Torch, he thinks, shining it down a long dark aisle, seeing piles of flour scattered across the floor. The English call this a torch.
He balances the torch on the shopping cart and picks his way through the rest of the supermarket, finding some bottled water but not much else. Eventually, he realizes there’s going to be nothing much of use anywhere – not the loaves of bread shrunk to nothing inside their wrappers, not the unplugged freezer chests filled with a black mold that smells like rancid olives, not the packages of cookies and crackers that are so much dust – nothing except the two aisles with most of the cans.
Again, many of them are rusted beyond use or so bulging with bacteria that Seth can practically hear it growing inside, but moving the torch up and down the shelves, he finds plenty that look normal, if dusty. He fills his cart with soups and pastas, with corn and peas, with even, he’s delighted to find, custard. There are so many cans, in fact, he’d have to make several trips here to even make a dent in them.
So, enough to feed him. For a while.
For however long he might be here.
The darkness and silence of the supermarket, even with the comfortably heavy torch in his hand, suddenly feels like too much. Too oppressive, too heavy.
“Quit it,” he tells himself. “You’ll go crazy if you think like this.”
But he puts his weight behind the cart and gets himself back out into the daylight.
He’s tiring again, he can feel it, and the hunger is a real thing now, almost as bad as yesterday’s thirst. He spies some green up around a corner from the market and remembers the little park there, sliding down a hill into a small valley with fountains and paths.
He pushes the cart, grunting at the effort, until he’s at the top of the park. It’s grown up like a jungle, unsurprisingly, but the basic shape is still there. There’s even a little sandbox area nearby. It’s about the only place here free of weeds.
“This’ll do,” he says, and lets his backpack fall to his feet.
He follows the directions on the camp stove, and five minutes later, there’s enough butane left in the small canister to heat up a can of spaghetti he opened with a far-less-rusty can opener he also took from the store. It’s only when the spaghetti is boiling that he realizes he didn’t take any knives or forks. He clicks off the stove and has no choice but to wait for it to cool.
He takes a bottle of water from the cart and holds it up to the sun. It looks clear, clearer than the water from his tap anyway, but even though the seal is unbroken, the water is still half-evaporated away. He cracks it open, the bottle giving a little hiss as he does so. It smells all right, so he takes a drink and looks down at the park below him.
It’s familiar, yes, despite the wildness, but what does familiar mean? he wonders. This place looks like a version of his childhood home stuck in time, but that doesn’t mean it’s actually the same place.
It feels real enough. Certainly to the touch, and definitely to the nose. But it’s also a world that only seems to have him in it, so how real can it be? If this is just a dusty old memory that he’s trapped in, maybe it isn’t really even a place at all, maybe it’s just what happens when your final dying seconds turn into an eternity. The place of the worst season of your life, frozen forever, decaying without ever really dying.
He takes another sip of water. Whatever this place might be, they’d never come all that much to the real version of the park. Sandbox and small play area aside, the steepness of the hill prevented it from being much fun. A big brick wall across the bottom of the main incline made even skateboarders avoid the challenge, so it must have been more a place for High Street workers to take a smoke break.
But there is the pond still, at the bottom, kidney-shaped but surprisingly clear-looking. He would have expected a film of algae across the top, but it actually looks cool and inviting on a hot summer day. There’s a rock in the middle that was usually covered with ducks preening themselves. There aren’t any today, but the sun is so bright, the day so clear and warm, that it somehow seems like ducks might swoop in at any moment.
He looks up, half thinking that his thoughts might create them. They don’t.
He’s hot in his over-warm hiking clothes, and the pond looks so inviting that he has a fleeting impulse to jump in, have a refreshing swim, have something even like a bath and just allow himself to float, suspended in water –
He stops.
Suspended in water, he thinks.
The terror of it, the sheer awful terror that never seemed to stop. Fear was bearable when you could see an end to it, but there was no end in sight out in those freezing waves, those pitiless fists of ocean that cared nothing for you, that tipped you over and down in a kind of callous blindness, filling your lungs, smashing you against rocks –
He reaches around to where his shoulder blade snapped. He can remember the pain of it, can remember the irrevocable snap of the bone breaking. He feels a little sick at the thought, even though his shoulder here, in this place, works fine.
Then he wonders where his body is.
In whatever world this isn’t, out there where he died, where is he? He wonders if he’s washed ashore yet. He wonders if they even know to look for him in the ocean or on the beach, because he wasn’t supposed to be there, no one was supposed to be there at that time of year. Freezing winter on an angry, rocky coast? Why would anyone be near the water, much less in it?
Not unless they were forced.
Not unless someone forced them.
He feels another pain in his stomach, an unease at the memory of his last moments on the beach that makes him feel even sicker. He screws the cap back on the water bottle and forces himself to return to the spaghetti, now cooled enough to eat. He makes a mess of it, tipping it into his mouth and slopping it onto one of his new T-shirts, not caring much.
He wonders how his parents found out. Would he have been gone long enough to be missed before his body was found? Would they have been surprised by policemen showing up at the door, carrying their hats under their arms and asking to come in? Or would they have been worried by his absence, growing more worried by the hour, until it became clear something had gone wrong?
Or if time worked the same here as it did there – though the warm summer here and the freezing winter there put that into question, and he had no idea how long that first purgatorial bit on the path had lasted, but still – he might have only died late the day before yesterday or even early yesterday morning. It’s possible they haven’t even noticed yet. His parents might think he’s at a friend’s house for the weekend, and between Owen’s clarinet lessons and his mum’s running and his father’s decision to start redoing the bathroom, they might still be unaware that he’s gone at all.