Even the streets outside were quieter the next morning, although Edward couldn't exactly place why. It was a sort of silence that did not ring quite true. As though something was holding its breath, biding its time. Even the usual background rumble of cars was muted, as though the world itself had drawn in a deep breath and started the play. Still, there were no results. Still, no answers.
When Edward walked into the shop, air inside the store was denser than it was required to be, and overhead lighting's whine served no purpose to ease any of that. Fewer customers occupied the shop today compared to yesterday, but those who wandered up and down the aisles were scattered more today compared to yesterday. There was a woman beside the ice cream pen pocket in line, but looking at the freezers of the ice creams, waiting blind, the fingers tracing on the glass like waiting for the miracle to happen.
It was increasingly difficult to tell whether one were tired or ill or otherwise. The silence that filled there, thick, the stifling weight of so many things unspoken hanging over all of them. Edward scratched his nose once more. That tickle at the back of his throat still remained from yesterday, and now the tickle was on the move, creeping up into the roof of his mouth. He could feel his sinuses filling up, his head getting a little cloudy. Allergies, he told himself, just allergies. Whatever else would be having the same thoughts as he did. "Edward," growled Darren from behind the counter. His hoarse voice older than his seventeen years, though. Red-rimmed eyes, pale face, and the dark black smudges under his eyes to give him the look of being up to a seven-day stubble age.
"How's it going?"
Edward's eyes widened in shock at the weariness in Darren's voice. "You okay?" he tried, trying to sound cool.
Darren shrugged lazily, blowing his nose once more. "Yeah, I'm fine. Just—bleh." He took a deep breath and rubbed his eyes with a growl. "Just not really feeling so good today, you know?"
"Aye, indeed I do," replied Edward. He was not even sure if it was the jarring change of environment or something did not agree with him, but his stomach had again curled itself into knots.
"I think Sam's in the back," Darren replied, and his voice dropped, as if what he called her by weighed on him. "You have to go and speak to her."
Edward didn't need to know why. He could see it in looking at Darren—how his eyes remained fixed on the ground as if attempting to flee some concealed truth.
"Thank you," Edward murmured to himself, very softly, as he moved to the back.
The storeroom was quiet, a blessed quiet from the endless clamor of the shop. The gentle whine of the fridge in the corner was a low thrum, and the shelf upon shelf of provisions seemed impossibly distant, as if it no longer existed. It wasn't so much that the room was quiet as that there was emptiness hanging in the air. The room was bare to the point of excess, too wide.
Sam leaned back against a shelf, sitting back and looking down toward the floor. She was breathing too hard, and when she finally looked up at him, her eyes wouldn't focus. She blinked furiously before her mouth dropped open as if she was learning all over again to talk.
"Sam?" Edward breathed, moving forward. Her face increasingly and increasingly grotesque with each passing second. Her movements slowing, jerky. Her skin pulled tight. The exhaustion in her eyes had sunk further into her flesh, as though it wasn't exhaustion anymore. Something else.
"Oh. Hi," she spoke softly, her voice a distance away, as though he was an echo that was fading. "I didn't know you'd arrived."
Edward dropped to his knees alongside her, drawing his fingers down across her eyes. "You're not okay, are you?"
She remained silent. She didn't dare to begin drawing her fingers along the bridge of her nose, the motion too slow, too purposeful. As if she couldn't ensure what she was doing.
"Sam?" Edward encouraged, his tone heavy with fear.
She smiled weakly, her eyes a glassy stare. "Just. allergies," she wheezed, tracing her fingers over her nose again, her head reeling dizzily to one side.
But the longer they stood there, the less it seemed like an allergy. No sneezing, no spasmodic sneezing, no puffiness. It wasn't that kind of thing. Her responses—if you could even call them that—were just. wrong. They were not responding to anything he'd ever seen.
"You have to go home," Edward urged now more desperately. He wasn't certain that he could believe her, and something inside him was screaming that he couldn't. Something was screaming in his head that if Sam didn't leave, that if she stayed around long enough, whatever was wrong with her would start to happen to him too.
"I'm okay," she replied, struggling to produce a tight smile, her eyes drifting off once more. "Seriously. I just. need to. rest."
Edward lurched to his feet, a wave of nausea that twisted his stomach inside out. "You sure?" He didn't even give Sam a chance to respond. He wheeled around and ran to the front of the store, having no idea what was going on with Sam, but every molecule in his body yelling at him that it wasn't an allergy. Something else.
The rest of the morning was a haze.
The store was busier than empty, and as other individuals strolled in, they roamed up and down with blank faces. They did not know what they were doing, just meandering up and down the shelves grabbing things and setting them down again. Nothing was purchased. No one even cracked a smile. The color had been drained out of the store. How everything that had entered into shaping them into the people they had become had vanished and all that remained was going-through-the-motions. It was going in Edward's direction by lunchtime.
His coughing-deep-in-his-throat, his hooding-of-his-head-what-was-supposed-to-be-him had left him a step behind, and his mind was vaguely fuzzy. He showed up in a haze, his mind cloudy, his responses too slow. He was leaning over the counter, wildly blinking as he tried to shake the dizziness. Maybe it was lack of sleep. Maybe it was stress. He would prefer to attribute it all to allergies, but way down inside of him, he knew that it was more. The old creaky door creaked and groaned. Edward's eyes snapped up, for a moment unfocused. An older woman entered, her face mask-like. She crawled along beside him slowly without glance, slapping feet, hollow eyes fixed. Edward hardly noticed she was standing there, in front of him, near the canned goods, just quietly for a minute or so.
And then, suddenly, the woman's head jerked to the side, eyes narrowing at him. She blinked once, slowly, slowly, as if she'd never seen him before in her life.
"Oh," she breathed. "You poor thing."
The hair on the back of Edward's neck stood on end.
She spun around and walked, fists clenching the grip of the cart with fresh urgency. Edward followed her anguished expression with his own queasy gut. Something was wrong. No longer just Sam alone. Something was happening with them all.
By then he was already in the storeroom, but the searing ball within his gut only grew stronger. Something was coming. And it would never stop.