He took off down the road, heading back the way he’d come earlier with Mei. If he got to the village, he could find someone to help him. He’d tell them about the crazy people in the tea shop in the middle of the woods.
The hook in his chest pulled sharply, the cable growing taut as it wrapped around his side. He almost fell to his knees. He managed to stay upright, flip-flops snapping against the bottoms of his feet. How on earth had he ever thought flip-flops were a good idea?
He glanced back over his shoulder toward the tea shop in time to see Mei and Hugo burst out onto the porch, shouting after him. Mei said, “Of all the stupid things” just as Hugo said, “Wallace, Wallace, you can’t, you don’t know what’s out there—” but Wallace doubled down, running as fast as he could.
He’d never been much of a runner, much less a jogger of any kind. He had a treadmill in his office, often walking long distances on it while on conference calls. He had time for little else, but at least it was something.
He was surprised, then, to find that his breath didn’t catch in his chest, that no stitch formed in his side. Even wearing flip-flops didn’t seem to slow him down much. The air was strangely stagnant, thick and oppressive, but he was running, running faster than he ever had in his life. He glanced down in shock at his own legs. They were almost a blur as his feet met the pavement of the road that led to the village. He laughed despite himself, a wild cackle that he’d never heard himself make before, sounding as if he were half out of his mind.
He looked back over his shoulder again.
Nothing there, no one chasing after him, no one shouting his name, only the empty, dark road that led to destinations unknown.
It should have made him feel better.
It didn’t.
He ran as fast as he could toward a gas station ahead, the sodium arc lights lit up like a beacon, moths fluttering around them. An old van sat parked next to one of the pumps, and he could see people moving around inside. He ran toward it, only stopping when he reached the automatic doors.
They didn’t open.
He jumped up and down in front of them, waving his arms.
Nothing.
He shouted, “Open the doors!”
The man behind the counter continued to look bored, tapping on his phone.
A woman toward the back of the store stood in front of a drink cooler, scratching her chin as she yawned.
He growled under his breath before reaching out to pry the doors open. His hands went right through them.
“Oh, right,” he said. “Dead. Goddammit.”
He walked through the doors.
The moment he entered, the fluorescent lights in the store above him flared and buzzed. The man behind the counter—a kid with enormous eyebrows and a face dotted with dozens of freckles—frowned as he looked up. He shrugged before going back to his phone.
Wallace smacked it out of his hands.
At least he tried to.
It didn’t work.
He also tried to grab the man by the face with the same amount of success. Wallace recoiled when his thumb went into the man’s eye. “This is so stupid,” he muttered. He turned toward the woman in the back, still staring at the coolers. He went to her without much hope. She didn’t hear him. She didn’t see him. Instead, she picked out a two-liter of Mountain Dew.
“That’s disgusting,” he told her. “You should feel ashamed. Do you even know what’s in that?”
But his opinion went unnoticed.
The automatic doors slid open, and Wallace ducked down when the clerk said, “Hey, Hugo. You’re out late.”
“Couldn’t sleep,” Hugo said. “Thought I’d pick a few things up.”
Wallace tried to lean against a shelf of potato chips. He cursed when he fell back through them, blinking rapidly as he was inside the shelf. He jerked forward, ready to flee when the doors slid open again. He froze when the man behind the counter said, “Hey, Mei. Can’t sleep either?”
“You know how it is,” Mei said. “Boss man’s up, so that means I’m up too.”
The man could see her.
He could see her.
Which meant—
Wallace had no idea what that meant.
Before he could even begin to process this new information, a curious thing happened: bits of dust floated up around him.
He frowned at them, watching as they rose before his face, heading toward the ceiling. The motes of dust were oddly colored, almost flesh-like. He reached out to touch a rather large flake, but his hand froze when he saw where the dust was coming from.
His own arms.
His skin was flaking off, bit by bit, the top layer of derma floating up and away.
He yelped as he furiously brushed his arms.
“Got you,” Mei said, appearing beside him. And then, “Oh crap. Wallace, we have to get you—”
He leapt forward toward the coolers.
Through the coolers.
He yelled incoherently as he went through a row of soda, and then a wall of cement. He was outside again, on the side of the store. He ran his hands over his arms as his skin continued to flake. The hook in his chest twisted angrily, the cable running back into the wall he’d just rushed through. He ran around the back of the store. An empty field stretched behind it under a night sky that seemed infinite. On the other side was another neighborhood, the houses close together, some with lights on, others dark and foreboding. He took off toward them, still rubbing his arms frantically.
He crossed the field and went between two houses. Music blared from the house on his right; the house to his left was silent and dark. He burst through the wall of the right house directly into a bedroom where a woman in a full-body suit of red leather slapped a riding crop against her palm, her attention on a man in footie pajamas who said, “This is going to be so awesome.”
“Oh dear god,” Wallace croaked before backing out of the house slowly. He turned toward the street in front of the houses.
He paused when his feet met pavement. He wasn’t sure where to go, and now the skin on his legs was flaking off through his sweats and off the top of his feet. His ears were ringing, and the world had taken on a hazy glow, the colors running together. The cable flashed violently, the hook shaking.
He hurried down the sidewalk, wanting to get as far as he could. But it was as if the bottoms of his flip-flops had melted, sticking to the concrete. Each and every step was harder than the one before it, like he was moving under water. He grunted at the exertion. The ringing in his ears grew louder, and he couldn’t focus. He gritted his teeth as he tried to push through it. The fingernail from the pinkie of his right hand slid off and disintegrated.
He curled his hand into a fist as he looked up. There, standing in the middle of the street, was a man.
But he was wrong, somehow, off in ways that turned Wallace’s skin to ice. The man was hunched over, his back to Wallace, his shirtless torso covered in gray, sickly skin, his spine jutting out sharply. His shoulders shook as if he were heaving. His pants hung low on his hips. His sneakers were scuffed and dirty. His arms hung boneless at his sides.
A chill ran down Wallace’s spine even as he took another step, everything in him screaming to back away, to run before the man turned around. He didn’t want to see what the man’s face looked like, sure it would be just as terrible as the rest of him. All sound seemed muffled, as if his ears were stuffed with cotton. When he spoke, it sounded like it came from someone else, his voice cracking. “Hello? Are you … can you hear me?”