Chapter 7 Chapter 7

Something was wrong with his face. Not injured, nothing you could point at and name. You could just feel that something was wrong with him now. His eyes were too wide open. His mouth too was the same thing. His skin had gone past scared pale into something else.

He looked at Maya. Then Leo.

His mouth moved.

"They took her," he said. No feeling in it at all. Like a voice coming out of a speaker in an empty room.

"Took who?" Maya asked as she moved backwards by two steps.

"The server girl. She touched one of the mannequins. And they took her."

Leo felt something cold drop through him.

"When?" Maya said. "When did she touch one?"

The delivery driver just stood there under the bulb. No answer.

Leo noticed Maya was already backing toward the hallway.

"We need to go," she said.

"What's wrong with him?" Leo asked.

"Come on. Now."

Leo backed up with her. The delivery driver watched them moving away from him. He didn't follow. He just stood there.

Then he smiled. It was a wrong smile. Way too big for his face. Stretched out past the edges of where a smile is supposed to stop.

"She touched one," he said again. Same flat voice. "Now she's part of it. You'll be part of it too. Doesn't matter how long it takes. Everyone here becomes part of it eventually."

Maya pulled Leo by the arm and they ran.

Behind them the delivery driver started laughing. It wasn't his laugh. It was hollow and empty, like someone had found an old recording of a laugh somewhere and was just running it on a loop through his mouth.

They ran hard. The torch light was bouncing off concrete.

Then they stopped.

The food court was right in front of them.

Same one. Same bolted tables and chairs that couldn't be moved. Same lights doing that slow lazy flicker.

The server was at her table sitting still. Her head was tilted back. Mouth open. Eyes open and staring at absolutely nothing.

Leo turned to Maya in surprise. "The delivery guy said she was taken by the mannequins. Why is she still here?"

Maya chuckled. "I am not surprised. Didn't you sense something was off? That's not the delivery guy. That is a mannequin in disguise."

"Oh! My goodness! No way!" His eyes went wide, his eyebrows raised and his mouth opened in an oval shape. "No wonder he looked and behaved that way." Leo looked at her hands on the table.

They had turned plastic gray. From the tips of her fingers all the way back to her wrists, the same material as the mannequins.

Her freckles were still on her face. Her red hair was still pulled back the same way it always was. But the person who had put her hands over her face and been scared and human was just gone from behind her eyes. Nothing left in there.

Maya walked up to her slowly.

"Can you hear me?" she said.

The server girl didn't respond.

Maya reached her hand toward the server's shoulder. She stopped right before touching.

"Don't," Leo said.

She shook her head in agreement. "I know."

She pulled her hand back.

The server's head turned slowly. In little clicks. Like someone rotating a doll's head with their fingers, one small movement at a time.

Her eyes found Maya.

Her mouth opened.

"Help me," she said.

It was a small voice. The voice of someone still in there somewhere, buried deep inside whatever was happening to her, trying to reach through it.

"Tell me how," Maya said. "How do I help you?"

The server's mouth kept opening. Too far. Further than a mouth should open.

"I don't know," she said. "I don't know how. But please. It hurts so much."

Real tears came down her face. Warm and human and completely real.

Something in Leo's chest just broke and stayed that way.

Maya's fists were tight at her sides.

"I'm sorry," she said quietly. "I don't know how to help you. I really am sorry."

The server's face went blank. Just like a switch flipped. The tears stopped. Everything stopped.

"Nobody ever does," she said.

Her head clicked back to face front. She stared at the wall.

Maya stood there a moment longer than she needed to. Then she turned to Leo.

"Anchor Room," she said. "That's where we go."

"And her?"

"Nothing we can do."

"We can't just leave her sitting here like that."

"We can and we have to," Maya said. "We stay and we end up the same way. And then there's nobody left to get out."

Leo looked at her one more time. Her plastic hands. The empty space behind her eyes. Her hair was still neat like she'd just tied it up five minutes ago.

He turned and followed Maya.

They went across the food court. Past her. Past the chair where the delivery driver used to sit and bounce his leg until the whole table rattled. Past the table near the wall with those old plastic handprints pressed into the surface.

The double doors at the far end were open. The same ones that went back into the mannequin hallway.

Maya stopped at them and looked at Leo.

"Anchor Room is through there," she said. "We go back past the mannequins."

"They're still there?"

"They're always there. They don't want anyone to complete the mission. They are stationed there to stop us."

Leo breathed in, held it, and let it out.

"Alright," he said.

They went through.

Red carpet. White walls. Numbered doors. The hallway exactly as it had been the first time.

And the delivery driver was walking toward them from the far end. Slow and completely even. His leg was not bouncing. His face was calm in a way it had absolutely never been calm before. The kind of calm that isn't calm at all but is something else wearing calm's clothes.

Leo stopped walking. "What is he doing?"

Maya grabbed his arm. "Don't move. Don't say anything."

The delivery driver walked right past them like they weren't there. He didn't look. He didn't slow down. He walked straight toward the mannequins at the end of the hallway like he knew exactly where he was going and had made up his mind about it.

"Stop," Maya said. "Don't go near them. Please."

He didn't stop.

His arms hung at his sides. His steps didn't speed up or slow down. He looked like someone on a walk they've done a hundred times.

Leo watched him close the gap. Five feet from the woman in the blue dress. Three feet. One.

"Please," the delivery driver said. His voice was very quiet. "Just take me completely. I'm so tired of being used."

The woman in the blue dress tilted her head.

He reached out and put his hand on her arm.

Her mouth opened. But not the way a person's mouth opens. It was like a hole that had been underneath.

The delivery driver screamed.

His body went colorless all at once. His clothes went flat against him. He was being pulled into her like he was made of smoke, his face stretching out sideways, his eyes still wide open the whole time, his mouth still open and screaming but the sound had already stopped coming out.

Then, just like that, he was gone.

His clothes dropped to the carpet. The uniform. The shoes. The socks. Everything in a pile.

The woman looked down at the pile of clothes.

Then she looked up at Leo.

Her face had changed.

It had his face on it now. The delivery driver's face. His eyes, his mouth, his particular expression. But frozen solid into the plastic. Fixed in place and smiling.

Leo stumbled back in shock.

The hallway started to move.

Not the mannequins. The actual hallway. The walls leaned inward. The carpet rippled like there was something moving underneath it. The numbered doors started slamming shut, one after the next, all the way down the corridor. Each one hit like a gunshot.

"Run," Maya said.

They turned and ran for the food court.

Behind them the hallway was coming apart. Leo didn't look back once, nor did Maya.

Maya hit the food court door and they came through hard. They were panting hard and sweating.

They were back under the flickering lights. Back with the bolted furniture. The server girl was still at her table with her plastic hands flat on the surface and her eyes on nothing.

Maya grabbed Leo and pulled him across the room toward a door in the far wall he hadn't noticed before.

Behind them the food court door crashed open.

The mannequins walked through. The woman wearing the delivery driver's face. The man in the suit jacket. The child. All of them walking at the same steady pace. No rushing. They didn't need to rush and they seemed to know it.

Behind them the hallway kept collapsing. Darkness coming in like a wave right behind the mannequins, swallowing everything they had just walked through.

"Anchor Room," Maya said. "We will have to get there before this room goes too."

She pushed it open.

Leo went through right behind her.

Behind them the food court lights went out. One by one by one.

The mannequins kept walking in their steady pace towards the door they just went through.