The Mall

by Bryant Delafosse

  Chance ran as fast as his eyes could reveal the shadowy terrain around him. He ran until his chest felt tight, his head cloudy from lack of oxygen. When his calves grew weak and shaky, he resorted to a sort of limping gallop, until he was forced to come to a complete stop.

  He whipped around and looked back in the direction he had come, trying to get his breathing under control so that he might hear the pursuer he knew must surely be closing in on him. His chest ached with each gasp of air and the racing of his heart filled his eardrums.

  It was at that moment that he realized that he had left his board down in the tunnel and felt a tinge of regret. Only then did Jesse enter his mind, and instantly, he felt ashamed for first thinking of an inanimate piece of wood with wheels over his friend.

  Jesse, his mind screamed! It killed him!

  He, Chance corrected himself. Not it. He.

  Just a man. A mental-defective crazy man, but just a man nonetheless. You can stay ahead of him here in the darkness, like you did down in the tunnel, but you have to get your shit under control.

  Stay chilly, he could almost hear Jesse tell him.

  He squeezed his eyes shut and suppressed the whimper rising from his throat.

  Don’t be a pussy, man!

  Chance took a deep breath, listening for a sound in the enormous open space. He glanced up and could see the other levels rising above him in the dim moonlight. The frozen escalator was just a few yards away.

  The thought occurred to him that the crazed guard might have gone vertical, trying to get behind him. He looked at the escalator rising up into the darkness and considered maybe doing the same. After all, if he could get to the top level before the other did, he could keep an eye on the floors below. If he did, though, he might be taking a chance that he would spot him again.

  Suddenly, he realized with horror that he had lost track of how long he had been standing there in plain sight, frozen there by his own indecision. Had it been less than a minute? Over ten minutes?

  He turned and began to run again, the aches and pains of a moment ago a distant memory as fresh adrenaline pumped through his body, renewing his tired muscles.

  He rushed behind the shiny body of a Mercedes-Benz automobile on display and tried to get his breathing under control again. He turned his head one way, then the other, wondering which way he should go, all choices looking equally hopeless.

  A skittering sound a few yards away drew his attention and he literally dropped to his hands and knees, half-expecting to feel the hands of the security guard seize his throat. Instead, he turned to find the shell of a downed Bot lying half inside, half outside a sunken area featuring a set of benches. The Bot’s feet moved back and forth in place as if trying to regain its footing on a floor that was no longer there. Chance had seen the innumerable bodies of Bots lying around the corridors of the Mall, but had not yet seen one moving.

  Taking another look back in the direction he’d come, he maneuvered back beside the fallen Bot. Spotting a dull blue light glowing within its visual sensors, he propped the machine’s head atop one aching thigh and lowered his mouth down to the narrow channels on the sides of its shiny head.

  “Hey,” he called in a subdued voice, casting fitful looks up the corridor. “Can you call for help? Can you please...?”

  The feet of the Bot stopped moving and for a moment, its eyes pulsed a brighter shade of blue. There was a brief hiss of static within the machines hidden speaker before it began to hum.

  “Please head to the north exit,” it exclaimed, the recorded voice amplified in the still, empty space around Chance. “Please head to the north exit! Please head..!”

  Chance hopped to his feet, turned and made a mad dash up the steps out of the sunken section, casting a look over his shoulder as he ran up the corridor. The command repeated by the mechanical voice fading as he drew farther away.

  When he began to feel that dull ache in his legs, Chance thought distractedly that he could sure use his board right about now, which led instantly to images of Jesse and a renewed sense of disorientation.

  As he struggled toward the center of the Mall on wobbly legs, Chance tried to focus on what he would do next. I need to go north just like we should have when we first heard those security guards, he decided. I just need to get out of this place and tell the first cop I see what happened to Jesse. Maybe then I’ll just wake up and have a good laugh about all this.

  But in order to do that, he’d have to head back to the Northern entrance, which was one level above the red tram station from where he had just fled.

  Back toward that security guard.

  And Jesse.

  He turned and looked back, but his legs refused to move. When they finally did, he started and stopped again. Rushing forward in a burst of confidence, then scrabbling backwards to his previous position in fear. He couldn’t muster the courage to do it. He was just too afraid.

  You worthless piece of shit, he thought, tears of frustration rolling down his face. You’re gonna die here just like this, running in a circle. Death by indecision.

  He scampered to the bordering wall and peered into the darkness, straining his eyes for any movement. When he saw none, he slowly crept along the storefronts, feeling like a whipped hound, hugging the border of an enemy’s yard.

  Head north, he repeated like a drumbeat in his head. Head north. Head north.

  17

  Albert used the dropped pin-light to examine the shattered skull-piece of the machine lying between the tracks of the abandoned tram tunnel. He had discarded his own flashlight an hour ago when he’d discovered that it had been a defective machine unable to fulfill its function.

  Feeling oddly disoriented and uncertain how he had gotten down here, he moved the tiny beam over a bit to the right and examined the bright red flower of color covering the teenager’s face, obliterated except for one clear and undisturbed wide eye. Scattered within the blood were stark white bits, that might have been pieces of the splintered skateboard lying broken beside him or shards of the kid’s own shattered skull.

