CHAPTER 1
Frozen.
Completely and utterly freaking frozen.
One second the woman had been speaking. She had, in fact, been half way through the nice of have a nice day. Her mouth was still forming the ni of nice, the syllable was the last sound she’d uttered before she’d completely stopped moving. Her face hadn't gone slack, her hand hadn't dropped to her side, she hadn't fallen to the ground but simply become freaking frozen into this strange mannequin-like thing standing behind the counter.
She stared unerringly at me, but it seemed as if she didn't see me as I watched her unblinking, vacant brown eyes. I kept waiting for her to come back to life, to finish her sentence, to hand me my change, but as the seconds ticked into minutes I began to realize that she wasn't going to move. Began to realize that she was not playing some sort of sick, demented trick on me.
She had in fact suddenly, instantaneously, been struck completely immobile.
It was the oddest, most unnerving thing I had ever seen and all I could do was gape at her. I continued to stand there, not because I wanted to, no one in their right mind would want to keep standing there, but simply because I was shocked into immobility. I hadn't been struck suddenly inert like the woman across from me, but I was entirely immobile as I gazed at her. I finally managed to close my mouth. Not because I was recovering from the astonishment that still gripped me so tightly, but because a little bit of drool had started to form at the corners of my mouth, and my jaw actually hurt from gawking at her for so long.
Though I managed to make the small movement of closing my mouth, I couldn't make any others. I couldn't drop the arm that was extended across the counter. I couldn't close the open hand still waiting in expectation of my change clasped within the woman’s hand. I had absolutely no intention of touching the woman in order to retrieve it either.
I didn’t care how scarce money was nowadays, I was not touching her. If I was going to get my money back I would have to touch her. I would actually have to pry open her clasped fingers in order to retrieve what was mine, because it was becoming extremely obvious that the woman was not going to move again.
I shuddered at the thought as the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. I knew no one was behind me but I couldn't shake the feeling that there was someone standing just behind me, breathing down my back. I didn’t know what that woman's hand felt like; it was probably still warm because she had only frozen minutes ago. Even though she was still on her feet, even though I didn’t know if she really was dead, in my mind her hand would feel as cold and clammy as a corpse’s.
A small spasm jerked through my extended arm, causing it to jump a little. It wasn’t the aching pain in my rigid arm that finally caused me to pull it back, but the fact that the small twitch had almost caused me to touch her. The mere thought made my stomach feel as if it had a hundred worms crawling through it. My arm fell limply back to my side, my mouth parted again.
For the first time in awhile, I blinked. Then, I closed my watering eyes, as I prayed that everything would be normal when I opened them once more. It was not.
Slowly I raised my hand and waved it in front of her unblinking, unseeing eyes. She remained as blank as a slate. I thought that perhaps I should hit her, maybe pinch her, but that brought me back to the having to touch her aspect. Throw something at her? I glanced at the gum stacked before the counter. It was a soft projectile but hard enough that it would get someone’s attention. Maybe it would wake her up, but I didn’t think it would work, and I couldn’t bring myself to heave something at the defenseless woman. It seemed as bad as stealing candy from a child.
I took a small step back, swallowing heavily as I looked around the store. Though it hadn't been crowded, it was easy to pick out every person amongst the racks of souvenir clothes (clothes that didn’t sell much anymore, at least not to tourists as we had few of them now) and candy counters. Mainly because they were all as still as stone too. I doubted throwing something at them would work either.
It was eerily quiet within the store. I didn’t hear any movement on the street outside either. Driving had been banned a month ago (I now realized why), but I didn’t even hear the hum of bicycle tires or the thumping footsteps of the passing crowd. The muted murmur of conversations had vanished. The street sounded just as dead as the store now appeared. The hum of the store’s air conditioner made my hair stand up even more as it seemed unnaturally loud in the unnerving hush.
I turned toward the door but the blinds had been drawn over the window to block out the summer sunlight. It was impossible to see if the rest of the world had been as affected as the store. I tried to believe that it hadn’t, that this store was an isolated incident, but I knew it wasn’t. A cold chill, that had nothing to do with the ac unit, raced down my spine. The room swam and blurred before me as fear threatened to choke me.
The store was cool but I was sweating profusely. I could barely breathe as I tried to gasp in air but my lungs didn't want to cooperate. Nausea coiled through me, it burned its way up my throat. My mouth was flooded with saliva and I felt like I'd been sucking on copper pennies, but I was somehow able to keep it down. This was the weirdest, creepiest, most terrifying thing I had experienced in years, but I could not throw up in this store. The act of doing so somehow seemed even more wrong and degrading than the situation surrounding me now.
I was hyperventilating though. I knew that. I couldn’t breathe and yet the more I panted for air, the less I was able to get into my lungs. I needed fresh air, I needed out of this store. My bag was still on the counter, but I was reluctant to grasp hold of it. I was sure my mom would forgive me for not bringing the milk home.
My mom!
My heart was beating with the force of a jackhammer as my chest constricted. Nausea swelled swiftly through me again. I managed to take a stumbling, awkward step back. Was my mom like these people? Was she one of them now, or was she like me? Was there anyone else like me? Was I the only one? And why was I still able to move while they couldn’t? What had happened to them, would it happen to me?
That thought caused my adrenaline to kick so fiercely that I was shaking from the effects of it. I glanced over the people again. They remained frozen. Not a one of them had moved in the past five minutes. I hadn’t even seen them take a breath, but they had to be breathing, didn’t they? Were they dead? Would they ever move again?
The questions rolled rapidly through my mind, my head began to spin. The questions kept hitting me, but I didn’t have answers to any of them. I couldn’t even begin to fathom the answers to any of them. Though I didn't feel like going anywhere near the woman again, I knew I had to grab that bag. If my mom wasn’t like this, then I suddenly had to deliver that milk to her. And if she was…