Imperfect Hunger

Sally knew it was going to be a bad day when her first customer complimented her on her vocabulary.

“I'll just leave you to peruse the lipsticks for a minute,” Sally said.

“Peruse? How refreshing! Good vocabulary coming from a department store employee!” Inwardly Sally rolled her eyes, but she smiled at the woman before walking off. Just another liberal arts major over-educated for their job. Nothing to see here.

She moved through the glass maze of the cosmetics department. Origins was in gift this week and already had a handful of people milling about. Fragrance and most of the rest of the department was deserted. A couple of the girls smiled and waved to her from their posts. She reached the stockroom door and stepped inside. The door shut behind her. Then the screaming started.

At first she thought it was Evelyn over in M.A.C., but then she realized it was coming from further back in the store, towards the hosiery. She poked her head back out in time to see people running. Customers leaving the store, and fast. Charlene teetered on her stilettos (how could she work in those?), looking in the direction of the screams. Sally thought she looked like some newborn herd animal taking its legs for the first time, a crazy hover of balance just before bolting away.

“Charlene. Hey, Charlene!”

Charlene jumped as though goosed. “Sally! God you scared the pee out of me!” And she looked like that was no lie, shifting her feet slightly back and forth. Sally resisted the urge to giggle.

“What's going on?” she said instead.

“I don't know.” She turned, eyes wide more with anticipation than fear. “You don't think it's the Terrorists do you! Oh my god, you know they are always saying malls are big targets…”

“I doubt its terrorists,” Sally said, cutting the her off before she picked up steam and then, disturbed by the other woman’s barely restrained glee, continued “I'm going to go see.” She came all the way out of the stockroom. Management was already moving to the area, too, and Sally headed after them.

“Be careful!” Charlene called, still in that weird flux of movement between fleeing and standing her ground just in case anything exciting happened.

Sally had already moved to the end of the cosmetic section. She always felt slightly odd when she was in any other part of the store, as though she was in violation. Being forced to spend 8 hours a day standing in what was roughly the size of medium cardboard box led to some odd issues she guessed, and this time she did giggle. Plus, unlike the overly bright lighting designed to convince even a supermodel she needed some serious face help, the rest of the store was downright dim.

The store was a mix of upscale designer clothing and sale racks marked in the teens because of merchandise that never sold. It had been owned by a family and was quite something back in its heyday. Everyone wanted to shop here and rumor had it that the family was the best in town to work for. After the founder died the son grew bored with the whole thing and sold it to a corporation. The store went from providing mid-priced, well constructed merchandise to carrying over-priced big name labels that were unwearable after a few washings or dry cleaner trips. The once impeccable customer service deteriorated into sullen clerks bearing the burden of poor management and low morale.

Sally saw a small crowd of maybe thirteen employees and four or five customers were gathered looking up at a ceiling vent in hosiery. The store manager, Ed Hogan, was trying to urge people to go back to what they had been doing. In other words, he wanted the few shoppers shopping, or at least far enough away in case whatever was happing would be bad publicity for the store. The woman screaming was someone who worked at the store, but Sally didn't know her. Maybe she's a floater, Sally thought, looking up at the vent screen where most everyone else was looking.

"Sally, what's going on,” a voice close to her whispered. Sally turned. It was Jon, from shoes, looking impeccable as usual.

“I have no idea. Nice tie, by the way.”

“Thanks. Derrick gave it to me.” His face glowed when he said it. Derrick was Jon's new boyfriend, but all the girls in cosmetics had decided the guy definitely had some sort of tie fetish.

“You're kidding! What's that make? Like, number 20?” She was smiling, though.

Jon blushed. “Yeah.” He didn't get to say anymore because the screaming woman had started to speak loudly.

“There is something UP there! I SAW it! Something is UP there!” The woman's eyes were wild and fearful.

“What do you mean, Millie, something? What, like a bag?” The manager had his hands on her upper arms, comfortingly. Definitely a store policy “violation”, but it was the only way he could get the woman to stop screaming.

