The Mall Read online

  Here at the yellow sector tram station, Jesse and Chance had come to the end of their limited supply of patience.

  “I’m telling you, man, it ain’t coming. It ain’t just the lights. Everything’s down,” Chance snapped. “We should have gone along with the rest of that crowd you wanted to hide from.”

  “Are you serious?” Jesse scoffed. “You saw the security geek that was with them. I’m sure every one of them’s looking for us by now.” He set his board on the ground and stepped up to the glass plasti-steel partition that separated the loading platform from the track. Digging his fingers under the lip of the door, he half-heartedly attempted to pull it open.

  “Now what are you doing, dumbass?”

  “I don’t know about you, but I’m not walking all the way back past two hundred stores to get back to blue sector.”

  That’s where the bikes were locked up. Chance had nearly forgotten.

  “Y’know, why don’t we just start coming in through the yellow sector,” Chance complained. “We always end up at the arcade anyway.”

  “Cuz the blue sector is closer to Sedgewick Park where we come in from, Dingleweed, and I’m not about to ride a marathon around the building just so I can park my bike outside the arcade,” Jesse shot back. “C’mon, over here and help me with this.”

  Chance sighed heavily to let Jesse know what a stupid idea he thought this was before dropping his board next to the other and grabbing the edge of the door just underneath his hands.

  “On three now,” Jesse told him. “One, two, three.”

  Both of them grunted and strained. After a few moments, the door screeched in protest and slid roughly apart. Pulling it wide enough for passage through, Jesse eased up and finally let go entirely. “It’s staying open.”

  Chance wiped his hands on his pants and casually glanced over his shoulder. He thought he had spotted something in the shadows and fixed his eyes on the darkness, waiting patiently for another sign before he spoke up. He sure as hell didn’t want to catch crap from Jesse if he’d been seeing things. Maybe it had just been one of those Bots wandering around.

  “Hey, wake up!” Jesse slapped him roughly on the arm and pointed down to the tracks. “Go on down and I’ll toss you the boards.”

  “Screw you,” Chance hissed. “I ain’t going first.”

  “What’re you? Some kind of pussy?”

  “Yeah, that’s exactly what I am, you fag,” Chance replied, giving him the finger. “When was the last time that worked for you? When you were five?”

  “What’s your point? Aren’t you five yet?”

  “If you’re in such a hurry to get electrocuted, you go first.”

  “How would we get electrocuted?”

  “Haven’t you ever heard of the third rail, dumbass?”

  Jesse rolled his eyes. “Explain to me how we could get electrocuted, Mr. Science, if the power’s out?”

  “Screw you. I’m outta here,” Chance murmured under his breath.

  When he turned his back and started away, Jesse took a long look down into the darkness beyond the plasti-steel doors and sighed heavily. “Fine! Just go get the boards for me.”

  Chance walked tentatively over to the two skateboards peering into the darkness where he thought he’d spotted the figure. Maybe he had just imagined it. Truth be told, all this was starting to spook him the hell out!

  He watched as Jesse carefully lowered himself down to the tracks beyond, nervous lines wrinkling his brow.

  Chance watched him with a smirk. He walked casually over to Jesse and spun one of the rear wheels of his board, causing the ball-bearings to clatter around in the base with a sizzling sound.

  Jesse threw himself back against the lip of the concrete platform with a startled huff.

  Grabbing his gut, Chance wobbled backwards in a fit of laughter, while Jesse, red-faced and sweating, gave him a one-finger salute. He dropped the final few feet to the floor beside the tracks and waved his hands in the air. “C’mon, candy-ass!”

  Chance kneeled down on the platform and craned his neck to look down the tram tunnel. “Dude, how the hell are we going to be able to see where we’re going down there?”

  Jesse raised the stolen laser pointer high above him, shining a small pin-light into the other’s eyes. “It’s got a pin-light, too.”

  “You’re a regular girl-scout.”

  “Now ask me if I’m wearing clean underwear.”

  The other chuckled under his breath. “I figure I know the answer to that one.”

  Chance took a brief moment to ponder the obvious question of why all of the Bots they had seen so far had stalled out when they supposedly ran on batteries, while the little laser/pin-light continued to work. But the question just as easily slipped from his mind as he turned back to the matter at hand.

  Handing the boards down, Chance took one last look back down the corridor before lowering himself down beside Jesse.

  “See,” Jesse sighed with a smug smile on his face, tucking the boards beneath his arms and taking a step backwards. “What did I tell y---?” Dropping the boards, Jesse’s face contorted and he stiffened, his whole body quivering and shaking.

  “Son of a bitch,” Chance growled in bored exasperation, leaning down to snatch his board off the tracks and inspecting it closely. “You better not have scratched my board!”

  Jesse chortled, grabbed his own board, and started into the darkness. “I had you going there for a millisecond, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah, I was actually thinking to myself, wouldn’t it be great if that wastoid fried himself crispy and I didn’t have to put up with him anymore,” he replied, following a few yards behind him. “But then I’d be left with the job of having to explain to your poor parents how you died humping a fuse-box. Oh, the humanity of it all!”

