The Mall Page 7

  “You should have hit the drink button,” Owen commented.

  “Ah, well, what shall I ever do with a spare bucket of popcorn?” George said with a smirk, tipping his wife a wink, and patting Owen on the head. “You don’t suppose you two could do me a favor and eat this tub of popcorn for me, could you?”

  “I will, I will,” Cora yelled, hopping up and down on her tippy toes.

  Lara shook her head at the elderly couple as she handed the first tub of popcorn back to them. “What do we say, folks?”

  “Thank you,” Owen and Cora said in unison as they hovered over the slowly filling tub.

  George slid his card into a separate vending machine adjacent to the first.

  “Would you consider letting me pay for that?” Lara offered, praying that they were the kind of couple she was hoping they were.

  George smirked at Lara as he retrieved a plastic bottle of water from the chute with a grunt of effort. “It was a small price to pay for a couple of genuine kid-smiles. We’re pretty selfish that way.”

  As George led Tess away from the concession stand with a final wave, he grumbled, “Now, how the hell do we find the right theater in this place?” One of the yellow service Bots scurried anxiously along behind them as they wandered across the lobby, reading signs like a couple of travelers to a far away exotic land.

  Cora stared after the couple with a smile that took up most of the tiny space below her button nose. She squeezed her mother’s hand and said, “I like them. They make pretty colors together.”

  Lara wrinkled her nose at her daughter and shook her head in confused wonder. “C’mon, you lucky little charmers,” she told her kids. “Grab your pot of gold and let’s go.”

  As Lara turned back to watch the elderly couple slowly walk out of their lives, the opportunist in Lara considered the prospect of calling out to them and asking them if they, by any chance, knew a good safe place a displaced mother and her two destitute children could find shelter for the night.

  Yet, the diplomatic side of her knew it would be inappropriate to prey on their good will.

  So she let them walk away.

  There was a momentary chill in the pit of her stomach that she would later recall as the moment that hope abandoned her.

  Glancing around wide empty lobby, Lara saw neither human nor robot anywhere. There was no trace of a live human voice, nothing but loud recordings of the coming attractions trailers on the monitors overhead and the scrolling electronic banners advertising concession products.

  And she felt a sudden desperate loneliness and recalled the moment on the residential level only hours before. Where were these feelings coming from, she wondered? Why now?

  Taking Cora tightly by her hand, she handed the stamped tickets retrieved from the turnstiles to Owen and mustered a smile for him. “Give me a direction, Magellan.”

  14

  “What’s in the pack, dude?”

  Jesse pulled the black backpack with the faded Billy Idol transfer out of the pay locker, hoisted it onto his shoulder and leapt onto the empty down escalator.

  Trotting after in an attempt to catch up, Chance thought that Jesse could be a real douche bag sometimes. “Hey, Cinderella! What’s your hurry?”

  He finally eased up just before they hit the subterranean level. Taking a quick suspicious look over Chance’s shoulder, Jesse started into the empty passage beneath the Mall. “Will you keep your voice down?”

  “You got a bomb in there!” Chance said, intentionally louder than normal.

  Jesse made a face and stepped casually up to the entrance to the moving platform. There were no stores down here. Instead, the subterranean level was composed entirely of four long platforms (very much like the ones in airport terminals), each broken into four variable-speed conveyor belts; two of the platforms moved west to east and east to west, separated by a short wall, and two more platforms moving north to south and vice versa. These platforms extended the entire length of the Mall, enabling shoppers to move to the polar opposite side at a faster rate of speed without having to walk or take a tram.

  Just before he stepped onto the platform, Jesse flung the pack into Chance’s chest. “Try and catch me, momma’s girl!” Jesse took a four step jog, and then leapt sidelong to his left onto the entrance to the next platform running parallel to the first, this one slightly faster than the first.

