Is this it? I thought as the car rolled to a stop next to the curb of the mall. The exterior was aging and dreary, but last I knew, management had begun revamping a few entrances on the far side. There was probably a metaphor to be found in fixing the outside before the inside.
“The mall closes in four hours. When shall I meet you here to pick you back up, Miss Livsey?”
“Closing is good,” I absently muttered, already half out the door. The muggy June air seeped straight through my shirt, leaving me uncomfortably tugging my sleeves down. I hated doing this here, tainting good memories. Bittersweet, but good; memories of better days. But there were too many watchful eyes at home, and it was getting harder to find privacy at school.
“Miss Livsey…”
“Yes?” I fought down a frustrated huff. My driver that evening was a new hire—Helena, if I recalled correctly—who I neither knew nor gave a shit about. But I could just imagine my parents somehow catching wind of me being rude to the staff. I had enough to worry about from them already. “What is it?”
She turned to properly look at me, her voluminous black curls shifting with the gesture, nearly engulfing her neck. She gave me a look I couldn’t parse. “You can always call me early, if you want. I’ll bring you straight back home.”
“Sure.” I tried for a polite smile. “Thanks.”
I won’t be. I closed the door.
The car pulled away, and I turned back to the mall and headed in. The doors parted, and cold, blessed air conditioning pried me free from summer’s grasp. I tugged my sleeves down, trying not to fidget as I oriented myself. There was a time, once, when I knew this mall like the back of my hand. Funny how it felt like a stranger. My feet carried me deeper into the building, and when I reached the fork, I briefly considered heading to the lingerie shop I had forced Reggie into last summer. Just to soak in the memories, to wallow in the past.
I scowled at the feeling of water pricking at my eyes. What good had crying done for Reggie when I was too late?
I pointedly turned left. Technically the bathroom down that way was a hair closer, but I didn’t trust myself. One of the mall cops I passed eyed me longer than I liked, so I passed the first bathroom in favor of the one by the food court further down and carefully checked to make sure no mall cops were in sight when I slipped in. I heard a mother gently shushing a baby in the back stall, likely using the changing table. It was nice the bathroom was nearly empty but unnecessary. I was accustomed to managing at school; I could manage here.
I started towards an empty stall in the middle, but the unfamiliar girl in the mirror caught my attention. Dark blond hair pulled back in a loose, messy tail contrasted sharply with the high quality—if misplaced in the summer heat—long-sleeve shirt of banded white and gray that hugged her just right. Likewise, the almost dainty collection of freckles over the bridge of her nose didn’t match the lips curled in a perpetual frown whatsoever. But it wasn’t the mismatched, opposing elements of her appearance that truly caught me. It was the dark storm that lingered in her gaze, held back for fear of how much worse she would make things if stopped holding it in.
The mother exited the back stall, breaking the spell the mirror held over me. I brushed past her, ignoring her confused expression as I dipped into the stall I’d eyed before. Door shut and secured, I sat on the lid and pulled my sleeves up. I looked right at home, surrounded by the graffiti scratched into the dividers. I pulled my foundation compact out of my purse and jammed my fingernail into the thin groove lining the edge of the plastic casing, prying it apart with practiced ease. The contraband I’d hidden within would have sent my parents into a frenzy had they known.
The razor didn’t glint in the dim light of the bathroom. It was dull, reflecting only my pain and failures. Admitting I had suspected something was wrong. Months of my parents’ hate and accusations, of my every move being hounded. They needn’t have bothered; I loathed myself enough for not finding him in time.
I plucked the small wedge of steel out of its hiding place and hesitated. Not about the what—only the where. It wasn’t the first time I had second guessed myself, been tempted. I held the tip of the blade over my wrist. One cut. Life didn’t have a reset button, but it did have a stop. I couldn’t undo all the pain I’d caused, but I could make mine end with one cut.
But Reggie deserved better. And I deserved to suffer.
