The Mall Read online

  Simon cast a humorless look at her and she realized that she had indeed been chortling out loud. She consciously cut off the sound with a clearing of her throat.

  He seemed to read the doubt in her expression. “It’s the only auto dealership in the Mall and this is the quickest way.”

  “I’ve no doubt,” she snapped, tension in her lips. “C’mon, Cora.”

  Taking Lara by the hand, he assisted her and Cora down the last step, shining his flashlight down upon the floor to assure their footing. “I should take Cora myself,” he said, going to one knee and reaching both hands out to her.

  Cora shook her head emphatically and clung tighter to her mother’s arm.

  Lara and Simon exchanged a look and he rose to his feet again.

  “Okay, but if you don’t keep up, you’re going to have to let Mr. Simon carry you, ‘kay?”

  Cora nodded and took Lara by the hand, her grip strong and resolute--just like the handshake of her father on a night long ago when they had first been introduced after that yawn-fest of a college seminar on the Depletion of the Ozone Layer.

  Simon stepped around the escalator bank and pointed the flashlight down the west-facing platform. It looked like a subway tube without the extra headway, Lara thought.

  “Perhaps you should set the pace,” Simon said, shining the light, ahead of them. “Don’t run. That will just increase the risk of tripping. We can make just as good time if we walk at a fast pace.”

  “I agree,” Lara replied, starting forward and tugging Cora gently to her side. “How far?”

  “Less than a mile. It shouldn’t take us more than thirty minutes to get there.”

  “Didja hear that, Cora?” Lara chirped. “We’re going to be with your brother in a half hour.”

  Cora shined the beam of her flashlight across the walls at their sides.

  “Mommy, what do you think got the Boogeyman?”

  “Cora, we’re not going to tell stories like that down here. You understand?”

  The little girl craned her head to look back at the fading patch of sunlight spilling down from the escalator opening behind them. In the silent stillness, the croak of her swallowing was clearly audible.

  “Face forward and watch where you step!” Lara chastised, giving her daughter’s arm a gentle tug of correction.

  “Mr. Simon, is the Mall alive?”

  “Cora, what did I just tell you?”

  Silence enveloped them up and a phantom shiver ran up Lara’s back and rattled her shoulders like a large playful dog. “How about we sing a song? ‘What makes that little ole ant, think he can move that rubber tree…’”

  Cora sighed heavily and snapped, “Mr. Simon, tell us a story.”

  “What a good idea, Cora,” Lara replied, her voice forcing positivity. “I’m sure Mr. Simon has a good memory for stories.”

  Simon seemed to consider his options for a moment, before beginning:

  “There once was a boy who loved to climb trees in his backyard. He’d climb trees from sun up to sun down and his favorite game was seeing how high he could climb. But the boy realized one day that he was very very lonely. He asked his father if he could have a pet and his father being a good and loving father gave him a cat, a dog, a parrot, and many many other animals to play with.”

  Lara looked from Cora to Simon. This was exactly the sort of thing she had wanted but had no talent at. She found herself thinking that Ben could have done no better and was instantly ashamed at the comparison.

  “But the boy found that he was still lonely. So he asked his father for a friend that was more like him than the other animals and since his father was a good and loving father, he found a little girl to be his friend.”

  “The girl was a very good friend to the boy. He showed her around his backyard and introduced her to all his pets. They shared everything and had so much in common that it was as if they had been molded from the same piece of clay. The girl loved to climb trees just as much as the boy and one day while they were playing in the yard, she saw a gigantic tree glowing bright green with life that had so many branches that it looked like an octopus reaching into the cloud-filled sky. The girl ached to climb it and asked the boy if they could. The boy told her that his father had told him that they could climb any tree in the yard but this giant green one. ‘The branches of this tree, the very first and the mother of all trees, reach so high into the sky that to fall from its heights means certain death,’ his father had told him.”

  Cora edged closer to Simon and embraced his arm like it was itself the limb of an enormous sheltering tree. In the pale light cast by her flashlight, Lara stared in wonder as Cora rested her head against his wrist, allowing her eyes to close yet continuing to match his pace.

  “One day, the girl was playing in the yard without the boy when she heard a chattering coming from the Mother Tree and she went to see which of his pets was making this strange new sound. But the creature that she saw high up in the wonderfully intricately winding branches of the tree was nothing that she’d ever seen before. It was an incredibly beautiful red-furred tree squirrel with a tail that was like velvet and glistening chocolate eyes like polished amber that seemed to glow with a warm inner light.

  “And he called down in greeting and asked the girl to come on up the tree and play with him, but she said that she couldn’t. ‘Why not?’ he asked. ‘Father says that we can climb any tree in the yard except for this one.’

  “The squirrel wanted to know what was wrong with the tree that he lived in, because from his perspective it was the best tree in the whole yard. She agreed that it certainly looked that way to her.

  “So what was keeping her from joining him, he wanted to know? Certainly, her father, being a good and loving father, surely wanted her to have as much fun as he was having climbing the tree and of course, he would never deny her something that might be fun.

  “Maybe, he thinks the tree is too tall and he doesn’t want us to slip and fall. Maybe he’s just looking out for us and protecting us.