  For a moment Chance stood immobile with the backpack in his arms before cursing under his breath and rushing after his friend. There was no way he could catch up with him after the head-start he’d taken. Jesse was a pro at navigating the belts in dense crowds, faster than anyone he knew and there was no one riding along down here tonight to create an obstacle for him. The platform was completely empty. It was the first time, Chance had been down here in the bowels of the Mall so late, and it was downright eerie to be alone amid all that open space.

  Within thirty seconds Jesse had already skipped to the fourth and fastest belt in the center of the corridor. He turned to face Chance, running back down the platform toward him, taunting him with a tug at his crotch.

  Ignoring him, Chance came to a complete stop and unzipped the backpack. Tucked inside were a dirty pair of gym socks--to dissuade the casual snoop--and a half a dozen CD’s that he’d lifted from a couple of music stores earlier in the day. Hidden at the bottom were two cans of spray paint--neon red and fluorescent yellow.

  He shook his head. Son-of-a-bitch, he thought. Not this again.

  When he’d reached the escalator stop in the direct center of the Mall, Jesse was waiting for him, standing directly in front of the platform exit. He had hoisted himself off the floor by his arms on the platform’s uptake railing, his elbows locked and his big red Nike cross-trainers cocked out before him in mid-air threatening to kick like a frisky kangaroo. Chance tossed the backpack directly at him, forcing him to drop back down to his feet. He stepped off and started toward the up escalator.

  “So what do you say, Chancie? Are you down?”

  “Blow me,” Chance replied with a bored sigh. “I don’t have a strong desire to see the inside of a jail cell tonight.”

  “What, you think Big and Beautiful is gonna catch us?” Jesse asked, stepping onto the escalator backwards and giving his friend a huge toothy grin. “Fat chance, Chance!”

  Chance tried to ignore Jesse as he split a gut over his witty repartee. “Look, Jess, I just don’t give a shit about getting in that stupid gang. I just don’t care,” he told him, as he stepped onto the moving staircase after him.

  “This thing will buy me a little street cred, dude.”

  “Not interested in any of that.”

  Taking a step back down to Chance, Jesse leaned against the railing, staring down at the pack in his hands. “Neither am I, man. I just want to give myself a little breathing space, s’all,” he replied, in a low voice. “Y’know, it’s just that I figure if I don’t, something bad’s gonna happen. Then maybe if I can get in good with them, they won’t mess with you either.”

  Chance followed the other’s eyes to the pack gripped in his hands, the nails of which had been chewed down to the quick. He could just make out Billy Idol’s fading scowl, that curled lip of his, and remembered how Jesse had gotten the pack for Christmas two years ago when every other song on the radio was “White Wedding.” They were both thirteen back then. Still kids, Chance thought. Now here they were talking about “street cred” and covering each other’s asses.

  What a wonderful world they lived in.

  “Look, it’s quarter to two,” Jesse continued. “There’s not gonna be anybody on those trams.”

  Chance glared up at Jesse and found himself listening for the first time.

  “The trams, huh?”

  15

  When Albert reached the tram, Vernon Willowby and Sam from maintenance were already on the scene. He could see the damage from a distance through the slowly dissolving group of shoppers stepping away from the sign Vernon affixed across the outside glass
of the car reading “Out of Order.”

  “Next tram will be along shortly, folks,” Vernon explained in a loud voice.

  Albert stepped through the crowd to stand beside Vernon. “What happened here?”

  “They saw a couple of kids on the surveillance cam just before one of them blacked out the lens,” Vernon replied, rubbing the bubbles out of the plastic self-adhesive sign.

  Almost on cue, both their radios squawked: “Attention all security agents, be on the lookout for two teenaged boys in jeans and t-shirts with skateboards, one with a backpack, last seen in Yellow Sector. Wanted for defacing company property. Message has been transmitted to all mechanized support units via the network. Bots have been ordered to report location if spotted, not to engage suspects.”

