The supermarket at the end of the High Street is deeper and darker than the rest of the stores, but
through the glass frontage, Seth thinks he can still see shelves filled with something. He shifts the
pack on his back and realizes, stupidly, that he's overloaded it with clothes and other supplies. No
place to put any groceries. He sets it down and starts to take stuff out that he can come back for, but
then something against a wall catches his eye.
That'll do.
It takes him nearly fifteen minutes to get a rusty shopping cart separated from the petrified row of
them, but eventually it comes, its wheels even mostly turning if he forces them hard enough.
It's easier to throw a brick the second time, though once inside, the store is much darker than he
thought. The ceiling is low, and the aisles block any view of what they might be hiding in their depths.
He thinks of the bats again. And what if there was something larger in there than a fox? Did England
have big predators? There were mountain lions and bears in the forests back home, but he couldn't
remember a single dangerous thing anyone ever mentioned as living in England.
He listens to the silence.
Nothing. Nothing at all beyond his breathing. No hum of electricity, no sound of things rustling.
Though, he supposes, the smashing of the doors could have silenced anything in here.
He waits. But still there's nothing.
He starts to push the unforgiving cart down the aisles.
The produce section is completely empty. The bays yawn open, with only a few shriveled husks of
unidentifiable fruits and vegetables at the bottom, and as he goes from aisle to aisle, his hopes start to
sink a little. The shelves do have stuff on them, but they've gone much the way of the things in the
kitchen cabinets. Dusty old boxes that crumble upon touch, jars of once-red tomato sauce now
blackened within, a section of egg cartons that have clearly been ripped apart by a hungry beast.
But he turns a corner and there's good news. Batteries, lots of them. Many are corroded but some
are okay. It only takes a few tries before his big flashlight is working.
Torch, he thinks, shining it down a long dark aisle, seeing piles of flour scattered across the floor.
The English call this a torch.
He balances the torch on the shopping cart and picks his way through the rest of the supermarket,
finding some bottled water but not much else. Eventually, he realizes there's going to be nothing much
of use anywhere – not the loaves of bread shrunk to nothing inside their wrappers, not the unplugged
freezer chests filled with a black mold that smells like rancid olives, not the packages of cookies and
crackers that are so much dust – nothing except the two aisles with most of the cans.
Again, many of them are rusted beyond use or so bulging with bacteria that Seth can practically
hear it growing inside, but moving the torch up and down the shelves, he finds plenty that look normal,
if dusty. He fills his cart with soups and pastas, with corn and peas, with even, he's delighted to find,
custard. There are so many cans, in fact, he'd have to make several trips here to even make a dent in
them.
So, enough to feed him. For a while.
For however long he might be here.
The darkness and silence of the supermarket, even with the comfortably heavy torch in his hand,
suddenly feels like too much. Too oppressive, too heavy.
"Quit it," he tells himself. "You'll go crazy if you think like this."
But he puts his weight behind the cart and gets himself back out into the daylight.
He's tiring again, he can feel it, and the hunger is a real thing now, almost as bad as yesterday's thirst.
He spies some green up around a corner from the market and remembers the little park there, sliding
down a hill into a small valley with fountains and paths.
He pushes the cart, grunting at the effort, until he's at the top of the park. It's grown up like a jungle,
unsurprisingly, but the basic shape is still there. There's even a little sandbox area nearby. It's about
the only place here free of weeds.
"This'll do," he says, and lets his backpack fall to his feet.
He follows the directions on the camp stove, and five minutes later, there's enough butane left in
the small canister to heat up a can of spaghetti he opened with a far-less-rusty can opener he also took
from the store. It's only when the spaghetti is boiling that he realizes he didn't take any knives or
forks. He clicks off the stove and has no choice but to wait for it to cool.
He takes a bottle of water from the cart and holds it up to the sun. It looks clear, clearer than the
water from his tap anyway, but even though the seal is unbroken, the water is still half-evaporated
away. He cracks it open, the bottle giving a little hiss as he does so. It smells all right, so he takes a
drink and looks down at the park below him.
