“Now that’s a little unrealistic, wouldn’t you say,” Charlene answered, giving her cigarette two taps into the crystal ashtray beside the lamp. “After all, he was my only son.”
Lara rose abruptly. “I think I should go.”
“Go? Go where?” Charlene snapped, crushing the cigarette out with a single sharp twist. “You obviously don’t have the money to put my children up in a hotel room or you would have never come to me.”
Lara had begun to feel light-headed, as if a monstrous animal had taken a deep inhalation of breath somewhere in the room and stolen the very oxygen from her lungs. She had to get out of this woman’s presence.
Sweeping a pen from the desk, Charlene brandished it before her. “I’ll take good care of them. You know I will. I’ll give them what you could never afford to on a secretary’s salary. Healthy food. Warm clothes. The best schools. Security.”
Lara shook her head emphatically, but she couldn’t deny the truth in her words. She had fallen on lean times. No, “lean” was too kind a word. “Destitute” was a more appropriate term.
The truth of the matter—the fact that she could never expose to this woman for nothing more honorable than simple ego—was that her last boyfriend, an IT cretin for a software company, had committed identity fraud in her name. He used her debit card to empty out her checking account. And as icing on the cake, he’d cancelled all her credit cards.
All this in retaliation for rejected intimacy.
Sex, she thought. She didn’t want it. Not yet. If he needed it so badly, he could find a willing donor at some local bar. Was it so wrong that she couldn’t give herself over to a man until she fulfilled the needs of her children? Wasn’t that the definition of selflessness, she wondered?
Or was it something else?
An image of Him rose in her mind and she instantly pinched it off like the wick of a candle that stubbornly refused to extinguish. She could hear his voice, still fresh despite his three year absence.
Cheer up, Gloria. Things can’t possibly get much worse.
Living from paycheck to paycheck for more than two months now, she had been forced to take in a roommate. Gabby, a college student in her early twenties, had answered an ad that she had posted on a bulletin board at work. Even after two bounced checks from the girl, it had taken Lara catching her smoking weed in the bathroom late one night to finally kick her out on the street.
Perhaps this was God’s final irony; the Great Slum Lord on High putting her out on the street. His idea of high comedy.
She couldn’t pretend anymore not to see the holes in socks and underwear. She had been surviving on government assistance for going on six months now and she had been forced to stretch their meals farther and farther each day.
She found herself looking at that pen held in those exquisitely manicured fingers, when a horrible screech came from down the hallway.
Lara rushed outside through the living room and into the kitchen.
Both children were standing wide-eyed, apparently safe, though obviously scared.
Andy, the tiny white Bishon, was convulsing on the tiled floor at a rate that defied reason. The sound that came from its body was unnatural.
Before she could utter a word, Charlene dropped to her knees beside the animal and bellowed, “What have you done?”
Cora ran to Lara and clutched her leg tightly while Owen just stood immobile watching the dog flopping around on the kitchen rug with a sort of morbid fascination.
“We were just playing with him,” Cora sobbed. “Honestly.”
When Charlene laid her hand on the dog, a blue arc of electricity shot from it. She screamed and fell back away from it, a look of shock on her face. The dog yelped one last time, smoke pouring from its open mouth. From between the tiny jaws, the glistening latticework of its mechanical interior was clearly visible within.
“It’s just a Bot!” Owen cried in obvious relief.
“Just?” Charlene bellowed. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
Cora squeezed a handful of Lara’s pants leg in her tiny fist and pleaded in a tiny voice, “Make her stop, Mommy. It burns!”
“I just thought I killed it,” Owen muttered under his breath, his eyes wide with wonder.
Charlene reached out and seized Owen’s arm from where she sat and gave it a hard tug. “Do you know what it costs to repair one of these?”
Lara grabbed Owen and pulled him behind her toward the doorway. “C’mon, Owen. We’re leaving.”