  Phrases and slogans in bright red and yellow covered the entire inside of the tram. “6th St Sculz,” the largest one, across the back wall, read. Others read: “Watch your ass!” and “Sculz rule 6th.” Albert’s eyes couldn’t seem to get past the one that read: “Fuk U, Fat Azz Piggy!” with a crude image of a pig wearing a badge.

  “If you locate them,” the voice on the radio continued, “please escort them outside the premises. Remember, never engage a customer physically. I repeat: do not engage a customer physically. If they refuse to leave peacefully, call law enforcement immediately.”

  Vernon glanced furtively over at Albert.

  “They were the ones at the Ferris Wheel,” Albert stated.

  “Yeah, I figured.” Vernon studied the other’s frozen expression as he stared at the graffiti. “Remember what I told you, Al. They’re just kids. Don’t sweat ‘em.”

  Sal, a uniformed black man with a perennial smile on his face stepped up to the door of the tram. “I’m taking her down to maintenance to get her cleaned up before the boss sees. You guys wanna ride?”

  Glancing at Albert, Vernon shook his head. “Nah, I’ll hang here. Thanks, Sal.”

  With that, Sal hit a button inside the open panel beside the entrance and the doors slid closed. “Clear?” he asked into his radio and after a moment it squawked back. He gave a bright smile and a wave and flicked a switch inside the panel. The tram slid smoothly down the track.

  “Boy, those things are sure quiet, aren’t they?” Vernon glanced warily over at the other, but Albert’s eyes were following the tram into the tunnel, only registering Vernon after it had completely disappeared around the curve of the tunnel.

  He turned and looked at Vernon with an odd expression, blinked once, twice, three times, then uttered the following words: “Of course it’s quiet. It’s a perfect transporting machine.”

  Vernon squinted at Albert in confusion as he fished around inside his pocket. “Hey man, you sure you’re okay? Have you been getting enough sleep?”

  Retrieving a tattered paperback from his pocket, Albert stared foggily down at it. “Nah, I’ve been having a little trouble lately,” he managed in a slurred voice, then suddenly more clearly, he added, “Hey, Vernon, you ever read Vonnegut?”

  Shaking his head at Albert, he glanced down at the book. “Hell, man the closest I get to reading is the articles in Hot Rod magazine. By the way, I finally found that damned roof panel for my Ford.” Vernon had been restoring his old man’s two-tone ‘55 Ford Crown Victoria Skyliner part by part for about five years now, and the acrylic glass roof panel for the “Glasstop Vicky” had been the real thorn in his side. “Got it mail order from Japan. Ain’t that the shits? I had to send off to friggin’ Asia to get a part for an American car. What’s this world comin’ to?”

  “Machines,” Albert muttered. “That’s what it’s coming to. The De-evolution of Man. This society creates skateboarding machines and vandalism machines. They don’t think or feel like me or… you.” Albert turned quickly and stared at Vernon with concern in his eyes.

  So intense was the expression that Vernon felt himself shrink away. “Say, you want to grab a bite with me on my break?” he asked tentatively, hoping the answer would be “no.”

  Pocketing the book, Albert walked away, without response, but humming what Vernon could swear sounded like the tune to Devo’s “Whip It.”

  BOOK TWO

  “BREAKDOWN”

  “John Fitzgerald Kennedy took office on January 20, 1964. The next eight years of the Kennedy Administration was a historic time. Domestically, Kennedy implemented his policy of the ‘New Frontier’ that saw an improved economy due in part to tax cuts and unprecedented job growth, mostly in technical fields, which Kennedy was a strong advocate of from his first days in office. He pushed for the first manned mission to the moon before the end of the decade and saw his vision completed during his administration on July 20, 1969. His personal interest in technology and space led directly to many foreign policy successes including several talks with the Soviets regarding joint missions during his second term in office (though no agreement was ever reached) and a landmark agreement with Japan, which allowed the sharing of technical advances in the field of electronics and computers (which would eventually lead to the first discussions of robotic technology in the early years of the Humphrey administration).”

