Close Encounters of the Bus Kind
[16]
Her words loudly echoed through the stripped, abandoned Sears department store. That should’ve imbued them with strength and agency, but she just heard all of her terror magnified into a crazed cacophony.
Nadia finally closed the distance between them with her little sister, Luna, clinging and dragging against her hip, as though she urgently needed to show her something. Odessa covered her mouth with her hand and focused on the still-floating remnants of Liz. What remained of that poor ghost fluttered idly in the air like strips of clear plastic bags caught in an updraft. Eva looked ready to bolt down the side corridor but clung to the group. Gina fumbled with her cell phone while her eyes struggled to take in the wild series of events around her.
Erin expected the writhing, chaotic black mass to launch at her. If that happened, then she’d already visualized using whatever powers she had to pick up the floor tile and fling it back on the creature. Would that stop or hurt it? She had her doubts, but hopefully that might distract it long enough for them to get away.
But she didn’t expect what actually happened. After several moments of relative calm and silence, the entity pulled back through the ceiling and vanished. Erin immediately and diligently checked right above her and on the side. No signs of dark rippling or omens that it was trying to sneak around them. She dropped her hands but still kept on alert.
The other girls settled, even though they still appeared tense.
“Okay… all right… okay. So, monsters, telekinesis, and aliens are definitely real,” Gina whispered, just loud enough for everyone to hear. Odessa looked back at her and over at the bits of Liz. Gina caught herself, “And ghosts. They’re real too. Clearly… And things that like to eat ghosts. Jesus...”
Eva softly said what sounded to Nadia like a quick prayer before crossing herself. Luna bowed her head with her hands clasped but didn’t neglect tugging her older sister away from the scene. A few moments later, Erin made a similar gesture and sighed.
“Can we please get the froop out of here? An emergency exit or grab something to break the glass?” Eva urged. They looked around at one another and quietly agreed.
Luna practically led the group towards and through an access hallway. They slowed a little ways in due to the all-consuming blackness. Gina eagerly volunteered her phone flashlight and Eva dug a container of mace out of her massive purse for some measure of protection. She additionally rummaged through the deepest recesses, noting that one of her uncles actually bought her a safety hammer for cars trapped underwater. Unfortunately, she determined that she left it in her mom‘s car.
Odessa and Gina each checked around for something but couldn’t find anything more heavy-duty than nail clippers and Ace bandages. Erin suggested that they might have to call 911 and come up with a credible story to explain things. Eva gave a sigh of displeasure but didn’t otherwise respond.
While keeping the light steady, Gina tried to make a call. It connected to emergency services, as far as the screen claimed, but the dial tone was broken up by harsh buzzing like an awakened beehive. She leaned close to try and speak into the receiver as glimmers of half-spoken words barely made it through the noise.
“Hello! Hello? Is this 911? Emergency services? We are trapped in an abandoned building, and we need rescue.”
She prepared to give the address when a sharp sound cut through. She just missed it. “I’m sorry? Could you please repeat that?”
“…oh…oooo…NO. No one is coming. You’re going to die here…”
It was the voice was of that fake woman. Several of the girls screamed, and it took great effort from Gina not to toss or drop her phone. They screamed even more when the light on the cell phone briefly went out.
Fiddling with the settings, Gina did her best to keep the light shining around them. With a grimace, she informed the group, “The battery is at 4%. And I just charged this.” Odessa, Erin, and Eva couldn’t even get their phones to turn on. Quietly, Gina noted, “Supernatural creatures sometimes drain batteries and electricity on ghost-hunting shows. What should I do?”
Nadia dug around in her purse for the fancy phone that replaced her older one. She stared at it, willing it to still have enough energy. Mercifully, it was actually at 98%. She urged Gina to turn off hers to save the last of the battery as she tapped for the flashlight, along with activating every power-saving option available. With the brighter beam from her model, they could see the air was saturated with foul, nasty unknown bits sprinkling from above like toxic snow. She wrapped her cardigan around her face to keep the worst of it out. Eva dug into her bag and produced several handkerchiefs for the rest of the girls.
Nadia endeavored to wrap one around Luna’s face for protection, but the kid fussed and grumbled. She also still dragged on her sister. In any other situation, Nadia felt like she had half a mind to scold her about that. When everyone had their face coverings secured, Nadia looked around at the group. She paused when her eyes landed on Gina. The girl was staring, pale and stock still, just above her head.
A quick swing of the light revealed dark rippling through the ceiling. The monster was back. The girls scattered in all directions as a black, twisting mass slammed down. Erin clenched her teeth and tried to repeat what she had just done with the tile, pushing the monster back and keeping it from hurting anyone. Only, she had no idea how this worked.
When she caught the projectile flying right at her head, it was just a reflex action, like how she drilled her students on how to play. She wasn’t thinking about what technique or effort she was doing more deeply than “STOP”. Trying to replicate it intentionally didn’t work. Everyone expected her to do the same thing again, to protect them from this terrible creature, but she couldn’t do anything.
Fortunately, the creature’s anemone-like tentacles didn’t probe very far before receding back through the ceiling. Reassembling as a group, they sprinted deeper into the access hallway. Erin rationally knew there had to be an emergency exit or access point nearby.
Her mind frantically reassembled the external features of a department store. Big box with a lot of bricks and some scattered trees. But there had to be at least some sort of loading area that usually went overlooked by the public. Luna was still pulling on Nadia to run, and Erin knew she would’ve felt the same way in her shoes. Just run away with the cute girl she had fallen for.
