The tallest peak had a dent near the top, almost like a face.
"Why do I know you?" Ray asked the mountains.
He stood there until the orange went out of the sky and the wind started cutting through his shirt, and the answer stayed on the tip of his brain like a word he'd forgotten during a test.
'Think about it later. Priorities: food, water, somewhere to sleep that isn't the top of a hill.' He had zero out of three, so he started down.
Night came fast out here. There were no streetlights to soften it, and the stars came out in numbers he had only seen in phone wallpapers. It would've been pretty if he weren't shivering in a work shirt on an empty stomach.
He missed the work vest, of all things. It was ugly and it smelled like cardboard, but it had been a layer, and right now it was lying by a door he couldn't walk back to. He rolled his sleeves down and turned his collar up, which helped about as much as he'd expected.
Then the noises started.
Crickets he could've handled. What he got was something hooting in three different voices, a giggle from a bush that went quiet when he looked at it, and far off, a long low sound like a tuba being strangled.
"Nope. That's a bird. That's a weird bird, and I'm not curious." He walked faster, hugging his own arms.
The ground shook under his sneakers.
It was a small shake, the kind a truck makes going past a bus stop. Then it came again, harder, and again, in a slow rhythm he recognized right before he wanted to. Footsteps.
Ray dropped flat in the grass. Something was walking along the bottom of the hill, and it was big enough to blot out a strip of stars as it went. He couldn't make out a shape; only that it had too many legs for its size, that it smelled like a wet basement, and that every step pushed the air against his face.
'That is not a cow. That is so far from a cow.' He pressed his cheek into the dirt and held his breath.
The thing stopped. A sniffing sound rolled over the hillside, deep and wet, close enough that the grass around him bent toward it.
That was enough for Ray. He crawled backward on his elbows until his foot found an edge, a gap under a slab of something hard, and he went into it feet first without checking how deep it was.
It was deep.
The dirt gave out under him and he slid, fast, on his back, with roots slapping his face, biting down on a scream. He hit something with ridges, bounced down five or six of them, and stopped in a heap at the bottom.
Above him, the footsteps moved on, slow and heavy, until the shaking faded out.
"...Ow." He lay in the dark and checked himself over. Both arms moved, and so did both legs. His tailbone hurt enough that he didn't want to try sitting on it yet.
Once he could hear something other than his own pulse, he dug the phone out of his pocket. It said 21%. He turned on the flashlight anyway, because the alternative was sitting in a hole with no idea what else was in it.
The ridges he had bounced down were steps. Metal steps, grooved, with a rotted rubber rail running along each side.
"That's an escalator." He said it out loud to check if it sounded as stupid as it felt. It did. "I fell down an escalator."
He swept the light around. The hole opened into a hall wide enough for a truck, with a cracked tile floor under a carpet of dirt and roots hanging from the ceiling like cables. Dead storefronts lined both sides. Most of the signs had fallen, and the ones still up had lost their letters to rust; one said SH ES, and another had kept only a pink cursive S.
A mall. He was in a mall, under a hill.
'Why is there a mall under a hill?' He had no answer, so he asked it again out loud, and that didn't help either. He got to his feet and followed the hall, since malls had food, or used to.
Near the first corner stood a vending machine, tipped against the wall, its front rusted shut. He checked the slot at the bottom out of habit, found dirt, and patted its side.
"You too, huh."
A directory stood in the middle of the hall, a slab of cracked plastic with a map under it. The colors were gone and so were the store names, but a red dot had survived in one corner with three words next to it. YOU ARE HERE.
'Thanks. Super helpful.' He checked the corner of his screen. The battery had dropped to 17% since the escalator; the flashlight was eating it alive, but walking through this place blind was worse, so he kept it on and walked faster.
The food court was at the end. He knew it by the rows of tables bolted to the floor and by a sign overhead that still read F OD C URT. The counters behind them had caved in. Whatever had been in the kitchens was black dust now, and a rat the color of a highlighter looked at him from a fryer and left.
He was about to make a joke about the health inspection when the light found the barricade.
Someone had dragged tables and chairs across the far end of the court and stacked them chest-high. Behind it lay blankets gone to threads and a camping lantern. Plastic jugs stood in a row along the wall, each with a strip of tape across it; somebody had been rationing.
And there were bones. They were brown and small with age, some still inside the shapes of jackets, lying close together the way people sleep when it's cold.
Ray stopped walking.
He had never seen a dead person before, let alone this many, and his brain offered him nothing to say. He counted them without meaning to and quit at eleven.
One table near the barricade had been left out of the wall. On it sat a plastic tray with two cups, two forks laid side by side, and a small toy still sealed in its bag between them. Two chairs were pulled out, facing each other. The dust on the tray was as thick as the dust on everything else.
