Feet
by Christian De Matteo
Maurice hadn’t slept in three days. He was starting to see things. Lights suddenly flashing in the corners of his eyes, floaters with faces ghosting past his pupils and once an ex-girlfriend from college in the employee bathroom. Demitra? Debra? Dolores? Sleep would have to happen very soon or his usefulness to the group would collapse. So where the hell was Emilio?
Scratching the side of his head with the barrel of his shotgun, Maurice tried to remember the last time he’d seen any of the crew. He was pretty sure he hadn’t volunteered for a 72-hour shift. The deal had been midnight to 5 AM. Right? Emilio would relieve him and he could sleep. When the security monitors all went static, he figured at least some of the crew would come in to check out what had happened or update him as to the situation. His brain was having a harder and harder time dealing with the static now, his eyes making up shapes in it, like spotting a figure in a blizzard or a pair of breasts on the porno channel your parents didn’t get. The sound of the static was doing anything good for him either. He was starting to hear words in it and none of them were signs of psychological well-being. “Shut the freezer and shoot yourself” had become the most common refrain. He had no idea why he should shut the freezer.
He was almost out of Twinkies, another factor for terror. Maurice was sure the only thing preserving him was sugar and preservatives. He squinted again through the openings in the dropped metal store gate. How many horror movies had he seen where the future victims ended up hunkering down in an abandoned mall. Granted, the cliché seemed well-earned, since that’s where all the supplies would be, but still Maurice hated being cliché. Unless it meant him becoming the final girl. He’d want a blue dress and maybe to have his hair done up in a beehive.
What the hell was he thinking about? A beehive? And he hated blue. And he had terrible legs for a dress. He was worried about his legs?
Maurice needed to sleep. 73 hours was imminent and he’d processed all the sugar and water he could. If Emilio or Tara or Becca or Nolan or Yogi Bear or Bugs Bunny or Gossamer didn’t show up soon, he was gonna pass out on the sliced bread display. No better beds than food displays in shopping mall mini-mart. Plus he could read the paper with the news from last Wednesday. Hell, he realized, maybe he’d gotten the whole story wrong and nothing bad was going on. Maybe the headlines “High-levels of deadly chemical detected in low fog” really said, “High school deans cleaning dentures in loud frogs,” or something innocuous like that.
Yogi Bear? What the shit?
Time to sleep.
After checking the front doors of the mall one more time through the metal store gate, Maurice headed to the employee bathroom to take a leak. After all that had happened, he wasn’t gonna also piss himself in comatose sleep. And he was pretty sure he was going to be comatose. Entering the storeroom, he put the shotgun they’d taken from Bob’s Sportsman’s Surplus! upstairs down on one of the many shelves full of candy, toilet paper and all other manner of mini-mart goodness. He had tried desperately to find the pornographic magazines, but it didn’t seem they even made those anymore. Short-sighted, he now realized, what with the internet going down worldwide. His appreciation for physical goods was getting higher by the day. I mean, he thought, what the hell would this brave new world be without easily accessible porn?
These were the wrong rambling thoughts for a young man attempting to urinate, his wang confused as to what activity it was supposed to be rallying for.
“Come on, buddy, just go so we can sleep,” he said to it.
“You got me all worked up about porn and now I can’t,” it responded.
“I don’t know, think about baseball or something. I’ve drank about a hundred energy drinks and my bladder is about to explode.”
“Couple of strokes and we could release all kinds of stuff,” his wang suggested.
“Dude, I don’t want to do that now. Just piss and let’s go sleep on the cloud beds in the flower garden.”
“Are you talking to your dong about cloud beds in a flower garden?” said a voice neither his nor his wang’s.
“Was I talking to my wang?” he asked.
“You sure were. And that’s not even the weirdest part,” replied the face in the mirror.
Still holding his swiftly retreating member, Maurice studied the face in the mirror, slowly gleaning onto the fact it was that of someone behind him.
“Denise?” he said hesitantly?
“Jessica, you dumb fuck,” Jessica replied with a mean smile. “You never dated a girl with a D-name.”
Still holding himself, Maurice turned slowly around.
“Jessica, that’s right. My ex from college. I thought I saw you before.”
No one was there. He was going loopy.
“The girlfriend you cheated on in college. With her roommate, Maurice. While she slept in the other bed. After you’d slept with her.”
Maurice slowly pivoted back around to the mirror. Jessica was there, in the glass again.
Art by James Lines
“Sins have feet, Maurice. Eventually they walk on back.”
Dong hanging limply along his open fly, Maurice raised his hands, as though in surrender. Then he turned and booked it out of bathroom. A bit of piss had begun to finally flow from him, adding to the horror and embarrassment of the situation.
“I was just thinking about Yogi Bear and Gossamer. I am hallucinating. Three days no sleep ain’t doing nothing good for me. Just gotta get outta here, find a comfy spot and sing “Oh My Darling, Clementine” with a reindeer. Shit, my mind is melting.”
Had he really done all that to Jessica? And in front of her? College was almost as much of a blur as this moment now, at the edge of the end of the world, a fog covering the earth full of deadly, mind-fucking chemicals and walking demons.
“Sins, Maurice, the fog is full of sins, everyone’s sins, mistakes, misjudgments that caused hurt to others. And I’m your first, Maurice. Only your first.”
She was in the doorway to the mini-mart shop. He could see all of her now. She was wearing the outfit he’d took her home from the bar in that night. The night he’d banged her roommate. Deana?
“I told you, you never dated a girl with a D-name!”
His pants warm with wet, he threw himself at his shotgun on the shelf. Jessica waved and 20 boxes of candy bars collapsed in front of it, half burying him.
“I just need to go to sleep. My mind is doing this to me. None of this is real.”
She was closing in on him. He held tight, ignoring his now freezing cold wang, swiftly cooling, wet pants and the blood starting to stream from a cut on this scalp apparently made by one of the falling candy boxes.
“Emilio…”
“Oh, he had his own misspent youth to deal with. So did Tara and Becca. Surprisingly, Nolan will be just fine. Really a sweetheart of a guy.” She kneeled in front of him in the sexy, girlish way women knelt when they wore a skirt above knee height. She reached out a hand and stroked his face.
Razor sharp, lava-hot needles sliced through his cheek, instantly cauterizing the wounds as it made them. The heat began to spread, building from the cuts, radiating out and into his head, super-heating his brain. Maurice held his head and shrieked. The pain wouldn’t stop building, a volcano ready to blow. A flamethrower blast of pressure blew out his ears and he slammed his hands down on the ground. His right hand found the shotgun.
“Sinners have feet too, Maurice. Use them.”
Maurice threw himself to his feet, back slamming into the shelves, knocking more boxes and items to messy, clattering piles on the floor. He raised the shotgun and fired at Jessica. He watched her raised right hand disintegrate as the recoil launched him five feet back along the shelves, toppling the last and sending him ass over tea kettle in front of the open walk-in freezer door. Looking up, he saw Jessica, waving a bloody wrist with fresh fingers pushing out of the stump. They rose like fast growing mushrooms, blood spattering her face and chest. Soon the webbing between her fingers became visible, translucent and veiny like stretched placenta, before birthing the beginnings of a palm.
“What are you?”
“I’m the shape of your transgressions, Maurice. We’re all here. We’re all back. For everyone. No one ever said Judgement Day would be fun. But it will be fickle.”
Maurice scrambled to his knees and launched himself into the freezer, turned around and slammed the door shut.
“Good, Maurice,” the ghost of Jessica’s betrayal said, “now shoot yourself.”