The floor in front of the emergency exit is cold. As is the wall, and the side of the refrigerator that Leslie is curled up against. A tiny crack under the door is letting in a draft. It must be frigid outside.
The spaced-out jock shoved her out of the way when she was about to head out, and her ankle twisted when she fell. It screams at her as she makes her body as small as possible.
Around the corner of the dirty white fridge, Sasha has stopped screaming. One of the monsters got in thanks to the idiots leaving the door open to try and call the other idiot back. The woman, the murderer, stops screaming as well. Leslie risks a look to see if the things have gotten her too. She doesn't know if it will work, but she thinks the door of the fridge might hide her if she opens it all the way. Heat won't pass through it. She doesn’t know if her cover was ripped in her fall, but without standing up to straighten it there is too much of her face exposed.
But the woman isn't being attacked. She has passed out. Leslie shakes her head slowly. ‘Did she pass out from fright or because she forgot to breathe while screaming?’ The reason doesn’t matter. If she gets eaten because she screamed too much and passed out it will be a good distraction that will let Leslie hide better. And it will be no more than the woman deserves.
Something is pounding against the door to the store. Multiple somethings, it sounds like. She curls up under her cover and pulls the ends around her face as well as she can. It goes on for a few minutes, then stops as abruptly as it began
Someone yells and the sound is so loud and sudden that Leslie jerks upright, hitting her head on the wall. She swears, then slaps her hand over her mouth to muffle the sound. It wasn’t too hard. There probably won’t be a bump but the back of her head is throbbing where it hit. By the time her ears stop ringing, the yelling is over. Surprisingly, the next thing she hears is two people yelling at each other. She doesn’t care what they are arguing about, just that they feel safe enough to argue. That means the danger has passed, or been stopped for the moment.
She peeks around the corner of the fridge. A large mound covered in a blood-covered cloth is lying where Sasha was. The survivors are scattered around the room, and the door is barricaded once more. She braces herself on the surfaces behind and to the side of her and pushes herself up. Her ankle screams when she tries to put weight on it, and she collapses against the wall, biting her lip to keep from crying out. Her brain flips through images of everything that is on the counter, but there is nothing she can think of that will help.
With a grimace, she pulls the cover over her head. She takes off her jacket and uses the small utility knife she snagged before to cut off a sleeve. That sleeve is then slowly cut into strips that she ties together end to end. Slowly, carefully, her shoe is untied and slid off, and she wraps her ankle with her improvised bandage as well as she can before putting her shoe back on. Tying the laces just tight enough that the shoe won’t fall off but no extra pressure will be applied, she stretches her leg out and gingerly sets it down again. The pain is less, and she hopes bearable. But she won’t be running any time soon.
Leslie folds up her cover and slides it under her shirt before tucking the fabric back into the waistband of her pants. Then she hobbles out to her chair that she left against the wall. The woman…she is sure that a name was given but she didn’t care then and she doesn’t care now, wakes up and her father helps her to her feet before glaring at Isabella and moving the remaining two chairs further away from her, and anyone else. Once she is sitting in one, shoulders pulled in as if to hide herself, he turns on the group. “Is nobody going to say anything to him? That boy nearly got us all killed!”
All eyes focus on Logan, who is hugging his knees and rocking back and forth against the underside of the table. His shoulders hit with a muted thump each time but he doesn’t show signs that it hurts. “I don’t know what happened. I was dreaming. Or, I thought I was. It felt like a dream. Everything was so bright.”
Leslie watches as everyone but Logan and the woman look upward with furrowed brows. She doesn’t see the point. It’s obvious that the light is muted, and seems to be even dimmer than it was last night. She frowns as well. Unless she is imagining it, that means there is something wrong with the generator. Maybe it's low on fuel or oil or something. Generator maintenance never seemed important enough to learn about before.
“Is he trying to say he was sleepwalking?” The man doesn’t seem to be burdened with realizations about generator issues and continues his confrontation. “You went off half-cocked like you were going to take on the whole bunch of those things and then came running back and brought them right to us. Don’t try to get out of it now, kid. Someone died!”
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Originally, she had no intention of joining in on the discussion, but whether it's the pain radiating out from her ankle, or the throb in her head, Leslie’s plan changes. She scowls at the man and crosses her arms.“So you can blame the monsters for the actions of your neurodivergent daughter when she murders someone, but everyone else is malicious when something happens?”
“Neuro- there is nothing wrong with my daughter! And she didn’t murder anyone!”
“She just screamed until she passed out from lack of oxygen. If you think that is normal then you have a problem as well. And she ripped off my grandma’s protection and fed her to one of the creatures during a meltdown.”
