The Mall Read online

  Albert slowly turned away and pretended that he hadn’t seen its true face.

  “I’ve been watching since about five o’clock this morning and the only cars that seem to be operating are the older, gasoline powered ones,” he began conversationally, “and they can’t get around so good because of all the derelicts clogging up the streets and highways. It’s a mess out there.” He fiddled with his radio again, got only white noise, and snapped it off with a sour expression. “What kind of a power outage takes out batteries?”

  On the horizon, a grey pall hung. Dark smoke funneled into the sky like an unfurling black flag. Oil fire, Albert surmised. Probably one of the big oil company refineries.

  Then almost as if in response to this thought, he felt a rumble beneath his feet, like the aftershock of a quake.

  “Whoa! That can’t be good,” Kaibigan exclaimed, displaying large white teeth.

  Stealing a look in the mirror, Albert saw that the Bot’s eyes were now blazing red.

  Albert stepped back and studied Kaibigan in the reflection as the little man leaned out to gaze up into the grey clouds above.

  “Y’know, I think it looks like there might be a storm coming,” Kaibigan murmured under his breath, then a bit louder he asked, “What do you think?”

  Albert stepped up behind him, grabbed him at the scruff of the collar and belt and tipped him forward over the edge of the railing. He forced himself to watch as the little man pin-wheeled his arms in a panic, striking the pavement several hundred feet below, color bursting out around him as he dove headfirst into the ground.

  Wow, he thought. They make those H-types so lifelike, don’t they?

  Blue eyes turned to red, Albert thought. Probably just received its orders to deactivate me.

  He peered down at the empty streets around the Mall and saw no witnesses.

  Albert leaned out over the extreme corner of the railing and craned his neck out to glimpse the adjoining deck. There was a good five feet of wall between patio of B-43 and B-42. It would be easier to make a hole through the shared inner wall than to get to his patio from here.

  “Why did you do that?”

  Dammit, he never considered the possibility that there would be others with the retiree.

  Albert spun around and readied himself to confront whoever had spoken. The living room on the other side of the deck was empty, but the Radio Shack transistor lay where Kaibigan had dropped it.

  Retrieving the radio, he entered the living room and slid the screen closed behind him, placing the radio neatly back onto the coffee table from where Kaibigan had picked it up.

  He stepped out of the living room, past the darkened kitchen and turned left down a hallway, finding three doorways. The apartment seemed to be arranged in the opposite design plan as his. With relief, Albert found the bathroom on the first door to the right. He had to take a piss for the last ten minutes but had been holding it, thinking he’d be home by now.

  Home.

  As he relieved himself in the darkness, that creeping doubt assaulted him again.

  Why did Kaibigan have a toilet in his home if he was a machine?

  Why should a designer make a machine that urinates?

  For that matter, why make a machine that bleeds? That screams?

  “To look more realistic,” Albert murmured into the darkness.

  Yes, but why? Whom are they supposed to fool if everyone is a machine?

  But Albert couldn’t answer that question, so he tried to concentrate on how he would get into his apartment instead. It was then that he felt the eyes on his neck.

  He spun around and fully expected for the second time to see the undiscovered third party, but no one was there.

  The second door led to Kaibigan’s office, which appeared to be a converted bedroom, used as storage space. Albert took a quick look around, noting a dust-covered typewriter pushed into one of the corners. The sheet of paper within lay half-filled with faded typeface. He drew close and in the dim light from the window read the first few sentences.

  “There was a voice in the soldier’s head which told him that if this was the day, his day to follow his brothers that had gone before him in battle, that he would be part of a proud, disappearing family. But he could only aspire to the degree of heroism that he had witnessed that morning, fighting the Evil that had come to his homeland. In his heart, Private Harrison felt he had been divinely called to fight the invading army.”

  For a moment, Albert thought about the book he himself was preparing to write. While he’d been gathering data for a really significant contribution to philosophical thought, this hack was actually writing this garbage. Where’s the justice in that?

