The Mall Read online

  “Can you please turn that off now?” Lara snapped.

  Cora lowered her head and switched the static off with a click.

  “I think maybe I’ll go see how Chance is doing with the cars,” Owen offered, rising to his feet and starting toward the door.

  “I don’t want you anywhere near those two,” Lara said. “I don’t trust them.”

  Owen remained standing in the same position, his back to them.

  “Owen, did you hear what I just said?”

  Both Cora and Lara turned.

  In the center of the room, Owen was watching several streamers gently swaying.

  Owen stepped slowly over and raised a hand next to the black-colored paper strips.

  Lara rose and joined him, looking up at the ceiling.

  Grabbing a folding step stool from beside the cabinets, Owen set it below a vent just in front of the streamers and stretched his arm up as far as it could reach.

  “It’s the A/C,” he concluded excitedly. “Do you think the electricity’s coming back on?”

  Lara waved him down and took his place. She lifted her hands to the vent, then moved the stool below a separate vent and did the same. “It’s coming from this one too, but not as strong.”

  Cora ran over to the light switch and flicked it on and off.

  Lara moved the stool a few feet from the first vent and pushed on one of the white ceiling tiles. It popped up. Even on tippy-toes, she was still an inch short of the opening. She lifted her nose just into the darkness beyond, her nostrils flaring.

  “I smell smoke,” she offered. “I think it’s coming from outside.”

  “Boost me up,” Owen exclaimed, snatching his flashlight off the table and rushing the step stool. “I’ll tell you what I see.”

  “No.”

  “C’mon, Mom, don’t treat me like a baby,” he pleaded. “I can do this!”

  “I know that you could, Owen,” she replied. “But I just don’t have it in me to let you out of my sight again so soon. Sorry.” She sighed heavily then glanced back at the entrance to the break room with a troubled expression.

  37

  Dugan boosted Chance up through the opening in the ceiling where the tile had been removed. The rest of them watched in silent expectation as the light from Owen’s flashlight bounced around in the darkness.

  “What do you see?” Owen shouted.

  Chance kicked out slightly and caught Dugan on the shoulder with the heel of his shoe. His legs lifted out of his hands and disappeared up into the ceiling.

  Thrusting his head through the opening, Dugan shouted, “Where are you going, kid?”

  “I see something, I think.”

  Lara rushed up beside Dugan. “Don’t go far! Do you hear me?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the subdued answer came back.

  Chance balanced himself on the support beam and slowly rose to a half-crouch and looked around. The crawl-space was mostly ventilation ducts—winding throughout like grey metallic snakes-- and pink insulation. He stood still for a moment and tried to sense the direction of the air flow.

  He began to move along the support beam toward the center of the building.

  After about thirty seconds, the support beam he was on joined a beam large enough to support both feet. Stepping onto the larger beam, he immediately felt a stronger current of air, flowing perpendicular. He shined the beam of his light to his left and for a moment became disoriented. The crawlspace seemed to disappear into infinity.

  He heart began to race with uncertainty.

  This is too much for me, he thought. I’m just a kid. I can’t do this.

  “You candy-ass.”

  He glanced over and realized that there was someone standing next to him, obscured by the darkness.

  Swinging around, Chance nearly lost his balance, but righted himself just in time.

  “J-Jesse?”

  The other turned his shadowed face toward him, gave him a cavalier smile and slugged him twice in the meat of his arm.

  “Two for flinching.”

  Chance’s mouth dropped open. He had felt that!

  With scarcely a word between them, Jesse rose and started away, turning back briefly to beckon him onward. After a moment’s hesitation, Chance followed.

  He seemed to know exactly what it was that Chance was searching for and took the lead. Eerily, the non-verbal communication was very much like just any other day, any other afternoon that they hung out together.

  Somehow, impossibly, Chance found himself accepting it at face value. Inherently, he knew it was no trick. No mind game. No hallucination. It was Jesse.

  Leaving the flashlight on, he set it securely into the crook of a cross-section as a marker and followed Jesse down onto slightly wider beam that opened up into a gargantuan passage. He soon realized they were walking along a narrow track, not unlike the tram track the two of them had followed in the tunnels. The reason for the track was unclear to him.

  Unsure if he should speak, but knowing that he couldn’t keep the questions to himself any longer, Chance asked, “You know what’s going on, don’t you?”

  “Sure, Chancey. You want out and I know how.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just do, all right? What’s with the twenty questions?”

  Chance relaxed slightly. It certainly sounded like his old friend.

  “Do you know what’s going on outside?”

  “No,” he simply stated without elaboration.

  Silence fell over them and Chance began to spot the occasional Bot—some with legs and some with a sturdy four-wheeled base. They stood frozen in the crawlspace like sentinels guarding a lair.

  “What are they doing up here?” he asked aloud without clarification, knowing that his partner would know exactly what he was referring to.

  “Repair Bots,” Jesse replied. “They travel along the tracks here and then climb deeper to get to the parts that need fixing. I’ll show you.”

  Where they were in relation to the Mall below them, Chance hadn’t a clue, though he was sure that it was an area rarely viewed first hand by the human eye. He was sure that the Bots gave visuals of any damage remotely to their human counterparts on the maintenance crew.