“Go on, then!” Charlene screeched, her face a reddened mask. “Leave a mess to clean up like you always do. Like you did when my Benjamin died!”
Scooping Cora up in her arms, Lara half carried, half dragged her through the kitchen door and into the exit in the living room, where Owen waited expectantly like a valet holding the door, a single tear streaming down his face. He brushed it away guiltily.
“Mom, I swear I hardly even touched it,” he exclaimed. “I was just playing.”
“It’s okay, Owen,” she replied, planting a kiss in the center of the musky mop of his unruly dark hair. “C’mon, let’s go.”
Leading her children outside, she took one last look back before shutting the door on what had been her final option.
In her head, she heard his voice again: “Don’t worry, Gloria!”
And it all came rushing back, in a single vivid flash of memory.
“Easy for you to say. You don’t have to carry the little booger for nine months.”
He rolled off of her and back over to his side of the bed, staring up at the ceiling. “You think this is a mistake, don’t you?”
She hesitated. Her mind had gone blank, devoid of a diplomatic response. “I’m scared, hon,” she said, hearing her normally confident voice wavering with emotion.
He turned and nuzzled his nose into the tender crook of her neck. She giggled in spite of herself, and impulsively raised her shoulder, clamping his face into a mass of her cascading brown hair.
“Don’t worry, Gloria.”
“Stop calling me that, you shit!”
“Glor-ree-ah!”
“Quiet, you’ll wake Owen.”
“G-L-O-R-I-A.”
Lara cried out and threw herself atop him, straddling his belly. “I oughtta throttle you right here, right now,” she hissed with a gleam in her eye. “No court would convict me. I’ll tell them we were in the throes of lovemaking and the passion just got the better of me and…”
“What? And leave you alone to raise two brats,” Ben chortled.
Her expression turned serious. She dropped a fist down atop his chest a bit harder than she had intended. “Don’t ever joke about that! Ever!”
Ben swallowed and re-connected with her evasive eyes. “I’m sorry, hon! If anything ever happened to me…”
“Stop, you shit!” she exclaimed rolling off and throwing herself to the edge of the mattress in a huff, her back to him.
Ben turned to her, drawing his lips close to her ear until the fine hair wavered before his warm breath. “If anything ever happened to me, kiddo, you’d go on, you’ll live and you’d know that I’ll always love you. Today, tomorrow, and forever.”
The memory of his breath on her ear—his warm breath—drove a fresh auger of pain into Lara’s gut and she dug the heel of her hand into the corner of her eye to capture the tear before either of her children could see it.
Ben was gone. Her husband was gone, and she was truly on her own now.
5
Albert could hear the two punks before he could see them, the sounds of rolling wheels amplified by the unique design of Coney Island Court, the direct center of the Mall. The wide open area displayed a cross-section of all five levels of the enormous complex. At its center, a hundred foot tall, twenty-car Ferris Wheel dominated.
The Wheel of Time, as it was called, featured a specially-themed car for every decade. There was a Wild West Car displayed, of course, cowboys and Indians; a Roaring Twenties car, complete wi
th sequins and Tommy guns; and a Swinging Sixties car painted with obnoxious tie-dye flowers.
On one side of the Wheel across from a fountain surrounded by benches, an immobile Bot stood. It was policy to send a Bot to attempt defusing a potential situation before sending security agents. Obviously the Bot had not worked, judging from the darkness of its electronic eye sockets. A Bot was programmed to shut itself down if faced with potential destruction. The sight of the deactivated robot only managed to further anger Albert.
Taking advantage of the bowl-shaped walls of the sunken area, two teenage boys in ragged jeans and t-shirts took turns taunting each other to go as far as possible to the top edge of the railing.
At the moment Albert arrived, one of them hit the railing with the wheels of his board and fell backward back onto the carpeted floor, barely missing the edge of the fountain’s rim. The other laughed as the other rolled on the floor in pain.
“Hey!”
Both boys looked up with disinterested expressions.
