The Mall

by Bryant Delafosse

  Lara rushed over to the bed, a complete display model laid out in the center of the Home and Bath department of Sears. Even the sheets and linens on the bed had smelled clean, though a little dusty from lack of use.

  Yes, Lara thought with bitterness, Utopia does still have dust.

  “How are you feeling, sweet pea?” she asked, feeling her daughter’s forehead with the back of her fingers. It was warm to the touch. “Do you have a headache?”

  Cora stared at her mother. “Are we still here?”

  “You mean in the Mall?” she replied. “Of course we are, hon. We have to find your brother before we can leave.”

  Cora’s face crumbled and she folded forward into her mother’s chest, sobbing plaintively. “I don’t wanna be here anymore. I want to go home,” she wailed.

  Lara held her silently, glancing over at Simon, who was watching the interaction with an expression of great interest, his brows furrowed in what seemed deep concentration.

  “How soon will we know something?” Lara asked him.

  “Not long.”

  Lara turned back to her daughter, ignoring the feeling of helplessness she felt in her gut. She lay down beside her daughter, placing her chin on her arm playfully. Cora peered at her suspiciously, her breathing evening out. Eventually, she sniffed back the next wave of tears. “S’okay, kid. Reggie’s on the job. He’s going to get your trouble-maker of a brother and then we’re going to get out of here, okay?”

  Cora turned her head slightly and looked her mother in the eye with a serious expression. “Somebody died.”

  The phrase was such a non-sequitur that Lara was stricken momentarily mute.

  “What dear?” she finally found voice enough to ask.

  “I smell it. It smells like copper.”

  The child’s eyes were wide with anxiety, not a flicker of deception in them anywhere—not that Coraline was given to such performances—and it made the hair on Lara’s forearms stand on end.

  “I think he saw it. I believe he’s running now,” the little girl said very quickly, almost conspiratorially. “He’s very sceered. I know that much.”

  “Who, hon? Who’s running?”

  “Owen.”

  Lara studied her daughter, a pocket of suspicious fear lighting a pilot-light somewhere deep in her belly. “How do you know this?”

  “Because of the burning behind my eyes.”

  Her anxiety increasing but compelled to follow the flow of logic to its conclusion, Lara pressed forward. “Does the burning talk to you, Cora?”

  The eyes of the five-year-old seemed to lose focus, almost as if she were looking within somewhere. When the spark of her eyes reignited, she scooted her tiny body closer to her mother and drew herself up to her ear. “It tells me without words. I feel things.”

  Lara pulled away and peered at Cora, needing to draw some reassurance from her appearance. She looked to be the same normal little girl that had entered the Mall that afternoon, but she couldn’t deny that her daughter was unsettling her, fanning the flames of her anxiety.

  “What kinds of feelings?”

  “Strong feelings,” Cora told her, snuggling closer, pressing her face into the crook of Lara’s neck. “Mad. Sceered. Bad.”

  “I don’t understand, hon. Who are you talking about? Who’s bad?”

  “Wicked like the green witch of Oz that set the straw man on fire.” Cora pulled away and glanced up at her mother innocently. “Except worse. He’s real. He’s here.”

  Lara nodded and gently pushed Cora’s head back down to the pillow and pulled the edge of the blanket back up to her chest. “Now I want you to rest, sweet pea, okay?” she told her soothingly. “No worrying allowed. Me and Simon will do that for you.”

  “Mommy, do you like Simon now?”

  Lara gave an amused snort and tweaked her button nose. “He’s growing on me.”

  Satisfied with the answer, Cora gave a pleasant smile and rolled to her side.

  Lara rose from the bed and went to Simon, who was standing outside the department at the foot of the frozen “down” escalator, peering into the darkened level below. “Anything interesting?” she asked sarcastically.

  Simon glanced at Lara with no sense that he recognized humor in her comment and gave a single shake of his head. “It’s quiet.”

  “You said earlier that you would know soon if Reggie found my son. How exactly is he going to contact you if the network is down?”

  “I’ll hear him,” Simon simply stated, continuing to stare down the escalator.

  Lara glanced back at the Home and Bath section then settled her rump back against the corner of the escalator entrance, placing herself strategically in Simon’s line of sight. “I don’t know of anyone who could have moved as fast as you did down there when she started screaming.” She searched Simon’s enigmatic expression for some indication that he had heard and absorbed what she’d just said. “How did you do that? You ex-military or something?”

  “No.”

  “So, what are you? Some kind of superman? How were you able to do what you did?”

  Simon remained stolid, his expression unchanged.

  “I asked you a simple question,” Lara hissed at him between her teeth. “At least have the courtesy to dignify me with a lie.”

  “I could never lie to you, ma’am.” Simon turned to look her in the eye, “because I’m an android.”

  19

  Casting yet another look over his shoulder, Chance limped warily up to the north entrance of the Mall, a dim emergency light revealing the enormous message to all exiting consumers above the set of ten doors.

  “The Mall of the Nation thanks you for your patronage. Please come back soon!”

