Doc and Regina are both looking at me weirdly, and I shrug awkwardly. “What? I work in construction. I listen when the city planners talk.”
“Wisdom of the builders aside,” Regina says, “the point is that there's a large empty building that, as Dan points out, is not particularly close to many people. Which are pretty much the criteria we're looking for, right? I don't know if Brian ever actually went in there or not, but he talked about it sometimes, so – it seems like a good bet, maybe? I don't know. It's the only idea I have.”
“It sounds good to me,” I say. “'Urban exploration,' huh? I didn't know Brian was into recreational breaking and entering.” I'm aiming to get a laugh from Regina, but she gives me an earnest look.
“I accused him of that once, and he said, 'It's just modern archaeology, you know?'“
She manages to capture Brian's speech pattern, tone and even his body language perfectly, and I'm the one who laughs.
“That was a pretty dead-on impression!”
“'Man, that doesn't sound anything like me,'“ Regina continues as Brian, her grin interfering with the sound of slight affront in her voice.
I laugh again, and the Doc is smirking as well. “All right, I'm convinced,” I say. “If you can sound that much like Brian, you can probably think like him, too. We'll go check out Stonefield tomorrow morning.”
Regina frowns. “Why not right now?”
I shake my head. “I still don't think it's a good idea to go out there at night, same as I told Peterson. It's easier for him to hide, it's easier for us to get hurt. Even if there's no one else there, a place that's been shuttered for a decade isn't likely to be in pristine condition. I don't want to end up back here because I stepped through a rotted section of floor that I couldn't see in the dark.”
“Oh, but you'll leave Brian out there for another night?” Regina retorts angrily.
Doc Simmons chimes in. “Actually, I have to agree with Dan here. By going out at night, we multiply the risks, increase the chance of failure and get very little extra reward. Additionally, we're not fully prepared to go out there yet. Do either of you even have a flashlight?”
“I mean, at home, sure,” I say.
“So we go home tonight. We prepare for what we'll need to go search an abandoned mall store to store. Flashlights, probably some tool for cutting chains –”
“I can cut chains,” I volunteer, raising my right hand.
The doc grimaces. “Fine. The point is, pack up whatever you need, whatever you think Brian will need, and get some rest. We'll meet at Stonefield at seven o'clock tomorrow morning, and we'll rescue Brian then.”
Regina doesn't look happy about this, but nods her assent. We walk back out to the parking lot and get into my car.
“So,” I say, starting it up, “back to City Hall to get your car, then?”
“Actually,” says Regina, “can I...can I stay at your place tonight? I don't want to be alone right now.”
“Sure, I guess so! Whatever you need.”
Back at my place, I propose my standard evening wind-down: vegging out on the couch. I'm pretty exhausted, and Regina looks even rougher than I feel. She's on board with this plan, so I settle in with a glass of soda and a stupid comedy about zombies.
Regina and I are at opposite ends of the couch initially, but after a few minutes she scoots over next to me, moves my arm out of the way and cuddles up against my shoulder.
“Um,” I start, not really knowing where to go from there. Fortunately, Regina cuts me off.
“Shut up,” she says, and I do. After a short while, I can feel her crying, so I awkwardly put my arm around her shoulders and hope that's what she wants here. She stops crying a few minutes later, so I suppose it worked.
Not long after that, I realize that Regina's fallen asleep pillowed against me. I look forlornly at my glass of soda sitting on the floor, well outside of arm's reach. My position isn't entirely comfortable, but I fluff up the cushions behind me with my free arm and make the best of it.
I wake up at around 3 AM with a crick in my neck. I reach up to rub it, and when I lift my arm off of the couch, I can't feel my right hand.
“I dissolved my hand in the night!” I think, panicked. A moment later, I realize that this is a stupid thought. All that's actually happened is that I've managed to pin my arm against the couch, and my hand has fallen asleep. Still, that split-second of terror is enough to have flushed all possibility of further sleep from my system.
