Chapter 9

The next day, Ellie hit the ground running. She marched into Freshfields like a lioness: proud, regal, and on the hunt. From the moment she clocked in, she was alert for anything out of the ordinary from Jae-Sun or any of his lackeys from the car park the night before.
Before she’d reached her scanner, she’d spotted Jae-Sun in the manager’s office, exchanging secretive words with Aoife. The two of them spotted her and ceased their chatter until she was out of sight.
To her surprise, she hadn’t found the experience of seeing him as soul-crushing as she’d expected. She couldn’t possibly, not now she was onto him. Her soul was now driven by the mission to find out what he and his friends were up to, and what link, if any, they had to the disappearances in the store. 
Her first stop had been the duty rota, held in a plastic wallet on the warehouse wall. She removed the document and perused it for the working hours of each person she’d seen in the smoking shelter. It didn’t take her long to find exactly what she wanted: Xana, Olivia, Aoife and Jae-Sun were in from now until five, and Charles started in the afternoon. 
Perfect, thought Ellie. Time to get to the bottom of all this…

Xana was the first target on Ellie’s list. On her way out of the warehouse, she opened the door to the bakery and peeked inside. She found Xana was skulking around shiftily, rooting through boxes and checking in cupboards, all the while keeping an eye out for Habib on the shop floor, who was busy filling the shelves. Becoming increasingly frustrated, she began banging and clattering around, desperate to find something in and amongst the bakery’s oldest and disused cupboards. 
Ellie’s heart leapt out of her chest as all of a sudden Xana spun around, looking in the direction of the door. Ellie let go immediately, and sped off with her trolley in tow, racing onto the shop floor to her aisle to avoid suspicion. 
Well that’s one of them definitely up to something. Now what about the others…

Ellie next saw Aoife messing with a scanner in the corner of an aisle; the second time in a week, she noted. Ellie finished showing her customer where the DymahCorp range could be found, and doubled back to catch another glimpse. The messy-haired woman had the scanner hooked up to her phone via a long black cable. Tapping away at her phone, she took periodic glances back at the scanner, often swearing when she didn’t get the answer she was looking for.
Seeing an opportunity, Ellie entered the adjacent aisle, exiting at the other end so she could catch a look at Aoife’s phone screen. The text was small, and Ellie had to squint to see much of anything, but what she did spy on her screen was some form of coding software: long lines of numbers and letters set out in an order indecipherable to anyone without the proper knowledge. 
Disgruntled, Ellie turned away. She’d left her trolley for far too long, and her SPIMS score wouldn’t be happy.

Ellie caught up with Olivia on her lunch break. Of all of them, she found Olivia to be the least threatening. Selecting a ready meal for her lunch, she proceeded to Olivia’s checkout, and listened intently to the conversation she was having with the builder being served in front of her. 
“So he’s gone missing too?” asked Olivia.
“Yeah,” said the builder. “He came in here for his lunch on Tuesday and we haven’t seen him since. It’s thrown us right behind on our job — we were meant to be finished by Christmas!”
“What makes you think he went missing here?” said Olivia, passing a sandwich through the till scanner and into the man’s carrier bag. 
“His van’s still in the car park,” the builder replied. “It’s got a parking ticket on it now. Ben loved that van, there’s no way in the world he’d leave it anywhere.”
“I’m sorry,” said Olivia, as the builder paid for the shopping with his card. “See you later.”
Taken aback by the unusually abrupt farewell, the builder took his carrier bag and walked away, casting a single look of confusion back at the pale checkout girl. 
“Someone else gone missing then?” Ellie asked as she handed her meal over. 
Olivia looked stunned,unsure of what to say. “Have you had a nice day?” she asked.
“Until I heard someone had gone missing again,” Ellie replied. “How many is that now?”
“Seventeen,” said Olivia, before backtracking. “That’s what that man I was just serving told me!”
“And the police aren’t anywhere to be seen,” Ellie commented. “Do you know why that is?”
“No,” said Olivia, handing back her ready meal. “See you later.”