He looked at the two chairs longer than he had looked at the bones.
"...Sorry. I'm just passing through." He lowered the light so it wasn't in their faces, which made no sense, and backed out the way he came.
How long did it take for people to look like that? He didn't know. Longer than it took a tree to grow through a car, probably, and he had not liked that number either.
Going back up was out. It was the middle of the night, and the thing with the legs was still somewhere above him. That left finding a corner of this place with no bones in it, so he walked the hall back past the escalator with the light on the floor, trying doors as he went. He didn't say a word the whole way.
He picked the shop because its door still closed.
It was at the far end of the hall, a narrow place with glass cases along the walls, and it took him a minute of looking to understand what it had sold. The shelves were full of lumps. Dozens of them, in faded reds and blues, sagged over their stands like candles left in a hot car.
Then he found one with a recognizable sword arm, and it clicked.
"Figures. These were figures." He picked up a lump that might once have been somebody's favorite character, turned it over, and set it back on its stand.
The posters had turned to dust on the walls and left only their rectangles. A spinner rack of trading cards had fused into bricks. It was a collectibles shop, the kind he used to walk through at the mall back home, touching nothing and buying less.
'A thousand-dollar statue, melted. Somewhere a collector is screaming in his grave.' It was the first joke he had managed since the food court.
Behind the counter, the light caught something long on the wall.
It hung on two hooks in a plastic case gone yellow: a black scabbard, a black handle wrapped in cord, a round guard. A katana. There was a card stapled inside the case, and enough of the print had survived to read.
DECORATIVE REPLICA. DISPLAY ONLY. NOT FOR COMBAT.
"I wasn't planning on combat." Ray looked at the door, thinking of wet basements and too many legs. "I was planning on having something in my hands."
The case was the clamshell kind. He pulled at the seam, then bit it, then hit it with one of the melted figures, and the plastic held through all three.
"A thousand years, and this packaging still needs scissors." He finally cracked it against the edge of the counter and shook the sword out.
It was lighter than he expected. The blade came out of the scabbard with a squeak instead of a ring, dull gray, with an edge about as sharp as a ruler, and the handle rattled when he shook it. He gave it a swing anyway. The whole thing wobbled.
A price tag hung off the guard on a loop of string, and he turned it to the light. $39.99.
"Forty bucks." He snorted. "The one thing in this mall I could've afforded, and I get it at a hundred percent off."
'Stainless steel, zero edge, loose handle. This is a butter knife with a dream.' He stood a little straighter holding it anyway. The phone was down to 12%.
He sat down against the counter with the sword across his lap and the door shut, and turned off the light to save what was left.
The dark was total. He listened to the roots drip and thought about two cups on a tray, then made himself think about the honey bun instead, which hurt in a different way.
A whole day of walking on one honey bun caught up with him all at once. His eyelids got heavy, his head kept dropping onto his chest, and every drip from the roots jerked it back up. Somewhere around the third time, he stopped fighting it.
...
When he opened his eyes again, there was a gray line under the door, and everything hurt in the order he had landed on it. His mouth tasted like dust. He wasn't even hungry anymore, which worried him more than the hunger had.
Daylight was leaking in from further down the hall, and he followed it with the sword in one hand. The phone stayed in his pocket; it had lost another three percent overnight looking for a signal that wasn't there, and 9% was all he had left.
The light came from a loading bay. Half the roof had fallen in ages ago and made a ramp of rubble and grass up to the surface. It was the first loading bay in his life he was happy to see. Ray climbed the ramp on all fours, squinting, and came out on the far side of the hill from where he had gone in.
Morning. The too-blue sky, the too-green grass, a breeze that smelled like nothing. The thing with too many legs had left a line of craters across the valley floor, each one wide enough to park a forklift in, and had kept going.
"Cool. Love that for me." He gave the craters a wide berth.
He almost missed the sign.
It stuck out of the slope at an angle, a big metal rectangle on a bent post, buried up to its middle. The paint had bleached nearly white, but the green still showed under it, and the letters were the same blocky white letters he had read from the back seat of every car he'd ever ridden in.
EXIT 14.
Below that, a town's name had flaked away except for its last few letters and a number. FIELD, 2 MILES.
Ray read it three times. Then he scraped the dirt off the bottom half with his sleeve, in case the rest of it said something that made this better, and found only more rust.
All night he had been quietly rooting for the dumb option. Another world meant his own was still out there somewhere, laundromat and vending machine and all, running fine without him. An exit sign meant something else.
He sat down in the grass with the fake sword across his knees.
"So this is home." His voice came out small. "Then where the fuck did everybody go?"