The Mall Read online

  “And because the Mall of the Nation is fully automated, we are open for your convenience twenty-four hours a day, three-hundred sixty-five days a ye…”

  “Owen, can you please get it to shut up?”

  Before Owen could even react, a feminine voice stated: “Audio deactivated,” and the enclosed interior became as silent as a glass tomb.

  The elevator took its time rising to the residential level of the Mall, for which Lara was grateful. It gave her time to plot out her approach. She had consciously avoided thinking about this meeting for the past twenty-four hours, perhaps fearing that over-thinking might allow herself the opportunity to talk herself out of it. All she knew was that she had exhausted all other options and that she must do this for the good of her children.

  The car stopped and the door opened onto a wide concrete courtyard. A cold wind blew Lara’s short brown hair back from her head and for a moment she had an inexplicable feeling of utter loneliness. Her arm shot out and clutched Cora—more for her own comfort than out of protectiveness--who remained by her side, as always. Owen had already started outside.

  “Owen Frederick!”

  The ten-year-old stopped dead in his tracks and glanced back impatiently. “Mom, it’s just an apartment complex,” he said with a patronizing edge to his voice.

  On the surface, that was exactly what it appeared. So what had gotten her so edgy all of a sudden?

  She rushed out and snatched Owen roughly by his wrist and started down the center of the courtyard, Cora in tow. There wasn’t a single tree within view. No flowers. Not a single blade of grass.

  Nor were there the typical sounds of a lived-in neighborhood. No screams of children playing. No dogs barking. No mothers yelling at their teenagers. For that matter, there was no sign of children whatsoever. No bikes or skateboards. No toys. No discarded ice cream or candy wrappers.

  Every numbered door they passed was identical, devoid of individuality. Almost like drawers for inanimate objects instead of entrances to homes.

  Then the reason for her discomfort hit home. It had all the warmth of a cemetery.

  And this was the home of her mother-in-law.

  How appropriate, she couldn’t help but think with an ironic chuckle.

  “Mommy, do you think Grandma Charley will have cookies?”

  “Highly doubtful,” Lara mumbled under her breath.

  So deeply absorbed in her own thoughts, she nearly collided with a man coming around the corner before he was nearly on top of her. The balding middle-aged man in a security uniform seemed just as surprised to see her as she was to see him. It first glance he looked flabby and overweight, but as he brushed past her she sensed an animal intensity in the six foot tall man that almost frightened her.

  “Oh,” Lara exclaimed. “I’m sorry!”

  He murmured something under his breath and altered his brisk pace only slightly.

  Lara stiffened, wondering for a brief instant if she should be offended, but let it roll off her instead.

  “C’mon,” she said tugging Owen forward.

  Just before Cora turned the corner she cast a look back at the scary uniformed man. He was already looking back at her with wide, anxious eyes—eyes that somehow flickered with recognition as they probed her face.

  The color that she could see surrounding him went from a muddy-brown to a mildew-yellow. She felt a prickling heat just behind her eyes and for a moment her vision became blurry. It was the same thing she’d felt only a few times before. Now here it was again.

  Then her mother tugged her around the corner and the troubled feeling fled from her like a tiny bird.

  3

  But it couldn’t have been her, Albert thought in horror.

  He increased his pace until he reached the bank of elevators, entered but stood silently as the voice above prompted him for instruction.

  After a few moments, he knew that he simply had to relieve his doubt. He started back the way he’d just come. When he reached his apartment door, he glanced casually around, making as if to dig his keycard out of his pocket. Instead, his finger fell on another object, sealed in loose plastic. He withdrew his hand guiltily and gazed over his shoulder.

  There was no movement anywhere. No sound of footfalls. He started away from his door at a deliberate pace—but not brisk enough to draw attention—and turned the next corner.

  Nobody.

  He took the long way around the floor back to the bank of elevators and passed no one along his path.

  Surely, it had been his imagination.

  Albert remembered clearly that the incident last week had been a near miss.

  As he recalled, the little girl had come out of nowhere as he was making a right hand turn onto Cedar Street. The white delivery van in front of him had been blocking his view and wouldn’t move its wide ass. He waited patiently for what seemed five minutes, giving a prompting beep of his horn periodically just to let the driver know that he was still there.

  Albert had been in such a hurry. Running late for work as usual and in security, there was no room for tardiness. The rest of your team depended on you to be there when they expected you. After all, a chain was only as strong as its weakest link.

  Finally, when his patience had worn out, he had laid on his horn and the van had surprised him by making a left hand turn instead of going right. Albert had given him another honk of his horn and one last hand gesture for good measure before his foot stomped the gas pedal.

  And suddenly, there she was.

  A little five-year-old girl stood in the middle of the road.

  If his reaction time or his brakes hadn’t been as effective as they had been, he’d have hit her as surely as he was standing here now.

  But they had been perfect—both his reaction time and his brakes--as efficient as a peak-functioning machine doing the exact purpose for which its designer had built it.

  His tires had squealed, his entire vehicle had rocked forward, his chest had struck the steering wheel, his mouth had dropped open.

  And she stared at him with wide terror-stricken eyes.

  Lord, but it had been close!

