Aisle Seven Is a Safe Zone

At 3:09 a.m. the soup was winning.

Dev Okafor had forty-eight tins of cream of tomato on a pallet and a shelf that held thirty-six. He'd done the maths twice. The maths stayed the same, which was the trouble with maths.

He clicked the price gun against his thigh. Click. Click. The fridges along the back wall buzzed their one long note, and the store smelled of lemon floor cleaner, the kind that scrubbed the inside of your nose.

His phone sat on the pallet, screen lit.

Ky. I know you don't want to hear from me but

He held the delete key until the words ran backwards into nothing.

Saw the bridge is closed for roadworks. Thought of

Delete.

I should have been there.

His thumb hovered. The radio over the tills played a song about summer, at a volume meant for nobody. He pushed his reading glasses up onto his head, where they would live until he forgot them, and typed one word.

Ky

At 3:12 the radio stopped mid-chorus.

The fridges stopped. The lights went out all at once, with no flicker. His phone went black under his thumb with the single word still on it.

For one second the dark was total. Then a blue square opened at the level of his eyes, bright as a pharmacy sign.

[Structure claimed: FRESHWAY, UNIT 4. Status: SAFE ZONE. Keeper assigned: Devon Okafor, sole occupant. Level 1. Zone Points: 0.]

Dev read it twice. He clicked the price gun at it, which did nothing, which was fair.

"No," he told the square. "I'm on nights."

The square closed. Somewhere under his trainers, under aisle seven's speckled tiles, something began to hum. Low and steady, like a fridge that had decided to keep working without the fridge.

* * *

He went to the front because the front had windows, and the car park would have an explanation in it.

It had dead streetlights. The only light was the moon and a faint blue line on the floor just inside the automatic doors, thin as chalk, running the width of the entrance.

Out on the tarmac, something moved between the trolley bays. Then several somethings.

They were low, the size of large dogs, wrong in the middle. Ridges ran down their backs like the spines of a closed book. They walked the way water finds a slope, choosing nothing, going everywhere. He stopped counting at nine because counting didn't help.

Dev stepped back. His hip caught the baked-bean pyramid he'd built at midnight because nobody had ever told him not to.

A tin dropped and rolled, loud as a bell in the dead store.

Every head in the car park turned. Not toward him. Toward the sound, nine ridged heads swinging as one to the patch of glass nearest the tin. Then the closest one came.

It crossed the car park in four strides and hit the door hard enough to shake it in its runners. Dev flinched so badly his glasses dropped onto his nose.

Its claw rested on the far side of the blue line. It didn't push. It didn't scratch. It stood like a dog at an invisible fence, ridges twitching.

The tin settled against the trolley stack. After a moment the creature turned toward some sound Dev couldn't hear and ambled off.

"Okay," Dev whispered. "Okay. Line. They stop at the line."

He heard himself, and shut up. Noise. They came to noise.

He picked up the tin and held it to his chest like it might apologise.

* * *

The woman came up the ramp at twenty to four.

He heard her first: wellies slapping wet tarmac, hard breathing through the nose. She wore a quilted dressing gown the colour of a sticking plaster and swung an open golf umbrella in front of her like a riot shield.

Behind her, three ridged heads had lifted.

She reached the doors and hit the glass with the flat of her hand. The doors didn't slide. Nothing was automatic anymore.

"Open it," she said through the glass. Not shouting. "Young man. I can see you."

Dev stood behind the blue line with the price gun in his hand.

Click.

He was a stack-the-shelves person, a sorry-we're-out-of-that person. He'd chosen nights four years ago because at night nobody needed you to be anything but awake.

"They can't get in," he said, low. "You're fine if you just stay still."

"I'm on the wrong side of the line, love. That's rather the point."

Click.

One creature reached the bottom of the ramp. She turned the umbrella toward it.

Click.

"Oh, for God's sake," Dev said, mostly to himself, and ran for the stockroom.

The pallet bar was where Gary from days always left it, leaning on the cardboard baler: a metre of red steel with a flattened hook at one end. Dev grabbed it, stuffed two tins of soup into his hoodie pockets without quite deciding to, and ran back.

He jammed the hook between the doors and pulled.

The rubber seals peeled apart with a wet kiss. Four inches. Six. Outside, three heads swung toward the noise.

"Sorry," he told them.

"Don't apologise to them," the woman said. "Pull."

A foot. He got his shoulder in and shoved, and the door ground back on its dead runners far enough for a person. She was turned the wrong way, fending off the nearest creature, its ridges brushing the canopy.

She wasn't going to make it on her own. He could see that the way he could see thirty-six didn't go into forty-eight.

He stepped over the blue line.

It felt like walking out of a warm house without a coat, except the cold was in his chest. Something behind his breastbone pulled, firm and specific, as if a finger had hooked a loop there and was tugging him back toward aisle seven.

A blue square flickered at the edge of his vision. 00:58. 00:57. It didn't say what it was counting toward.

Dev pulled a tin from his pocket and threw it across the car park.

