Pel nodded nervously. “I’ll admit: it was a good idea.”

“So was yours,” Jules replied.

Pel smiled a little. “If you’re interested, I think I have another.”

“Go for it.”

Jules watched—curiosity fighting against terror—as her mother pulled rubber bands off some of the packages and then used them to tie the third shopping cart to the other two. “There,” Pel said, patting it down to make sure it was secure. She looked at our daughter. “Now, there’s nothing to distract you from bat duty.”

Jules nodded in agreement.

They traveled down the aisle, picking up some precious toilet paper and the last two remaining bottles of disinfectant. Much like the religious food, some of the more exotic or politically unpopular offerings were relatively untouched: cans of dehydrogenated meat, freeze-dried ramen noodles—sassy pork flavor, chicken mola flavor, and more—and bags of dried kelp, crispy, green, and as light as air.

“C’mon Mom,” Jules said, “let’s pick up the pace. I want to get out of here!”

“You’re not the only one.”

Jules helped her mother knock some small bags into one of the carts.

“No,” Pel said, “go look ahead. There might be something worth taking.”

Nodding, Jules walked to the halfway point of the aisle where a horizontal break opened the shelves up, and as she looked to the right—

—Holy shit!

Jules let out a frightened yell. She staggered to a stop. Her breath was wet fire trapped between her mask and her lips.

There was a monster in the hallway. There was a goddamn monster in the hallway. It—he?—… he was wearing human clothes. He was drowning in clothes. Cloth, rags, scarves, priests’ prayer shawls; a sartorial mountain was piled on top of him.

Jules’ feet refused to move. Sweat trickled down her arms and brow, slicking her grip on Rale’s bat.

The monster shoveled junk food into his mouth. Cheesy potato puffs, mini-cinnamon rolls, candy bars—wrappings and all. Food spilled out onto the floor. He brushed it out of boxes and off of shelves, deluging it onto himself.

If only that was the worst of it.

The monster was recognizable. Once, he had been a man. Now, he was becoming… something else. He was too tall; far too tall. Beneath him and his layered clothes, his pants dangled below, only filled to the knees. His neck had elongated enough that it could curl like a serpent’s. Skin that was not skin broke out dark and ruddy on the man’s arms and hands and his freakish neck, and beneath his robe’s coattails, something unseen brushed along the floor, side to side, rasping scattered cereal on the vinyl and crunching cheese puffs with its weight. Several of his fingers were completely missing; the pointer finger on his right hand had swollen like a sausage and now bore a Night-black claw half-again as long.

Jules whispered, “M-Mom…” Her breath was caught in her throat. She didn’t know if she wanted to be heard.

Oh my God.

At the sound of her voice, the man turned toward her like a rabid dinosaur, head and neck bobbing.

Oh my God.

Jules’ legs felt like jelly.

What was once the man’s face was now a distended thing, stretched along the odd, angular surface of the rostral malignancy erupting from his head. Ratty hair covered what had once been scalp, split up into patches by swaths of dark red tissue. His eyes had drifted slightly, moving toward the sides of his head. They had no pupils, no lashes or irises. His eyes were golden orbs, alien and glistening. They were beautiful.

It’s a fucking demon…

Dark red lids slid out from nowhere, wiping bits of orange cheese powder from the demon’s eyes. Then, turning, the demon moved toward Jules and her mother, his robes dragging across the floor behind him. He held his big claw at his side, like a sickle.

Jules looked her mom in the eyes. No words were needed. Adrenaline flooded Jules’ veins.

Jules and Pel ran. Jules held the bat in one hand as she took position beside her mother and pushed the carts along with her. They rolled them as fast as they could, racing down the aisle, their hearts gasping.

And then death came around the corner, and their hearts skipped a beat. A new figure limped toward them, moaning in agony.

The dead man burbled out the words, “I’m scared.” He was barely comprehensible. His words were those of a drowning man. A fading man, buried alive.

Jules and her mother screamed. They dug in their heels, skidding their soles across the vinyl as they tugged the rearmost shopping cart handle with all their might.

The figure moaned incomprehensibly, flailing as it staggered forward, wrapped in broken business casual; tie and collar undone, hair half-gone. What was once a man was now more dead than alive; a decaying, ruined thing. His skin was ulcers and weeping chasms, suffused by alien veins that radiated like black lightning. Dark filaments merged into fungal lobes that crested out from the cracks in his being. His limbs twitched, as if beyond his control, pulling him forward along the shelves as he pleaded and begged like a frightened babe, weeping tears in black and green.

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“Get back!” Jules yelled, brandishing her brother’s bat. “Get back!”

The infected man lurched forward, his necrotic fingers clawing through the air.

“I’ll ram him!” Pel shouted.

“No!” Jules screamed. “It’ll contaminate the food!”

Jules rushed forward.

“Jules!” Pel reached. “No!”

My little girl ducked low. She skidded along the floor like at the end of a home run and then lunged forward and bashed the bat into the doomed man’s shins.

There was a sickening crunch. The bones snapped like twigs. The man moaned, in pain beyond words.

Darting ahead, Pel grabbed our daughter by the shirt and pulled her back just as the man toppled forward. He fell with a wet, splattering thud that spewed black ooze in every direction.

Jules turned around, tugging her leg out of the way, narrowly dodging one of the gobs of death ichor. She tucked the bat’s handle under her arm and grabbed one side of the tied-together shopping carts and pulled, as did her mother.

The infected man crawled forward, coughing out black and green mere inches from their heels.

They had to turn the shopping cart around, but there wasn’t time.

“Push!” Pel yelled.

Heaving, they rolled the caravan back the way they’d come. Jules groaned from the effort. The metal slipped beneath her fingers as the car rolled away.

