The Mall Read online

  “He was a friend of mine,” Chance muttered under his breath. “He’s dead now.”

  Throwing all his weight into the crowbar, the back cover of the machine popped open with a crunch. Dugan smiled and peered in. His expression collapsed. “Will you lookit this? Twenty-five dollars in crumpled five dollar bills. Damned credit system is making a dishonest living more and more difficult every day.”

  Dugan rose to his feet, took a second smell of the slice of cheesecake, crammed the remainder into his mouth, and then hopped back over the counter. “What were you saying about your friend being dead?” he asked with a full mouth.

  “A security guard killed my best friend Jesse yesterday down on the tram tracks.”

  Dugan looked up with interest for the first time. He swallowed the cheesecake with an audible gulp. “What do you mean, ‘killed’?”

  “Murdered.” In way of proof, Chance lifted the tail of his t-shirt that was smeared with the blood he had tried to scrub off his face. He had found some antiseptic wipes in a health food store much more effective in removing it.

  For the first time since Chance had met him, Dugan actually seemed focused. In fact, the man looked pale.

  “Was he a big burly rascal? About yeh tall?” Dugan asked, raising his hand about a foot over his head.

  Chance simply nodded.

  “I think I saw him early this morning,” Dugan said in a weak voice. “He was pulling one of those flat bed carts through the Mall.

  “What was on the cart?” Chance could not stop himself from asking, but the question was mere rhetoric and in response to him, Dugan simply gave him a knowing look in return.

  “Wait, you expect me to believe a security guard murdered a teenaged kid? Did your friend have a gun on him or something?”

  Chance shook his head once and said, “No, this guy snuck up behind us in the dark and beat Jesse to death with his own skateboard.”

  Dugan tensed. The only word he spoke in response was, “Why?”

  Chance started to shrug but thought better of it. He knew the answer. The man who had killed his best friend was insane. But that wasn’t the answer either. Something specific was wrong with the security guard that had murdered Jesse and he was slowly approaching the answer from the side like an animal he was leery to face head-on.

  He didn’t know what his answer would be until the words escaped his lips.

  “Something got inside him and drove everything that was human out.”

  Dugan reached back blindly and snatched the crowbar off the counter. Without another word, he started past Chance and headed for his cart filled with merchandise.

  3

  Owen trotted south into the blue section corridor, letting the last of the bright orange crepe paper unspool behind him from his right hand. Dropping into a squat, he opened the slowly dwindling shopping bag and pulled out a roll of day-glow yellow crepe paper and tied one end to the orange.

  He’d come up with the idea on the fly as he’d passed the Hallmark store after he’d separated from Chance and the Mercedes. If it worked for Theseus, he thought, it should work for him; though, in this case, the trail wouldn’t be for him to find his way out of the proverbial maze, but for his Family (the word had in the last few hours risen to a state of importance enough to require capitalization) to find him. Weren’t teachers always telling them to apply what they’d learned? Here was a situation Mr. Olivaw could never have foreseen when he’d taught them Greek mythology.

  He had gotten such a routine going and had picked up such a good head of steam that he had actually passed the Sears store before he realized that he had done so. Dropping the bag and spinning on his heel, he rushed into the open doors of the Sears store and began screaming at the top of his lungs: “Mom!” over and over again.

  He raced up the escalator and searched in a white-hot fevered panic one department after the other, his hope slowly dissolving like cotton-candy on a child’s tongue.

  “Your mother and sister are waiting for you in the Sears store in Blue sector. Simon Peter is with them,” the silver Bot had told him. He remembered the words, committing them to memory like a mantra.

  Forcing himself to stop in the center of the denim department just inside the front entrance of the store, Owen took a deep hitching breath, holding the tears at bay by the thinnest threads of sheer will. If the Bot had been sent by this Simon Peter person, then they must know where he had been, right? On the surface, it sounded logical. But if that were the case, why hadn’t they come for him?

  They thought the Bot would deliver him back to the store.

  They obviously hadn’t counted on sharing the Mall with an insane security guard.

  Or maybe they did know and had left the Sears to find Owen.

  Either way, if they had left, there should be a message, shouldn’t there?

  Then he saw it, just as he was stepping off the escalator onto the second floor into the bedding and linen section. One of the display beds had been slept in, and if he knew his mother—and he felt that he knew everything he could possibly know about her in his ten long years living with the woman—she demanded that his sister try and sleep.

  As if anyone could possibly sleep in this creepy, haunted store.

  He dropped onto the bed, snatched up a handful of blanket and yanking it off the bed with a scream of rage. He whipped it off and tossed it into the mirror of a dresser, the weight of it causing the mirror to collapse backwards and shatter on the floor behind it.

  Next, Owen grabbed the sheet and pulled. It resisted and he realized that his mother must have made the bed with her characteristic hospital corners, nearly impossible to yank off. This realization, that she had taken the time and care to tuck the corners under for his sister with such meticulousness while he was missing—while he was running for his life from a maniac in a security uniform--drove him into an even greater rage. He pulled the sheet off with all his strength. Finally, it gave along the seam and he began to rip it off in tattered strips.

