Husk

“Who’s chasing you?” the clerk asked. He handed the customer her change, allowing her to leave.

The woman made a quick exit, and Penelope pointed past her to where the van had pulled to a stop outside the parking lot’s entry. Its headlights went dark.

“That man’s trying to kill me,” she said. “He’s been following me for over an hour, and he just rammed my car off the road.”

Three other people perused the aisles of merchandise: another employee stocking shelves, and two middle- aged men looking at fishing poles. Each regarded her with expressions of uncertain curiosity.

“Damn, are you okay?” the clerk asked. He wore a dark blue, short-sleeve shirt with a red stripe down the left side and the name “Bird” embroidered in white over the right breast pocket.

“I’m fine,” Penelope cried. “Just get the cops here to arrest that asshole!”

Bird picked up a phone from beneath the counter and set it beside the register. He glanced from her to the doors. “Do you know who he is?”

“Not a clue,” Penelope replied. “He’s wearing some kind of mask.”

Bird faced the massive front windows as he dialed. “Well, he’s watching us, whoever he is. Hopefully the sheriff will get here quick enough to catch the guy.”

Penelope thanked him in a confident tone but had to hug herself to keep from shaking. Taking deep breaths, she leaned against the glass countertop and tried to relax. In the display case directly below, her reflection stared back in the polished blades of a dozen enormous hunting knives.

She straightened up.

Bird put the phone to his ear and a concerned look crossed his face. Placing the handset back in its cradle, he faced the cold storage lockers along the back wall of the store and called to the other employee. “Hey, Jason, come watch the register a sec.”

The lanky, red-haired kid trotted over. “What’s up?”

“The phone’s dead,” Bird told him.

Penelope faced him.

“Don’t worry, I’ve got a cell phone,” he assured her. “Regular lines have been up and down half a dozen times since Friday night’s thunderstorm.” He briefed Jason on the situation and told the kid to keep watch on the van. “Use the binoculars; see if you can get a license plate number. Oh, and log the counter time on the surveillance cameras,” he added, pointing to a set of security monitors. “The Sheriff will want to look at the tape. I’ll be back in a minute.”

He turned and strode toward the back corner of the store. Penelope glanced from Bird to Jason and back, then hurried after the towering tribesman. She crossed between aisles of camping equipment, following him into a small office. She reached him in time to see the man searching through a gym bag alongside the manager’s desk.

“Thanks again for all your help,” she said. “I really appreciate it.”

He nodded. “Glad to do it.”

She wanted to sit tight, believe everything was going to be okay, but one question still undermined her resolve. “What if he comes after me?” she asked.

Bird eyed her, still hunting for the phone. “Not to worry,” he replied. “We’d see him on those.” He gestured to what looked like several portable TVs immediately to her left.

Stepping farther inside the office, she spotted four monitors similar to the pair out by the registers. Along with the two cameras keeping watch on the interior of the store and the fueling area outside, an additional pair provided wide shots of the property. She spotted the van in the upper right corner of the third screen.

“So what if we do see him coming?” she prodded. “What if he comes into the store?”

The large man smiled. He leaned across the desk and produced a short-barrel revolver from one of the drawers. “One problem. Six solutions.”

She tried to emulate his level of confidence but only managed a strained grin.

He found his cell phone and flipped it open. “I doubt it’ll come to that,” he reassured her, dialing the sheriff’s office. “He hasn’t even gotten out of the—”

He trailed off in mid-sentence, staring at the phone.

“What about the phone lines, though?” she asked, again turning to the security monitors. “What if they’re not down because of the storm? What if he cut them? That would mean he’s already out there?”

Before Bird could answer, the black and white images on the screens dissolved into static. One by one, they all went out.

Penelope spun, mouth open, but stopped short at the look on Bird’s face.

She froze. “What? What’s wrong?”

“Jason is dead,” he whispered, still staring at the cell phone. “That’s what the display on my phone says: Jason is dead.”

The lights went out. Everything went black.

The windowless office became a cocoon of darkness.

“What the hell?” one of the men asked from the main room.

Glass shattered at the front of the store, chased by a piercing scream that choked off abruptly.

“Crap,” another man shouted, his profanity punctuated by the noise of several fishing poles crashing to the floor.

Penelope’s hands swept the wall beside her, searching for the way out. Bird edged past her in the dark and shoved through the door. His massive silhouette charged toward the counter, and she raced to catch up to him.

Battery-powered flood lamps mounted in the back corners of the room provided some relief from the darkness, but their orange light also helped to enhance the shadows between the aisles and those gathered in the checkout area.

“Hey, what’s going on?” one of the men in the fishing section demanded. “What the hell was that noise? I’m blind as a bat’s ass over here.”

The two men had been separated from the rest of the store behind tall racks of fishing poles and nets. Now, in the blackout, she couldn’t see them at all.

Penelope hurried onward. She caught up to Bird, finding him backed against a pyramid of stacked windshield washer bottles directly across from the registers.

“We shouldn’t go out the front,” she started to say, but fell silent when she saw his eyes had gone wide and his mouth had dropped open.

Penelope turned, afraid the man had reacted to someone who’d approached from behind her, but saw no one at the empty checkout island or near—

The display case.

The glass lay shattered across the floor, the metallic framing blasted out of shape.

All the knives were missing.

Then she noticed the blood. It sprinkled out of the darkness like some hellish rain, splattering the floor in the center of the clerks’ work area. Shivering with fear, acting out of instinct rather than on command, Penelope looked up, tracing the liquid path back to its origin. She found Jason’s gutted body stuck to the ceiling, pinned in place with the stolen knives. The corpse remained half-hidden from view by overhead storage racks of cigarettes and lottery tickets, but she saw enough of him to know that his belly had been slit open and emptied.

Penelope opened her mouth to scream but the sound failed to come.

“Would one of you answer us,” a customer shouted.

She faced the voice to see the two men standing in the light at the end of one of the aisles, followed by the silhouette of a third man dressed in a fisherman’s vest, waders, and fatigue hat. He stepped into view behind the two customers, walking out of a display of set-up camping equipment. Lost in shadow, the person’s face hid within an ovoid patch of darkness.

But there was no one else in the store. Which means—

“Look out,” Bird shouted, voicing the words already screaming in Penelope’s mind.