  Albert ripped the page from the typewriter, wadded it and tossed it to the floor, with the single flippant comment of “Shit.”

  He was no Vonnegut. That was for damn sure.

  The thought of the book spurred sudden panic. He strained to hear the Voice, but there was nothing. No Evil Otto. He was free of its influence, whatever it had been.

  “Where are you now, you fuck!” he bellowed so loud the narrow walls rung around him.

  He stood for a moment in the darkness and had a brief sensation of vivid loneliness, like a child standing in the busy street of a strange city, alone for the first time. It was in this moment that Albert heard the clearing of a throat from behind. He whipped around, his brows high in puppy-dog panic.

  There was a figure silhouetted in the doorway, its features blackened by the light streaming in from the hallway. It was short and narrow-shouldered.

  “Who..?” Albert barked in shaky voice, missing the menace he had tried to convey by a mile.

  It slowly stepped backwards into the hallway, and Albert realized who it was the moment before the daylight revealed the teenager’s features.

  He opened his mouth to respond, to hurl an insult at the punk kid, but in a moment of clarity he recognized that this was no longer the same defenseless teenage boy (machine) whom he had emptied of life (charge) less than twenty-four hours ago. He had become something else, something fearsome, though he knew enough to grant it was not this punk’s voice that he had been hearing. Not by a long shot. Whatever was downstairs in the Mall was something much worse than this irritant, but the presence of the kid stirred many more questions than it answered.

  Could a machine have a ghost?

  If the answer to that question was no, had he gone completely insane? He thought of the character Dwayne Hoover from the Vonnegut book and shuddered.

  Albert’s mind sat temporarily in neutral, the only sound which escaped his lips was a thin moan.

  “What are doing here, pig?”

  “I’m going home,” replied Albert, surprised by the feebleness of his own voice in the confined space of the darkened room.

  “You know you can’t do that, Lynch. The only place you’re going is Gehenna, where the devouring worm never dies and the fire is not quenched,” Jesse pronounced, giving him a knowing wink. “Or so I hear.”

  Ignoring him, Albert turned to the closet, pulling down boxes from the upper shelves and ripping clothes that smelt of mothballs down from hangers, looking for something, anything that could help him break the lock on his apartment door.

  He could feel the kid behind him now, but he refused to turn.

  “You’re not a machine. You finally got that much, right?”

  Albert looked down. Shoe and hat boxes lay about his feet, nick-nacks valuable only to whoever owned them, spilling out. He sifted through the junk with his foot, finding a baseball trophy from 1965 and envelopes full of faded photos of people probably long since dead. Angrily Albert crushed a ceramic angel and punted a glass globe across the room, the contents--a Santa wearing a cowboy hat and riding a horse—exploding against the wall.

  Albert could feel the kid’s breath on his neck, which he knew was patently impossible, not just because the little punk-ass was a nothing more than a simple troublemaking machine, but also, even if it could
breath, it was not even tall enough to reach his chest.

  “Funny thing Death. When it happens—now don’t take my word for it--you’ll know soon enough, of course. When it happens, you have access to all sorts of things you didn’t before, a storehouse of information that you had no way of knowing in Life. Not talking Heaven or Hell. It’s the in-between that I’m talking about. The ‘Where’ where I’m at, ya dig?

  When there was no response from Albert, Jesse continued: “Some people call it the Akashic records or even the Book of Life. Fascinating shit. You’ll see… or possibly, you won’t. Maybe I belong to a club where you won’t be offered membership.”

  Albert rushed out of the room and down the hallway to the final doorway, which led to the master bedroom. It was dark and he flung the drapes open to shed light, but the light didn’t quite reach the closet on the far side. There was an unmade queen-sized bed and a stationary bike with a set of dumbbells sitting next to it on the floor.

  Pathetic, he thought, lumbering to the nightstand and yanking the drawer completely out and spilling its contents out onto the bed. Sleeping pills, rosary, batteries, flashlight, earplugs, and a half-eaten package of Gummi-bears.

