I don’t spend that much time in dollar stores, but when the rest of the city is trying to kill me I’m not too picky about my sanctuary.

I sat in the middle of one of the aisles with Travis, Roger, Vivi and Annie. After everything that had happened this night we helped ourselves to the groceries around us, gulping down water and eating less-than-healthy snacks in our efforts to cope. A camera in the corner saw everything, but no one came to yell at us and, more importantly, the store didn’t immediately collapse in on itself and drop us in a vat of acid.

“The city itself is alive,” I said.

Travis and Roger nodded. Vivi was enjoying some candy while cradling an off-brand doll her father had found for her. Poor kid looked ready to drop and wouldn’t stop shaking. “No objections?” I asked.

“I’ve lived my entire life in this city,” said Roger. “It’s always been… different. Everything’s so close, the streets have more bicycles than cars, and so much of it was built with aid from the municipality. Yet at the same time… I never knew anyone who worked construction. Or civil engineering. So many buildings just popped up at a speed I didn’t know the government could manage.” He looked outside. “Almost like the structures weren’t so much built as they were… grown.”

“I’ve only lived here for a bit but I could feel it too,” said Travis. “I just thought it was a well-designed city. The sort of place where everything truly was in arm’s reach. But the more I stayed here the more everything just seemed so… uniform. So many buildings were built the same way. Lots of cookie-cutter blocks with a little bit of everything mixed throughout them.”

“Then how did I pick the one building that isn’t trying to kill us?” I asked.

“This used to be an empty lot,” said Roger. “The dollar store had its own contractors build it. They didn’t work with the city. I’d imagine a lot of the big corporate chains did things by their own standards, and since no one could possibly have known this city was alive they didn’t stop it.”

“There is no earthly way people in the government weren’t aware of this,” I said. “How on earth could something like this be completely missed by everyone? Did the city workers not notice random spouts of acid in the sewer system?”

“Nothing like this has ever happened in the decades I’ve called this city home,” said Roger. “There’s no way the municipality could have kept this a secret. Someone would have leaked it. And if they had known about it they would have made sure they were the last people in the city should it do… this.”

“Because the government always has the best interests of its people at heart,” I said, rolling my eyes.

“They have the interest of the votes of its people,” said Travis. “Hard to vote when you’re dead. I don’t know how on earth this slipped under the radar, but it still doesn’t change that we’re stuck here.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “Please tell me we’re at least getting close to the city limits. At this point city hall has to be a lost cause.”

“A few more miles to go,” he said. “It’ll take us longer if we go around the historical district. I also don’t know how much time we can spend on the streets. The city’s actively tracking down whoever isn’t already dead.”

“A thought about that,” I said. “When we were on the streets, it saw Jess through the cameras. It also knew when Sam interacted with the taxi cab. But it didn’t know we survived the Foundry.” I took a drink of water. “I don’t think it actually knows where we are. We’re like fleas on the back of a dog. It only knows where we are when it can sense us. The cameras are its eyes and the cars its digits.”

“How are a few fleas supposed to get off the dog?” asked Travis.

“We stay where it can’t sense us,” I said. “We stick to back alleys and we go through shops and apartments. We keep that up as much as we can until we’re past the city limits.” I didn’t mention the quite real possibility that the city limits weren’t actually where its influence ended.

“Assuming it doesn’t collapse a building on us as soon as we enter it,” said Travis.

“I think if it wanted to it would have caved in the entire city already,” I said. “But it hasn’t. I think it’s saving energy. It doesn’t want to completely destroy itself. It’s already feasted on the entire banquet inside its borders. It’s not going to use more effort to catch the remaining few bites than those bites would be worth.”

“That’s enough for me to risk it,” said Roger. “For my daughter.”

“I wanna stay here,” whimpered Vivi.

“Sweetie, we can’t,” said Roger. “This place isn’t safe.”

“I don’t wanna die!” she cried, clinging to her father. “If we go out there we’re gonna die. If we go out there we’ll fall in the pits and die. I don’t wanna go!”