  The yellow caution tape strewn across the sidewalk outside the entrance lay still in the breezeless Gulf coast night. Well, I guess it wasn’t a storm that knocked out the lights, he thought. So what? Was it the Russians that Ronnie “Raygun” had always warned them about?

  Wind-blown caution tape and toppled wooden barricades told a tale about the state of the exit. Confidence level low, he nonetheless tried each of the doors, one after the other, finding all of them locked.

  Unable to face the fact that he had reached a cul-de-sac, Chance threw his weight against the last door over and over until the third time he felt a sharp dagger of pain in the area between his upper arm and shoulder.

  Stepping back, he stared at his refection. Spots of red covered the face of the scared little boy he saw there.

  Then the realization hit him. That was blood on his cheeks. Jesse’s blood.

  Lifting the tail of his t-shirt to his face, he began to scrub at his forehead and cheeks, feeling them redden beneath the coarse material. He glanced at his reflection, saw the blood, and began to rub his face again. Each time his image looked the same.

  Were the stains really on his face or only in his head, he wondered?

  Finally giving up, he slid down the glass, dropping to the floor with a grimace. He peered helplessly outside the glass, noticing a thin grey light struggling to make its appearance on the horizon. Could that possibly be dawn approaching?

  He glanced down at the unmoving hands of his watch and sighed.

  His folks must be pissed.

  There was a smattering of cars still parked outside, yet not one person.

  His eyes found a smear of what looked like blood on the glass outside and he reached up, running the tips of his fingers over the only remaining evidence that humans still remained somewhere out there.

  His isolation had always been self-imposed. He’d search for opportunities to get out of his parents’ house, even if it meant going to school early or staying late at the library.

  He’d hated them for years now. Despised them for their expectation that he must adhere to the narrow perimeters they’d set for him.

  Keep your room clean. Take out the trash out. Turn the radio down.

  He fought against their rules, intentionally bucked their autho
rity every chance he got. He would never turn out like them. Never become an automaton.

  What a sad existence it must be to lead that kind of life? To conform. To be an adult.

  Now he was free of those restraints they’d imposed on him all his life and this newfound discovery of freedom was terrifying rather than comforting.

  What if his folks were truly gone forever? What would he do? Where would he go? What if they were..?

  Unable to hold back the tears any longer, he planted the heels of his fists against his forehead and began to cry. “Oh God no,” he croaked through the lump forming in his throat. “I don’t want to die.” He pulled his knees up to his chest, and hid his face in his hands. “But I don’t know what to do now.”

  He dragged a sleeve across his cheek and lifted his head to look back into the darkness of the Mall. If this was the way a fifteen year old handled this kind of situation, how would a ten-year-old cope?

  As that familiar chill of guilt settled across his heart like congealing gravy, he imagined that he could hear an engine in the distance. He turned his head and watched in a rapt silence as a Volkswagen Microbus flew across the last ten yards of empty parking lot, headed directly toward the spot he now sat.

  Someone’s coming for me, he thought.

  But the Microbus never slowed.

  Instinctively, Chance did the only thing he could in the instant before impact, throwing his arms over his head and rolling away from the advancing vehicle.

  The explosion of sound that accompanied the impact was like nothing he’d ever experienced before—not in any theater auditorium or in the soundproof room of a stereo component store.

  When Chance parted his fingers far enough to gaze through, he realized that the VW had struck the squat four-foot tall concrete columns placed at intervals in front of the sidewalk just outside of the doors.

  He unfolded his arms and legs in a dreamlike daze and examined the crumpled front end of the vehicle, radiator spewing steam and oil pooling at the foot of one of the flat front tires. A large web of cracks blossomed on the driver’s side of the windshield, where he could see a thin sheen of dark red. The passenger side wheel had managed to make it up atop one of the concrete barriers and had settled there, causing the entire bus to tilt to the one side.

  Suddenly, the driver’s side door swung open and all at once, the upper half of a figure slid out, the backside of the head soaked in blood and one lifeless arm dangling just a few inches short of the ground.

  Chance turned away, bent over, and emptied the contents of his stomach onto the waxy surface of the Mall floor. His abdominal muscles clenched and unclenched like a machine, fulfilling a prearranged program.

  So it goes, Chance thought darkly. How long has it been now? Five or six hours? Is that how long it takes for the world to fall apart, he wondered with detached amusement?

  Now that I know the answer to that one, I’ll tackle that one about the tree falling in the woods and how many licks it takes to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop!

  Chance rolled to his knees, took a deep breath, and raised himself the rest of the way to his feet.

  I should go see if I can find that kid, he thought resolutely. If I’m this scared, he must be shitting his pants by now.

  Before he had even taken the first step, an enormous corona of light bloomed across the floor at his feet, illuminating about twenty feet of the interior of the Mall in front of him. For one terrifying moment, he thought it must be the headlights of another, even bigger, vehicle coming to finish the job that its smaller counterpart had begun. An instant later, he heard a second even more deafening explosion and he turned to witness the VW Microbus disappear within a cloak of orange.

  Revealed in the light of the conflagration, Chance noticed that a series of words had been spray painted across the last few doors of the entrance that he had not noticed the first time. The irony in the fact that it had been spray painted was not lost on him as he concentrated on reading the phrase backward, as it had been written on the outside glass.

