Another hearty push, and it is clear that the plain door hidden next to the fridge is not going to open. Leslie bares her teeth in a snarl. It doesn’t make sense to have what looks like an emergency exit be half hidden and unable to open at all times. She runs her fingers along the seam and over each piece of hardware but can find nothing that might let her force it open. At least, nothing that won’t require tools she doesn’t have. How cruel to be yards away from things that could help her gain her freedom, but no way to get to them. Someone somewhere must be having quite the laugh.
She turns too quickly and bangs her elbow on the side of the fridge. Rubbing it gently, she leans her side against the doorframe and looks around her newest hidey hole. Larger and brighter than the underside of her last one, at least. A grey table that looks to be made of concrete is on its side and pressed against the door that leads into the store. Probably left over from some earlier year’s patio closeout sale. It seems from a distance to be sturdily made. ‘If that is what was blocking the door when I tried to get in,’ she muses with one more caress of her smarting elbow, ‘then it should be fine keeping those things out.’
Low voices reach her ears. Two figures are kneeling on the floor next to another that looks to be on its side. The light brown hair on the girl she recognizes, one of the dumb cheerleaders, but the muscled figure next to the girl is who catches Leslie’s eye. Broad, well-muscled shoulders and chiseled upper arms stick out from a plain, sleeveless white undershirt. She swallows the saliva gathering in her mouth, choking on it when the figure turns its head to the side. ‘If I’d known he was built like that I might have offered to help tutor him,’ she laments, ducking back behind the fridge while she clears her throat.
Once she is in control of her esophageal function, she surreptitiously ducks her head around the side of the fridge. Nobody is paying any attention to her area of the room. In two chairs toward the center of the room, the two inhabitants she briefly shared a boat with are huddled together. At least the woman isn’t screaming anymore. The man leans to the side to rub his leg and Leslie can see the woman clearly. Blood is drying on her face beneath her crooked nose, and dark circles are already forming around her eye. ‘Good,’ she thinks, her lip curling up in another snarl. ‘If that stupid bitch had just gotten under the boat then-’
The thought she is trying to avoid punches into her chest with all the force of an 18-wheeler. There is no way her grandmother is still alive. She risked her life to try and help two people she probably barely knew, and for what? Why couldn’t she just keep going? That old woman was certainly quick-thinking and capable, but she wasn’t as smart as Leslie gave her credit for. Nobody with half of a brain would have helped others in that situation. It was her own fault she died. But…Leslie curls her fingers up, her nails driving into her palms as she clenches her hands into fists at her side. Breaking that moron’s nose wasn’t enough. She makes note of the woman’s features and files them away. When they get out of this, she will make sure to return some of the grief that the woman has caused.
A muffled scream pulls her attention to the other side of the room again. The muscular form of Joseph is standing near the counter, and she consciously avoids looking directly at him. On the floor, a lumpy figure is pressing their arm against their face. Probably to keep from screaming louder. Only one person in the entire town dresses like that outside of winter. Or during winter, for that matter. Leslie pulls her eyes away and looks the room over again. No Marcus. He must have been the one she saw going through the manager’s window. A scrawny figure like his, it would have been a shock to find him still alive after that. ‘Not a huge loss to the world.’
Seeing no reason to spare the other survivors any more attention, Leslie turns her mind toward examining the rest of the room. The ceiling is not even half of the height of the warehouse-style shopping area, less than ten feet certainly. It isn’t a drop ceiling, so there is no chance of pushing up a tile and looking for a way out. The vent is the circular kind, barely a foot across. No escape there either. She walks over to the vending machines and looks behind them just in case another door is being hidden by a large appliance, but the wall behind them is bare. Nodding her head, she turns back to face the room again.
Another figure is on the floor near the seated pair, a boy’s body she couldn’t see from the exit door. By the letterman jacket, she can tell it is one of the other football players, and if it’s the one that came in with Isabella then it is probably Logan. Another waste of oxygen. Shaking her head she walks quickly across the room and begins to scan the things laid out on the counter. Nothing really useful, and she wonders which of the three had enough brain cells to even think of gathering things.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
Her fingers run over the desultory items, lingering on a red multi-tool. It is small enough to fit on a keychain, one of the kinds given to older kids when they first start camping or roughing it in the woods. Glancing out the corner of her eye to make sure nobody is watching, she palms the item and pushes it into a pocket. Any weapon is better than no weapon.