  Every sense he possessed told him that the corpse before him was real.

  Of course it looked real, how else would they have passed for machines all those years? Hey, Hollywood did it all the time and some of that stuff in movies looked pretty realistic!

  Albert’s mind seized on the concept like a piece of flotsam passing a drowning man. He thrust the weight of his entire psyche onto that idea and prayed that it would support him.

  Just below the mass of blood and dark hair, shiny with sweet-smelling gel, he thought he could make out something bluish-grey in color.

  There! That’s metal!

  Momentarily considering the prospect of examining it closer, he shook his head in revulsion and backed away from the disabled unit.

  If anyone were to see him down here with this…

  Slowly, his present situation came back to him. The Mall was abandoned, right? There was an evacuation, wasn’t there? Something bad must have happened outside and the Mall was locked-down.

  But why exactly did he choose to stay behind instead of leaving with the others?

  There was something he had to do. Some work he had to finish, but what that task was he was having problems remembering. And who had given him those orders? Had it been his boss, Jason Marrs?

  Why was he having so much trouble concentrating all of a sudden?

  He shut his eyes for a moment, took a deep breath, counted to ten in his foggy mind, and let it out.

  When he opened his eyes again, he discovered that he was standing at the closed set of double doors marked “Authorized Personnel Only,” a large ring of keys gripped tightly in his right hand.

  With utter confusion, he stared down at the keys, still swinging as if from forward momentum. He felt an icy numb sensation rush up his back.

  He glanced over his shoulder offhandedly and was surprised to find a flat-bed cart from the House-Wheres store parked at his heels. The machine that looked
like the kid from the tunnel sat atop the flat-bed, a single wide eye aimed accusingly at Albert.

  Albert threw a hand over his mouth, stifling a frightened moan.

  How had all this gotten here?

  He turned his back on the ghastly image and giving it a wide berth, walked out into the middle of the corridor. He recognized that he was at the fore-end of Red sector, the familiar scaffold-like structure of the Wheel of Time looming in the shadows above him. The last thing he remembered, though, was standing in the abandoned tram tunnel over a quarter mile away.

  In front of him on the floor, a Red sector Bot lay on its back, its legs still moving up and down as if trying to move forward, unaware of its present orientation. One eye sensor flickered light blue, while the other was completely dark.

  Why the Bot looked so familiar to him, he hadn’t a clue.

  Glancing up the corridor, he wondered if he was being watched, if someone was screwing with him and getting a kick out of watching him in this confused state.

  He controlled the urge to yell a curse into the darkness. Instead, he ducked into the open door of the trendy kids fashion store adjacent to the double-doors, the one with all the dark Goth bullshit, and snatched a couple of t-shirts from the nearest display.

  Walking back to the flat-bed, he shook the black shirt out and dropped it over the kid’s mangled face. A grinning skull peered up at him from the front of the shirt, below which read the words “The Misfits.”

  What the hell did that mean? Was it a b-movie or a devil band or something?

  Fucking kids and their morbid shit.

  He took the other black shirt, reversed it, and draped it atop the first, hiding the grinning skull decal.

  There!

  He turned back to the double-doors and was confused to see that he was now standing in front of one of the massive incinerators that were in the bowels of the Mall, a couple of levels below the subterranean people-mover platforms. His stomach did a cartwheel and once again he looked over his shoulder suspiciously.

  What crazy ass shit was going on here?

  Albert glanced down and was not at all surprised to find the flat-bed with the so-recently departed skater-punk, lying below him. He nudged the body once with the tip of one boot, feeling the dead weight of it settle to one side.

  Albert reached down and took a corner of the dark t-shirt between two trembling fingers. Lifting it up, he looked at the mangled face glistening in the firelight. Was that blood-stained brain matter or stainless steel? And maybe that wasn’t blood at all but some sort of Bot-oil or power-steeling fluid or whatever the hell these things excreted.

  Not dead, Albert countered defensively. Deactivated.

  As deactivated as this Mall.

  He felt the dribble of sweat crawl down his face between his eyes and dribble past his nose. Not completely. The incinerators still worked, he thought, swiping a sleeve across his brow.

  It was hot as hell down here.

  The incinerators in the basement of the Mall of the Nation were half as big as shipping containers, or as Vernon had been fond of saying, “half as big as an Egyptian temple and if that ain’t Tootin’ Uncommon, I don’t know what is.”

  Vernon Willowby seemed to have a ready-made joke for every occasion—just like Gillie, his best friend from grade school.

  Gillie had been a hoot! He wondered in passing what had become of Gillie.

  Gillie was probably dead, too. Like his parents. D-E-A-D.

  Not dead. Deactivated.

  D-E-A-D dead. Dead as a doornail. “Like a Ford, Found-On-Road-Dead,” as Gillie used to say.

  That Gillie was one joke-making machine, he was!

  Albert had a sudden brief but powerful desire to talk to Gillie as he stood alone staring at the incinerator before him.