Regina's still out, so I carefully extricate myself from beneath her and sneak off to prepare for the day. I set coffee on to brew and go to take a shower. I never feel less clean than when I've fallen asleep in my clothes. Which is funny, because I come home filthy on a regular basis from work, but there's just a greasy feeling when I wake up fully clothed that's much worse than actual dirt. It's like I've slowly bonded to my shirt and pants overnight.
A shower and a cup of coffee later, Regina's still not awake and I'm trying to quietly sift through my disorganized closets in search of what we might need today. I put two flashlights into a backpack, then can't really think of much else that we actually need, so I start putting stuff in more or less at random. Water bottles? Sure, we might be out there for a while. Maybe we'll get dust in our eyes that we need to rinse out. In they go.
Box of Band-aids? Yeah, lots of places to get cut there. Pair of work gloves? Absolutely, why not. Bungee cords? I mean, I can't think of any situation that would need them. But on the other hand, they're not doing me any good sitting around here, so they're coming along!
I'm in danger of emptying an entire closet into the backpack, so I step away for a minute and go scramble some eggs for breakfast. Regina makes her way into the kitchen in the middle of this process and stands there, rubbing her eyes.
“Morning,” I say. “Coffee?”
She accepts a mug and sits heavily at the table. “What time is it?”
“I don't know, four-ish?”
“Ugh.”
This seems to be all she has to say on the subject, which I can understand. I'm not much of a conversationalist before my first cup of coffee, either.
She's still working her way to the bottom of the cup when I pass her a plate with scrambled eggs, toast and half of an only-slightly-elderly tomato that I found in the fridge.
“Haute cuisine, Dan?” she says, smiling.
“Man, I am an excellent cook!” I exclaim. “No matter what Brian says about it.”
Regina's face falls. She grabs my wrist, and I turn to look at her.
“Dan, he's going to be okay, right?”
“He's going to be fine,” I assure her. “We're going to fix this. We're gonna get him back.”
“Okay,” she says, letting go of my arm. “Okay.”
After a pause, I say, “Hey, speaking of, what should we be bringing today? I put in flashlights and some Band-aids, but then sort of ran out of reasonable ideas.”
Regina snorts. “Dan, you can go from reassuring to clueless in about two seconds flat, did you know that?”
“It's been mentioned,” I say.
- Chapter Nine -
Sunrise on the Ides of March finds me in the parking lot of an abandoned mall with my best friend's girlfriend, waiting for a doctor to arrive so that we can bring said friend home, by ambush and force if necessary. Despite the chill in the air, I'm sweating a bit. I've taken the advice I gave to Peterson and have worn multiple layers. I have an undershirt, a regular shirt, a flannel hanging loose over that and a jacket on top. I'm wearing a hat to protect my head, and I'm basically just hoping that Brian doesn't go for my legs, because I'm only wearing a single pair of pants. I thought about doubling up there, but decided that I wouldn't be able to take them off in anything like a timely fashion if I needed to. My life has never before called for me to own tearaway pants.
The doc shows up at five minutes to seven, and steps out of her car carrying the satchel we saw her pack yesterday. We stand and regard the mall fo
r a moment. With the sun rising behind it, casting the building into silhouette, it looks normal, even inviting. If it weren't for the cracked and weed-strewn parking lot extending out in front, it would be easy to believe that the mall was still alive and preparing to open for the day.
“Shall we?” asks the doc, gesturing forward, and together we walk to the front doors.
Simmons tries the first set, which are locked, and moves on to the next one, then the next. “All locked at this entrance,” she reports, starting to walk away.
“Doc? I can open any door you want,” I say.
“Yes, and if we can't find Brian's entry point, we'll go that way. But I'd rather find the route he took in, and reduce our search radius immediately, wouldn't you?”
“Okay, your logic's sound, Doc. But your bedside manner could use some work.”
“No one ever got better through false hopes, Dan.”
“You live a very uncompromising life, is all I'm saying.”