  “Well, couldn’t you fall from any of the trees in the yard, the squirrel asked? What makes this tree any different from the others in that respect? Not only that, but I’ve lived in this tree all my life and haven’t once fallen, he told her.”

  By now, Lara recognized the story, but allowed Simon to continue out of sheer curiosity of how his interpretation would differ from the version she knew.

  “This logic seemed flawless to the girl and she spat into the palms of her hands and set to climbing that enormous tree. She climbed and climbed the winding tentacle-like branches higher and higher but had the good sense to stop just short of the highest branch on the tree. Even so, the second highest limb reached so far into the sky that she found herself sitting among the puffy white clouds above the yard. There she saw with amazement that the little patch of green that she and the boy had been playing in was just a tiny island in a vast ocean. In that moment, she realized that they lived in an enormous unexplored world of endless possibilities and she decided right then and there that they should leave the tiny yard and travel the rest of this huge new world she had discovered.

  “She rushed down and told the boy of all that she had seen from the top of the Mother Tree. The boy was at first shocked, then jealous. ‘But weren’t you afraid that you would die like Father said?’ he asked her. ‘Yes, at first, but the squirrel explained to me that he’d lived in the tree all his life and had never once fallen.’”

  “The boy pushed the girl aside and set to work climbing the Mother Tree and the girl followed just behind. ‘Show me how high you climbed,’ he demanded, and when they had reached the second highest limb of the tree, the girl sang out, ‘Here! I stopped right here!’

  “But the boy continued to climb until he crouched atop the highest limb of the tree, a branch so high that when he slowly rose into a standing position, he could not only see the tops of clouds and the countryside below that, surrounding his backyard, but also the curvature of the pl
anet itself and sights no human eye had yet seen; ink black nothingness broken by tiny bright glowing spots and swirling whirlpools of glistening dust. So taken aback was he by this wondrous vision that he forgot to breathe and when he finally remembered, he found that he could not. Clutching his throat, he lost his balance and fell from the Mother Tree, hurdling to earth and striking several limbs along the way.

  Cora’s eyes flickered open and she stared up at Simon with rapt interest.

  “As he lay there gasping for air, he saw the squirrel above him in the tree chattering down at him: ‘Get up! Up on your feet! I have still more to show you when you are ready!’

  “But the boy felt sick with guilt for having ignored his father’s command, and as he tried to gather his legs beneath him to rise to his feet, he discovered that he could no longer feel them. With horror, he realized that the fall had broken something in him and he would never set foot in another tree for the remainder of his days.”

  Cora glanced up at Simon when he had gone silent, perhaps waiting for him to conclude the story and give it a more happily-ever-after ending, but when none was forthcoming, she gave a grunt and a nod. She released his arm and dropped back into step between them.

  “That’s the story of Adam and Eve, isn’t it?”

  Simon nodded. “It’s the Biblical story of the root of original sin.”

  “What does the story mean?”

  “Some interpret the Adam and Eve story as a metaphor for the origins of suffering and how humanity chose suffering over happiness under a benign ruler.” He grew quiet for a few moments then said, “For me, it is a cautionary tale of the repercussions of breaking design code.”

  Cora gave her flashlight a few extra cranks refreshing the beam to a brighter intensity, casting it forward into the gloom. “Do you believe in God, Mr. Simon?”

  Lara felt herself stiffen.

  Simon looked at Cora and smiled. “I know enough to know that I would not propose to know the answer, but I’ve learned to keep an open mind on the subject. As an android, I will have many years to gather data and ponder the question.”

  “Father Pat visited our school when we had job day last month and I went to talk to him because everyone else was talking to that guy who does the morning news show,” the five-year-old said with staccato enthusiasm. “I asked him the same question and he told me that no one can ever prove that God exists. He said that it was a question of something called faith.”

  Lara studied her daughter with a troubled expression.

  Simon blinked at Cora, a look of wonder on his face. “Exactly, Cora. In five short years you have hit upon the core of an argument that has taken me a lifetime to express. The man who is credited with my construction was a man of science and felt that to believe in a Universal Creator was to give in to the supernatural. He thought that his logical nature and the search for truth naturally excluded the possibility of faith. In recent years, I have come to suspect that the two concepts can co-exist.”

  “I’m not entirely comfortable with this conver…”

  “That sounds like what Father Pat said when I asked him about the world being created in only seven days,” Cora loudly interrupted. “He said, ‘What makes you think our days are as long as God’s days?’”

  Lara pulled Cora to a rough stop by seizing her sleeve. “Cora, how come you never told me about this talk you had with this strange man?”

  Cora stared at her mother with wide-eyes.

  “Because I know you don’t like to talk about it.”

  “About what?”

  “God.”

  Lara turned to glimpse Simon’s reaction but he had drifted ahead of them, safely out of the range of commentary.

  “Mommy, why don’t you like to talk about it?”

  Lara considered her daughter’s question, one which had never been posed to her before, once again feeling that familiar irritation at raising a child with above-average intelligence and that vexing traveling companion called curiosity that inevitably went along with it.