“So what are you lot up to, then?”
It was the first thing she’d said to Charles when his shift started. She’d accosted him the moment he entered the warehouse and began searching for a scanner amongst the shelves.
“What are you talking about?” he asked, as if prepared for her question. 
“I know you’re all up to something in this store,” said Ellie. “You, Xana, Aoife, Olivia and Jae-Sun.”
“The people who started the same day as me?” Charles asked incredulously. “I barely know them.”
“Drop the act,” said Ellie. “I’ve seen you… doing things.”
Charles turned his attention back to the shelf and reached behind some boxes for a scanner. “We’ve become friends,” he said by way of an explanation.
“Pretty good friends by the look of it, meeting up in the car park after hours.”
“Yep.”
“Because you all started working here at the same time?”
“Yep.”
“Who all have jobs in different areas of the store, who wouldn't otherwise interact.”
“...yep.”
“So what made you so close all of a sudden?”
Charles logged into his scanner and began picking items for his trolley. “Your SPIMS score won’t be happy if you spend so much time talking to me.”
“Then give me some answers,” Ellie demanded. “Of all of you newbies, I’ve gotten to know you the best, and I don’t like being lied to. It was bad enough when I put my heart on the line…”
Charles shot her a hurtful look. To all intents and purposes, it looked like it was really hurting him to withhold the truth from her, but he wasn’t willing to budge any time soon. “I’m really sorry, Ellie, I don’t know what you think is going on, but I have no answers to give you. Can I carry on picking my trolley now?”
Ellie felt a surge of emotion begin to build inside her. The pressure climbed, and she feared berating Charles with a burst of anger, or flooding him with her tears. 
In the end, neither happened. Ultimately, Charles was right. She wasn’t here to investigate the shady happenings of a few newbies. She was here to do her job: stock the shop floor, earn some money, and go home. 
Dejectedly, Ellie, scanner in hand, walked back across the warehouse, and began picking her next trolley, questioning what had started this crusade she had embarked on. It had all started on her date with Jae-Sun. He clearly wasn’t as interested in her as she’d hoped, and instead of handling the rejection with a glass of wine and moving on, she’d turned on him, seeing him and his group of friends as villains. What proof did she have other than a snatch of out of context interactions and conversations? To accuse them of something untoward, did that make her the villain? 
Her spiralling thoughts ended with the ping of her scanner: she’d picked the last item for her trolley. She grabbed the handle to take it onto the shop floor and faltered. She felt like crying, and the last thing she needed was Carol seeing her at her lowest. 
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She wouldn’t normally check it while working, but for Ellie, today was no normal day. The notification was a text from Maddy: “Always here if you need a chat.”
If she could, Ellie would have left then and there for a much needed catch up with her bestie, but she still had a few hours to go. She unlocked her phone and typed a quick message back to Maddy, arranging a meetup as soon as possible, before slipping it back into her pocket. Grasping the handle of her trolley, she set it in motion when her scanner pinged once more. 

Ice lolly 6 pack requires immediate restock.

Ellie looked at the screen in confusion. “Freezer food isn’t my department…” she mumbled.
Well, she resolved, to quote Gary Wheeler, “Whatever SPIMS wants, SPIMS gets.”
Ellie dragged her trolley back across the warehouse, past the long aisles of shelf racking, to the large, heavy metal door of the store’s back of house freezer. Leaving her trolley behind, she marched over to the long steel lever and pulled with both hands. The metal door rolled aside and an icy wind greeted her. 
Ellie instinctively shivered, and lifted an insulated jacket from a hook on the wall. Even with protective clothing, she grimaced as she stepped inside. The sub-zero temperatures surrounded her like a pack of wolves, biting at her with savage intent. She needed to get out of here as soon as possible, but didn’t know where to start. It had been months, perhaps over a year since she’d last been in here, and she barely knew the layout then. 
“It’ll take me ages to find ice lollies in here,” she groaned.
She heard a grumble of metal behind her.
The door closed shut. 
Ellie gasped in horror, sucking in frosty air. Her scanner flew out of her hand as panic drove her to the only exit. She pulled at the internal lever, but no matter how hard she tried, it wouldn’t budge. Her heart beat faster, offering her body a temperature boost, but if she didn’t find a way out soon, it wouldn’t last. 
A crackle from somewhere amongst the stock caught her attention. Ellie turned to see her scanner resting on a frost-covered cardboard box, sparks emitting from the seams at its edging. This lasted for several seconds, before a larger hiss of sparks burst from the casing. Ellie stepped as far back as she could manage, watching as the charge emitting from the scanner had now burned through the box it was resting on, and had scorched several more in the nearby vicinity. The sparks reached crescendo, encompassing everything in a metre radius, before coming to an abrupt halt. The scanner, having burned through all of the boxes — and stock — within its vicinity, now rested on the cold, concrete floor, depleted and dead.
Ellie stood for a few moments in shock, attempting to process what had happened, until the abrupt activation of the freezer’s cooling fans tore her from her thoughts. The air soon whipped up into something akin to a hurricane; Ellie’s hair blew into her eyes making it hard for her to see. She struggled to move, pushed against the wall by the force of the wind, to the point she felt the skin on her face begin to ripple.
“Help!” she attempted to call, but whether the words escaped her lips amongst the chug of the fans and the power of the wind, she would never know. 
Ellie fell to her knees, curling into a ball. The thick insulation of her freezer jacket offered some protection against the onslaught, but even so strong drafts billowed their way through whichever cracks and crevices they could find.
She began to wonder if whatever this was — malfunction or otherwise — would be the end of her. From what happened with the scanner, she was lucky she wasn’t a goner already. 
Amidst the gale force blasts whipping about her, Ellie thought that she could hear — no, feel, something; a vibration, rhythmic and panicked, like the sound of drums. 
She soon realised it was someone on the other side of the freezer door, attempting to reach her. Ellie called out to them, but again her voice was lost in the frenzied air. Would they reach her in time? Her extremities had long since gone numb, and her frantic heart was trying its best, but with the frantic winds whistling around her, it was getting harder to breathe. 
By the time the door did open, Ellie barely registered it. Voices surrounded her, but the meaning of their words was lost against the throbbing in her ears. Her vision was fading, and with it any grasp she held on reality. 

Next Aisle: Chapter 10