  The incinerators converted the tons of garbage generated by those dirty animals that passed as people (waste-producing machines) into virtually nothing, reducing the volume by nearly ninety-five percent, the resulting ash carted off in trucks to a solid-waste landfill. The best part about the process was that the resulting heat and steam was used to supplement the Malls’ energy reserves, some of which was used to power the emergency lighting.

  Albert had only been down here twice before. The first time had been during orientation, the same one where they had explained to all the security trainees the lockdown procedures to be used in case of disasters--a procedure that Vernon Willowby had affectionately called the “Oh shit” initiative.

  The second time he’d been forced to come down here was when he had worked the late shift over the Christmas holiday, on one of the few occasions that Marrs had assigned him the acting supervisor position, simply because no one else was available.

  That night something had gotten stuck in one of the “tubes” that brought the trash down from the receptacles spread throughout the Mall.

  Using the emergency instructions posted along the wall of the basement, Albert had been forced to shut down Central Incinerator #6, disconnect the main tube from the unit, and send one of the heat-resistant micro-Bots up into the maze of duct-work to check things out.

  Like everyone else on the job, Albert had heard horror stories of the items customers had sent down the chutes. One of the stories was that a few months after the Mall opened to the public, the shift officer had dragged out a human leg wrapped in a blanket out of one of the tubes. There was an extensive investigation conducted by the FBI, assisted closely by the Mall brass, which included the viewing of hundreds of hours of surveillance video but rumor had it that no one was ever convicted.

  There was even some speculation that whoever had tried to dispose of the leg in question might have done away with the rest of the body previously in the same way they’d tried to get rid of the leg. It was even possible, some debated, that the furnaces had been used by organized crime figures for months after the Mall first opened before stricter fail-safes had been added to the system.

  Though he had prepared for the worst that night, Albert hadn’t faced anything as provocative as a severed body part. The image the micro-Bot had sent back was a canvass bag filled with porn magazines and a couple of college text books.

  Now, as he remembered the story of the disembodied leg, and its possible Mafia ties, Albert decided that he must have come down here for a specific reason.

  The incinerator in front of him continued to burn intensely. Even with all the heat proofing, the room was nearly unbearably hot. The air was dense and hard to breath.

  Albert pulled a welder’s mask and heavy gloves from the shelf and wheeled the flat-bed close to the nearest incinerator. Donning the helmet and gloves, he reached down and gripped the handle of the pot-bellied iron door down at his knees. Preparing himself for the blast of heat, he pushed against the bar and rolled the jaw-shaped door down on its track. With a clunk, the door slid into place and locked open.

  A wall of volcanically charged steam slammed into Albert, hard enough to rock his entire body a few steps backward.

  “Son of a bitch,” he bellowed, his voice barely audible above the roar of the ravenously hungry flames contained behind the two-inch thick iron boiler plating.

  Albert turned to the flat-bed and gathered the awkward package up in his arms, hoping to turn and fling the lifeless mass all at once, but something he glimpsed within arrested the action.

  He saw a face. It stared at him from the embers revealed in the narrow sliver of space between the belly of the furnace and the door. The face wasn’t human in appearance. Instead of a nose and chin, the creature seemed to have a snout within which Albert could clearly see teeth, enormous predatory in their length.

  In that instant, Albert knew what he was witnessing.

  It’s the dragon.

  Then as suddenly as it had appeared, the face collapsed with the shifting of the embers and dissolved back into randomness.

  Albert looked down at the body in his arms and realized that in his excitement and horror he had been holding it aga
inst his chest almost protectively. With a blank expression, he tossed the bundle into the compartment, the black t-shirt landing at just the right angle to display that skull, grinning up at Albert mockingly. He kicked the door shut with his boot, the jaw rolling back to slam closed like the gate of a castle.

  Instead of walking away, Albert lingered there a moment longer, attempting to hear the beast as it fed on the flesh of the dead kid (deactivated Bot).

  And after several patient moments, he imagined that he could.

  “Lamia.”

  Albert froze, staring down at the radio on his belt.

  “Fulfill your function,” the radio squawked.

  Slowly, Albert raised the radio to his lips and depressed the talk button. “What is my function?”

  “I will show you,” the voice told him.

  18

  Cora heard her mother’s voice say, “…too much excitement for one night. I think she’ll be fine now that she’s resting.” She opened her eyes and tried to make out where she was lying. Oddly enough, she felt something soft beneath her, almost like a mattress.

  In the dim light nearby cast by a flashlight, she could see two figures standing together, heads bowed conspiratorially and talking in low tones.

  “Where’s Reggie?”

  “I sent him out to find your son while you and Cora rested.”

  “Do you really think he can?” Lara hissed, unable to disguise the hope in her voice.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “How?”

  “He told me that he’s been hearing multiple sounds from various locations since the northern exit was sealed,” the other voice replied. “With the quality of his auditory receivers, he’ll be able to target the source sufficiently to locate your son if he wants to be found.”

  Cora watched as Lara reached out and grabbed Simon’s arm excitedly with one hand, even as the other pressed against her mouth, quaking with emotion. “Thank you, Simon,” she managed in a shaky whisper.

  “Mommy,” Cora managed, pulling herself up on her elbows and looking around at the covers she lay beneath. “Where are we?”