  Now here was the little girl again, here in the place he lived.

  But of course, it couldn’t be her. The chance of her being here defied logic, and if nothing else, Albert Lynch was a man of logic. Son of an electrical engineer, Albert had done everything within his power to rise above his humble origins.

  To begin with, he had chosen a career path that was more cerebral than his father and graduated from Rice University with a Graduate Degree in philosophy. His plan had been that he would teach while he wrote his first book, a treatise on humanity’s fatal flaw to strive for greatness and what this ultimately said about American Imperialism. When his plan to get a job teaching at a local university fell through—though he was offered that job at a junior college in Nashville, he had refused to sell himself short and would wait for an opportunity that was more deserving of his talents—he decided to apply for a temporary position with security at the Mall of the Nation. He figured that it would be the perfect opportunity to view the cracks in the foundation of the crumbling edifice of American capitalism from the inside. He could gather plenty of fodder for his planned book.

  But four years after graduation, he had only gotten as far as an outline—which he had submitted to publishers, though he was still waiting for one perceptive enough to see the inherent brilliance of the idea--and several hundred pages of notes in the form of a journal. The actual writing of the book had proven to be more difficult than he had surmised. He had even considered turning his journal entries into a sort of “man-on-the-scene” memoir on the destructiveness of “the American dream.”

  Though he had once felt concern that working there might make him complacent and soft on the vice that surrounded him, he’d found himself instead growing more and more bitter toward the vapid-eyed consumers who wasted hour upon hour of their lives stockpiling unnecessary luxuries like fat ants.
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br />   But by far, what made him the angriest was the knowledge that he himself continued to work for a system that he loathed out of basic necessity. He tried to look at it as simple survival. He must serve the present masters while continuing to search for a method of escape from their enslavement.

  The doors of the elevator opened and he swung into the car, resting his substantial weight against the back wall. “Which floor pl…?”

  “Pedestrian level three,” he snapped.

  “Thank you, Albert Lamia Lynch.”

  Albert took a deep breath. “What did you say?”

  There was the briefest of pauses before the voice of the elevator prompted him to, “Please repeat command.”

  He closed his eyes, took a deep measured breath and said, “Repeat last statement verbatim.”

  “Please repeat com…”

  “Repeat statement before that one.”

  “Thank you,” the female recorded voice repeated with just as much enthusiasm as it had the first time, minus his full name.

  Albert released his breath and opened his eyes.

  There now. Of course, the computer couldn’t have spoken his full name. Obviously, as an employee of the company, his name would be in the system, but these machines weren’t programmed that way. They were supposed to be cordial, yet impersonal.

  Besides, his personnel files knew him as Albert Lamar Lynch and not a soul outside of his parents knew his middle name was “Lamia.” It was a ridiculous family name from his mother’s Greek side, that he had purged himself of the moment he was eighteen, not that anyone in this cultural illiterate society was even familiar with Greek mythology anymore. He just hated the name, pure and simple. Sounded too much like “labia” for his tastes. I mean, how could the guys in management take you seriously when you were named after ladies’ junk?

  Before he was even conscious he was doing it, his fingers found the object in his pocket and caressed it through the plastic bag it had been sealed inside. When the doors opened again to the Mall, his radio began to emit a piercing pulse that meant that he had been chosen by the System as the unit CIP (closest in proximity) to an “event.”

  Albert punched the red button atop the radio attached to his belt. This told the System that he was available to respond and to shut the hell up. Checking the radio display, he read a series of codes that told him the section, level and nature of the emergency.

  Disturbance. Great, he thought. That could translate to any number of things from a crazy homeless guy throwing a fit to kids tossing water balloons off the railing of the top levels. One of the problems with having a robot on the scene act as dispatcher was they were sparse on the details. Clarity and perspective sacrificed on the altar of efficiency.

  “Anybody have an eye on what’s going on at the Ferris Wheel?”

  A moment later a garbled voice replied: “Yeah, we got two teens with skateboards outside the entrance of the Wheel at the fountain. You nearby, Lynch?”

  “On my way now.”

  4

  When the door of the apartment opened, a little white Bishon peeked through, yapping madly. The woman at the door swept the animal aside with her heeled shoe and cried, “Back, Andy! Back!”

  The door opened wider, the stale smell of air freshener sprayed precipitately atop years of nicotine residue assaulting Lara.

  “Coraline! Look at you, my child! So beautiful!”

  Charlene swept open the door, went to one knee and held her arms out to Cora. The five-year-old dutifully went to the woman, gingerly placing her arms around her. Owen cast a disgruntled look at his mother. She gave a firm shake of her head in return.

  “Owen, look at how much you’ve grown,” Charlene cried with a croak of a throat abused by years of smoking. She gave him a one-arm squeeze—her wrist rattling with dangling jewelry--that he managed to tolerate. Following his sister inside the house, he turned back just long enough to make a gagging face for his mother’s benefit.

  Lara tried to maintain her expression as her mother-in-law gave her a look of harsh appraisal, then stepped aside, allowing her to follow her children inside.