She sobbed, and Annie moved forward and placed a hand on her back, rubbing it. She looked at Roger and gave him a smile of encouragement. She then looked to us and nodded.

“If you want, Roger, you two can stay here,” I said. “The city can’t affect this store, right? You could wait here. I’m sure there will have to be rescue crews. There’s no way the National Guard won’t get rallied because of this. An entire city can’t just disappear.”

“Okay,” said Roger, hugging his daughter. “If no one comes, though, please send help.”

“If we get out of here, I think we’ll have earned a call to someone in power,” said Travis.

A noise cut through the ambient noise of the florescent lights and whirring refrigerators. Something rushing underneath our feet. We all shot to our feet, Roger scooping up his daughter as we looked around, trying to figure out what on earth was happening now.

“I thought you said this building wasn’t made by the city!” I said.

“It’s not!” said Roger. Then it dawned on him. “But it’s connected to the municipal utilities!”

Explosions blasted from the bathrooms to the side, the doors blown off their hinges as pressurized acid shot out of the pipes once used for water. My eyes widened as I saw the stream of acrid-smelling, green fluid pouring from within, then bulged more when I looked to the front entrance and saw a bus rolling to a stop right in front, the only way out through the bus’ own open door.

We backed away as the torrent of corrosive fluids kept pouring out of the bathrooms, the splintered bits of wood and any foodstuffs in the path of the flood sizzling and popping as the acid got to work on them, the items almost melting before our eyes. It spread out further and further, consuming everything in its path, even the drywall near the door starting to crumble at the base. As it continued pouring out another explosion rocked the ground beneath us, water pipes blasting open sections of the floor to allow the melting slurry to disappear into the network beneath us.

Roger and Vivi found themselves on the opposite side of the expanding flood from the rest of us, scrambling for one of the nearby shelves. Roger hoisted his daughter onto the top before climbing up, knocking down the various bags of potato chips that had previously been on it. As the fluids came closer the salty snacks floated on the surface like buoys before disintegrating into empty bags, then nothing at all. Vivi cried in terror, clinging to her father piggyback as he tried to make his way across the shelves to a corner of the store.

Travis, Annie and I rushed to the other side of the building, barging into the employee-only section and rushing past the shelves of backstock as the swinging doors did nothing to stop the constant flow. Travis stopped for a moment, grabbing a large box and pulling it down across the hall, stopping the torrent from reaching us for a few extra moments as we made our way to the emergency exit.

An emergency exit completely blocked by pallets of groceries waiting to be stocked.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me!” I yelled. “This is a safety code violation! We shouldn’t have to be putting up with this on top of everything else!”

“Less talk, more pulling boxes off!” said Travis, grabbing the edge of the topmost box and throwing it to the floor. It looked like the pallet contained canned goods, jars of pickles and other things that wouldn’t be moving in a hurry, and already I could see our impromptu levee dissolving into viscous, disgusting green sludge. Drains in the floor let some of the acid flow out, but it wouldn’t be nearly enough, not when even the walls were starting to break down.

I looked further down the hall and saw just what we needed to escape. “This way!” I called out, darting down to the roof-access ladder nestled in the corner, wading around more pallets of items waiting to be stocked to finally reach it. I grabbed the rungs and hauled myself up, everything in the cramped, flooding, dissolving chamber closing in on me, getting closer and closer. I didn’t even know if they were following me as I moved up, up, then forced open the access hatch and pulled myself out.

I fell onto the roof, calming myself down the best I could with the pleasant memories. Country. Open home. Cats running around. Not a skyscraper in sight. It helped, but I still felt the grit underneath me, heard the metallic echoes of Travis and Annie going up the rungs, and saw a fly rubbing its proboscis over the desiccated remains of a mouse a couple feet away from me.

I sat upright, watching a small puddle of water start flowing toward the center of the store’s roof as the walls beneath us continued to degrade under the city’s assault. I heard windows near the front of the store shatter and a tiny part of me hoped that was Roger and Vivi escaping out the front before the acid got them.