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Eva managed a few squirts of her mace at the entity but didn’t seem to connect. Gina, for all her supernatural enthusiasm earlier, looked like her legs were about to drop out from beneath her. She quivered and trembled, to the brink of hyperventilating. Desperately, Erin wished that she could’ve taken her aside to comfort her, like the poor scared kid she was, but all she could do in that frantic moment was nudge her along to keep up. Odessa seemed to be doing the best out of all of them, but Erin figured she was just running on adrenaline too.
When the tendrils dropped, she couldn’t help but notice that Odessa was the first to dash out of the way. In fact, for one strange moment in the low light, it almost felt to her like the girl had started moving before the creature dropped out of the ceiling. She always had excellent reflexes though.
The problem with running in the same direction, Erin feared, was this horrible creature would try to get ahead of them, like a cruel game of whack-a-mole. But she had an idea.
They had no certainty for what sense or trigger the monster operated on, but Erin kept her voice low and guarded as she ordered the others to cling to the walls. It seemed to favor dropping in from below, so this would hopefully allow them to keep separate but close enough to stay out of its way.
She put them in the basic organization of a volleyball rotation. Since there were six of them, it functioned perfectly. The only problem was Luna and Nadia weren’t accustomed to it. Luna seemed to swiftly and innately understand what to do though. However, she didn’t want to leave her sister’s side. Still, it worked. Gina recovered somewhat with the familiar structure as Erin assigned Eva and Odessa to watch different directions and give warnings. Even though they surely looked peculiar as a rotating mass going down the hallway, it helped until they came to a T junction.
Everyone looked to Erin for the answer of which direction to take. She hadn’t anticipated there would be a choice. Neither direction looked particularly promising, but the left felt like it would take them closer to where they had originally entered and the direction of the mall. However, the opposite direction could promise a back door that would’ve been out of the way from crowds. She didn’t notice any emergency doors nearby when she ran into the abandoned department store, but she hadn’t been paying particularly close attention to that.
If she made the wrong choice, then they could be boxed in with a dead-end corridor. However, it didn’t make sense that this place would have something like that. There had to be a way out. And there was one, so long as they found something to smash the glass on the side. For now, her mind basically flipping a coin, she directed the group to make a right turn.
Nadia‘s cell phone light was vital but also so desperately limited. Along the way, the girls freaked out about cords and tufts of ceiling material stretching down as false alarms of the monster. The passageway had a gray door on the left. Odessa jiggled the handle before kicking and shoving it, but it didn’t even budge. Nadia had seen examples of liminal spaces online and the high-walled, dirty but otherwise blank space definitely qualified. Luna dragged on her so hard that she nearly stumbled off her feet.
Putting up with Luna‘s tug so far, Nadia now narrowed her eyes and admonished her sister, “Why are you doing that?” With wide, pleading brown eyes, Luna simply answered, “You need to run. You all need to run now.” The rotation of the group wobbled but carefully continued as they listened to Luna’s urgently whispered words.
What if she knew something they didn’t? Nadia reflected on the possibility. Strange things had been happening with her younger sister. First odd comments, then the shimmering glow and peculiar knowledge. How could she possibly know such things? One possibility that occurred to Nadia was that her sister somehow had a psychic power. It could be just one of those things that family otherwise ignored. Perhaps the only other outward sign was Murat’s interest in the supernatural.
No matter what it was or why, Nadia understood that it might be folly to just ignore her as a panicking little kid. So, she proposed running to the group. Eva narrowed her eyes. “Isn’t that what we’re doing? If we just flat-out sprint then surely that dram thing is going to know and try to pick us off. Plus, there’s all kinds of crump we could trip over.”
Despite that sensible explanation, Luna’s urgent plea didn’t diminish. Gina squeezed her face covering and tried to take the strongest breath. “I don’t mind running. I just know I’m totally the fastest and I don’t wanna accidentally leave someone behind or go barreling into an unseen wall and knock myself out. That’s all. Yeah.”
Eva actually managed a quick smile listening to that. She looked like she had a lot to say in response but held her tongue. Odessa chimed in softly, “We shouldn’t run unless we know where we’re going.”
The lingering absence of the creature didn’t go unnoticed by Erin as they slowly advanced through the right hallway. If only she still had her gun, even though she doubted it would be the most efficient weapon here, she would at least feel a little safer.
Moving as efficiently as possible, they sighted a left turn and cascaded with relief when it abruptly led to a push door labeled with grime and the words “emergency fire exit” along with the regular alarm warnings. Considering the place still had a little bit of electricity with the earlier scattered lights, Erin fully expected that an alarm would sharply sound. No matter. At the worst, someone found out and they would have to deal with the consequences of their trespassing later. At best, they could get far enough away that no one would ever realize it was them who did anything.
As a unified group, they all pushed on the bar as hard as they could. They expected a rush of light and a blast of glorious fresh air. Instead, they were greeted with an impossible sight. Beyond, was not only another hallway, cloaked in the menacing shroud of darkness, but branches and doors stretching off in a seemingly endless array. Some went lower, and others rose into the sky like vertical shafts. And the meager light only revealed the closest section, but it was clear they had entered into an absolutely enormous space.
Under her breath, Eva muttered bleakly, “Fudging stick…”