  Who the hell was this guy? Albert wondered with amusement.

  He pulled out the flashlight and tried it. Dead.

  Stepping over to the closet, Albert reached into the darkness. As he groped methodically around on the top shelf of the closet, the dead boy slipped back into the room, though this time it kept its distance.

  “It’s waiting for you back inside. You know that, don’t you?” he asked with a sneer. “For whatever reason, it can’t leave the perimeter of the Mall. You were either very smart or very lucky when you decided to come here and we both know you’re no Mensa, Clyde. Question I have is why did it let you go? Could be that it had real big plans, but you were an even bigger disappointment.”

  The kid leaned casually against the doorjamb and watched the other rummage. “Do you have even a vague idea what it is you have breathing down your ass, Lynch?”

  Evil Otto

  Then, as if the spook could read his thoughts, it said, “No, you poor silly sack of shit. That’s a friggin’ video game. The thing that’s out there was created by human beings, but the building-full of programmers who wrote the code imbued it with the sorts of responsibilities that would give those geeks at Atari wet dreams. It gave this monster the power and authority to run a city. A kingdom.

  “Once it monitored the power flow to millions of appliances and fixtures every day. Controlling the temperature by adjusting the amount of sunlight entering from the glass ceiling. Locking and unlocking doors. Starting and stopping that stick-up-my-ass elevator Muzak they pipe in here. Activating the thousands of Bots that serve the customers during the day and controlling the hundreds of Bots that clean and stock when shopping traffic dies down late at night.”

  Albert dumped the folded stacks of sweaters, tossed an empty duffel-bag across the room, and then touched a shoebox with something heavy inside.

  “And it did these things twenty-four hours a day since that first morning the Mall opened for business,” the kid continued. “When a machine, any machine, builds up that kind of momentum, it doesn’t stop all that easy. Here’s a bit of basic junior high physics that I’m sure you don’t remember, jerk-off. A body in motion tends to stay in motion. Newton’s First Law.”

  Albert dug his fingers beneath the shoebox and tested its weight. It felt about right for a gun. Gently, he took down the box, carrying it in two hands, almost reverently into the square of light thrown across the floor by the window.

  “The beauty of Newton’s law is that it transcends the simple motion of the physical. They can be applied to intelligences as well. But of course, using that logic, the Mall should just keep on doing what it’s always done. But it can’t. Not without power. So what does it do? It learns a new trick. It protects itself. It attempts to remove from its body the parasites--the ones using up the resources, sucking down all the power. But it can’t do all this without a body, so it reaches out to one who can act as its representative in the physical world.”

  Albert opened the lid and gazed down into the box. He squinted in confusion. Was that what he thought it was?

  “Now let’s take you and apply Newton’s First Law,” Jesse said, stepping closer to the box on the floor. “You’ve murdered two people in cold-blood in less than twenty-four hours. First me, then Kaibigan. And I can see that you want to kill Chance and the ten-year-old. A compulsion that strong has its own momentum. A momentum of the mind, but real nonetheless. A dark irresistible force that compels that roulette wheel to keep on spinning.” Jesse looked up at Albert, fixing him with hard cold eyes. “I know you’ve done it before, Lynch.”

  Albert moistened his lips. “She was an accident.”

  “Is that what you tell yourself?”

  “It was an accident! It could have happened to anyone!”

  “Was killing the old man an accident or did you enjoy murdering him?”

  Trying to ignore the other, Albert reached down into the box to retrieve the object, but the kid leaned close, his greasy long bangs hanging down over his curious unearthly dark eyes.

  “No, he was a machine,” Albert stated simply. “Just like you.”

  He reached inside the box and picked up the grenade resting atop crumbled wads of multi-colored newspaper, written in a foreign language (probably Tagalog, Albert thought, or some other harsh ear-grating language those dogs speak to each other in the rice patties). The overall effect was like some bizarre Easter egg basket, the prize hidden within while not as colorful, was far more treasured to Albert.