  Leaping onto the bed he seized the last object left on the bed, a single pillow. He snatched it and spun around with the intention of flinging it as far as he was able but stopped.

  He stared at the pillow, his excited breathing catching the scent of something familiar, and he raised the pillow to his nose. The smell of Johnson’s No More Tears reached his nose and the full impact of his position became instantly tangible.

  He was alone again. Alone!

  He would never find his family. Never!

  He would die alone in this Mall. Die!

  Then his eyes lit on a bright color lying amid the white of the torn sheet on the floor.

  Stepping carefully down off the bed—for if he came down wrong and broke his ankle, who would care for him? Nobody!—he carried the pillow under his arm to the base of the escalator. He knelt in front of the sheet and drew Cora’s troll doll from the middle, examining it like an artifact from an ancient age.

  He folded forward into the ripped sheet, keeping within his sight the entrance to the store framed in the slowly sloping railing of the escalator.

  Within five minutes, he had fallen asleep on the same sheet and pillow his sister had used less than twelve hours before, her doll cradled tightly against his chest.

  4

  They had been walking in virtual silence for nearly five minutes when Simon firmly grabbed Lara (who, in turn, seized Cora) and stopped.

  “What is it?”

  Without a word exchanged, Lara slapped a hand over Cora’s mouth and pulled her protectively against her.

  Simon held a hand out behind him as he drifted a few steps forward, holding the flashlight out before him.

  Cora began to quiver against Lara. She extended her arms up to be held but Lara shook her head firmly, probing the darkness with her own flashlight.

  The light of Simon’s industrial flashlight scanned the belt to their right, dancing along the wall. The beam jumped to the belt to the left and swept slowly around to the right.r />
  A single figure appeared in the tiny pool of light his flashlight produced. It marched determinably down the opposite platform toward them.

  Lara reached down and hoisted Cora up to her hip, dropping her bag but taking care to maintain her hold on her flashlight, knowing that without it, she was blind down here.

  “Lara, start moving back the way we came,” Simon stated simply.

  Lara stared fixated as a second figure appeared a few feet behind the first.

  Then another.

  “Mom,” Cora’s tiny voice croaked.

  “Lara,” Simon barked. “Run!”

  The words finally broke through to her brain and Lara took action. She ran, feeling Cora bury her face into her chest as she hefted her tiny form higher up the side of her ribcage. After fifty yards, the weight of the five-year-old had become unbearable. Her ankle and knee began to scream at her in bitter rage at nearly the same moment.

  “Honey, Mommy has to put you down.”

  “No,” Cora screamed when Lara came to a stop and dropped her roughly onto her feet.

  “C’mon, Cora, run,” she screeched, seizing her by the hand and starting forward, but Cora refused to move. Turning back to the girl, Lara bellowed a single word “Now!”

  But Cora was staring past her now and over her shoulder. Her lips were moving but no words were being produced.

  Lara turned and saw the first Bot less than ten yards away in the beam of Cora’s flashlight.

  “Surrender to the authority of Mall management,” the foremost Bot croaked through its distorted voice synthesizer. “Comply immediately androids or you will be deactivated.”

  As Lara turned and rushed in the opposite direction, the meaning of the words the Bot spoke caught up to her brain. So, it was true what Simon had said! Though she had known inherently that Simon was incapable of lying, she had thought that perhaps his facts had been somehow wrong. How could the machines not know that we’re human? Wasn’t the truth as obvious as the noses on their faces?

  Though, hadn’t she thought Simon was a man?

  Suddenly, out of the shadows ahead of her came another Bot careening toward her.

  For Cora’s sake, Lara had resisted the urge to panic, but now found herself unable to suppress the scream rising from her chest any longer. Shrieking just as much in frustration as fear, Lara dropped Cora to the frozen platform below and threw her body protectively atop her.

  The figure in front of her leaped and she braced for its impact.

  After several seconds lying in a prone position, she realized that she hadn’t been touched. She peeked down at Cora, her frightened eyes watching her hungrily for direction.

  Lara turned to look over her shoulder and realized that Simon had leapt over her and was wrestling with one of the Bots that had come at her from behind. A second one was missing its head and a third was attempting to get past the first.

  “Mommy?”

  Feeling a tug on her arm, Lara turned to find Cora using all of her strength to try and lift her to her feet. “Let’s go,” the little girl pleaded.

  Lara scrambled to her feet and rushed after her daughter, the dim light of her hand-crank flashlight casting its beam into the darkness. They came upon the body of two headless Bots, then a third. The platform ahead seemed clear from that point.

  “Go-Go. Run as fast as you can and don’t look back,” Lara screamed.

  Cora ran, her short legs pumping, pushing the limits of her strength. The beam of her flashlight whipped back and forth with the swinging of her arms. Her sobs and the intake of her breath competed with each other. She could still hear the panting of her mother just behind her as the first glimpse of sunlight peeked through the ceiling opening of the escalator ahead.