“Look!” says Regina, cutting our argument short. Ahead, sunlight glints off of the glass panels of doors protected behind a gate of steel bars. The bars have a large hole eaten out of them, though, and one of the doors is missing its glass. No shards are visible on the ground, just a thick coating of dust.
“Well,” says the doc. “Once again: shall we?”
I take a deep breath and step inside the abandoned mall.
Inside, the mall is surprisingly well-lit. The early-morning sun creeps in through well-placed skylights, and the large central atrium allows this light to suffuse all but the most remote corners. Inside the shops themselves, it's probably another story, but for right now I'm pleased at how not-creepy this place is. I squint my eyes, trying to picture it in the dark, and come to the conclusion that I was absolutely right to wait until daylight.
“Keep moving forward, Dan,” says Simmons behind me, and I guiltily step ahead a few more paces so she can enter, too. The doc clicks on her flashlight and starts scanning the floor.
“I think it's pretty sound,” I say, jumping up and down experimentally.
Simmons gives me that familiar look, the one that says I’m acting like an idiot. “I'm looking for footprints, or any sign that Brian came this way. I'm not worried about the structural integrity of the ground floor.”
“What happened over here?” asks Regina, and we turn to see her shining her light on the wall next to the entrance. From about waist-height down, irregular patches are missing from the drywall, and the metal studs revealed behind it have been eaten away, too. The damage reaches to the floor, which is also pitted reaching nearly to where we entered. The same pattern of damage is on the opposite wall, too.
“Something to do with the power,” I say.
“Clearly,” says Doc Simmons. “Is this something you can do?”
“Not as far as I know. This looks like a really wide spread of buckshot or something. Acid buckshot. I tried using it at range, but never got anywhere with it.”
“Well. Keep your eyes peeled, and your layers loose, I suppose,” says the doc.
Since everyone else has their flashlight out, I turn mine on, too, and check the floor ahead of me. I'm not entirely sure what I'm looking for; a clear set of footprints in the dust like you see in movies, I suppose. But while this floor is definitely dirty, it turns out that when you walk on dirt, you mainly just get dirt left in place, only slightly flatter. Looking behind us, I can't even see our own footprints. Maybe I'm just a really bad tracker.
Whatever that spray was about at the door, I don't see it repeated anywhere else as we make our way through the mall. I let the doc take the lead, since she seems to have some idea of what she's doing. While she studies the floor and Regina watches the hallway ahead of us, I let my light play along the walls as I take a look at the empty shops around us.
I take back what I said earlier about this place not being creepy. It is, but its creepiness is so big that I missed it at first. It's a gigantic tombstone, a monument to the death of civilization. The shops are all shuttered, the ceiling is cracked and peeling, the floors are unwashed and slowly being subsumed by dirt. In two thousand years, they might find the ruins of this place and study it, marveling at ancient American culture. This Cinnabon sign might still be there, its plastic and metal tarnished but still present. Will they know what that was? Will they understand why this kiosk was labeled a Sunglass Hut?
Brian's right. Urban exploration is just modern archaeology.
We move slowly past an empty food court, the chairs still sitting at the tables like they're waiting for the crowds to come back. People have been in here. The walls are covered with graffiti. Some of it's just scrawled tags, but a lot of it is impressive art. There are fields, rivers, pyramids, and jungles painted on the walls. Misshapen people lean in at the angles, and odd little monsters crouch along the floor. Someone's gone around to every one of the cutouts in the wall where the fast-food restaurants used to be and painted a gaping mouth around each one, so each empty blackness appears to be stretching down some strange creature's gullet.
For whatever reason, the graffiti seems to be limited to the food court. Is it a gallery of some sort? Are there rules about where you do and don't spraypaint? How come no one's broken any of the tables or chairs, or even the windows? This is a piece of the world I know nothing about.
We're approaching a grimy escalator when the doc says quietly, “Brian's been here.”
Her near-whisper echoes sibilantly in the cavernous space. I start to look for what's caught her attention, and she adds, “Don't shine your light around. If he doesn't know we're here, that'll alert him. Just look, both sides.”