  “Quit screwing around and get up here, willya?” Jesse snapped, shining the pin-light back at Chance.

  “Nah, I think I like following you at this distance,” Chance commented wryly. “Gives me a few seconds more to run, just in case something happens to your ass.”

  As their dueling voices faded into the darkness, a figure dropped silently down through the open plasti-steel doors behind them.

  10

  “Mr. Simon, what issa Electro-magnet-pulse?”

  For the last few minutes, the group had been walking in virtual silence, broken only by the occasional hiss of static from Cora’s hand-cranked radio/flashlight.

  “It’s a burst of electromagnetic radiation that could damage electronic systems.”

  “Would that break this radio?” she asked, swinging the flashlight down to him by its fluorescent yellow leash.

  Lara watched with interest as Simon examined the gadget for a moment, turning it off and back on, raising and lowering the volume of the incessant hissing of static. “It seems sufficiently operational.”

  “But I can’t get any music on it.”

  “Probably an issue with the transmission source, not the receiver,” he concluded, handing it back up to Cora, who wore a thoroughly confused expression on her face.

  Lara frowned disapprovingly at Simon and was about to make another comment on his people skills, when Reggie slowed, raised a single hand into the air with fingers spread then closed them into a fist.

  “What was that?” Lara asked, keeping pace beside Simon.

  “He was informing me that the doors have been sealed,” Simon replied, his eyes finding Lara’s and lingering on them significantly.

  Lara realized for the first time how interesting his eyes were. They were of a unique color that she was attempting to define when he looked away again. “How does he know? I thought you told me that the system was down or something?”

  “It is,” Simon told her. “He heard the northern doors close and lock.”

  “Wait, we’re on the southern end, right? He heard all the way across to the other side of the Mall?”

  Simon gave her a simple nod. “Yes.”

  She look
ed across at the silver Bot and gave a low whistle. “Impressive, Reg!”

  “Thank you,” the Bot replied humorlessly.

  “So, I guess that’s it then, huh? In for an ounce..,” Lara quipped, hoping that the other would take her cue and finish the time-worn phrase for her, but he didn’t. What the hell did it take to connect with this guy, she wondered?

  “By the way, what’s with all the gesturing?”

  “It’s a form of shorthand I invented,” Simon stated. “It saves time.”

  “What’s one to do then, with all that time?” Lara asked, with a chuckle.

  After nearly a minute of silence, Lara decided that Simon had simply decided to ignore her attempt at small talk. Figures that he might be frustrated as hell that she hadn’t taken his advice, and now that they were sufficiently prisoners in a capitalist paradise, here she was, making stupid jokes.

  “You think we’ve made a big mistake, don’t you?”

  “It’s not my place to judge.”

  “That’s a refreshing attitude,” Lara said, flashing him a smile. “Are you religious?”

  Simon was silent.

  Sensing that she might have overstepped her boundaries, Lara rushed into a verbal soft-shoe routine. “It’s just that I noticed the Bible earlier and I was just wondering… Maybe I’m getting a little too personal, though.”

  Again silence.

  “I guess I find it hard myself to buy… I mean, if there this all-powerful being, why does He want his creations to suffer so much?”

  “I don’t know the answer to your question, Lara,” Simon replied. “I’ve been making an effort to educate myself about a part of life that I was raised to disregard as inconsequential. I’ve read the Torah, the Koran, as well as the New Testament of the Bible. The truth is a lot more complicated than I was initially led to believe.” After a moment’s silence, he continued, “I find that, in general, religious individuals are happier. Do you find that to be true, in your experience?”

  Lara shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. I’m neither happy, nor religious.” She scoffed. “Hey, I think I might have just proved your hypothesis there. Guess I’m really a mess.”

  Simon glanced over at Lara beside him and scrutinized her, a confused smile on his face. “Considering the circumstances, you’re handling this situation with better humor than most people would.”

  She glanced over at Cora, running a palm down over the silky-smooth top of her hair, if for nothing more than to give herself some motivation for breaking eye contact. “Yeah, well that’s just the Myers game face.”

  When Simon turned away, she glanced back at him, her eyes seeking a physical representation of the newly formed dimensions that she’d just discovered in his personality.

  But he looked like the same lost soul she had found back in the machine repair shop a little over an hour ago.

  “I’m assuming that you’re not married. Only single men have the luxury and time to soul-search like that.”

  Simon cocked a single eyebrow at her. A moment later she burst into laughter.

  “I’m sorry. You looked so much like Spock just then,” she murmured as an aside, her voice trailing off into an inaudible whisper. Midway through the statement, she had come to the horrific realization that Ben used to make the same face at her when she had lapsed into, as he was fond of putting it, “Lara-speak.”

  Just another in that long list of terms of affection that our-boy-Bennie used with his gal “Gloria.”

  Lara felt herself sinking back into that cold swamp of self-pity that she despised when Simon said something that jerked her right back up like the hand of a rescuer.

  “You have a pleasant laugh.”

  Lara glanced at him with an expression that might have appeared as shock. She could feel the blush rising in her cheeks and felt absolutely foolish for it, and the mere thinking about it made it just that much worse, she knew. She’d always been a chronic blusher, one of the draw-backs of being born a peach-skinned daughter of an Englishman.

