World-Mart (25 page)

“I shouldn’t have gone home without you!” she cried aloud.  “I should have kept looking!

“Then you both would have died in the cold,” said a woman who sounded eerily like Virginia.  Shelly looked around.  The garage had once again been opened to weekend foot traffic, but no one seemed to be addressing her.

“Where are you?” Shelley cried out, desperate to find the face to her phantom speaker.  “Show yourself!”

A few people turned to her, looking surprised and alarmed by her outburst.  She listened silently for the woman to say something more, but it was clear that she had gone.  Shelley hurried through the thin crowd as the shuttle to Housing inched its way in.  She found a seat, then waited for the shuttle to gain momentum.  It moved slowly through the heavy snowfall, and the lack of adequate interior heating left even complete strangers huddling together as they awaited their stops.  Shelley stared out the frost-clouded windows, watching what she could of the storm.  She happened by chance to spot a giant snowflake as it smacked against the window closest to her, holding its shape for a moment before it melded into the growing sheet of frost, and she couldn’t help but wonder how something so beautiful could also be so terribly destructive.

Her cheeks were raw with tears, her nose red and sore.  She couldn’t shake the image of Kurt’s frostbitten face from her mind.  His eyes had been frozen closed.  She wasn’t sure how she would have reacted if he had stared back at her through that frozen face.  Still, what was left of him seemed more like a wax doll than her brother . . . completely inanimate, as if it had never been alive at all.  It left Shelley with an emptiness that she couldn’t define.  It felt almost as if a small piece of death had forced its way onto her soul, threatening to turn all that was left of her foul and grey.  She fought to keep from hyperventilating as her mind’s eye brought Kurt’s face back to the forefront, only this time he stared right at her, his brown eyes glassy and still.  She cried out, and then shuddered at the realization that every person in the shuttle was staring at her.  She took slow, deliberate breaths, turning to her window and ignoring the
whispers
.

The shuttle strain
ed
to continue despite the storm.  The power threatened to go out a few times, the lights failing through the last several miles of Shelley’s ride.  By the time the shuttle got to her exit at Housing, she
felt ready to collapse
.
  She cried off and on, her eyes so puffy from tears and injury that she could barely see.
  She
made her way
home, planning to stay just long enough to calm down, warm up by the heater, pack some extra clothes, and gather a few provisions.  She tried to call Charlotte, hoping her parents might let her
stay
with them for a while, but no one answered.  After much deliberation, knowing that she absolutely could not face
her father’
s response to Kurt’s death, she decided to go to the church for the night, meet up with Charlotte in the morning at Sunday class, and then figure out the rest of her plans from there.  She hurried back to the shuttle garage, only to find all of the shuttle associates leaving their posts.

She hurried up to a nearby security associate.  “What’s going on?” she asked.

“Corporate’s given the order for everyone to stay indoors until the storm lets up,” the associate said, overseeing the small crowd of people as they hurried toward Housing.  “You should go home, miss.  Most of the shuttles are powering-down because of the
blizzard
.”

Shelley looked around, hoping to find just one shuttle that was still manned.

“You look like you’ve been crying.  Are you okay?” the security associate asked, glaring at her black eye.

She nodded.

“Then you should return home,” he said.  “You’re liable to freeze to death out here.”

Shelley frowned, knowing the associate was right.  She readjusted her bag over her shoulder and began the short walk back
home
.  Frustrated, she started crying again.  She rushed back to her apartment, afraid that someone else might see her in such a panicked state, and
she hurried
through the door and lock
ed
herself in once she reached it.

The apartment was just as dark and lonely as it had been
before
.  She stomped over to the wall heater in the kitchen and turned it back on before it had a chance to cool.  In a fit of rage, she punched the wall beside the heater, and then pulled back her hand with a defeated cry.  She massaged her scuffed and swelling knuckles, suddenly feeling positive that she hated just about everyone and everything.  There was nothing left for her here, nothing at all.

Shelley could remember life offering such mystery
w
hen she was a child, such excitement.  The world was filled with all different kinds of vibrant colors and fantastic smells, wonders to explore, and marvels to discover.  As the years went by, however, the colors seemed to fade slowly to shades of grey.  Her parents slowly taught her that dreams were the musings of fools, and that hope could only take a person so far.  No one was above the system.  They provided well enough for Shelley and Kurt, but the best they really could offer either of them, when it all came down to it, was a life of mediocrity.  Shelley suddenly felt certain that death was the only viable option she had left.