“Does this look like a park to you?” Albert barked, standing at the top of the steps leading down into the sunken area.
The two teenage looked at each other with confused eyes as if trying to decipher the foreign language of the adult who had just spoken.
“Well,” Albert snapped. “Don’t just stand there like deer in headlights. Clear out of here!”
“We’re waiting on our parents, dude,” said the one in a white t-shirt that displayed the 1983 concert dates of the band The Police.
“So wait somewhere else. Let’s go!” He gave a clap of his hands and that seemed to wake the two boys up. They snatched up their skateboards and dropped their shoulders in defeat.
As they started up the steps past Albert, the taller one in a black t-shirt displaying ZZ Top’s “Eliminator,” a cherry red 1933 Ford Coupe, gave him a squinty-eyed look through the long dirty hair that fell across his eyes.
His hand dropped to the Faze-Wand at his hip, the only weapon he had at his disposal. Because of insurance issues, no security agent was allowed to carry a lethal weapon such as a gun. Albert always thought they should. After all, weren’t they law officers in the strictest sense, defending the rules of Mall management?
“How about giving us a few inches of room here, ton of fun?” the punk mumbled under his breath.
For a moment, Albert thought he might have mistaken what he had just heard, but then he immediately regained his senses. Of course, this child was disrespectful and filled with smug self-satisfied confidence. It was just another symptom of a youth-worshipping culture leaving children on their own to raise themselves, while their parents were busy buying hi-fi stereo systems and sports cars in a futile attempt to stay young themselves.
“Say that again, you piece of shit,” Albert growled between clenched teeth, his anger surfacing like a predator catching the scent of blood.
The taller one glanced at Albert’s hand on the Faze-Wand and flipped his long almost feminine hair back out of his eyes. “Try and touch me with that. See what happens.”
Albert exploded forward, grabbing the kid’s collar in both his fists. In that moment, he wanted nothing more than to smash the punk’s nose back through his skull.
Suddenly, someone had a grip on his arms from behind, firmly yanking him back. Albert whipped around and saw that fellow security guard Vernon Willowby had intervened.
“What the hell are you doing, Al?” Vernon hissed.
The other teenager grabbed his bolder companion and was hauling him away, but he wasn’t quite finished making his scene. He slapped the other’s hands away and threw his bony chest out through his baggy black t-shirt. “I oughtta sue you and this fucking mall, you fat ass tool!”
His buddy grabbed him again and this time he didn’t let him go.
Albert watched the two kids as they disappeared into the crowd, Vernon studying him with an alarmed frown on his face. “Goddamit, Al. What’s gotten into you?”
“Zit-faced, snot,” Albert growled. “Did you hear what he said to me?”
“Look, I don’t care what he said,” Vernon barked, giving the other a hard look. “You can’t treat a customer that way. The last thing this place needs is another lawsuit.”
It was well documented that a little old lady from DFW named Dolores Ritter had slipped and fell in a soda puddle before a service Bot could get to it. Ms Ritter had retained a personal injury attorney to get reimbursed for a one-time emergency room visit and ended up netting a cool two million dollars for a twisted ankle. She had claimed punitive damages. Pain and suffering.
Of course, any business the size of the Mall had minor accidents every day, most of which were settled out of court, usually with a discount coupon or gift card, but since the Ritter case had been publicized there had been a rash of bogus slip and fall claims, which the insurance company was fond of calling “copy-coots,” in deference to the average age of the claimants. Ninety-nine percent of these were dismissed with a simple meeting in which the surveillance video of the proposed “accident” was presented to the client, many of them captured with the aid of Bots equipped with video capabilities.
Security had been told directly that they couldn’t afford another Dolores Ritter and that protecting the customers was really secondary to their main duty:
Protect the Mall.
“Don’t ever engage a customer physically. Period,” Vernon continued. “You have an issue, you let the real cops handle it. That’s why they pay them the big bucks.”