It was a bad throw. He'd never been a thrower. But it hit the roof of a parked hatchback with a clang like a dropped saucepan, and every ridged head in the dark turned toward it.

He grabbed the woman by her dressing-gown belt. "Inside."

"Mind the umbrella."

He didn't. It caught on the frame, the spokes snapped, and in the struggle the door edge opened his palm like a letter. He felt it as heat, then wet.

00:41.

He hauled. She came through backwards over the line, wellies squeaking, and he went after her and landed on his backside on the lemon-scented floor.

The pull in his chest let go. The countdown vanished.

The nearest creature had abandoned the hatchback. It stopped dead at the line, nose an inch from the gap, claw raised. Then a bin lid banged in the wind and it went to investigate.

The woman lowered what was left of the umbrella.

"Well," she said. "You took your time."

* * *

Her name was Margaret Ellis, and within ten minutes she'd found the head torches in camping, the first-aid shelf in aisle three, and the good scissors at the till that Dev had been told never to lend anyone.

She sat him on a crate among the tinned peaches and shone a torch on his hand.

"Hold still."

"I am holding still."

"You're holding still the way a cat holds still. Flex your fingers. All of them. Good."

The antiseptic stung like gossip. While she worked she hummed, slow and certain, a hymn shape that assumed the building would still be standing at the end of it.

On her left wrist was a man's watch, steel and heavy, the strap on the last hole and still sliding. She checked it every couple of minutes.

"Does that still work?" he asked.

"It's wind-up." She didn't look up. "It's always worked."

"Whose is it?"

"It'll want a stitch or two, this," she said. "Strips for now. I've nothing I'd trust in a needle."

"You've done this before."

"Forty-one years on wards. I've closed worse with less." She pressed the strips down, firm. "Do you work here?"

He looked at the dark aisles, the silent fridges, the doors he'd broken.

"I'm just the night shift."

"Then you're who's here." She snapped the kit shut. "I'm having that first-aid shelf. Leave the plasters alone, I'm counting them."

"You're counting the plasters."

"Somebody has to." She checked the watch again. Her mouth tightened at whatever it told her, and then she was humming, moving off down the aisle with the torch swinging ahead like she'd managed the place for years.

Dev looked at his hand. Neat white strips, brown already showing through.

He'd opened a door. People opened doors constantly.

He clicked the price gun with his good hand. It felt different, and he didn't like that it did.

* * *

She built a bed in the pet aisle out of dog beds, three large and two medium end to end, with a fleece throw from seasonal on top. It looked ridiculous and more comfortable than his flat.

"There." She lowered herself onto it with a small grunt. "You don't need to keep watch, you know. I saw that one stop."

"Somebody does."

"Do they?"

"Somebody should," he said, which wasn't the same thing, and they both heard that it wasn't.

"Is there somebody you'd rather be watching for?"

He picked up the pallet bar. "Go to sleep, Margaret."

"That's a yes," she said to the ceiling.

He took a crate to the front and sat facing the doors with the bar across his knees. He didn't try to close the gap. Closing it would be loud.

Out in the car park the creatures moved and stopped and moved, following the small noises of a city with nothing left to hum it to sleep. A car alarm, briefly. A dog. Then no dog.

Past the retail park the river would be running black under the closed bridge. Beyond it, the flats on Halsey Street. Third floor.

Dev took out his phone. Dead glass. He turned it over in his good hand and didn't put it away.

Behind him the humming stopped, and her breathing went long and slow.

When the sky turned the grey of old dishwater, a small square opened in front of him.

[1 occupant slept safely within the Zone. +1 Zone Point. Keeper experience gained.]

One point. Not for anything he'd fought or killed. For a woman in a dressing gown sleeping on dog beds.

"That's it?" he said quietly. "That's the job?"

The square closed. It didn't have an opinion.

The hum under the floor changed. All night it had been almost a feeling. Now it rose until the tins on the nearest shelves buzzed in answer. It was coming from aisle seven.

He went, pallet bar in one hand, glasses on his head.

The soup pallet stood where he'd left it at 3:09. Beside it, one tile was cracked across the middle. He'd mopped round that crack for two years. Now its edges glowed blue.

He knelt, wedged the metal base of the price gun into the crack and levered. The tile came up in two pieces.

Underneath, the concrete had split around something no bigger than an apple pip. A point of blue-white light, with roots. Fine threads branched from it into the concrete, the way a seed in wet cotton wool pushes out its first white hairs. The threads pulsed in time with the hum.

As he watched, they pulsed in time with him.

[Zone core bonded to Keeper. The Keeper may not remain beyond the threshold longer than 60 seconds. At 0, the bond is severed. A severed core does not regrow.]

Dev read it until the words stopped being words.

"Sixty seconds," he said to the light.

He'd spent nineteen of them on a stranger's dressing-gown belt.

He looked past the soup and the dead fridges and the forced gap at the front, to where grey light came in over the rooftops. Toward the river. Toward a bridge he couldn't reach in a minute, not if he ran the whole way and nothing on the far side had ears.

In his hoodie pocket, the dead phone still said Ky.