“No. No!” She shook her head and rolled her eyes up to the grate again. “Not a bag. Something alive. I think it's a, maybe a person!” She shivered, and drew in a deep breath. The manager, obviously afraid she was going to let fly a loud one again, shook her gently. She looked back at him. Crisis averted.

“Tell me what happened, from the beginning.”

“Okay. Okay.” She drew in a shuddering breath. “I was just about to put the new stock out…”

...and her arthritis was really bad today. Somehow she always got scheduled on the days to do stock, and she suspected those young skirt-tails she worked with planned it that way. That's what happens when you get old, she thought. They all run around together, drinking and partying, then next thing they all want to be off on the same days, and the old employees get all the crappy schedules. This was work the young and strong should be doing, not someone who can hardly lift the damn boxes.

She dropped the box of hose to the floor. She had just managed to get her joints loose enough to get down on the floor next to it when she thought she heard a noise above her. A scraping noise, very soft. A sneaky noise, she thought, and shuddered.

She looked up. Directly above was a big screen square covering the crawl space in the drop ceiling. Nothing special about it, the store had lots of these all over the place. A lot of the girls thought they housed hidden security cameras, watching the employees so they could know if one of them walked off with half the store or a wad of cash. And a few of them did have hidden cameras stashed. But most of them were access points to speed up repair work. Like now, Millie thought. Repairmen must be up there patching up something. She was surprised personally that the whole store hadn't just collapsed around them already.

She went back to the hosiery. The hair on the back of her neck felt like it was standing up. She was being watched. She was certain of it. Watched by something up above her. Something in the dark. “Oh just stop it now, you silly ninny," speaking aloud as she had as a little girl when she was frightened and by herself. The sound of her voice was not soothing this time, however. It echoed, emphasizing her isolation here. She looked up again, anyway. That was when she saw it, grinning down. She felt cold, dizzy, and for a moment everything fell into those eyes.

“Saw what, Millie?” The manager sighed. They didn't pay him enough to deal with post-menopausal hysteria.

“Saw the eyes!”

Collectively the small group fell silent. Everyone except the manager looked up uneasily. The darkness behind the screen was still, and gave nothing up.

“It was eyes, Mr. Hogan. A pair of eyes, peeking down out of the dark watching me! They looked, they glowed, you know, like an animal's at night.”

“Oh,” Ed Hogan smiled. “We probably have a raccoon in the duct work. Nothing to worry about Millie, we just have to call animal control.”

“No,” Millie shook her head emphatically. “Not a raccoon, don't you think I'd know a raccoon if I saw one! This was too big to be a 'coon, those eyes were human size, Mr. Hogan.” Her voice was starting to rise hysterically again.

“Now Millie,” the Hogan started but before he could finish the woman reached up, grabbed his shirt, and shook him hard.

“I KNOW what I saw! Shining eyes, like a devil's, watching from the dark. Like,” here she shuddered again, “like they were hungry.” She finished in a whisper, and crossed herself. Now Hogan did look up, uneasily, more from how the woman sounded than the unlikely story she told. He sighed again and wished he had called in sick today. Sally moved over to him.

“We should call the police, Ed. Even if there's nothing to it. Even if it is an animal they can take care of it.” He looked at Sally for a moment.

“You think so? I'd hate to make a big deal just because someone didn't get enough sleep last night.”

“Yes,” Sally said. “What if there is something to it, and we get robbed? Then corporate would want to know why you didn't do anything.” A look of horror passed over Ed's face as he saw his district management aspirations die a sudden and ugly death.

“Yeah. Okay.” Ed ran his hand through his hair, then straightened his tie. “I don't think we need to evacuate the store, let's just keep it discreet for now.” No doubt so you can cover your ass by not losing sales even if you get in hot water for calling the cops, Sally thought.

She nodded. “I'll get the customers moving.”

He threw her a grateful glance, then turned and announced there was nothing further to see and that he was escorting Millie to the break room for a few minutes. Sally reached into her pocket and pulled out a handful of the free perfume samples she always carried, and as she passed them out she also gently herded the small group of shoppers toward cosmetics.