  As the two of them moved further away from the abandoned flashlight, the world around them grew darker and slightly redder in color.

  “It’s like the tram, isn’t it?” Jesse said next. There was an ache in his voice that sent chills up Chance’s spine. “Did I tell you? I nailed him for good. That fucking pig guard. He won’t be messing with you no more. I’ll tell you that much.”

  Chance remained quiet, unsure the proper response to such news.

  When Jesse eventually came to a stop, he turned and looked out to his right toward a source of pale red light. A stiff and steady breeze blew from that direction.

  “The real problem—the thing that drove the bastard to kill--is still out there. Down there in the Mall.” Jesse glanced back at Chance to see if he was following, both literally and figuratively. “They have to watch for the old lady, because it’s in her now. But this time it can’t get out because the lady was no coward. It settled down in there. Deep. And now that the lady’s given her spirit up, it’s trapped there. Permanently.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re talking about, Jess.”

  “You don’t have to understand. You just have to trust me.” Jesse stopped then and turned as if commanding his friend’s full attention. “The important part, the part you have to remember, is this: You have to kill the vessel it’s residing in.”

  Chance tried to look away from the other’s eyes but found that he couldn’t. He could only swallow back the fear lodged in his throat and ask, “How do you know that?”

  “The same way I knew about this,” he answered waving Chance up ahead of him.

  Chance craned his neck to look into the crawlspace that narrowed nearly to an arrow-like point as roof beams connected with support beams. In the bright red lig
ht pouring out of a crevice above, Chance could just make out a repair Bot squatting below a section of metal that had come unfastened. On the ends of the machine’s arms were several tools connected to its wrists instead of hands. Its eye sensors were dark and dead.

  Edging his way along the narrow beam, thankful for all the years of honing his balance on his skateboard, Chance peered up over the Bot’s shoulder into the space he had been in the process of repairing when the Mall went down.

  Stepping carefully onto the Bot’s shoulders and stabilizing himself with his hands on the top of its head, Chance peered up into the narrow space. Immediately he felt the breeze on his face and the smell of burning oil that it carried with it.

  Pushing the piece of metal away from him with all his strength, he was able to bend it up just wide enough to fit his head through. Right away, he knew that out of the five of them, only he and the two kids would ever fit.

  Carefully, he closed his eyes and pushed the top of his head through, feeling the sharp edge of the metal brush against his ears.

  When he opened his eyes, a horrified gasp escaped his mouth. He was swimming in a pool of stars, broken by a moving paint-smear of hazy red light. For a moment, he was completely disoriented, feeling as if he had somehow floated free of the building and had been swept up into some sort of tidal current pulling him into outer space.

  Both his hands instinctively clamped down the sides of the Bot’s head-piece below to regain his balance.

  Cautiously turning his head to look over his shoulder, he gazed upon the infinitely large glass and steel roof of the Mall, the unbroken sea of solar-panel mirrors reflecting the world above his head. In the distance he could see several plumes of dark smoke, the source of the burning oil smell. Below, he could detect no movement. No people. No cars. Everything as far as the eye could see was like a paused frame of video.

  Slowly, he lowered his head back down into the comfort of the enclosed crawlspace and closed his eyes, willing his heart-rate back under control.

  I can’t do this. No way.

  “You asked for a way out,” Jesse replied as if he had spoken his thoughts aloud. “This is it.”

  “Dugan told me that he wants to use the grenade to blow a hole in the display window.”

  “He’s an idiot,” Jesse replied. “All that’s going to get him is dead. You don’t want to die, do you?” Jesse gave him a look of interest, his eye reaching out to harvest the truth from his friend.

  “No,” Chance answered weakly.

  “Okay then, you have to trust me on this one. This is the only way out,” Jesse said, fixing Chance with a serious expression, “in this world.”

  “What do you mean,” Chance asked, crawling carefully off of the deactivated Bot.

  “There are… places where things turned out differently,” Jesse told him. “Places where we stayed friends until we were old men. Places where we never knew each other. Places where you died instead of me. You understand?”

  Chance shook his head slowly.

  Jesse laughed then like the old Jesse used to.

  Chance started back down the passage the way they had come. After a few moments, he turned to look back at Jesse and realized that he wasn’t following.

  “When I go out there, will you come with me?”

  “No,” Jesse said in a quiet voice, “I think I’ll stay here awhile. I’ve always kinda dug this place, y’know. Remember how we always talked about sleeping in here overnight?”

  Chance laughed in spite of himself and when he looked up again, his friend was gone.

  38

  When Chance’s voice rang out from above, “Coming down,” everyone gathered around the hole in the ceiling as Dugan mounted the step-stool, to peer up through the opening. He probed the darkness with Cora’s hand-crank flashlight until it struck a moving form.

  “You okay?” Dugan asked, as he reached up into the ceiling, offering the teen a hand, but the other waved him off.

  Hope-starved eyes stared up at the face floating above them in the darkness like a ghost.

  “Well?” Lara snapped impatiently. “Did you find a way out?”

  “Yes,” Chance announced in a downbeat tone.