She begins to open cabinets to see what might have been missed, hoping there is more than the pile of junk in front of her. A lighter, some matches, surely the workers in this dump can’t all be living the clean lung life. Most of the people at school are more into vaping to try and kill their lungs, but there are still plenty of old, crusty workers at Rusty’s. Well, maybe not anymore. Still, someone had to be taking their nicotine the old-fashioned way, and if there was, then a little book of matches was probably hidden somewhere.
The water cuts on in the sink over the cabinet next to the one she is kneeling and looking around in. She jerks upright, stopping herself before she can bang her head on the underside of the counter. There is nothing in the recess besides some mysterious stain and a pile of brown napkins so she pulls herself out and shuts the door. Isabella is next to her, her eyes laser-focused on scrubbing something in the basin. Leslie watches as she straightens, shakes her hands a little to get the excess water off, then turns around and beelines straight for the bathroom. Sounds of vomiting come soon after.
“At least she didn’t do that all over one of us,” she says to Joseph, who is using a damp paper towel to wipe off a toolbox before setting it on the counter.
She doesn’t know why, but something inside her wants him to look at her, to show some kind of relief that she is alive. There is nothing in her memory about him that sticks out, and that in itself is curious. Unlike the other players on the team, he is not rambunctious. He doesn’t get great grades or bad. He doesn’t go out of his way to stand out, or to blend in. When not doing things with the team, he always seems to be with other kids from the reservation, but she has never gotten the impression that it is for solidarity. But maybe she just hasn’t paid enough attention to them. Now she regrets automatically dismissing all the classmates in the grey zone, the not quite worthy of contempt middle ground. “Do you want me to take a look at Sasha?”
“No, there is nothing else we can do until help gets here.”
He doesn’t look at her as he picks up a pair of discarded scissors and rinses them off in the sink. Leslie tries to look concerned, placing a hand lightly on his forearm. “Are you sure? I’m sure Cheer Barbie did her best, but it can’t hurt to have someone more capable look, right?”
Joseph shifts his arm out from under her and sets the scissors down next to the tackle box with a clink. “Like I said, there is nothing else we can do for now.”
He turns away, his eyes never drifting in her direction, and kneels next to Sasha again. Leslie can’t hear what he is saying, but she doesn’t care anymore so she goes back to looking through the cabinets instead. ‘Looks like all the muscle is in his arms and none in his head. Too bad.’ The dismissal irritates her, but she can’t understand why. ‘I’m obviously better than anyone else in his life. Maybe it's the stress. That’s probably it.”
Leslie turns all of her focus back to looking for matches or anything else useful that might have been missed. Her confidence returns from its imperceptible dip. She will consider Joseph again after she gets him out safely. If nobody is coming to save them, then she will have to do it. Figuring out how to get another person out shouldn’t be too much harder than just one. Now that the ditz is done screaming, and the pile of clothes with a person inside is done bleeding all over the floor, she can think better.
She closes the cabinets below the sink and moves to the last one below the counter. Over a dozen containers are lined up inside. All look empty, but she goes over them anyway. No grand plan comes to mind. There is no flashing sign in her brain pointing to a perfect way to escape. There is just a background track that lies beneath her scattered thoughts, keeping any good ones from forming. Sounds of something heavy hitting flesh, something large exhaling as it is struck. A body hitting the side of an aluminum boat. Grunts of exertion. And then quiet except for a strange, wet slapping noise. Over and over it plays, an infinite loop distracting her from what she needs to do.
There is very little left in the cabinets beyond garbage, and she hungrily eyes the rest of the surfaces in the room. The loop makes it back to that wet noise. She shakes her head. Fingers trail over the top of the fridge, finding only dust. The snacks vending machine yields the same results, but when her fingers trace back to the rear of the soda machine they bump up against something. A small square of cardboard folded over on itself. She slides it against her palm and steps into the dark, recently vacated bathroom.
It feels good to be right, and it is a feeling she is used to. In the shadows, she looks at a bright green matchbook with gold lettering advertising some motel in Green Bay. Flipping it open she counts the flimsy matchsticks. There are three left. Their crimson heads mock her. She slides them into her front left pocket so there will be no chance of them scraping against the little multi-tool in her right. Not that it would set her on fire, but it could scrape off the precious material the paper sticks are coated with.
The loop makes it back to that wet, slapping, smacking sound. She knows what it was. And that’s how she knows that her grandmother didn’t win her fight. Leslie swears to herself before rejoining the others that she will win hers.