The Mall Read online

  The Mall

  by

  Bryant Delafosse

  Copyright 2012 by Bryant Delafosse

  All rights reserved.

  Electronic edition: June 2012

  Published in the United States of America

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events of locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental

  Cover design by The Design Office

  Kindle formatting and layout by Geraldine Delafosse

  For my wife and son

  BOOK ONE

  “ONES AND ZEROS”

  “In one of the closest election in U.S. history, Richard Milhous Nixon was elected president in 1960. The decisive moment in his campaign against challenger John Fitzgerald Kennedy seemed to come during the course of four debates conducted on radio when technical difficulties within the burgeoning young medium of television prevented televising the debates as planned…. Even so, Nixon’s margin of victory—both in the popular and electoral vote--proved to be the closest in American history.”

  Excerpt from the article entitled “A Brief History of the Presidents of the United States of America,” from the Uni-pedia on-line resource.

  1

  At first glance, Lara thought the Mall looked like a cross between a cathedral and an airport. The large central chamber at the entrance stood beneath an ornately gold-leaf inlaid rotunda from which an enormous crystal and fiber-optic chandelier hung. From where she stood, she could see several other levels above her, one stacked atop the other, like a layer cake composed of lights and colors. The ceiling itself, an all-encompassing glass web, filtered just the right amount of natural light and heat to the shoppers below.

  The Mall was fully automated, of the sort that had become so popular lately. During the day, a shopper had the choice of working with a live sales clerk or completing a purchase entirely on their own. For the luxury of a salesman, a customer often had to wait for his turn among a group of other customers seeking such “specialized help,” as the large digital signs posted throughout the Mall stated.

  “If you should desire specialized help, please retrieve a pager from the below receptacle. A knowledgeable sales representative will be happy to serve you as time allows. Keep in mind that the wait time varies according to current business volume.”

  Lara read the sign as shoppers scrambled around her, several bustling rudely around her to snatch a pager from the dispenser that she was obliviously blocking.

  “C’mon, Mom! We don’t need one of those. I can find it on my own!”

  Attempting to concentrate on the sign, Lara tried to ignore her ten-year-old son, but it was becoming increasingly difficult especially since that annoying whining quality had entered his voice.

  Cora dutifully continued to hold her mother’s hand loosely as she watched wide-eyed and with half open mouth the flurry of activity around them. Distracted shoppers rushing around with their bags of purchases, electronic advertising boards squawking so loudly that one announcer’s voice bled into the other until it was impossible to distinguish one message from the other.

  Current business volume, Lara thought, scoffing under her breath in frustration. What exactly was wrong with saying, “If it looks busy, kiddo, expect to cool your heels”?

  “Cah-monnn.” Owen was dragging the word out now, getting the full force of his whine behind it. Funny how children know exactly which buttons to push, how hard to push it, and the most inappropriate time, then like a bored artist they start experimenting with variations, striving for maximum effect. If she reacted now, he would enthusiastically add this one to the ever mounting list of “tactics that get results.”

  “Excuse me, ma’am!”

  Lara jumped and Cora actually squeaked.

  “Mommy, it’s a Bot,” Cora hissed with awed excitement, stepping protectively closer to Lara’s side.

  The tall metallic man seemed to grow shorter, almost submissive. It lowered its head and bent one knee slightly as if bowing. “I did not mean to startle you, but I could not help but notice that you have lingered a somewhat longer amount of time than it takes for the average shopper to read and comprehend this informational sign,” it said. “Perhaps, I could be of some assistance to you?”

  Owen gave the metal man a jaded scowl and folded his arms. “CAH-mahhhn. We’re wasting time!”

  Patience finally snapping, Lara gave her son a pinch on the arm.

  Owen cried out in pain and turned beet red, clutching his arm as if she had just drawn blood. “Whatdidjadothatfor?”

  The Bot standing before them shuddered and for a brief moment seemed on the verge of collapse. Its electric blue eyes flickered and went dark briefly before returning to their previous intensity. Despite being a machine incapable of emotion, the Bot gave Lara and her children a look that could only be defined as “confusion,” turned and walked briskly away from them.

  Crazy Bots, Lara thought. When was someone going to program them with the concept that a little tough love was sometimes not only necessary but vital? She knew that since their inception, all mechanized men had been programmed to “do no harm to living beings,” and as a result, had an exceptionally low tolerance for perceived pain of any kind, no matter the amount. She had heard of them completely breaking down at the sight of spilled blood.

  “Enough, Owen, or we’re going straight home,” Lara proclaimed.

  “What home?”

  A sudden pain shot through Lara’s insides.

  There it was in a nutshell. Wisdom from the mouths of babes. (Smartass babes, but babes nonetheless.)

  What home?

  Without giving him the satisfaction of an answer, she wrapped a hand around his wrist and gave him a tug into the thick of the crowd. “C’mon,” she growled.

  She’d know the answer soon, although seeing the woman again would not be pleasant. At her husband’s funeral--the last time she’d been in the presence of her mother-in-law--the old bitch had uttered the unforgivable words: “He’s dead now. I hope you’re happy.”

