“Holy shit,” Zoe chuckled.
“Wait, quiet,” Tyler ordered. The three listened for a little while longer but no sound came. “Do you think that was a natural sound, or someone else?”
“If it’s someone else, that means they either are already in here, or that clang was them arriving,” Nami thought to herself.
“Which means if they used our entrance, they’re between it and us,” Zoe finished the thought. “We can’t just run for it.”
“But if they’re already here, they could be anywhere!” Tyler countered.
“That echo sounds like it was from pretty far away,” said Nami.
“Yeah, but if it’s that echoey but that loud, it had to be big,” Tyler pointed out. “We’re not talking like a mouse or something. Either this place is more unstable than we thought, or there’s someone else in here.”
“Wow, both options suck. Thanks, Tyler,” Zoe sarcastically grumbled.
“You suck,” Tyler shot back.
Normally, the trio were never quite this humorous when a situation like this unfolded. This type of situation only happened once before, when a security guard was looking over the field they were wandering on. The three hid and shivered with fright. Oddly, this time there was no shivering. In fact, the trio kind of found it… exciting, in a weird way.
“I actually kinda like this,” Zoe said out loud to no one in particular. “Is this what being an adrenaline junkie is like?”
“A-ha! Junkie! And you came down on me for saying hobo bum,” Tyler replied.
“If it has the word ‘adrenaline’ in front of it, it clearly means something else, idiot,” she told him. “You were actually describing a homeless person.”
“Speaking of, I don’t hear any footsteps. Or any other noises,” Tyler replied, choosing to ignore her comment. “Whatever it was, it’s not wandering around. It either was not man-made or the man… lives here.”
“You did say if you were homeless you’d live here,” Nami replied.
“Hell, if their house is an abandoned mall then as far as I’m concerned, they live on public property,” Tyler continued, standing up.
“Yeah, this is still private property, and you’re still an idiot,” Zoe countered, standing up with him.
“Should we get out of here?” Nami asked. “We should at least make a plan.” She stood up with them.
“Okay, yeah,” Tyler agreed. “Okay, shine your flashlights backwards. On us. That way the trail of light isn’t visible, but we can still see. I’ll go first, in case the worst happens. I took three years of kung fu so I can do self-defence basics.”
“Backwards, on us?” Zoe repeated.
“Yeah, got a problem with that?”
“Aside from it being the dumbest shit I ever heard, no problem at all,” Zoe raised her voice at him. “If we point it backwards, and there’s a guy at the end of a long hallway, we’re literally pointing a light at ourselves. We’ll be able to see him but he can’t see us. But if we point it forwards, if we’re thinking about self-defence, we’ll be able to see him and more importantly, blind him.”
“But if he’s in a store or at an angle or something, he’ll be able to see where we are by following the light…” Tyler weakly protested.
“There are three of us and one of him,” Nami added thoughtfully.
“Unless there’s, like, a commune of ‘em,” Tyler replied.
“Homeless of the world unite?” Zoe joked.
The three snickered and decided to venture off into the darkness after a few seconds of non-movement. “So are we going back or going forward?” Nami asked.
“I actually kinda want to go forward, if I’m being honest,” Tyler admitted. “Think about it. No footsteps. Big clang. Maybe something cool happened and there’s no one else here and we get to be the first to see it.”
“You are the dumbest person I have ever met,” Zoe told him. “I’m in.”
Nami didn’t reply. She felt her breathing getting deeper. Maybe it was the fear, or just her trying to make sure fear wouldn’t set in. Plus, she couldn’t smell anything other than must and age in the air, which was a good sign, though every once in a while, she thought she could pick up a whiff of something else. She didn’t know how to describe it.
The trio continued into the dark, never knowing what they’d come across. All they knew was that they were walking in the general direction of where the sound was coming from.
“Keep an eye out for anything that looks like it crashed,” Tyler piped up in a loud whisper.
“Looks like it crashed?” Zoe asked him.
“Yeah! Like, if something’s in a pile on the floor or there’s some hole in the ceiling. If we can pin down the noise, we’ll know we’re safe,” Tyler reasoned.
Even though he couldn’t see it, Zoe shrugged in agreement. Nami followed the other two, breathing in more deeply than she usually did. All three of them were.
Before long, the three had resorted to looking at different stores again, seemingly temporarily forgetting their goal of looking for the sound;s origin. It was fun playing “guess which store this used to be” without the benefit of seeing the products on display. Over time they’d learn the telltale signs of what store was what – tech stores had the remains of extra security measures, clothing stores had more shelving setups, etc.