“Good call,” said Travis. “It just won’t give up, will it? Hasn’t it eaten enough? Are we really worth all this effort?”

Annie tapped us both, and gestured to the store below us. She pulled out a wrapped snack cake she’d had in a pocket and pointed to it. She tossed it away and smacked her head.

“Next time we’re desperate for shelter and about to die we’ll make sure to pick a place not quite so loaded with edible items,” I said. “Now let’s get off this roof before it–”

The center of the roof caved in, tiles and lights shorting out as they fell into the bubbling pond of acid that had formed underneath us, even the shelves starting to fall victim to the fluids. The metal carts withstood the assault, but even the plastics struggled to maintain their form.

We backed away as the hole moved outward, passing under a power line as we reached the edge of the building and looked out. To the side of the store was a dumpster, shut tight but high enough we could get down onto it without risking hurting ourselves. I took that fall as fast as I could and Travis followed shortly after. Annie paused for a moment, psyching herself up before getting on the edge of the roof and turning to hoist herself down.

As she lifted a foot to move down, one of the power lines overhead snapped, the cable swooping down and wrapping itself around her leg, pulling tight before the pole itself fell into the store, twisting as it did to drag Annie away from us and down into the newly-formed pit. We could barely cry out before we heard the crash, then the splash, and then nothing. Part of me was almost glad she wasn’t able to scream before the city took her like she was just another piece of popcorn in a near-empty bucket.

“We’re not going to make it,” said Travis. “We’re dead, Steve. There’s no way. No way we can make it to the city limits. We can’t possibly get out of here in time.”

“We’re not dead until we’re dead,” I said, trying to fight off the apathy starting to fall over me. Really, what was the point? What would we do? Hide in buildings? They probably had cameras in them, or more impostors like the taxi cabs, or some other fresh hell as the city took its pound of flesh. Or rather every last bit it could.

Wife at home. Stupid cats frolicking around.

Again the buildings loomed overhead, identical multi-use developments distinguished by nothing in this back alley, each window seeming like an eye.

Open spaces. Green grass. Trees blanketing hills looking like broccoli.

The ground trembling under my feet like the city somehow knows we’re here, probably watching from whatever camera it had used to just catch Annie about to escape. Maybe it didn’t have the right angle to actually see us, but it knew we were here.

I grabbed a fallen rod of metal that had been part of the store and walked up to the brick face of one of the buildings. “You can’t keep taking everything! You’ve already had enough, and what are you giving back? What have you done that we couldn’t do ourselves!”

“Steve,” said Travis, “I know what I said but you really shouldn’t–”

I didn’t listen. After this entire night I was just done. “This is what I think of you!” I yelled as I jammed the metal into the mortar, smashing it away a chunk at a time. “How’s that? Hurts, huh?” I continued railing against it, actually dislodging a brick, which I grabbed and threw through the nearest window I could find before turning back to the section of the wall I had been assaulting.

A shining white strip of bone hid just behind the brick.

I jumped back, dropping my weapon as I saw it. It looked like a section of a femur or something, mixed into the wall like it was any ordinary building material, and then I saw other splintered bits of bone joining it, tarsals and metatarsals and I think I saw part of a jaw, all bleached white and intact.

“Defacing public property is a crime, you know,” said a voice behind me.

I turned around and saw a group of men approaching us. They looked to be wearing uniforms of some sort but I couldn’t tell what they were. “Oh thank God,” I said, feeling so much tension wash away from me I nearly collapsed. “Is it safe on this road? We need to get out of this city as fast as humanly possible.”

“Hey!” said Travis. “You’re the garbageman who works near my apartment!” He looked at one of the men. “Wait. How are you all here, and why are you so calm? Most of the city has been murdered!”

The men raised bats and walked toward us, weapons in the air.

Part 4 - https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/17hc3p1/urban_appetite_part_45_a_city_needs_and_cherishes/

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