Travis, or what used to be Travis, heard the people below. More than that, he could smell them. A touch of cinnamon. Someone was chewing gum. Someone else was high. He smelled the weed. Most of all he smelled them. The scent was a tangy mix of blood, feces, urine, perfume, sex, and sweat. It was maddening. His tongue worked in and out between new sharp incisors, cutting itself on them repeatedly. He didn't notice. He didn't bleed anymore.

He wanted to tear through them all, fill himself like a bloated tick, until they were inside him. Until they became him. Drool dripped off his lower now torn lip and onto to metal floor of the crawlspace. Travis did notice this, and he shut his mouth. Travis was no longer human, but Travis was cunning. Travis knew he mustn't be found here in the dark. Must not be found hiding above where he once worked pushing carts and pulling dollies most of the night, moving merchandise off the trucks and into the store where idle people would come and spend their money on things they would likely never use.

Before, Travis used to think about things like that. He used to think about them a lot, working out elaborate theories for why people behaved as they did. Most people saw him as just the stock man if they noticed him at all. No one at the store knew he had been an avid student of psychology books, and read every issue of The Economist. He might as well have been a ghost. The only reason they knew his name was because when you needed to move a heavy load, you called Travis. Good old Travis, the heavy shit hauler.

But Travis wasn't a shit hauler anymore. Travis wasn't even a ghost. Travis was real. And he was hungry.

He scuttled sideways back without a sound away from the grate. The shadows swallowed him. He retreated deeper into the dark matrix of metal above the mall. It was good in the dark. He would wait in it and soon, very soon, he would fill his belly in it too.

Travis dropped down and hiding behind a stack of crates on the loading dock he fell into what appeared if anyone had been looking a deep sleep. Except his eyes were open. And he was dreaming. In his dream, he was having a beer with his buddy Eric out behind the loading dock of the store. The stars glittered bright overhead and one of the street lights was softly buzzing. Bulb’s going to go soon, he thought. The conversation was droning on like it had a hundred times before, Travis theorizing why people were comfortable judging others by their appearance and profession.

“Why is it so dark?” he said suddenly, but he felt all foggy. Must be the beer. And Eric’s voice was so soothing, like water whispering against your raft when you are floating on the water just about to drop to off to sleep. Travis had to really make an effort to hear the words.

“I mean, take us for example. Sure, you unload trucks and stock a store, and I watch the dreaming dead for a living.”

“They're in a coma,” Travis mumbled. His tongue felt too fat for his mouth.

Eric continued as if he hadn’t heard. "But that doesn’t mean anything. I mean we are three dimensional, you know? Multi-dimensional, even.”

Eric raised his beer. “Multi-dimensional. Damn straight.” His mouth sounded full of cotton. Travis turned to get a better look at him, maybe to ask him if he felt funny too.

“I mean, I think about a lot of things. A lot of things, Travis. Like people. Like how people smell. These days I really think a lot about their smell.”

Travis blinked, because Eric looked different. For one things his eyes looked like small round lights, like a ‘possum’s would when caught in headlights. “Can you smell them?” Eric went on.

“I think maybe we should go, Trav. Something’s not…something’s wrong here.”

“Because I gotta tell you, Trav, they just smell so damn good.”

He heard a wet sound. It was coming from Eric. Travis wanted to look away. Oh god, I don’t want to see this, do not want to see… but he couldn’t look away and Travis turned to face him.

“They smell so good and I am so hungry.” Now he could see what was causing the wet noise. Eric had chewed his lower lip to ribbons with his new needle-like teeth. He was working them even now compulsively against the bloody lip. Then he grinned, his bloody lips pulling back so nothing about those teeth could be left to imagination, and said, “Hungry.”

He couldn't remember the dream, the last one he would ever have about his previous existence, when his eyes opened. But he remembered the hunger. Oh yes, and he was so hungry.