“You ever wonder just what we’re supposed to be doing here,” Albert posed, slapping the Faze-Wand at his belt. “I mean they give us these Tinker Bell wands but then they tell us not to use them.”
“You oughtta know by now, Al. We’re just a deterrent. A false front. Y’know, like ‘Beware of dog,’ or ‘High Voltage.’ That’s us.”
“Well, I don’t like it,” Albert grumbled. “Makes me feel like a little cog in a big machine.”
“Hey, just be grateful they don’t expect us to enforce. You know how much of our lives we’d have to spend in a courtroom testifying in frivolous lawsuits if we did?”
“The way I figure it, I just saved the Mall another lawsuit by putting a stop to it,” Albert protested in way of defense, though he couldn’t care less about the preservation of the pocketbooks of the Mall investors. He had only wanted to put the punk in his place. For a moment, his anger had been palpably real, like a red hot flash of a lover’s lust, though the fervor had already started to drain out of him and he found himself a little confused about why he had overreacted. “Guess I’m just a little edgy or something.” His hand drifted down into his pocket like a dropped ball compelled by gravity.
“Don’t worry, my friend,” Vernon quipped, giving him a gentle slap on his arm. “They’re nothing but children, hanging out ‘cause they got tired of whacking off to their momma’s Victoria’s Secret catalogs.”
Albert laughed, his fingers connecting with the hard yet pliable object sealed in the zip-lock baggie in his pocket. The scene was already fading like a bad dream, like it had never happened at all, in fact.
Then Vernon said something that remained with him long after the conversation had ended and they had gone along their separate routes.
“Fate will take care of their kind soon enough.”
Albert glanced over at Vernon Willowby, and in his eyes, he saw a cold metallic gleam that he’d never noticed before.
6
“Mommy, are we just going to leave Grandma Charley with that hurt puppy?”
“There’s nothing we can do for it, Cora,” Lara assured her briskly, as she hustled the little girl into the elevator car after her brother. “Besides, it’s not a real dog anyway.”
“It’s real to her,” Cora muttered under her breath and stared down at her faded Willy’s World of Wonder shoes, turning them slightly inward until the frayed toes touched.
Again the flourish of sound from above gently intruded as the doors slid shut. �
�Which floor please?”
Lara shut her eyes and for a moment her mind was blank. What was left for her to do? She had run out of options. They couldn’t even sleep in the tiny rusted-out Toyota like common vagrants because it was filled with as many possessions as she had managed to ferret away. Everything else was still in the apartment, behind a door with a fresh new lock.
“Which floor please?” the voice persisted. Did it sound just a wee bit irritable, like a salesman running out of patience for a particularly indecisive customer?
“Mom?” Owen groaned.
“Where is this E-Bot store?” she snapped.
“E-Bot Universe. Level One. Section B-3,” the pleasant yet vaguely disgruntled recorded voice stated. “Do you require directions?”
Directions? Lara thought. Goddammit all, but I really do need a direction right now.
“Yes,” Lara answered in a tiny childlike voice.
“Thank you,” the patronizing voice chirped back. “Please exit the elevator to your right. Proceed along the red zone corridor to its end and take the Blue shuttle. You will get off at stop number three.”
“You got that, Owen?” Lara asked, her eyes still locked shut against the world.
“Red. Blue. Three,” Owen quickly responded. “Got it!”
The car dropped beneath them and with that, the three of them had a destination again, if only temporarily.
Finally, Lara opened her eyes and glanced back at her son, who had the hint of a smirk on his face for what seemed the first time that day. The car cleared the residential level, revealing the mall below again. Mesmerized, he stared down at the action in contented silence.
Owen really was a sharp kid, Lara thought, and those types of children were the ones who got bored so easily.
He made a sound of excitement and grabbed the wrist of his sister, dragging her to his side and pointing excitedly. She let out a gasp and gave a short hop. “Mommy, can we ride the Fairy Wheel?”
The Mall Page 3