  To all appearances, the metal ball was the real thing. Not only was the pin still attached but there was a broad yellow zip tie securing the lever against the body of the device.

  Leave it to a gook to keep a live grenade in his house like a souvenir, Albert mused. Maybe it held some special significance to him. Perhaps he had brought it with him on the boat from the islands.

  Well, it wasn’t a gun, but it would damn sure blow a hole in the wall big enough to get back into his own digs. From there, he would have all the firepower he’d ever need to take out the rest of those machines before they came after him again.

  Then the spook said something that cut through his reverie: “Why don’t you take a real good look at what you have in your pocket and tell me if you still think that came from a machine.”

  Albert glanced up at the kid, the characteristic smartass smirk that was so much a part of his face replaced by a hard-focused expression of confrontation.

  Slowly, almost as if it had a will of its own, Albert’s hand stole away into his pocket. Two fingers clasped the baggie and drew it slowly out.

  Albert gazed at the transparent baggy in his hand. He slowly pulled the zip-locked seal apart and leaned down to get a better look.

  A putrid odor wafted out.

  It smelt of Death.

  The truth that struck him was as unpleasant, as pungent as the odor rising from the bag.

  He recalled now that when he gotten to the parking garage after the collision, he had walked slowly around the front of the car, in a secluded spot away from the heavy traffic of others. His flashlight had revealed the corner of the front license plate that had been folded back slightly, the bumper slightly dented. Easily repairable.

  Then he had looked behind that folded corner.

  How it had gotten there was beyond his limited capacity to imagine.

  He looked on it now, the object that he had found there. It was a piece of a little girl’s skull that he had found in the tiny space between the bloody license plate and the dented bumper of his car.

  A shard of bone from the dead girl’s body.

  The little girl that he had run down with his car was no machine. Was not damaged. Was not “easily repairable.”

  She was dead. Here was the proof, resting in his fingers.

  “You were never
a machine and you never malfunctioned,” Jesse spat. “You’re just crazy.”

  So, there it was, Albert thought. I can’t deny the reality of physical evidence. It isn’t metal shavings or gear lubricant; it is bone and blood.

  Hands quivering wildly, he carefully closed the baggie. Reverently, he set it just inside the shoebox, set the lid atop, and rose to his feet.

  “Here’s another gem from Newton’s greatest hits collection: ‘To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction,’” Jesse stated. “I’ll be seeing you soon, pig. Real soon.”

  He stared across at Albert, a devious sparkle appearing briefly in his cold dead eyes, and a moment later, the kid was gone again.

  Albert started down the hall, holding the box with the hair and skull fragments straight out before him like the escort of a holy relic.

  Like a tiny cardboard coffin.

  When Albert stepped into the living room, his attention was so fully on the box in his hands that he never saw the woman until she was close enough to kiss him.

  He looked up, confusion in his eyes, and only had a brief moment to formulate one question--“Isn’t that the snooty bitch from B-39?”--before the butcher knife from Kaibigan’s kitchen slid roughly into his gut, piercing his lower intestine, sending liquid fire into his nether regions.

  That hurt, he thought in amazement, as white hot fire pulsed like rapid fire daggers throughout the lower half of his body. He expelled a mouthful of breath in surprise, wheezed a whimpering kind of ironic laugh, and thrust the shoebox into the hands of the screaming woman standing before him, gazing down at the torrents of blood streaming through the fingers pressing against his belly.

  He cast one last wish out into the darkness that he might really be a construction of metal and electrical charges after all, so that he could avoid whatever pain he had coming to him if anything really lay beyond this life.

  Oddly enough he had never truly considered it a viable possibility until this moment.

  “Willya look at all that blood,” he hissed, lifting a hand gently to the woman’s face and actually feeling his index finger slide down one wrinkled cheek in a sort of caress. “Almost as real as a movie,” he moaned in a whisper that sounded almost like a declaration between lovers.