  Those words had come as such a shock to Lara that she had been rendered speechless, her mouth capable of making nothing more than a confused whimper as the few somberly-dressed witnesses around her either stared dumbstruck or averted their eyes in vicarious embarrassment.

  Charlene Myers-Cartwright had always hated her. Until that day, Lara had never realized just how much.

  Now she had been reduced to going to the woman for help. Besides burying the love of her life, it would be the hardest thing Lara had ever had to do.

  They’d reached a wide intersection dominated by a large combination clock and signpost, that had been donated by President John Connally while he was still the Governor of Texas. The clock tower itself had been constructed in the quaint, old-fashioned style of the forties, though the red digital names scrolling across the signpost arms below its glowing yellow face ruined the timeless effect the designers had perhaps hoped to achieve.

  To Lara the choice of placing the weight-driven timepiece from a by-gone era here in the midst of state-of-the-art consumer technology only succeeded in making it look archaic and sad, like an elderly farmer that had wandered, scared and confused into a busy mono station. Intended as a respectful monument to our pasts, it had instead become something else altogether, an anachronism held up as spectacle.

  Owen tried pulling her south toward the Blue wing of the Mall.

  “What exactly are you doing?” she asked, yanking him up short and engaging his eyes.

  “The E-Bot store is this way,” he announced, returning her look impetuously for a moment before spotting the seriousness there and diplomatically dropping
his eyes altogether.

  “We’re going to see Grandma Charley first,” Lara responded, jerking his arm along the previous path they’d been following, navigating around a bowed Bot tying a little girl’s shoe. Cora clapped excitedly and gestured at the sight.

  “You never said that,” Owen snapped, jerking his arm away and following at just enough at a distance to still be considered “minding.”

  “I certainly did,” Lara replied.

  “No, you didn’t.”

  Before Lara could say something she’d regret, Cora pronounced under her breath: “She did. I heard her.”

  “Shuttup, Smeagol!”

  Again Lara pulled Owen up short, bowed until her face was even with his and hissed through her teeth, “One more word from you and we are out of here, goddammit!”

  Owen lowered his head, his cheeks turning beet red. He knew his mother had reached her limits. Lara rarely ever cursed, but it seemed lately the boy had been getting harder and harder to reach. It was as if he went out of his way to take offense to everything she said or did and she was running low on patience since the eviction.

  The thought of their homelessness brought her back to the task at hand.

  “Now if you want something to do, help me find the suites,” she said, stepping aside and waving him forward.

  Owen glanced away from her, his face a firm mask of repressed anger.

  Oh, great, Lara sighed. Now comes the pouting.

  “How about you, Coraline? Got any ideas how to get to Grandma Charley’s apartment?”

  The five-year-old was busy untying her shoes in the hopes of attracting the attention of one of the service Bots, though at her mother’s question she leapt to her feet and exclaimed, “Let’s ask one of the Bots! They like to help people. It’s what they do.”

  Owen started forward with a sigh. “This way,” the ten-year-old snapped, stomping forward up the concourse past a kiosk displaying fluorescent, spinning objects which dangled up and down like spiders on a silken web. Lara wasn’t sure what they were for until she noticed one teenager affixing one to her ear in front of a display mirror.

  “Mommy, can I get my ears pierced.”

  “Definitely not, sweet pea.”

  As they walked through the frenzied street of the virtual city, Lara found herself focusing on the people more so than the stores. The Mall of the Nation had been designed to be a sort of consumer’s Utopia. One of their advertising jingles even had the audacity to include the phrase “everything worth having in this world under one roof.” Yet nearly everyone she saw, carrying their brightly bagged purchases, walked alone, their expressions frozen in a dumb-founded almost semi-hypnotic state of satisfaction. But that smile seemed to disappear just below the surface of their skin. Their hard-set jaws and slumped shoulders told a different story. They were an anxious, lonely lot, searching for fulfillment that couldn’t be purchased.

  Where were the families with tiny kids? Where were the young couples?

  Almost immediately Lara caught sight of a college-aged couple headed toward them. The handsome blond man in a casual jacket made eye contact with Lara for one long moment, a brief flirtatious smile meeting his lips. The hot young thing in a short skirt and high heels never noticed as she continued prattling in an endless stream beside him.

  Then his eyes slid down and hardened slightly as he spotted Owen and Cora.

  “Look at the puppies, Mommy,” Cora exclaimed shrilly, rushing up to the display case of a pet store called Mammals and More, where two white balls of fluff engaged in playful roughhousing.

  Owen turned and grumbled. “Mom, if we stop at every store along the way...”

  “Oh, are we going to miss that appointment with your broker?” Lara snapped at Owen in frustration. She glanced longingly back at the blond man and noticed that he had lost all interest, his hand finding the tiny waist next to him and pulling her close for a quick peck on the corner of her brightly painted mouth.

  Whore!

