white hump that might have a VW underneath it. The wind whipped his words away, leaving him with the impression that someone else, not he, had spoken.