Travis watched from the shadows as one of the last employees walked past to the parking lot and drove away from the mall. He wanted, needed that person, but he was also slow. He was too sluggish. He withdrew back into the loading dock and pulled the door shut. It took a while for him to relock it because he had trouble getting his hands to work right. They were stiff and he dropped the keys twice.

The pain in him was like a blaze running through his body now. He was cramping badly. He doubled over and vomited up a stinking darkly colored mass. He straightened up and looked at it, without realizing his hand had slid up and into his mouth. He stood there, chewing his forefinger down to the bone absently for a few minutes. Then he reached down and pulled a wooden pallet over the vomit. He had to eat.

He swung himself up onto a tall set of shelves that held new collapsed boxes and rows of register tape. Above it was the vent screen he had left hanging open. He slipped up into it and pulled it closed. He shambled off in the direction of the greater mall. Most people, including himself, didn’t realize that up here there was a maze of duct-corridors that connected all the stores.

He wandered them on all fours, until something brought him up short. He sat back on his haunches and sniffed the air. He caught the musky scent of something warm and alive. Following the smell, his vision turned red as if he were looking though a rose colored glass. The red intensified around one opening, seemed to be seeping up from the room under the screen.

Looking down through the grate, Travis saw an open-top enclosure that held three brown rabbits, one black rabbit, and a single white one. He was over the MaxPetz store. He fiddled with the latch until it finally popped open and the grate fell down. A little ripple ran through the rabbits at the sudden sound. Travis smiled and dropped down to the floor. The bunnies all clumped together at the far end of their holding pen. The parakeets in their cage along the far wall began to madly beat their wings trying to fly away.

Travis had time to take this all in, even the tiny flare of one rabbit’s nostrils as it realized eminent danger. It was too late for it though. In one leap Travis was in the pen with them, kneeling in the center of the small enclosure. They panicked and ran, knocking each other over but Travis easily plucked a brown one up. By now his vision was red, all red, sweet red and then sweet red was in his mouth flowing over his mangled lips and tongue. His eyes rolled back in his head. He stood there over the trembling rabbits, legs apart, face buried in belly fur, blood coating his hands and face as he feasted, finally, yes.

He tossed the rabbit away and grabbed another, then another. He made a greedy lip smacking sound. Grabbed a fourth. The burning pain was receding. He saved the white one for last. He wasn’t sure why he had done this, only it seemed right somehow. He felt alive, strong, powerful. He felt like God.

Sally made her way through the dark store. The last customer had made her late and everyone had already left except for security, and probably a manager or two. They would all be downstairs with the cash bags. She carried her own bag under her arm to the elevator and as she waited for it to come, she replayed the days weird events. What had been up with Millie anyway? She had left early due to the fright. But maintenance hadn't found a thing up in the ducts. She had always liked Millie. She frowned. Hopefully it was nothing medical.

Finally the elevator doors opened and just as she stepped inside she caught a glimpse of movement. She turned and poked her head out, holding the door to keep it from closing.

"Hello?" No answer. "I can hold it for you if you hurry!" She waited, and when no one responded she shrugged and let the door close. They could take the stairs or wait for it to come round again.

The doors opened on an unusually dark lower level. This was where gift wrap, offices, and the home department were all situated. Sally knew the store was almost empty but someone usually left the lights on until the last of the cash bags got turned in.

"Thanks, guys," she said aloud to no one in particular. When she reached the window to turn in the bag there was no one there. She leaned over and tried to peer through the glass to see if anyone was further down the hall. It was too full of shadows to tell.

"Hey! Candice? Londa?" No answer. "I have a cash bag here and I am dying to get home. Late customer, of course. Hey! Is anyone back there?" Weird. She looked around trying to decide what to do. She couldn't just leave the money laying out.

That was when she smelled it. Something brought vividly to mind wet, swollen rot. Just as quickly it was gone. Before she had time to formulate a thought she saw movement. Instinctively she whirled and started backing away. Every hair on her body was standing up and her mind was a buzz of DANGER DANGER DANGER. The cash bag hit the floor with a solid thump.