At first, I don't see what she's talking about. The shops on each side look perfectly normal: large empty entryways, barren shelves and racks disappearing quickly into the darkness inside, just like all of the others we've passed. Finally it hits me – the security gates are missing. Completely gone, as if they'd never existed. And straining my eyes, I now can see the white dust piled on the white tile at the shop entrances.
“Which one do you think he's in?” whispers Regina.
“Either's equally possible. Or neither. Could be a trap,” Simmons whispers back.
“Hey, stupid question,” I say quietly. “Why are we whispering?”
No one answers, so after a beat I continue, “I mean, we want him to know we're here, right? Half of the point of waiting for day was so that we didn't accidentally startle him into doing something stupid. So, if we think he's here, isn't it time to, like, shout for him?”
There's another moment of silence, and then the doc says in a normal tone, “All right. Regina? He'll probably be happiest to hear you.”
Regina sticks her flashlight under one arm and cups her hands to her mouth. “Brian?” she calls out, her voice ringing throughout the mall. “Baby? We came to find you, Bri.”
We wait expectantly, but nothing moves in the silence following her announcement. Regina looks quizzically at me, but I just shrug. Half a minute passes before I say, “So – left or right?”
“You want to go beard the creature in its den, Dan?” asks Simmons with a small smirk. “You sure you wouldn't like to split up first, too?”
“Har har. Do you have a better option? If he's not coming out, we've got to go in.”
“He's not a creature,” Regina says, frowning at Doc Simmons.
“It's just a joke. I'm sorry,” I tell her.
“Why are you apologizing? She's the one who said it.”
“Well, I'm sorry that she said it, then.”
“Left it is,” says the doc, training her flashlight into the store and walking in. Regina frowns again at Doc Simmons's retreating back and I just shrug, but we both fall into step behind her.
The sunlight quickly fades as we enter the abandoned store, and by ten feet in we're totally dependent on our flashlights. Regina's still calling out for Brian as we go, talking to him the same way you'd try to soothe a panicked animal.
“Are you in here, Bri? We're here to help you. You've done good so far, you've done great. Let us help you get this under control. We're gonna get through this, Brian.”
Regina keeps the monologue going as we progress, pausing her speech after each sentence to invite a reply. No response is forthcoming, though, and so we continue forward, our lights scanning the naked aisles of the store.
Toward the back, I spot a ragged hole in the wall, a vaguely circular shape taller than a man. The floor near it is dissolved in erratic pits, just like at the entrance to the mall. I still can't make sense of the pattern. There's a clear path to walk into the hole in the wall at the center, but then the pits start about two feet out from that on each side and continue just past the edge of the circle. It really does look like someone fired a wide burst of shot on each side of the central path before passing through.
Stepping carefully past the eaten-away section of floor, Regina leans into the makeshift tunnel. “It opens up into another store,” she reports, shining her flashlight in. “Looks basically the same as this one – Brian? Are you in there, baby?”
From the hole issues a sound that at first I think is rushing wind, before it deepens into a feral growl. I tighten my grip on my flashlight, wishing I had a better weapon. Beside me, Doc Simmons digs through her messenger bag.
Regina takes a single step backwards, but calls out again, “Brian?”
“You could all learn to take a hint,” comes Brian's voice, thick with rage. “Did you even find the doctor? Or did you just ignore my extremely simple request and come barging in here, certain that you knew what was best? Like always?”
“Hey, man, we're looki–” I begin, but Brian cuts me off.
“Don't even talk to me! It's bad enough that you're here. Your tainted breath is poisoning the air. I could smell you from outside. You're like a wound in the air, a parasite moving under a scab.”
I open my mouth to protest, but Doc Simmons puts a hand on my arm and shakes her head at me. I motion to her, asking: should I leave? She shakes her head again, and I grimace. I don't know what I'm supposed to do here.
Everything Falls Apart Page 9