  “I’ve been doing that a lot lately. I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Lara responded apologetically. “This is how I fight off the impending panic attack, I guess.”

  “Don’t worry,” Simon stated with a matter-of-fact bluntness. “I won’t let anything happen to you or your daughter, Lara.”

  Her instinct was to protest--to tell him that she didn’t need taking care of. However, with shocking clarity, she realized that not only didn’t she mind, but she actually felt comforted by the statement. It had been a long while since she had allowed herself that luxury—to be vulnerable enough to allow someone else to take the reins out of her hands.

  It felt simultaneously foreign and achingly familiar.

  Before she was aware enough to stop it, she heard herself asking another personal question. “How long have you been divorced?”

  “Never married.”

  Almost instinctively, she began tallying up a list of flaws in her head. She barely kept from asking the question, “How old are you,” before controlling herself sufficiently to be slightly more diplomatic. “That’s too bad. Any specific reason?”

  “I’ve been told that I’m a perfectionist and a workaholic,” he replied briskly, casting a little boy’s smile into the darkness ahead of them.

  “That’s a deadly combination,” Lara murmured. Then rephrasing the question of several minutes before, she asked: “What do you do with your downtime?”

  “My work is my life.”

  With those five words, Lara Myers knew that Simon Peter had just tapped the very core of his being, the definition of the man he was.

  Suddenly, she felt very safe and uncharacteristically lucky that he had become her ally in the impossible task of searching for her son in a shopping mall the size of a city. She knew he was the sort of man who would see a job through to the end, once begun.

  Surprisingly, Lara found herself thanking whatever coincidence, stroke of luck, or nebulous Creator-figure that had thrown her and the stiff little man together. It was surprising simply because when the morning had begun, Lara had been sure she was an atheist.

  Now, she was only certain of one thing. She would reserve judgment until after her son was safely returned to her.

  “I’ve been thinking about the question you asked and I think the answer is ‘yes.’”

  Lara glanced over at him questioningly.

  “You asked me if I thought He wanted his creations to suffer.”

  “So God’s a sadist,” she replied. “Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

  “No, on the contrary, I believe He may be trying to make us better,” Simon commented. “Suffering changes what it touches. Like a whetstone against a knife edge.”

  “So what is your God trying to improve when He kills a newborn?” Lara snapped with more bitterness than she had intended.

  Simon glanced at her, but remained silent.

  Lapsing into a sullen silence, Lara pondered the source of her sudden burst of anger.

  11

  They had been walking in silence for only a couple of minutes, when Chance heard the noise in the impenetrable darkness behind. It had sounded like a foot shuffling, though he couldn’t be sure, especially since the acoustics of the tunnel made it hard to distinguish the direction of the noise. It could just as well have come from in front of as from behind.

  He casually edged up closer to Jesse and touched his arm.

  “Hands off the merchandise, you fag.”

  Chance ignored the taunt, and moved closer still, whispering in the general direction of his ear, though in the puny illumination of the pin-light, he couldn’t be sure just how close he actually was. “Do you hear that?”

  “We’ve been through this one before,” Jesse moaned, elbowing the other in the ribs.

  “I’m serious this time.” Chance stressed each word distinctively, hoping to get the point across in his delivery where his words had failed. “Footsteps. Listen.”

  Jesse had
the good sense to keep his mouth shut. A few moments later, as if on cue, Chance heard it again.

  Without a word, Jesse picked up his pace.

  “Hey!” Chance had no choice but to pursue. “What are we gonna do?”

  “Tell you what I’m doing. I’m shagging ass outta here,” Jesse hissed. “I believe I can make out some light just around the bend ahead.”

  Sure enough, Chance could see the subtle lightening of the darkness that might mean a light source in the distance. Still, if they were being pursued, they’d never get out of the tunnel before their stalker overtook them, because they still had the platform door to open, and it would be a whole lot trickier from their current position than it had been at street level.

  “I’m gonna stop, but when I do, you gotta keep talking,” Chance proposed.

  After a moment’s confused hesitation, Jesse came back with the expected, “Say what?”

  “I gotta get behind him, see, and he won’t notice that I stopped until he passes me,” Chance tried to explain. “But this won’t work unless you make him believe that I’m still walking beside you. Got me?”

  “Ohhh,” came the slow reply. Then: “What if it’s…” Jesse stopped right there. He had just enough oats left in the bag to know that if he expressed his true monster-in-the-closet irrational fear of what might be following them in the musky-oily smelling darkness he’d never be able to live it down. “What if whatever’s back there is bigger than you, dude?”

  “When I yell out for you, you better get back here. And I mean, quicker than a bad case of the Hershey squirts! Okay!”

  “Yeah,” he answered timidly, due more to the prospect of being alone than any doubt he might have had in the plan itself. “All right, man.”

  Chance could tell now from the way he answered that he did indeed “get it.” Jesse was as ready as he was ever going to be.

  “Okay, start talking,” Chance snapped, coming to a complete stop, and dropping to a crouch in the dusty darkness, lying the top of his board securely across one leg.