The smell came back, stronger this time. She felt bile rise and fought it, fumbling along the wall until she got to the open store behind her. Afraid to look away, she kept backing up into the house wares section. Whatever it was, it moved fast. How could it be so fast? Then it was in front of her.

"Tra...Travis?" Instead of sounding confident like she wanted, her voice came out as a strangled whisper.

Yes, it was definitely Travis. But not the humorous, intelligent man she had worked with for the last couple of years. His head cocked to the left like he couldn't quite hold it upright. He twitched and drool was strung from the corner of his mouth to his shirt. Something about him reminded her of the feral cats always slinking around the dumpsters out back.

She lurched away involuntarily as if something primal was now in control just as Travis lunged at her. He got tangled up in the linen display and she seized the moment to flee. She ran just ran, through the lower level, not looking back not stopping. She ran until she reached the motionless escalators. They turned off the power at night. She would have to climb them like stairs.

They loomed before her, so steep, and the top ending in complete darkness above. Anything could be waiting up there. She listened and didn't hear Travis behind her. She turned and her eyes strained until the burned searching the dim light for any movement. There was none. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and looked up the mechanical stairway again. Not hearing Travis behind her made the prospect of going up even more terrifying.

She chewed her lip and considered the options. She couldn't stay here, there was no place to hide. Unless the corridor leading to the offices was unlocked. Then she could safely lock herself in and wait until the morning shift arrived. She looked back the way she came. Darkness stretched out there too. Above and below, both were equally dangerous. Travis couldn't have gotten upstairs ahead of her, she reasoned. He would have passed her and she was certain he hadn't.

She took a deep breath and started the climb up, running at first. The steps were too steep for that though, so she settled for taking two at a time.

"Don't look back, don't look back," was her mantra with every step.

Halfway. Almost there. A hand grabbed her arm from the other side. She shrieked and pulled away. Travis was grinning across the middle divide, holding on and not letting go. She fell, twisting the arm painfully but the momentum broke his grip enough for her to pull free. She stumbled and pitched backward, falling down almost to the bottom again. Travis hopped the divide and she crawled the rest of the way.

Right around the corner was the service opening to access the underside of the escalators when they needed maintenance and she scrambled to it. Raking her nails along the panel she found the latch and almost didn't believe it when it opened. Scooting inside she slide the panel back.

She heard Travis outside. She held her breath until he had passed, then exhaled slowly in spite of her burning lungs. Something felt wet. She fumbled around in her pocket for her cell phone. Damn! She had already put it in her purse for closing. She held her arm up and felt it with the other hand. The flesh was jagged and bleeding. Travis must have scratched her in the scuffle. She could hear him searching still, drawing closer again.

She was so tired. I am going into shock, she thought, drawing her legs up and resting her head on her knees. If she was quiet maybe he would go away and she would be safe. She just had to close her eyes for a minute.

She woke when she heard the scrape of metal. The panel was being pulled back. Travis looked into the space. His eyes reflected light like an animals. He was chewing a bloody torn lip with his too sharp teeth. He slid into the space on all fours and leaned into her. He was trembling as if cold. She could smell his breath, metallic from the blood of rabbits. Inches from her face, he stopped. His pink stained drool dripped onto her shoulder. His eyes dimmed. He sat back, then turned and slowly started to move away.

Sally reached out and pulled him back. They were locked for a moment in an awkward embrace. Then she snapped his neck.

She pushed his body out of the opening and crawled out. The store was alive with the scents of the living who passed through earlier that day. She cocked her head to the side. The colors even in the dark were so vivid they almost hurt to see. She stepped daintily over Travis' body, casting him a distasteful look as she did so. He was imperfect. A failed process. Not like her.

She turned and strode up the elevator. She could hear the night outside, pulsing with life, and she headed toward that pulse. Out through the loading dock door. Her black eyes reflected the light, like an animal's. No, Travis wasn't like her. She was beautiful. Hungry. And the night was hers.