  Where the Hell had that come from, Lara wondered with a certain degree of alarm as she turned back to her children.

  “Why don’t you go show Cora the snakes or something?”

  Owen seemed to be calculating an appropriate comeback when his tense frown dissolved and he looked almost pacified. “You think they got chameleons?”

  Rather than correct his grammar, Lara simply gave him a shrug and a single forced smile. “Why don’t you go find out?”

  Owen strode inside without a look back, while Cora glanced up at Lara with a hope-filled expression.

  Lara gave her a nod, thus releasing the youngest of the Myers brood to scurry inside the pet shop. Funny, how differently they had been programmed, she thought. Like little machines designed with incompatible purposes, they responded completely different to the same stimuli.

  Sighing heavily, Lara stepped over to a kiosk selling tasteful fake jewelry. She selected a faux diamond earring and held it up to her ear next to the full-length mirror at the kiosk.

  She wasn’t bad looking for a twenty-nine year-old. Sure, she thought, I could have bagged that twenty-something college kid, no problem. Trim figure, short brown hair, and light blue eyes with a sparkle of mischievousness still remaining from her girlhood. So what if she was a little thick in the posterior!

  Ben said that he’d always found that part of her alluring, though he was probably just playing the diplomat. He had always been the more politic of the two of them, always stepping in to mend fences when she’d let her “Wild-Bill mouth” run away with her. That had been their inside joke, as in, shoot first and ask questions later.

  She found the lady in the mirror flashing a bit of her teeth through parted lips and almost didn’t recognize herself. It had been a while since she’d actually seen a genuine smile on her face. Had she laughed once since the day she’d buried him?

  The day he left me, she thought bitterly.

  She suddenly remembered the kids and glanced back at the pet store. Cora had a huge smile as one of the store-keepers was holding a white rabbit out for her to stroke.

  She’d never wanted them.

  It popped into her head unbidden, like a subliminal image of a bleeding corpse spliced into a saccharin Disney film. It made her feel cold and empty for having produced the rogue thought.

  Ben had been an only child and had always sworn that he would have lots of kids when he started a family of his own. Lara had decided at nineteen that she would never marry that sort of man. Then that dark-haired bastard with his stage magician’s charm had materialized and ruined all those sacred teenage vows she’d made to herself.

  Undoubtedly, she’d still be in this particular fix even if she’d never had the two of them, but without them, she’d definitely have a bigger cushion to fall back on. Now there was nothing but responsibilities and lost opportunities.

  “Those look great on you, ma’am.”

  Lara swung around with a glare so menacing that the little high school nymph manning the kiosk actually took a short step back, an awkward lump rolling down her throat. Tossing the earrings back into the display case, Lara gave the kid another one of her big smiles, not attempting in the least to make it look the slightest bit genuine.

  She thought about saying something snide to the child, something about living life while you could, because when you reach my incredibly ancient age your decrepit soul just withers up and dies like an un-watered plant tucked into the dusty corner of a room.

  Nah, Lara decided, the biggest revenge I could have against you, kid, is to let you find out the hard way. By then, it will be far too late to do anything about it.

  2

  The doors opened and Lara herded the children into the empty car. Owen immediately began to look for buttons, but there were none.

  A loud flourish of synthesized sound erupted from somewhere above them, followed by a polished female voice asking: “Which floor please?”

  Lara turned a pirouette searching for a sensor or microphone of some
sort. Failing that, she finally lifted her chin toward the ceiling and responded: “Top floor, residential level.”

  “Thank you,” the voice said with the sort of smug satisfaction of an overachiever doing a simplistic job well below their pay grade.

  As the car smoothly began to rise, Cora and Owen rushed to opposing walls and pressed their respective noses to the cold glass. A panoramic view of the Mall opened up before them below like a hot air balloon rising above an amusement park. As far as their wondrous eyes could see were immense spaces spilling over with intense glowing colors like expressionist paintings on infinite canvases. Outrageously-dressed crowds flowed from one passageway to the next like flocks of birds through an electronic sky.

  For the first time that day, Owen was content to exist in the moment.

  “Look, mommy, look,” Cora exclaimed, grabbing her mother with a strength that belayed her size and dragging her to the glass. “Isn’t it beau-tee-ful?”

  A second documentarian-style voice began.

  “The Mall of the Nation in Houston, Texas is the largest consumer shopping facility in the nation. At just under 8 million square feet and towering four stories, and one subterranean level for time-saving transport, the Mall of the Nation is home to 1600 stores and an additional three stories of residential apartments. The Mall has been designated its own zip code by the U.S. Postal Service. But don’t worry about getting around. For your convenience, there are four separate trams to serve you.”

  “The young and old alike will enjoy the Mall’s ice rink, Ferris wheel, wave pool, and aquarium that include over thirty-five thousand varieties of animal species.”

  “Boasting a 30 screen movie theater, a five star resort-style hotel and two five star restaurants, the Mall is everything you ever wanted in one place. You may never want to leave. And now with the grand opening of the Choice Life Estates, you won’t have to.”