An explosion shook the building, the walls, the toilet, my wrist. The blade slid across my skin, but by a minor miracle, the explosion had prompted me to jerk back and away—I missed the artery.
“What the fuck?” Another explosion. Closer? I wasn’t sure. I heard screaming in the distance. “What. The. Fuck?!”
I sat there, paralyzed with terror as the screaming grew louder. What was happening? We were in a mall. Why would there be explosions in a mall? A gas leak in the food court maybe? Terrorists? Should I make a run for it? Stay?
A third explosion rocked the room, making my decision for me as the aging infrastructure began to give up the ghost. I scrambled off the toilet, the compact clattering to the floor and coating my legs in a cloud as I fumbled with the stall door. I narrowly avoided a falling ceiling tile as I rushed for the exit, my heart in my throat. I reached for the door, and it flew open to meet me. The painted steel connected with my wrist first, nearly breaking it and barely slowed for it before colliding with my face. The bang of corroding steel against the wall felt distant as I was thrown to the floor, but the screams only grew louder as the woman from before rushed back in, her screaming baby clutched to her chest.
“Wha’s—?” I nearly choked on a glob of blood and teeth before weakly coughing it up. “Wha’s happ’n’n?”
The door opened, and I blinked, briefly believing the sight to be the result of my head trauma.
A great maw of fur and teeth stood within the door. Its focus fell upon me, and it was only when I saw the crooked, yellow grin inside of it that I recognized I was looking at a man. A man swathed in cloth and fur and blood. A man with bones arranged around his head like a predator’s jaw.
A man who chucked a cheeseburger into the ruined remains of the restroom.
I stared, unsure what to make of the unspoken non-sequitur. Unsure why the mother’s screams redoubled, her child wailing in her arms as she tried and failed to scale the mound left by the partially collapsed ceiling. Dazed as I was, staring at that yellow wrapper was likely the only reason I noticed the bolt of something as it flew through the air and stuck the burger.
I certainly didn’t miss it beginning to swell and glow.
The door began to swing shut, the beast of a man leaving. The woman finally recognized the futility of trying to flee and settled on throwing her child up into the ruined ceiling. And I had no idea what that swelling cheeseburger meant. I lunged for the door anyway. I wasn’t going to make it.
It was a strange feeling, coming to the end of a journey.
The door slammed shut, and pain beyond words overwhelmed me. I rolled to a stop, floor before me, blood to door. The beast man was shaking—laughing?—walking away. I breathed but couldn’t, gasping, drowning. Reggie? Let me up, Reggie! It hurt—I hurt—please please please!
A tear escaped and crawled down my cheek—
I was alone—no Mom and Dad, no scars, no Reggie. There was only the abyss and the better days that haunted it, pinpricks in an empty void. Fury roared out of me like a peal of thunder. I didn’t want to remember, to bear the weight of him anymore. It would be easier to only know the dark, to have never known the light of day. But I didn’t deserve it. The light grew, twin starbursts in a world too small for their terrible magnificence, who wept when they laid eyes upon us. It was their mercy that cut them down, and it was their mercy that found me.
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—only to reverse course, climbing back into me.
Blood. Bones. They came back like a river, flowing, under and around the battered steel door across the hall. The world lurched sideways, and life pried me free from death’s grasp. My vision doubled with a wet squelch as an eye I only now realized had burst reformed and popped back into its socket. I felt with horrible clarity as vertebrae and nerves reconnected, as bones reformed from dust, as my blood slithered back into veins reborn.
I breathed. I breathed, and I screamed—
I was drowning in the void, the light crushed and scattered, made mere motes, harbingers of the grave awaited creation. Where before I cast it away, now I welcomed it, but through the doors flung wide came the grave robbers with their stolen sparks, shards of a greater whole I could never dream of fathoming. They wept in the face of the end, mighty rivers built of their ill-gotten bounty, and I drank of the water.