  Excerpt from the article entitled “A Brief History of the Presidents of the United States of America,” from the Uni-pedia on-line resource

  1

  Back to the Future had been such a success with Owen and Cora that they had wanted to stay and watch it a second time. Despite how entertaining the movie, Lara still found herself nodding off halfway through the first run. Whether it was the soft cushion against her back or the cool temperature of the auditorium, or maybe just the sense of being in a safe place, all Lara knew was that the tension of the day, the stress that comes with the insecurity of not having a place to lay your head, drained out of her body from the ends of every hair on her head to the tips of her toes. She had been in a constant state of fight or flight since the eviction that morning and hadn’t eased up. So much so that when she first sat down in the “rocking-chair” seat, she had felt the ache and throb of every muscle, as if she had just completed a full-out marathon dash for some indefinable goal.

  “Oh God,” she purred, rolling her neck along the top edge of the puffy soft seat back. “Those tickets were worth every penny we paid for them.” Her stiff neck cracked and she groaned in comfort. Was it possible to get an orgasm from a seat?

  Somehow her eyes had flickered open just in time to see the DeLoren fly away up the McFly’s tree-lined street. She had been so deeply asleep that for a moment she was completely disoriented. Where the hell was she?

  “Mommy, can we see it again?” Cora wanted to know.

  “I don’t know, hon,” Lora attempted, straightening in her seat and blinking foggily at her son in the seat next to her. “What does your brother have to say?”

  “Oh yeah!” Owen was all pearly white teeth and green eyes--those same deep emerald eyes that belonged to his father. “That was so awesome!”

  “I guess it’s settled then. We go back to the future one more time.” She had looked over her shoulder then and realized that the two other teenaged couples that had shared the auditorium with them had departed, leaving them the sole members of the audience. For a single moment, Lara’s tummy fluttered with an indecipherable panic. Was it possible that they were the only ones left in this entire thirty screen theater? Who was she kidding? Surely on a weekend, there would be tons of teens roaming from screen to screen.

  She checked her watch. It was only thirty minutes after midnight. Still early for a Saturday night… er, Sunday morning.

  Still she had insisted that all three of them take a bathroom break together. She was comforted to see several other people moving through the corridors, even a couple not much older than her. She even held hope that she’d see the elderly couple, George and Tess, again. They’d reminded her of her parents, though her memories of them had grown sketchy over the years. She’d only been eight years old when they’d died.

  One thing she did recall, though, was
that they had been inseparable, with a bond that seemed so exclusive that at times, Lara had felt like the third man out.

  When they had died, Lara had gone to live with her aunt on her father’s side, the only available relative.

  Tragically, her parents had died within a month of each other, her mother of ovarian cancer and her father of a heart attack, though she often told people that they both died of cancer (because in her mind her father had ultimately died of a fatal case of “lack of wife”).

  “Because they shared the same soul,” a friend of hers had once remarked upon hearing the story. “One could not survive without the life force of the other,” had been the friend’s poetically misplaced conclusion. “When your mother left this world, your father had lost his will to go on.”

  Maybe it was that touch of the tragic which made it seem so romantic, but Lara feared that she had carried that ideal of perfected love along with her to every relationship she’d ever formed. Perhaps it was this more than anything else that had ruined her ability to be happy.

  Even with Ben, she hadn’t appreciated him as much as she should have, until the day it was too late for second chances, she thought, staring at a coming attractions one-sheet on the wall of the theater. It was an advertisement for another one of those low-budget slasher pics that John Carpenter’s Halloween had made popular.

  The poster portrayed a dirty-faced teenager clutching the bars of a jail cell, her eyes terror-stricken. In the darkness behind her was a shadowy figure with--what else--a butcher knife.

  For the briefest of moments, the face on the poster was hers, and the figure behind was a grim-faced woman.

  The Witch.

  “Mommy!”

  The sound of her daughter’s voice jarred her out of her thoughts. “Yeah?”

  “Can we go watch the Goonies while we wait for Marty McFly to start again?”