  “We all die the Addicts death,” it read in hurried, haphazard script.

  Chance stared at the words with a frown, trying to fathom its meaning.

  He spun around and for one brief moment, Chance thought he saw Jesse, standing in the flickering light of the Mall entrance and smiling that cocky uneven toothed grin of his.

  Go find the kid, he told himself, forcing his legs forward into the Mall.

  But he needed to do a little shopping first.

  20

  Sitting on the edge of the bed beside her daughter, Lara watched Simon Peter at a distance, searching for some indication that he was in fact what he had just proclaimed himself to be only minutes before. Oddly enough, she found herself incapable of it. Everything about him provided the necessary evidence of humanity, from the receding hairline and glasses, to the spot of what appeared to be dried mustard on his collar-- the ghost of lunches past or simple yellow paint--to the slight paunch of a middle-aged man falling well short of his required daily exercise routine, and finally down to the dusty, worn loafers on his awkward oversized feet.

  He appeared as a man, in all his flawed glory.

  It was eerie, she thought, trying to scratch an itch out on her neck that she suspected was only psychological. Admittedly, his admission had initially done a number on her nerves. She had immediately put some distance between them, hovering protectively next to her dozing daughter.

  But nothing had really changed had it? He was still helping them, still standing guard, and if truth be told, as a machine, she could trust him as she could no other man. For a man could change his mind; could lose his nerve. A Bot simply followed a set of command routines with no interpretation.

  “Why?” she snapped suddenly, then noticing that her voice had caused Cora to stir, Lara rose and drew closer to the machine that called itself Simon Peter. “Why do you look more human than the other ones?”

  “I am as I have been designed to be,” he stated, turning his piercing eyes to her, “in the likeness of my creator.” Then he gave an ironic smirk, melancholy in its bitter reflection.

  It was in the eyes that Lara finally saw the difference she’d been desperately seeking. There was an unidentifiable metallic sparkle there, hardly noticeable, but hard to ignore once spotted. Almost as if an intense golden furnace lay behind them, radiating its energy outward.

  “My designer spared no effort to make me pass as human, but the behavioral code that governs all Bi-Mech creations is nonetheless part of my basic programming. I can’t stand idle while anyone shows pain or discomfort. When your daughter began to scream, I reacted without hesitation. Since my reaction time is almost instantaneous, you might have imagined that I was moving at a superhuman speed.” He gave a shrug of dismissal. “Actually, I was simply moving as fast as a human is capable without all the constraints of physical and psychological restrictions that slow most people down as their age progresses.”

  As Lara began to process the information and got more comfortable with the reality of what the figure before her was, she felt herself relaxing slightly. It bordered on the miraculous, she thought as she stared at him. Almost too much to believe. If she hadn’t seen the way he had moved with her own eyes, she wouldn’t have accepted his claim.

  “And all this,” she asked, indicating with a sweep of her hand from his head to his feet, “is stage dressing?”

  “I have surmised after some self-reflection, that in order to pass as more fully human, it was decided during the design phase that I should have the true flaws of one.” He glanced back at Cora, his eyes lingering on her for a few moments. “Though, I’ll never know the reasoning of my Creator, I can only conclude that it was understood that only in man’s attempt to overcome obstacles does his humanity become more apparent. I believe that it was for this reason that I was built with more intentional restraints than my brother units. In a sense, you might call these limits governors.”

  “
So how were you able to do what you did if you were designed with these governors?”

  “The behavioral code inherent in all Bots takes precedence over everything else,” he stated. “I can’t allow anyone in my presence to come to any danger. If it is within my inherent abilities to prevent it, I must.”

  Although she still had many questions, she had more pressing issues at the moment. “Right now, I need you to tell me one thing. Will you be able to hear Reggie when he finds my son?”

  He gave her a prompt nod. “I’ll hear him. The low frequency at which Reggie will transmit will travel a much farther distance than a higher frequency. Actually, you might be able to hear it as well, Lara, if you condition yourself to listen for it.”

  Lara turned and looked down the escalator anxiously. “Can you ask Reggie how he’s making out so far? Find out how much ground he’s covered or something?”

  “Oh, I can’t send communications to him that way,” Simon responded.

  She turned and flashed him a look that was almost accusatory. “I’m confused. Why not?”

  “The restrictions that have been placed on me make that impossible.”

  “If Reggie can communicate with this low frequency, why can’t you? You were built with the same capabilities right, they’re just being… stunted, right?”

  “In a sense.”

  “Well, can’t you turn this governor thing off?”

  He gave her a simple shrug. “No.”

  “Why not?” she asked. “Weren’t you designed to be human-like? Humans have free will. Don’t you have free will?”

  Simon gave Lara a look of such pained sadness that for a moment she found it nearly impossible to believe that the expression might simply the result of the activation of tiny servos beneath a synthetic material. “No, Lara. I’m constrained by the perimeters of my programming.”

  He then broke eye contact and stepped back up to the foot of the down escalator, but as he passed her, Lara was shocked to see on his face an expression that could have been described as shame.