The goop on Jules’ goggles flowed downward. In seconds, it would fall on her.

No! NOOOO!

In one fell swoop, Jules turned around and pressed her goggles against a box on a shelf while pulling the bat out from under her arm. Her left goggle glistened, tinting everything a faint lime green.

She screamed a frightened war cry. She didn’t want to die.

Jules beat the crawling man back. She swung from below, bashing her dead brother’s bat up under the dying man’s neck, knocking him back and kicking up a fresh splatter of ooze that she skipped back and dodged just by a hair.

“Jules!”

“Mom!” Jules raced to join her mother. She turned around and ran.

The path ahead was clear. The entrance was at their backs, and they were near the middle of the supermarket’s right-hand side.

“Please tell me you’re safe!” Pel moaned.

“Just run!” Jules yelled.

“No!” Pel thrust her arm, pointing forward. “Up, then across!” She waved her arm to the right. “Then back.” She curled her arm over her shoulder like a hitchhiker, thumb and all.

Jules nodded, gritting her teeth.

She understood the plan. They’d go to the rearmost row of the Gilman’s, cut across to the opposite side, and then turn down the leftmost aisle and zoom out the front door, all the way home.

They charged down the aisle full speed, running away from the crawling infectee as fast as they could. Then, sprinting ahead of the backwards-pointing cart caravan, Jules grabbed the rearmost handle and then backpedaled for all she was worth, hefting like carts like a great hammer, and pulling the carts, she turned them, facing them right once more.

Her mother knocked into her side, joining up at the back of the caravan. They pushed together; together, they pushed, mother and daughter, rushing forward, steeling themselves for the turn up ahead. They passed deathly tableaux as they ran. Sights of horror flashed in the passing aisles. Human corpses, wan and drained, scattered like dead insects, ulcerated and broken. Fungus was taking root, spreading across the shelves and the vinyl floor, their growth like an ancient wood. Fruiting bodies had begun to form, bearing glowing bulbs, plump, tapered, and full.

And then—

—Oh no…

Several bodies littered the rearmost row at the far end. Crossing them would be a death sentence. The wheels would crush their twisted bones and spray the air full of their potent spores.

Pel yelled: “We gotta turn now!”

Again, they dug in their heels into the vinyl, burning rubber as they skid and slowed. A piece of the back of Jules’ old, worn sneakers came loose, and she almost stumbled.

Then, up ahead, Jules looked down to the left and saw a path to safety: a clear aisle with a straight line of sight that went all the way to the Gilman’s entrance at the far end.

“Here,” Jules yelled, “this aisle!”

Metal rattled as the caravan turned, slipping into the aisle.

They were home free; they raced down the final aisle. The carts’ wheels passed over a dead man’s legs like a speed bump, crunching as they cracked. The carts shook, but Jules and her mother held firm.

And then, up ahead, at the row in the middle of the aisle, a little girl hobbled into view. She wore a tea-time dress, prim and red, spotted in white and edged in doilies and frills. Her spore-dusted shoes gleamed, still freshly polished. The green dust had only just begun to corrode her shiny metal shoe buckles.

She moaned. “Mommy… mommy…”.

Her blonde hair crumbled atop her scalp, with its ravines that dug in all the way through her skull to the evil that smiled within her mind. Darkness spidered along her skin, its dark lightning converging on one of her eyes, swelling to the size of a second head, gracing it with a narrow, puckered orifice whose tip dribbled spores.

No good thing could come from hitting her. Jules knew this. She couldn’t bash the girl in the head; she couldn’t knock her over. The slightest impact, and the little girl’s puffball eye would blow, and everyone would die in dreams of black and green. And their shopping carts were hurtling toward her.

Jules screamed. “Mom!” She felt the tears run down her face.

“It’s going too fast!” Pel yelled.

Jules dug in her heels, to try to stop the impact. But it was too late.

They were doomed by their own momentum.

“I can’t stop it!” Jules screamed. She wept. Her grip tightened on the bat.

It won’t be long now, little brother.

Then, up ahead, the ragged man flew. Jules’ eyes went wide. The mass of cloth and robe billowed past, flying feet off the ground, crossing rightward, slamming into the infected girl with the force of an oncoming bullet train. Girl and monster rocketed out of sight so fast, the spores had no time to burst.

For an instant, Jules saw the girl’s limbs and skirt, and the next thing she knew, they crashed into the shelf against the wall several aisles over, casting out a roar of spores that rose from the impact in an expanding mushroom cloud.

A polyphonic voice bellowed. “Run!” he said. “Run!”

The sound rippled through the spores.

Jules didn’t need to be told twice.

And though they ran with all their might, Jules couldn’t help looking at the crash sight as they passed it by. Nor could her mother.

It was a glimpse. A single frame flashed between aisles. But what they saw there, they would never forget.

One of the man’s legs had come loose. It had snapped off like a dead leaf, tumbling out through his ripped, ratty pants-legs. The severed limb rolled to a stop across the supermarket floor, all twisted and blackened, joining the mound of produce the demon’s impact had launched off the refrigerated shelves.

A tail writhed beneath his robes; thick, long, and embroidered in red scales.

And the girl. The little girl.

The demon had dug into her like a wild animal. He had sliced her body into thirds with swipes of his great claw. His jaws had cracked as they opened, impossibly wide. He’d swallowed the girl slice by slice. Only one slice remained. The last slice. It still moved as he held it. Her voice still pleaded and begged.

“Mommy… mo—”

—Only for her pain to be silenced with a crunch of skull.

And then Jules and her mother passed through the jammed-open automatic doors and out into the dying morn.