A Small Gray Dot

The back of my neck prickled but I had to find her so I went over and turned to shine my light down the aisle. Nothing. The half-seen figure must have been on the other side of the window and it had appeared to be nearly my height, too tall to be Zoni. Or perhaps it had not been there at all.

Unease beat at me. If Zoni wasn’t in the store, that would be troubling because where else would she be? I headed down the aisle, and made a right, intending to bypass the next one and go knock on the ladies’ room door. My foot hit something slippery causing me to slide and almost fall. Startled, I aimed my light at the floor. A dark liquid was seeping in from somewhere and puddling at the bottom of the aisle. It was hard to tell with the little phone light but it looked like transmission fluid. Or blood.

The prickle in my neck expanded and ran down my back. I moved my light along the floor. A rivulet from up the aisle snaked down to the puddle. I froze when the narrow beam came to rest on something lying a few feet away. My heart sped up as I started forward. Avoiding stepping in the liquid, I inched up on the still form.

Horror slithered into my mind as I found myself looking down into the pasty face and fixed eyes of the clerk who always opened up the place in the morning and manned the front counter.

His unattached head lay at an angle to his body and his body was in four pieces.

Chapter Three

FOR A MOMENT, THE WORLD TILTED. I staggered back. I’m not sure but I think I yelled. I know I puked because my stomach spasmed and the bile that rose into my throat went spraying from my mouth. I dragged the bottom of my tee shirt across my lips, gripped my cellphone, and backed away with dread twanging in me like a guitar. I turned to run and slipped in the viscous liquid, landing on my hands and knees. The phone went skittering down the aisle. I scrambled to catch it and then raced to the bathrooms in the back. I threw open the door of the women’s room. No Zoni. I flung open the one to the men’s room. Nothing.

A feeling of crawling insects covered my entire body as I kicked aside the door to the small back office. It was empty. Spotting the desk phone, I yelled, “Call 911!” There was no response so I grabbed it and jammed it to my ear. Silence; no dial tone. I slammed it down and ran back out into the store where I tore up and down each aisle searching for Zoni. Finding nothing I raced to the front door and burst out into the eerie fog. The morning was no longer quiet. Screams and hoarse yells were coming from different directions and somewhere in the distance, a siren screeched. I was shocked to realize it was the alert put in place a few years back during the tensions between the US and China that almost caused a major conflict until cooler heads prevailed.

The noise added to my fear. I couldn’t tell if we were under attack but something bad was happening. Foremost in my mind was finding Zoni so I didn’t stop to try to find out what it might be. I ran around the outside of the building, peering into every misty shadow, scrabbling inside the half-filled dumpster, but I found nothing. I dashed back up the street, shining my light into each parking lot and yard, calling her name. Other people were out on the street by then. I couldn’t see more than dark outlines but some of them were yelling and I ran into someone who seemed to be frozen in place almost knocking them down. It was a woman. She peered up at me with frightened eyes.

It wasn’t Zoni. I steadied the woman on her feet, mumbled out an “excuse me”, and kept going. There were other hard to see forms and I dodged aside onto a lawn as one that didn’t appear to notice me, came down the sidewalk going in the direction of the Quick Mart. As the figure went past, I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, but its feet and legs didn’t seem to be moving in synch with its speed and it appeared to be traveling above the pavement. That was disturbing but my mind was fixated on Zoni and relegated it to being a trick of the fog. I didn’t take time to wonder about it.

I arrived in front of the apartment building without seeing her anywhere, and in the parking lot, I spotted a large dark rippling blur that turned out to be a crowd bunched around and staring down at something in front of a couple of parked cars. I muscled my way through. Three figures appearing to be in the same condition as was the store clerk, lay sprawled on the pavement.

One was a woman but I realized almost immediately that she was too big to be Zoni. I didn’t recognize any of them so, amid cries of “What’s happening? Are we being attacked?” I turned and rushed up the steps and burst into the lobby. The frightened voices blended with the screaming siren, making for one big, inarticulate noise. I slammed the door shutting it all out.