Doomsday Supermarket

Chapter 3 - Open Sign

Chapter 3 · 1,121 words

Wren moved the first batch of supplies to the perimeter edge an hour later.

He used the stock cart, loading it with canned goods (soup, vegetables, beans, things with long shelf lives) and bottled water, twelve-packs that he stacked carefully so they wouldn't shift during transport. He wheeled the cart through the store and out the automatic doors, across the concrete apron, to the edge of the light where the asphalt began its transition to darkness.

He arranged the cans in rows. Six cans wide, four rows deep. Soup on the left, vegetables in the middle, beans on the right. He stacked the water bottles beside them, three twelve-packs, labels facing outward. The arrangement was neat, deliberate, the same way he'd faced products on shelves for three years. Neatness was something he could control.

Then he went back for the lighting.

The store's emergency supply section had four portable LED units, battery-powered floodlights meant for power outages, the kind that clipped onto shopping carts or sat on the floor during blackouts. He'd never used them. They were still in their packaging. He took all four, walked them to the perimeter edge, and positioned them at cardinal points around his supply cache: north, south, east, west. He angled them outward, away from the store, so their beams reached into the darkness as far as the batteries would allow.

The extra light didn't reach far. Maybe ten meters beyond the store's own perimeter fixtures. But it was something. It was a signal.

He sat down on the apron's concrete curb, twenty meters from his supply cache, and watched.

The portable lights cast their cones into the dark, and the darkness absorbed them without concession. Wren could see the edge of the light clearly, the point where illumination ended and the black began, and beyond that edge, he could hear.

The sounds carried a pattern, a rhythm of movement and stillness that suggested intention. Something large passed through the darkness to his left, heavy footsteps on asphalt, a pause, then a scraping sound as whatever it was dragged itself against the curb that marked the parking lot's edge. The sound moved away, receding into the distance, and was replaced by a different sound from the right: a low, resonant vibration that might have been vocalization, might have been something else entirely.

Wren counted the sounds. He gave each one a number, the way he'd counted inventory. One: large, left side, moving away. Two: resonant, right side, stationary. Three: a new sound, ahead, something clicking against the pavement in a rapid, irregular pattern, too fast for footsteps, too rhythmic for debris.

He sat on the curb and listened to the darkness breathe.

The temperature dropped as the hours passed. The store's recycled warmth didn't reach this far from the building, and he could see his breath in the portable lights' beams. He went back inside, found a thermos in the break room, filled it with the last of the coffee from the pot that had gone cold hours ago, and brought it back to his post.

The coffee was terrible. He drank it anyway.

The sounds beyond the light continued through the long hours. Shapes passed through the darkness, some large, some small, some fast, some slow. He counted fourteen distinct movements before the cold worked past his clothing and settled into his shoulders and the base of his neck. His back ached from the curb. His legs were stiff. He shifted position, stretched, and looked at the store behind him. The building was a rectangle of light in the void, its windows glowing, its perimeter fixtures casting their industrial circles. It looked like the last building on earth.

He thought about the people who might be out there. Survivors. Other people who had been inside buildings when the designation happened, who were now trapped in their own fifty-meter circles, or who had no circle at all. Were there other stores? Other operators? The interface hadn't said. It had given him his countdown and his criteria and nothing else.

The sounds beyond the light changed character as the night deepened. The individual movements gave way to a sustained presence. The things in the darkness settled, their separate passages ceasing into a continuous, low-frequency hum that seemed to come from everywhere at once, a vibration in the air and the ground and the bones of his skull.

Wren watched the supply cache. The cans were still arranged in their neat rows. The water bottles stood in their stacked formation. The portable lights burned. No one came.

He thought about going back inside. The store was warm. The terminal was running. There was nothing to be gained from sitting on a cold curb in the dark. But he stayed. The countdown was running. Every hour he spent watching was an hour closer to understanding whether anyone was out there, whether the signals meant anything, whether the store's light was visible to anyone who might need it.

Dawn didn't arrive. Not really. The darkness beyond the light remained dark, and the sky above, if there was a sky, showed no change. The store's perimeter lights continued to burn with the same steady output. Time existed only in the countdown and in Wren's body's accumulating record of cold, stiffness, and exhaustion.

He'd been outside for nine hours when a shape appeared at the edge of the light.

It was large, larger than anything he'd heard moving in the darkness, and it moved along the perimeter's edge with a slow, deliberate gait, its outline visible for a moment in the portable lights' beams before it passed beyond them and continued into the dark. He couldn't make out details. He could see mass. He could see movement. He could see that whatever it was, it was not human, and it was not interested in the store.

Wren watched it go. He looked at his supply cache, the cans, the water, the lights, and then at the darkness beyond, and then at the store behind him. He had made himself visible. He had built a signal. And the only things it had attracted were the shapes that already owned the dark.

The thermos was empty. The cold was absolute. Wren stood up from the curb, his joints cracking, and looked out at the light's edge one more time.

Nothing human. Nothing that needed what he was selling.

He picked up the thermos and walked back to the store. Behind him, at the very margin where the portable lights' beams dissolved into black, something shifted, a scrape of weight on asphalt, deliberate and close, the way something sounds when it has decided to stop moving and start waiting.

---