“That…she…” The man sputters, his face growing an alarming shade of red.
“Oh, shut up already.” Leslie cuts him off before he can make up some sort of excuse. “Nobody here is a kid, and you are the only one here that hasn’t helped anybody in any way.”
“Enough.” Joseph’s voice is strong and sure, cutting between the two glaring daggers at each other. “We don’t need this right now. Or ever, but especially right now.”
Leslie rolls her eyes and looks away, tilting her head up and staring at the ceiling. “We need to study the thing that is in here, so we can figure out if they have any weaknesses.”
“We can’t,” Isabella speaks up, quiet enough that Leslie has to concentrate to hear her. “If we uncover it to look at it closer, it might bring those things to us again.”
After a moment of being unable to pull up any memory of the conversation and yelling that she didn’t care about while hiding, Leslie shakes her head and gives up. “I didn’t see anything, why do you think that.”
Isabella explains her theory, and, unfortunately, with her actions and the cessation of attacks at the door it makes sense. Grudgingly Leslie accepts it and asks the other girl to explain the things she saw since she was closer. Joseph joins in, and slowly a mental image is formed of the creature hidden under the cover across the room. The lack of fur is interesting to her. It was something she had not paid as much attention to outside.
“Like a dolphin? That would make sense. If it has thick rubbery skin then it is likely to keep heat emissions down. Hunting by heat, they wouldn’t want to attack their own kind. And there are too many out there to consider them being lone hunters or territorial enough to want to attack others like their selves. And it lends credence to their blood signaling others. If one is in trouble and gets injured while hunting, their blood would call others to fight off the attacker.”
Isabella makes an affirmative noise but doesn’t immediately follow up with anything else. Whispered conversation between the man and his daughter are briefly audible until the cheerleader speaks up again. “They don’t seem to have vocal cords at all, which makes sense since they have no ears. It was breathing heavily, like a pant, but that was it. No growls or anything beyond that. And the blood didn’t start heating up until a minute after it was exposed to the air.”
“Interesting, but useless.” Leslie turns her thoughts inward, ignoring the others. ‘Unless I can attack them from a distance, and a far enough one that the others of its kind won’t see me in the immediate area, I can’t use any of that information.’
She places her hands across her stomach, drumming her fingers against the fabric and making the fabric of the cover crinkle underneath. There weren’t any rips that she noticed while folding it before. For the next hour, she works her way through as many scenarios as she can to see if it will work trying to get to the office again. The football player is out of his stupor, or shock, or whatever he was going through. There shouldn’t be any more bumps coming from inside the room. But are the creatures all idling outside the door? Are there any more survivors out there making heat that could pull them away? There is no way she will be able to get past them if they are milling around.
“Maybe if I set a fire,” she murmurs, her hand sliding to the pocket holding the matches. Would that work? A fire burns far hotter than the human body, would the creatures go for it or stay away?
She will need something else, she decides. Two parts to her plan to get there. The fire could cause a distraction, although she will have to find some way to fling the flames far enough away that their heat will not seem too much through the shelves bordering each aisle, and it will need to land somewhere with a lot of flammable things so it keeps going. Then, she will need to come up with something else to use once she is out into the store.
Leslie stands up and walks to the vending machine, pulling out a bag of mixed nuts. She tosses the walnuts out as she makes her way to the counter, creating a trail of kernels behind her. If anybody says anything about her littering she doesn’t hear them. Thanks to years of practice, she can turn off the ability to hear others with the flick of a mental switch. She peruses the remaining selection of items, dragging her fingertips lightly across different things. One by one, each item is dismissed. Chemicals might help with the fire she plans to cause, but there is nothing she can use them for as a backup. Perhaps if the things had eyes, or if she could force them to drink the cleaner.
But she has no intention of being close enough to them to get them to open up their mouths and chug.
With a mental shrug, she turns away and heads back to her chair. The woman is leaning against her father, shoulders shaking gently. ‘Crying is stupid, but it is a textbook response to strong emotions. Screaming could even be considered normal,’ she thinks to herself, settling into her seat again. ‘Not as much as she has been doing, though. And he just coddles her instead of acknowledging her issues. Worthless, both of them.’
She figuratively pats herself on the back for her compassion and understanding. If the creatures were summoned by sound, she could use the woman as bait since her screams could probably be heard from as far away as the road. She slides her hands under her thighs to warm them up. The lights have grown dimmer still, and the air has a distinct chill to it that has only grown worse since waking. Whatever she is going to do, she needs to do it soon before the power runs out or the cold makes her too lethargic to move. Tilting her head back to rest against the wall, Leslie closes her eyes and shapes a new plan.