— I blinked, slow and languid. Pieces of something were rushing towards me, and I was sideways…? I pushed myself to my feet, struggling to… remember…? Oh. Oh.
“What the fuck?” I was naked. I was naked, and people were screaming. “What. The. Fuck?!”
“Well fuck me.” My eyes snapped up. A man stood down the hall, looking back over his shoulder with a hint of a dazed expression and an ugly leer, a toothy smile sat within a headdress of bones and fur arranged like the maw of a beast. He turned back to me, the large satchel slung across his chest shifting with the motion, tugging at the studs of his leather jacket. “You’ve got powers? This just got way more exciting!”
His hand dipped into the satchel, pulling out a… burger? A man like him makes a statement like that then pulls out fast food? It was dangerous, had to be. Right? My body was already in motion, even as I wrestled with parsing my own logic. Rushing forward while dodging as he chucked meat wrapped in bread wrapped in plastic, as something my eyes refused to focus on shot out of his finger after it. I was upon him in an instant and gripped the strap of his satchel, yanking hard and throwing him after his own projectile. As he flew down the hall, the satchel strap caught on his jacket again, tugging it and him off and sending him into a tumble that threw him headfirst into the floor well short of the burger swelling and glowing ominously.
How did I do th—?
The burger exploded. The force of the shock wave knocked me back and the breath out of my lungs, the only reason I wasn’t left howling in agony as the remains of the tile floor tore into me. My exposed body was nearly flayed apart by the intact floor further down as friction dragged me to a stop. I heaved, greedily sucking in air, feeling faint. My everything hurt. What had—? The man. The burger. I needed to get away, I needed to get out of here, I needed… needed…?
I felt strange, like running water was slipping under and past me, except it stayed—it stayed, and the pain left and the… the something left too. I shook my head, trying to clear the cobwebs and grasp what was eluding me, but it was gone. With a sigh, I flexed my abs to pull myself upright.
My abs? I didn’t— “What the fuck?” Forget the fucking abs, why was I naked? “What. The Fuck?!”
A groan drew my attention back to my surroundings, and I gaped at the chaos and destruction around me. The hallway half reduced to rubble, the jacket and bag in a heap nearby, and the man splayed over the floor further down the hall, his clothes cobbled together with bones and fur half scoured away and burns left in their absence. People were screaming somewhere nearby. Had there been a bomb? Bombs? I instinctively grabbed the jacket, throwing the heavy, studded leather over my shoulders in a vain effort to preserve my decency.
“God, I— I need to get out of here,” I whispered to no one. Certainly not the broken man on the floor, his moaning continuing in refrain. “Get up, Sarah. Just get up. Get up, a-and go.”
I pushed myself to my feet and pulled the jacket on properly after the movement nearly sent it slipping off my shoulders. I sprinted down the hall and away, sucking in deep breaths as I stepped out into the… mall? Right, I had wanted to come here, wanted to—what? Memories were elusive, like I was trying to grab water with a strainer. I should have been worried, horrifically worried that I couldn’t recall what I had done that day, but all I could muster was a sense of unease and frustration.
Even caught up in my head as I was, I knew to run away from the screaming. There was no running away from the arrow that shot through leather and my shoulder alike, sending me tumbling from the sheer force of the strike. I’d scarcely hit the floor when the air beside me erupted in a ball of flame, instantly torching the skin not covered by leather.
“You. Who are you?”
I barely heard her over my torturous wail, let alone registered her words when my every thought was consumed by the sheer, unadulterated pain… flooding…? I shook away a sense of déjà vu, blinking at the sight of skulls strung on a cord of leather over samurai armor embellished with barbed blades and bone fragments. God, déjà vu?? How had it taken me even a moment to place where I knew this cape? I’d seen her on the news recently, hadn’t I? An arrow clattered to the floor from somewhere as I scrambled back, my ass cheeks catching on the tile as I tried to put distance between myself and the Butcher.