  5

  At a near sprint, Cora and Lara emerged from the subterranean level escalator. When Cora hesitated, Lara grabbed her by the hand and followed the obnoxiously-painted emerald green walls around the corner to the enormous glass-enclosures that took up one side of the western entrance. Sparkling new model Mercedes vehicles were lined up inside the showroom behind a glass display window.

  “Owen!” she bellowed, rushing up to a set of double-doors and tugging on the handles.

  Locked.

  Spotting a sliding glass door further down the concourse, she found this locked as well and pounded on it with the butt of her flashlight, screaming her son’s name at the top of her lungs.

  Lara rested her forehead against the glass of the locked showroom. She felt completely demoralized, physically and psychologically exhausted to the core of her being. “Is it possible that you were wrong about him being behind the wheel of a car?”

  “I’m not sure,” Cora answered, her eyes dropping in shame. “I just know he was in a car.” She stood in the center of the concourse, her back to the escalator.

  “Cora, get away from the…” Lara sensed movement out of the corner of her eye and turned to see a boy standing just inside the center of the showroom. Her heart lurched in her chest and a hopeful gasp escaped her parted lips. For an instant she was sure it had been her son, then she realized that the distance separating them had played a trick on her perception of scale. The boy was much taller, much older than Owen.

  The teen started toward her with a look of amazement that she was sure mimicked her own, when a man stepped from the peripheral of her vision and into her foreground.

  She leaped back in surprise and rushed back to grab Cora up in her arms.

  The leather jacketed man tapped the muzzle of a gun on the glass and beckoned them forward with a single curled finger.

  6

  Owen awoke to a gentle prompting shake. He opened his eyes and at nearly the exact moment his mother mistook another boy for her son on the opposite side of the Mall of the Nation, Owen briefly saw his mother’s face instead of his Grandma Charley’s and an automatic gasp of joy escaped his lips.

  Confusion instantly followed.

  What was his grandmother doing at his bedside?

  Then he glanced over her shoulder and saw the arms of the escalator trailing down into the darkness and realized that he was still living the nightmare.

  “G-Grandma Charley?”

  Lifting him abruptly to his feet, she studied him with a jeweler’s eye, seemed to reach a satisfactory appraisal and asked, “Owen, where is your sister?”

  “I don’t know,” he replied, his eyes watching her with a spacey disorientation. “Do you?”

  She stepped up to foot of the escalator and scanned the floor below with an eerie similarity to way Simon Peter had the morning before. “I know where your mother took her. Let’s go.” She reached back without looking and snagged him roughly by his hand, tugging him along after her down the frozen metal steps.

  Owen followed her out of necessity, thinking for the second time in that many days that Grandma Charley was a stranger to him and that he was beginning to understand why his mother seemed to be so afraid of the woman.

  “Owen, why did your mother leave you alone?”

  He padded outside after Charley, saw that the crepe paper that he had left behind was indeed still there, and decided that this must have been how she had found him.

  There really was no way around it. He would have to tell her the embarrassing truth.

  “It was my fault,” he told her. “I got mad and ran away. Then they closed the Mall.”

  She was walking briskly and was several yards ahead of him when she switched the shoebox she was holding to her opposite hand and held the empty one out to him. Owen hesitated, staring at the wrinkled long-nailed fingers and slowly relented.

  The hand was cold.

  “Grandma Charley, what’s in the box?”

  “A surprise for later,” she said, her tone lacking any of the playfulness the words might have suggested.

  “Where are we going?”

  “We’ll know very soon,” she replied. She turned and looked him in the eye for only the second time since he’d awakened. “Th
at was very clever, you know, making that trail of paper.”

  Owen remained silent.

  “Soon, we’ll know where to find your sister as well.”

  “And my mother,” Owen prompted her. “They were together.”

  “Of course.” She seemed to consider the ceiling of the Mall for a moment. It was closing in on evening.

  Owen could see that the sky had started to darken, but he didn’t feel that it was nearly late enough for that. He realized with alarm that there was a grey veil of smoke drifting over the Mall. It was dark, of the sort that came from a really big fire. Behind the slate grey of the smoke, there was something oddly “flickery” about the sky, a reddish quality that he concluded must also be due to the source of the same smoke.

  “Did your mother ever tell you how your father died, Owen?”

  Owen looked from the reddish sky to his grandmother. It seemed a very oddly inappropriate question to ask at the moment. “She said that he had an accident.”

  “She lied to you,” she stated. “Would you like to know the truth?”

  Owen remained silent, contemplating the implications of each possible response. He came up with a third option.

  “I’m hungry, Grandma.” He glanced again at the shoebox, held protectively at her side and wondered if the surprise inside was edible.

  “Soon, son,” she answered smoothly, squeezing his hand with what might have appeared to be affection, but instead seemed strangely mechanical, almost as if it were a response formulated to be most appropriate to the given situation.

  7

  Sliding the wide double-paned plasti-steel door open, Dugan seized the woman by her sleeve and dragged her inside. The little girl held, tightly in the other’s hand, stumbled in after her.

  Dugan pulled the door closed again and peered back into in the slowly darkening west-side corridor outside. He could detect movement and stepped over to the far left side of the glass wall, peering through at a different perspective.