Sobbing, she started a hot shower.  She forced herself to face the mirror, staring, looking for something.  Nothing came, however, and so she gave herself a spiteful sneer.  The bruise around her eye now featured giant splashes of yellow and green, making her face all the more unsightly.  As she stared herself down, the eyes in the mirror seemed to take on a life of their own.  They stared back at her with disgust and hate, egging her on.  Crying aloud, Shelley picked up a shaver from the sink.  She carefully removed the razor and set it in the shower soap dish.

Removing only the first couple layers of clothes, Shelley hurried into the shower and allowed the hot water to douse her hair and body.  A shiver went through her as she sat down and allowed the water to beat down on her.  Her thoughts went to Virginia and Kurt, to her broken education, and to all of the new responsibilities that had been dropped down upon her.  Kurt’s face returned once more, and she screamed and cursed until the image retreated again to the back of her mind.  She breathed in the calming steam, telling herself nothing mattered anymore.  Her hands shaking, she held the razor up against her wrist.

She closed her eyes, afraid that she might go hysterical at the sight of so much of her own blood.  She took a deep breath, trying her best to remain calm and steady her hands.  She pressed the razor hard against her skin, swallowing what she told herself would be the last of her tears, but she could not bring herself to finish the deed.  She thought to give herself a moment, and then try again.

She took another mental inventory of all that had gone wrong in her life, knowing that her resolve to end it would return as soon as she thought enough about all of her grievances.  Instead, thoughts of a new purpose in life flashed through her mind, and she set the razor blade in the soap dish as she considered her vindictive idea: if she was going to die, she might as well take out as many deviants as she could first.  She
would
hold someone accountable for the inordinate amount of suffering she had been forced to endure.  Someone had to suffer for all that she had lost.  Perhaps she wouldn’t get the deviant directly responsible for her mother’s infection, but one way or another she would find a way to even the score.

She got out of the shower, stripping off the wet layers, quickly drying off, and putting on multiple layers of clean, dry clothes.  She wrapped
a
towel on her head, and then went back to the kitchen to prepare something to eat.  Saturday was usually chicken pot pie night, but Shelley decided that tonight, for a change, she would have spaghetti.  Filling a pot of water to boil, she dug out the spaghetti and canned sauce from the cupboard.

She sat by the wall heater as she waited for her dinner to heat, shaking her hair out of the towel and letting it air dry close to the glowing coils.  She glanced over at a small window, seeing nothing through the glass but snow and darkness.  The desire to write hit her, and she scrambled for a pen and paper.  The release came quickly, as cold, dark words fell from her fingers to the page in thick, hateful waves.  She wrote too quickly to keep her penmanship completely legible, scribbling line after line of cryptic, syncopated promise.  She stopped for a moment to review her new masterpiece, carefully reading each line.  Fully satisfied with the draft, she decided to self-publish.  She turned around, took a deep breath, and then wrote her entire poem across the wall in large block letters:

     The dim light flickers overhead

       and she contemplates the night

       with vengeance on her mind

       and a specter’s cold hands

       tight around her throat.

     The cold consumes her

       in more ways than one;

       thorns and heavy bags of ice

       only feed the fire within her

       and draw the demons ever nearer.

     The white snow washes out the dark sky

       only to be trampled and defecated on,

       reduced to black mud on the ground;

       what was once white and pure

       is bound to corruption.

     The light flickers out

       and she prepares herself,

       knowing what must be done;

       the specter slowly loosens its grip

       and she takes a deep, hateful breath.

She finished it with the most professional-looking signature she could manage, and stood back to admire her work.

“Genius,” she whispered aloud, tears streaming down her face.  “Pure genius.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

THE BASEMENT
had grown especially cold, although the snowstorm had finally ended a few hours ago.  The sky remained cloudy and ominous up until the Conrads decided to retire to their bedroom, prompting Virginia and Nadine to retire as well.  There were a few small, one-foot-tall windows in the basement, but all of them were close to the ceiling, right above ground level, and snow covered them completely.  Virginia stared at them anyway, pretending in the darkness that she was gazing out at the clear night sky.

Both Virginia and Nadine shivered beneath their blankets, both of them too cold to fall asleep.

Unable to take the cold any longer, Nadine grabbed her blanket and got up.

“Where are you going?” Virginia asked.

“The kitchen floor has got to be
warm
er than this,” Nadine said, and then disappeared up the stairs.

Virginia wasn’t sure how the Conrads would react to finding the both of them on the floor in the morning, and she decided to play it safe and stay where she was for the time being.  The rest of the house was much warmer, with central heating vents pushing hot air through every room, but almost none of the heat trickled down into the basement.  It hardly seemed humane for the Conrads to expect their hired help to sleep down in an unheated basement.  Virginia already understood, however, from her earlier findings online, that Corporates were anything but humane.