  “But?”

  Scooting up to the edge of the opening, Chance dropped his legs and let them dangle above their heads. “The air is coming from an opening’s just big enough for me to fit through,” he reported. “It lets off onto the roof.”

  “Can you see anything from there? Any way down?”

  “Nothing yet but I’m going back to take a walk around the edge, see if I can see anybody down below, y’know, like cops or attorneys or anything.”

  Owen rushed up to the opening. “Should I go? In case you need help?”

  Lara opened her mouth to protest just as Chance snapped, “Nah man. It’s tricky moving around up here,” he admitted. “One misstep and I could fall right through the ceiling.”

  Cora pressed herself against Lara, practically shivering with excitement. “We’re getting out, Mommy! We’re getting out!”

  Staring down at her, Chance swallowed awkwardly. “Thing is the roof is covered with solar panels. I figure maybe I can walk across the length of it while it’s still dark out, but once the sun comes up, I’ll have to come back down. Those panels’ll fry my eyes right out of my head.”

  Dugan glanced at his watch. “You got at least two hours then.” He caught the confused look Lara was giving him, tapped the face of his watch, and gave her a shrug. “Self-winding.”

  Chance clambered back to his feet and gave Dugan a look. “Worse case scenario, how much time do you figure it will take me to walk a full circle around the edge of the building?”

  Dugan gave a bitter chuckle. “More than you got, kid,” he replied. “Best bet, once you get an hour out, turn around and start back this way.” Dugan looked down at his watch, hesitated for all of five seconds before unbuckled it and handing it up to Chance. “Bring it back in one piece.”

  Taking it, Chance smirked down at Dugan and said, “Maybe you can con the others into thinking you’re some kind of hero, but I know you’ve got two more just like this one squirreled away in Santa’s shopping cart.”

  Dugan’s eyes narrowed, then softened. He reached up and tagged Chance on the arm. “See, that’s why I like you, kid. You’re a kindred spirit.”

  “For your sake, you better hope I’m not exactly like you.”

  Dugan stiffened and dropped his eyes.

  Making eye contact with Owen, Chance motioned him over. “Boost him up,” he told him. When Dugan narrowed his eyes at him, he shrugged. “I know you’re not one for apologies, but I need to do this.”

  Dugan glanced over at Owen, who looked to his mother for permission. After a nod from her, he allowed the man to lift him up until his head was obscured in shadow.

  Less than a minute later, the younger of the two boys gave a nod and Dugan lowered him back to the floor, the man’s eyes lingering on him as he returned to his position beside his mother. He glanced up at Lara, whose eyes hardened into a protective barrier between them.

  Dugan climbed back up to Chance. “You still have my gun, right?”

  Chance returned a blank expression. “Hope you’re not asking for it back, because I set it down before I climbed out onto the roof and I’m not going to make this trip a third time.”

  “Relax, kid,” Dugan snapped. “I just wanted to make sure you were covered.”

  Giving the others a parting wave, Chance trained his flashlight out behind him and started back into the ceiling, disappearing like a ghost.

  39

  With the blankets from first aid kits, Lara made beds out of the two leather couches in the employee break room. For the first time in her memory, the children put up no resistance.

  Cora fell to sleep almost instantly, but Owen held on a bit longer, his eyes lingering on his mother as she reclined in the reading chair between them. She put her bare feet up on the coffee table and released a bre
ath that she felt she had been holding since the morning before.

  “Where will I go when I die?”

  Her eyes fluttered open in disorientation.

  “What makes you wonder that, Owen?”

  He turned away from her to stare up at the ceiling. “I was thinking about Chance’s friend. One minute we were all laughing and then he was dead.”

  Lara slipped over beside him and propped his head in her lap. “Try not to think about that kind of stuff, hon. It’s all over now.”

  “Is there a place for people like him. For Daddy?”

  Lara tried to swallow back the lump rising in her throat.

  “Yes.” The word escaped her without conscious thought. For the first time, she found that she might actually be capable of believing it. If nothing else, she would try to. For her son. For her daughter. “There’s a better world waiting for them and your father is there.”

  “Even if he did kill himself?”

  “Your father was sick. That’s all,” she said, smoothing a curl of hair from his face, so that she could look directly into his eyes. “He was a good man, Owen, just like I see that you’re becoming. You were very brave today and I’m very proud of you.”

  “You are?”

  “Yes, very much.” She rose and gave him a kiss on the forehead.

  “Mom, where are we gonna go once we..?”

  “Y’know what you can do for me? Close your eyes for me and let me do all the worrying for awhile.”

  “I’ll try,” he managed, turning to glance out through the window.

  “Hon, what did this other boy tell you a while ago?”

  “Oh yeah,” Owen exclaimed, rising up on his elbows in excitement, sparing a quick glance over at Dugan, who had dragged the other reading chair over to the center of the room just below the missing tile in the ceiling. The man’s head was cocked in a position that indicated that he was either fast asleep or dead of a broken neck. “He told me to tell you something. Said that you might understand what it meant: ‘Watch for the old lady. It’s in her now and can’t get out.’ He was talking about Grandma Charley, wasn’t he?”