“A regenerator.” Past her, I could see Teeth everywhere, hunting and torturing mall patrons, watching their twisted festivities, looting—both stores and the bones of victims. But my eyes refused to focus on them, not with the Butcher herself looming over me, a bow the length of her height in hand with an arrow already nocked. “Interesting. What did you do with Spurt?”
“S-S-Spurt?” I shook my head, bewildered. “What? Who?”
Without warning, my world became pure pain. Nothing I had ever felt came close, not even breaking my arm on the playground as a child. How could a broken bone compare to the agony suffusing every last bit of me at once? There was no room left for thought, only blind, instinctive reaction. I flailed, I howled, I begged, I cried—
“Do not try my patience, girl.”
It was tiny, the anger those tears birthed in me. Near infinitesimal measured against the pain that had provoked it, but it grabbed me and grew with vengeance, a spark on oil that burst into an inferno.
“Where i—?” She reacted before I was even in motion, the all-encompassing pain instantly vanishing as her wide eyes shot down to trace my foot as it arced towards her stomach. A pressure around my neck disappeared, and it was only as gravity asserted its dominance over me that I realized she had been holding me up by my throat. The world around me changed, and an explosive force tore into me even as I was baptized in flame.
The fracture of shattering ceramic tile, the whoosh of innocent mall foliage set ablaze, the rip and crack of leather and iron armor torn in two, the shouts of people rushing towards us. Over it all, it was the grunt of air escaping the Butcher that I heard as my foot slammed into her stomach, undeterred by the rest of me being ripped apart. And as we fell together, I pulled on the wrist I had never released, the wrist I had apparently grabbed while I was choked and flooded with alien agony. I pulled her, and as we fell into the broken shards let by our violent arrival, my fist met her. The painted metal of her mask fared no better than the armor over her abdomen, but again, it was no the sound of split steel that caught my ears—
— it was the crack as her head snapped to the side.
We collapsed, strings cut, the play over. Cue the curtain call to the tragedy. How had I even found my way here? What had I done to earn the attention of the Butcher? A rasp slipped out of me, as my head lolled. I didn’t need to see the damage she had done to me. Every inch of me was screaming, and not because the dead Butcher next to me willed it. This puppet was done, spent, and the hands that had made me dance were content to let me burn, return to the ashes…
“Ah, I see.” My eyes cracked open with a wince at the harsh glare of exposed fluorescent bulbs above me. A shadow passed over me, and I blinked, bleary-eyed but relieved from the shade. “Another is crowned.”
“See what?” I slowly sat up, tired and confused. “Where am I?”
“You are here, quite naturally.” I turned to give the unfamiliar voice a look for daring to sound so amused while waking me up from my apparent catnap, but stopped short at the feeling of ash and hot tile shifting under my butt and heavy cloth draped over my bare thighs.
“What the fuck?”
Standing in a silent circle around me were unknown men and women wrapped in cloth and leather, all adorned with blood and bone. The person who had spoken was knelt beside me, a bloody tooth resting in the palm of her hand. Her cheeks were lined with tears of caked blood and caressed by a spiked crown of dull, dark steel, but it was her eyes that grabbed me. Hurricanes caught for a time, death suspended until the right moment.
“What. The. Fuck?!”
She rose to her feet as the sound of sirens reached us, and gestured to the people surrounding us—to the Teeth—scattering them. An injured one lingered, his costume and headdress of bones and fur ripped and scorched clothes sparking overwhelming déjà vu, but he left a moment later.
“I apologize for this unfortunate introduction.” I blinked, bewildered by the hand up she offered me. “Come, we must leave.”
Maybe it was the thought of how much fuel it would add to the fire that was my life, of trying to explain how I woke up at the mall surrounded by Teeth, with only the shredded remnants of a leather jacket and a bolt of dark blue cloth to protect my modesty. Or maybe it was her eyes and how they reminded me of the girl in the mirror, of the fear that every day I kept going, I would keep making things worse.
Maybe that was why I took her hand.