  So she found herself saying something she had sworn to herself she would never say in response to a genuine question from one of her children:

  “You’ll understand when you’re older, Coraline.”

  She seized her hand roughly and pushed forward into the fathomless darkness, trying to outrace the feeling of lingering dread that had accompanied her daughter’s question.

  53

  When the lock tumbled and he cracked open the security door leading to the residential level, Albert was expecting perhaps to see chaos; trash and glass littering the concrete courtyard and perhaps even the bodies of those unable to defend themselves against the rioters and looters.

  The courtyard was empty and deathly quiet. Surprising, it looked to Albert like any other day in Choice Life Estates.

  Of course, the Mall had been designed to keep the residential area secure from anyone from the outside in this sort of situation. During the event of a lockdown, even the tenants were restricted from entering the Mall area from the top levels. Only Mall security had access to go in or out.

  Glancing nervously over his shoulder as he rushed across the vacant courtyard, he knew the mostly elderly denizens (fear machines) were all huddled inside their cookie-cutter caves.

  So, he asked himself, what was he looking for? Was it a physical sign that the feeling of being pursued was more than just paranoia?

  The walk over had given Albert a chance to think about his situation. He had come to the conclusion that although he no longer believed he himself was a machine, he was convinced that everyone was and that they meant to do him harm.

  Evil Otto was still watching him, he knew.

  Albert reached his apartment door, retrieved the keycard from his pocket, absently waving the card across the scanner as he cast one more look behind him.

  Nothing.

  For a moment, he glanced at his keycard in confusion, before realizing his mistake. He ran the pad of his finger over the tiny keyhole below the scanner that he had never used. Hell, he wasn’t even sure where the key was. Probably in the “junk” drawer in the kitchen with the reams of expired pizza coupons and garbage bag twist ties.

  He cursed himself for his short-sightedness. He had found the key to get into the section but hadn’t considered how he would gain entry to his apartment, and he needed his guns for protection from the Deactivating Machines that were after him.

  Stepping over to the door labeled B-43, the apartment adjacent to his own, he rapped briskly. He glanced down at his coveralls and noticed the blood stains for the first time. Knowing Mr. Kaibigan (a cowering machine) was probably checking him out through the peephole just about now, he casually turned his back to the door, unzipped and struggled out of the upper half of the jumper, revealing the glow-in-the-dark Astroworld t-shirt beneath, upon which a green-tinted white transfer displayed a silhouetted image of the world-famous Texas Cyclone with the Astrodome—the real honest-to-God “Eighth” wonder of the world--in the background just behind. He had just managed to tie the sleeves around his waist as the deadbolt clunked open and door knob began to rattle.

  Kaibigan peeked out through the narrow crack with tiny blinking light-shy eyes. When Albert turned, recognition struck the little balding Filipino man and he gave a confused smile, widening the crack in the door another inch.

  “You get locked out?” he asked.

  Albert nodded. “Yeah. Yeah. Something like that.” Not wanting to seem too hasty, he lingered indecisively, an uncertain grin on his face. “I was hoping there might be some way to get onto my balcony from yours.”

  Kaibigan just blinked from inside the foyer of his apartment, his smile disappearing, Albert was afraid he was going to shut the door in his face. Instead, he opened the door the rest of the way and stepped back, allowing the other to enter.

  “I doubt it, but let’s go take a look,” he told him, shutting the door securely behind him, enclosing he and Albert in the short, dark foyer. He turned and
led Albert up the entryway, which smelled like a comforting combination of cigar smoke and something recently fried.

  “Do you have a propane stove, Kaibigan,” Albert wondered.

  “So you work security down below in the Mall, right,” the man asked Albert.

  “Well, yeah, until the whole thing went to shit.”

  The little man stopped and turned on Albert abruptly, almost confrontationally, but the expression on his face displayed only starvation for information. “I’ve been trying to get my Radio Shack transistor to work and the only two batteries that seem to have any vinegar in the whole house give me nothing but static. What’s going on out there?”

  Albert simply shrugged. “I know about as much as you do, actually.”

  “So what did your bosses tell you?”

  He hesitated then responded, “Same old cock and bull story. City-wide power grid outage. Your business is protecting our investments. Keep your eye on the ball. Etc. Etc. They’re not exactly a wealth of information.”

  Kaibigan blinked disappointed eyes up at Albert, turned and headed through the short cozy living room—reaching out and snagging the handheld AM/FM radio sitting on the glass and black steel coffee table--to an open screened-in patio door through which a pleasant breeze blew. He unlatched the screen and pulled it open, gesturing Albert ahead of him.

  Albert stepped out and glanced only briefly at the view of the city of Houston. From their perspective, several hundred feet up, the city looked abandoned. Scarcely anything moved. Gone were the steady hum of traffic and the movement of groups of commuters along sidewalks like flocks of dark birds.

  The fourth largest city in America lay comatose.

  Albert stepped to the eastern side of the patio and stood in front of the full-sized mirror which formed the walls, gazing at the reflection of his little Filipino neighbor as he stepped up to the railing of long narrow balcony. Albert instantly stiffened.

  In the mirror, Kaibigan stared off into the distance with the glowing blue eyes of a Bot.