It's familiar, yes, despite the wildness, but what does familiar mean? he wonders. This place looks
like a version of his childhood home stuck in time, but that doesn't mean it's actually the same place.
It feels real enough. Certainly to the touch, and definitely to the nose. But it's also a world that only
seems to have him in it, so how real can it be? If this is just a dusty old memory that he's trapped in,
maybe it isn't really even a place at all, maybe it's just what happens when your final dying seconds
turn into an eternity. The place of the worst season of your life, frozen forever, decaying without ever
really dying.
He takes another sip of water. Whatever this place might be, they'd never come all that much to the
real version of the park. Sandbox and small play area aside, the steepness of the hill prevented it from
being much fun. A big brick wall across the bottom of the main incline made even skateboarders
avoid the challenge, so it must have been more a place for High Street workers to take a smoke break.
But there is the pond still, at the bottom, kidney-shaped but surprisingly clear-looking. He would
have expected a film of algae across the top, but it actually looks cool and inviting on a hot summer
day. There's a rock in the middle that was usually covered with ducks preening themselves. There
aren't any today, but the sun is so bright, the day so clear and warm, that it somehow seems like ducks
might swoop in at any moment.
He looks up, half thinking that his thoughts might create them. They don't.
He's hot in his over-warm hiking clothes, and the pond looks so inviting that he has a fleeting
impulse to jump in, have a refreshing swim, have something even like a bath and just allow himself to
float, suspended in water –
He stops.
Suspended in water, he thinks.
The terror of it, the sheer awful terror that never seemed to stop. Fear was bearable when you could
see an end to it, but there was no end in sight out in those freezing waves, those pitiless fists of ocean
that cared nothing for you, that tipped you over and down in a kind of callous blindness, filling your
lungs, smashing you against rocks –
He reaches around to where his shoulder blade snapped. He can remember the pain of it, can
remember the irrevocable snap of the bone breaking. He feels a little sick at the thought, even though
his shoulder here, in this place, works fine.
Then he wonders where his body is.
In whatever world this isn't, out there where he died, where is he? He wonders if he's washed
ashore yet. He wonders if they even know to look for him in the ocean or on the beach, because he
wasn't supposed to be there, no one was supposed to be there at that time of year. Freezing winter on
an angry, rocky coast? Why would anyone be near the water, much less in it?
Not unless they were forced.
Not unless someone forced them.
He feels another pain in his stomach, an unease at the memory of his last moments on the beach that
makes him feel even sicker. He screws the cap back on the water bottle and forces himself to return to
the spaghetti, now cooled enough to eat. He makes a mess of it, tipping it into his mouth and slopping
it onto one of his new T-shirts, not caring much.
He wonders how his parents found out. Would he have been gone long enough to be missed before
his body was found? Would they have been surprised by policemen showing up at the door, carrying
their hats under their arms and asking to come in? Or would they have been worried by his absence,
growing more worried by the hour, until it became clear something had gone wrong?
Or if time worked the same here as it did there – though the warm summer here and the freezing
winter there put that into question, and he had no idea how long that first purgatorial bit on the path
had lasted, but still – he might have only died late the day before yesterday or even early yesterday
morning. It's possible they haven't even noticed yet. His parents might think he's at a friend's house
for the weekend, and between Owen's clarinet lessons and his mum's running and his father's
decision to start redoing the bathroom, they might still be unaware that he's gone at all.
They never had noticed him all that much. Not after what happened.
In fact, maybe, secretly, they'd have some guilty happiness that it wasn't Owen who had drowned.
Maybe they'd be a little relieved that Seth was no longer a walking reminder of that summer before
they moved. Maybe –
Seth sets down the empty can of spaghetti and wipes his mouth with his sleeve.
Then he wipes his eyes with his other sleeve.
But, he thinks, it's possible to die before you die.
There's no one walking through the park, no one in this world at all who can see him sitting on the
edge of the sandbox, but he lowers his face down to his knees, as he can't help but weep once more.