“Joanna seemed upset this morning,” he said abruptly when we stopped at the lights on Hebert; I nearly jumped out of my skin. I hadn’t expected him to say anything to me, let alone something I couldn’t really reply to.
Well, I’m not fucking surprised, I almost said. Instead I shrugged. If he didn’t know about this… this new stalker, this new situation, then it wasn’t up to me to tell him. I stared at his profile, hoping to get some clues from it, but his expression was fixed.
“She’s tired,” I said carefully, unable to bear the silence much longer. “She’s working on something big.”
“Renewable energy, yes. She described to me the design of the reactor.”
“…Oh. Good. That’s good.”
“It does not seem to me,” he said quietly, the end of his words a little clipped, as we turned into the parking lot, “that it should work, however.”
I glanced at him. That was the closest to real anxiety I’d ever seen him express. For a moment I debated spilling everything, telling him what she’d told me, begging for help; she couldn’t deal with this alone, not if They were everything she said They were, and who knew how she’d come to that conclusion anyway. I mean she was smart, yes, absolutely, but she was still just a kid, we were just kids, I couldn’t help her, we needed… but I knew I couldn’t. “I guess that’s why she’s tired. You know. Testing it or whatever.”
“Perhaps.”
We had taken, at her request, a twisty route; I ran from the Lexus and managed to clock in just in a minute before my shift started.
“You all right, Nicky?” asked the bakery manager, Barb. “You sound stuffy. Coming down with something?”
“Hm? No, I don’t think so. Allergies,” I said.
“You look sketchy, baby. I got some Benadryl in my purse, come see me after you check the bread numbers, okay?”
Everybody wanted to be my mom. I sighed and headed into the bakery storeroom, then stopped, confused. Something stank, something that would have been just as out of place but more comprehensible coming from the meat locker: a rotten stench, green-black in colour, not the fuzzy apologetic blue of bread mould. I hesitated near the tall shelves, sniffing—and then the door swung shut behind me and the lights went out.
For a second I stood in complete darkness, and then I spun and scrabbled at the wall for the switches, feeling them under my fingertips as up, thumbs-up, yes sir, we’re still on. I flicked them anyway, up and down a dozen times. Nothing. A darkness, strangers, the sound of gunfire. I reached for the handle, and cried out as a hand closed around my wrist.
“Uhh!” I yanked back, but the grip was like a handcuff—scaly, hot, carrying a wave of stomach-churning smell so that I had to spit quickly onto the floor to empty my mouth. The hand didn’t budge. I wrenched at it, this can’t be happening, I was just too tired, that was all, hallucinating, or some fucking prank you guys, some fucking prank, but the hand wasn’t human, and I was only, I knew, using the word ‘hand’ because ‘appendage’ would have made me scream. Even now I wondered if I should be screaming; my affronted grunt wouldn’t have attracted any help.
It wasn’t completely dark; there was a little light, ordinary fluorescent light filtering under the half-inch gap under the door. As my eyes adjusted, the thing holding me came into focus—yes, of course it was the thing from the creek, a limb extending from the raggedy blackness and clamped tight around my wrist.
I was sure that if I kept squirming it would simply take the skin off, and a dim embarrassment soaked through the terror: that it was not the pain I feared exactly or the injury itself, but how I would explain it when I got out of the storeroom, if I ever got out. Because everyone would ask how it happened and if I couldn’t explain I would be in trouble. I became aware of my panting breath and willed it to slow. Okay. All right. Found me. I believe.
I believe. I believe.
“Let me go,” I said.
A long hiss, almost laughter. I turned my head away from the fresh torrent of stench, the tangled mass of ugliness inside the hood. And the white, straight, shining teeth—I had seen them for a fraction of a second, and that was long enough. My skin kept trying to