Tyler and Nami turned away from their latest store to go look at another, but Tyler stopped in his tracks. Zoe was very good at keeping up her own pace with the others – she never fell behind. If she wasn’t with them, it was because she was blazing her own trail. Slowly, Tyler turned back to see the back of Zoe’s head, seemingly fixated on a wall.
“D’you want to stay in this store a bit longer or something?” Tyler asked her.
“Sorry,” Zoe mumbled, not even making an effort to turn back around. “I’m just feeling light-headed. Give me a sec.”
“Are you okay?” Nami asked. Immediately after, she realized maybe Zoe was feeling the same way she was. “What are you feeling?”
“I’ll be fine, guys,” Zoe half-chuckled. “Don’t fall over yourselves. Just need to clear my head a bit.” She turned around, a light sheen apparent on her face. She gave a small, polite smile, which was reserved for Zoe’s normal meaningful-smile-or-no-smile-at-all face. “All good.”
It was hard for Nami to see Tyler’s reaction to Zoe’s out-of-character break, since she was ahead of them both. Nami turned around at the same time as Tyler did, and the three resumed their trek throughout the rest of the mall.
“We’re just about near the end,” Zoe observed in a slightly higher-pitched voice than usual. “This mall only had one floor, right?”
“Yeah, one floor. Three ends though,” Tyler replied. “We came in through the west end and travelled south. There’s also a north end, if we wanted to go full balls-to-the-wall with it. This end used to be a bunch of clothes stores.”
Nami shivered. She remembered coming here before. There was an Old Navy or Hollister or something like that around here. Her old crush Jeremy would hang out here a lot, and she went to the mall a silly amount of times pretending she wanted to buy something but secretly hoping he would be here. He liked to browse, and maybe buy a few things on a whim – he seemed like the privileged rich kid type, but she liked that cocky arrogance he had in that way.
Most importantly, he bought his cologne around here. If she closed her eyes, Nami could swear she could smell his old cologne from memory. Either that or there was somehow some remnant of it in the mall. Maybe Tyler was wearing it…? No, Tyler was the ‘natural musk’ type. She was just imagining it… or imagining Jeremy. Fantasizing about him. He was the very embodiment of sexy. He was what every teenage girl wanted. What they craved.
Nami didn’t come back to reality with a start or a gasp or anything clicheed. Over time she realized she couldn’t afford to let her ‘daydreams’ get the best of her – and not in a place like this. Tyler and Zoe teased her enough for being boy-crazy as it was, and she didn’t want a reputation for being too hormonal or anything like that. She did note that she let her thoughts get the better of her – she rubbed her thighs together and realized with a deep blush that, given her ‘fluids issue,’ she may have needed a change when she got home.
One thing struck her as odd – she was daydreaming for a decently long time. She would have thought that the others would have snapped her out of her daydream, but they were actually not too far away themselves, looking at the entrance of some clothes store. She cleared her throat and joined them.
“So what are we doing? North end?” she asked.
Tyler looked around and shrugged. “I guess so. Maybe the sound did come from the north end. Maybe I was-”
He paused and instinctively held a finger up. The two girls stood there, motionless, looking at him. With the same finger, he motioned for the three to gather in the clothes store, then tiptoed in there, hiding behind the doorway’s wall. The other two tiptoed in behind them.
“Flashlights off,” he ordered.
Zoe was unmoved. “Are you s-”
“Flashlights off,” he repeated emphatically.
Zoe sighed and turned hers off, with Nami following suit. The three stood in the darkness for a few seconds, the sounds of their breathing the only things to keep themselves company, for a long while. Nami could hear Zoe breathing in to pipe up about what made Tyler do this when her answer came prematurely.
At first, the sounds weren’t pronounced. It sounded like shifting. It was unclear where the sounds were coming from, but it was definitely coming from somewhere down the hallway. Nowhere close, and yet, not too far away, especially comparing to the clang they first heard.
For the longest time, it was unclear what the sounds were coming from, with the sounds evolving from some sort of shifting movement – cloth rustling? Couldn’t have been anything that quiet – to something else. Some sound that was vaguely familiar to the three, but definitely out of their range of believability.
All three denied what the sound sounded like until it became painfully obvious with an echoey, guttural moan. A female moan. A needy, throaty, female moan.
“No fucking way,” Zoe whispered in disbelief. The three started laughing in that quiet way you laugh when you don’t want to get caught. Tyler turned his light on again but covered it with his hand, so the three could face each other.
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