door opened wide, she saw a stairway leading up, and then the door closed. High up on the wall, near the ceiling, she saw a series of one-way-mirrored windows that she'd never noticed before.
The manager's office.
She shivered.
'What's going to happen?' Vern asked. His voice was low, quiet, and she realized for the first time that he was scared, too.
That made her even more frightened.
'I don't know,' she said.
'Could I have some service here?' a man behind her demanded.
Holly held up her hand. 'Just a minute.' She put down the coffeepot on Vern's table and, on impulse, started walking down the aisle toward the manager's office. Vern came with her.
They were nearly to the door when it opened and Mr. Walker emerged. He scurried away, into the hardware aisles.
Mr. Lamb, the personnel manager, came out seconds later. He quickly scanned the aisle before him, his gaze locking on Holly's. 'Is that your friend who wanted to see the manager?'
She nodded dumbly.
His voice was serious, his words orders, but there seemed to be a trace of a smile at the corner of his mouth. 'Call the paramedics,' he said. 'I think he's having a heart attack.'
3
'Everybody's family's crazy,' Diane said.
Shannon shook her head, sighing. 'Not as crazy as mine.'
The two of them were walking down the path that led through the forest from Granite Road to The Store parking lot. It was hot, felt like summer already, and Shannon wished they'd stopped off at George's to get a Coke or something before starting off on this trek. She was dying of thirst and the path seemed to be a lot longer than Diane had led her to believe.
But at least it gave them a chance to talk.
'My dad makes us say grace before every meal. Jo's a klepto, my brother's a doper, but my dad thinks that if we thank God for the meat loaf, it'll somehow make up for his poor parenting skills and we'll all turn out to be perfect people.'
Shannon laughed.
'It's not funny.'
'It's a little bit funny.'
Diane smiled. 'Well, maybe a little. But the point is, compared to me, you have nothing to complain about.'
'I wouldn't say that.'
'I would. So your dad's a little whacked-out about The Store. Big deal.
There're a lot worse things he could be.'
Ahead, through the trees, they could see open space. Sunlight on car windshields. Black asphalt and brown brick. The Store.
'At last,' Shannon said. 'Civilization.'
'Can you imagine what it must have been like in pioneer days? Traveling for months without seeing another human? Living on, like, a drop of canteen water a day?'
Shannon shook her head. 'I don't even want to think about it.'
They broke through the trees at the side of the parking lot and slid down a short dirt embankment to the asphalt. Diane leading the way, they wound their way through the rows of parked cars toward The Store entrance.
Suddenly Diane stopped short. 'Oh, my God.'
Shannon almost ran into her. 'What is it?'
Diane pointed toward the row directly in front of them. 'Mindy.'
Mindy Hargrove, her hair disheveled, her clothes in disarray, was running toward them, away from The Store, crying uncontrollably. Shannon stood next to Diane, staring, not knowing what to do. She hadn't seen Mindy for a long time.
The girl's attendance had been sporadic for most of this semester, and for the past month she hadn't been in school at all. The rumor was that she wasn't going to be promoted from eleventh grade, that she'd still be a junior next year.
Everyone felt sorry for Mindy because of what had happened to her father, but at the same time, she'd always been a bitch and no one really felt _too_ sorry for her.
For the first time since it had happened, Shannon thought of her encounter with Mindy on the road home after school.
_It's built with blood_.
The two of them had not spoken since then, although they'd seen each other a couple of times in the halls, and Shannon had sort of assumed that Mindy had been embarrassed by her outburst and had not wanted to be reminded of it. She'd stuck to her nervous breakdown theory and figured that Mindy had merely been looking for a scapegoat for her dad's death.
But for the first time, the thought flashed through her mind that maybe there _was_ something wrong with The Store. Maybe her dad and Mindy weren't so far off.
She immediately dismissed that idea. It was stupid, childish.
Diane moved forward, stepping out from between the cars into the open row of the parking lot.
Mindy suddenly screamed at the top of her lungs and darted to the right, stopping next to the driver's door of an old Buick.
'What's she doing?' Diane said.
Shannon didn't answer. She watched as Mindy, still screaming, pulled a set of keys from her right front pocket and started sorting through them. Her unchecked cries had attracted the attention of a handful of other people in the parking lot and all were staring at her nervously.
'This is spooky,' Diane said. 'Let's get the hell out of here.'
Shannon agreed, and they slipped between cars, moving around to the front of the building.
From behind them came the unmistakable sound of metal on metal, and they turned to see the Buick scrape the side of a Volkswagen as it sped through the parking lot away from them, heading toward the highway. A second later, it rounded the far end of the row and sped half the length of the lot, turning down the aisle directly in front of The Store's entrance and immediately accelerating.
'Oh, my God,' Shannon said. 'She's going to ram the building.'
The car gained speed, its engine racing loudly as it shot toward the front doors. Mindy was screaming, her face red and contorted, and even from this far away, Shannon could see the expression of fanatic determination on her features.
The car hit hard with a noise that sounded like an explosion, a crunch that Shannon felt in her stomach and under her feet, like a sonic boom. The bumper and right front panel of the car smashed against the brick, crumpling instantly, but the rest of the car plowed into the doorway, glass shattering inward.
There were screams from all around, inside and outside the store, seemingly everywhere, and Shannon was suddenly aware of the fact that she was running toward the accident, Diane at her side. Mindy was slumped over the steering wheel, completely limp, held in by a shoulder harness, and it looked like she was dead, but with one convulsive jerk she was moving again, and the car, whose engine had never stopped running, lurched backward, tearing free from the building with an excruciating squeal and nearly plowing through the gathering crowd behind it.
From the side, Shannon saw Mindy's face, and it was covered with blood, but that look of crazed determination was still there, and she watched helplessly as the car backed up and then sped forward to make another run.
This time, Mindy missed the entrance entirely and the Buick smashed against the brick wall, bouncing back. It