  “I apologize for Andy’s behavior. He reacts that way with all strangers,” Charlene murmured, casting a judgmental eye in Lara’s direction. “I’ve set out plates of cookies for you two in the den. Why don’t you watch some TV while your mother and I have a talk?”

  Lara tried to control her slowly rising panic as her children disappeared from her view into the next room. She wouldn’t give this woman the luxury of the fear she knew from experience that she coveted. The little white dog started after the children but Charlene gave a single snap and it scurried immediately to her heel.

  She turned and started down the hallway, turning into the first room to the right, not taking a look back, only assuming that she would be followed.

  “He’s well trained.”

  “Should be,” Charlene chirped, stepping around a heavy oak desk in the darkened office and drawing a pack of cigarettes from the top drawer. “I paid enough for the little bastard.” She waved Lara to the leather couch beside the door.

  Lara edged back into the couch and sunk into its plush cushion. She immediately pushed herself up, leaning forward--elbows on knees--hoping to appear somewhat business-like, despite her floundering confidence.

  Andy gave her feet a few sniffs, then pranced out the door and down the hall.

  Charlene cracked the blinds on the window behind the desk, sending a harsh ray of dying sunlight from the hazy Houston sky into Lara’s eye line. She was nothing more than a silhouette to Lara now, a dark smoking shape that could be Beelzebub for all she knew. Perching herself on the corner of the desk, Charlene’s silhouette sat that way for a few silent moments.

  Lara gave a long and heavy sigh and scooted even further out on the edge of the cushion as if preparing for a quick launch off the starting line. “Listen, Charlene…”

  “What kind of trouble have you gotten yourself into this time?”

  Lara swallowed awkwardly. So it was going to be this way, she concluded.

  “Truth is me and the kids are temporary without a place to stay.”

  “Evicted? Again?”

  Lara opened her mouth then snapped it closed again. She shut her eyes and counted to three. “Charlene, I would appreciate you putting your grandchildren up for a few days until I make arrangements.”

  “Why were you evicted this time? Boyfriend trouble?”

  “The owners defaulted on their loan and kicked us out, which as you might know is illegal under state law,” Lara replied, her voice gathering momentum as she gained courage. “I have a friend, a lawyer. He said he would talk to the owner and try and get him to forego legal action by letting us stay through the end of our lease.”

  Charlene said nothing. The embers of her cigarette glowed brightly as she drew on it in the darkness. “I know that you would never have turned to me unless you had exhausted all your other options. What about friends?”

  “I had something lined up with a coworker.” Tabitha, a data entry technician from the accounting firm where she worked, usually reliable in a pinch, had a family emergency and left town suddenly, abandoning Lara to her own fate with a series of sincere, and ultimately ineffective, apologies. “But her mother had a stroke early this morning and…”

  “So you’ve known you were homeless since this morning?”

  Lara attempted to remain quiet, but her frustration spurred her on. “You know that I’m an only child. Both my parents died when I was eight and my only surviving aunt is in a state hospital. I have no cousins…”

  “My brother has several children,” Charlene stated bluntly. To anyone else, this might have seemed like a non-sequitur, but Lara knew the way Charlene Myers-Cartwright’s mind worked. She was simply pointing out her inherit superiority, in case Lara might have forgotten.

  “It might surprise you to hear, that not one of them returned my phone calls,” Lara replied, attempting to keep the sarcasm ou
t of her voice.

  When Tabitha had fallen through, Lara’s first instinct was to try and find a way to get back into the office building where she worked. She soon remembered from past experiences, having forgotten some prescription medication in her desk drawer several months ago, that on the weekends the card readers did not allow her access.

  “And before you ask, I’ve been meticulously going through the list of everyone I’ve ever known from high school until the day I started work a year ago as a secretary, hoping for just one other option, but I came up with zip.”

  The figure continued smoking in the darkness, adding nothing to the interrogation.

  Taking this as a sign of encouragement, Lara added, “Charlene, I do not want to expose my children to a homeless shelter.” She had planned on playing the guilt card only if she’d had no other options, but it was starting to look grim. “Please. Just a few days.”

  “Lara, I would be happy to take my grandchildren in.” One dark appendage trailed off from the main body of the silhouette and turned a green shade lamp on atop the desk. As Lara blinked back the stars from her eyes, the other swept what appeared to be piece of paper to the edge of the desk. “But I’m going to need you to sign this document first.”

  Something cold and fluttery awakened inside Lara’s stomach.

  “What is that?” she said with dull dread.

  “It’s a letter of guardianship.”

  Her chest stiffened. “Perhaps you m-misunderstood me…”

  “No, I think we understand each other perfectly, Lara,” Charlene replied. “We always have.”

  Lara stared at the single sheet of paper beneath her mother-in-law’s long-nailed fingers.

  “Let’s be perfectly frank,” the other continued. “You never wanted those children. They’ve always been something of an inconvenience to you. You’ve as much as told my son that on several separate occasions.”

  It took a few moments for Lara to realize that her mouth had drifted open. She snapped her jaw shut and tried to formulate the words coursing through her jumbled head. “The words that passed between me and my husband—my deceased husband--in the heat of past arguments have no bearing whatsoever to what’s happening here today and I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t bring him up again.”