Sycamore 2

by Craig A. Falconer

  “How much money did you get?” Kurt asked.

  Ernesto was surprised by the directness of the question but didn’t shy away from it. “Nine million dollars,” he said. “Before fees.”

  Kurt turned to Minter and drummed his fingers on the table. “Nine million dollars. Nine. Nine million dollars, and you knew the whole time. How many dollars do you think me and Randy got? Hmm? Have a guess.”

  “Kurt, man…”

  “Guess.”

  “Zero,” Minter said.

  Kurt shook his head slowly. “Lower.”

  Minter didn’t say anything. No one said anything.

  “I’ll help you out,” Kurt said. “Add up three funerals, four sets of hospital bills, and all the medical bills for Randy’s ongoing treatment. Our parents had nothing to leave us, unless you count debt. His wife’s life insurance paid out a few months later, so at least Randy could keep the kids in their house, but losing his job more than cancelled that out. We had nothing. Nothing. And you knew the whole time. I can almost understand Amos not telling me, but you?”

  “When was I supposed to tell you, man?” Minter said. “When I was with Amos? He would’ve killed me.”

  “What about on the way here, when you told me Michael’s son won a lawsuit against Sycamore but wouldn’t tell me what it was about or who he was representing? Why not then?”

  “What difference would it have made then? It’s not like you could have still got the money. I didn’t tell you in the car because there was no point and because I knew this would happen. I knew we would be arguing about money, and I knew you would be angry at Ernesto for getting so much when you didn’t get any.”

  “How could I be angry at Ernesto?” Kurt shouted, the loudest he had been. “Look at him! He doesn’t even know.”

  “There were no survivors and no next of kin on the other side of the crash that my father died in,” Ernesto said, confused by everything that Kurt was saying. “I think there’s been a mix-up here. Ask Anthony; the settlement was clear. It said there were no survivors and no next of kin, right there in black and white.”

  Kurt turned to Ernesto. “November 28th, 6:14pm,” he said, stating the date and time of the collision which killed his parents and sister-in-law when an unclosable pop-up ad obstructed the vision of an oncoming driver.

  Ernesto’s eyes welled up. “I swear I didn’t know,” he said. “Did Stacy know?”

  Kurt nodded. “That’s what she was talking about in the letter, when she said you wouldn’t believe why I hate Amos as much as you do. She told me about the ad that popped up in your dad’s Lenses; about how he told you on his deathbed but nobody would believe you. Up until then my brother thought it was his fault. He thought he’d killed four people.”

  “What’s done is done,” Minter said.

  The flippancy of this comment and Minter’s total lack of remorse infuriated Kurt, and the only thing keeping him from reacting was the knowledge that he needed Minter on his side. As Kurt had warned Anthony when he feared that Ernesto and Michael would rough Minter up, if anyone pushed Minter too far he would stop cooperating. Minter was their gatekeeper; the only one who could get them inside Sycamore’s systems.

  Reading the hostility of the group, Minter stood up to leave. “I’ll be ready in my room,” he said. “She’s not coming back.”

  ~

  Another four hours later, by which point she was four hours late, Val still hadn’t returned to the mall.

  Something must have happened.

  Kurt refused to give up hope that it was something minor like a road closure or engine trouble, but every passing minute made those scenarios feel less and less likely.

  Ernesto had moved to the south of the mall, where he was sitting in the monorail station looking out. Michael, who had first raised the possibility of Val or the car being intercepted, went with him.

  Harry and Joyce were packing their things, as resigned as Minter and Anthony that Val wasn’t coming back. Kurt was left in the food court with Lisa and Ty, his two best friends in the mall. They both shared Kurt’s optimistic view that something non-critical might have been delaying Val’s return. Ty’s idea was that the car had broken down and that Val, unable to ask for assistance, was currently making her way back to the mall on foot.

  Though stubborn in their optimism, none were in the mood for anything; not even a game of Four In A Row. Ty eventually asked Kurt where he thought everyone would go if Ernesto decided to leave, but Kurt said they couldn’t afford to think like that. When Lisa grew doubtful and asked how long was left until five o’clock, Kurt’s reply was “long enough.”

  With an hour to go, Lisa left to pack her things. “I still think she’ll come,” she said, “but I don’t want to hold everyone up if she doesn’t.” Ty went with her. Kurt understood.

  Kurt did nothing except wait and occasionally check the time on his phone. The most recent time he had seen was 16:21. When he next lifted his phone to check, it buzzed in his hand. A Chifi, from Ernesto.

  “Tell me you can see her,” Kurt said.

  Ernesto hesitated. “She’s walking.”

  Kurt sprinted down the mall and reached the entrance before Val. Ernesto and Michael were there waiting.

  Val looked unhurt. Tired, but unhurt. She was carrying an almost-empty water bottle and had rolled her sleeves up as far as they would go.

  As soon as she entered, Ernesto asked the most important question: “Are you okay?”

  She nodded, clearly fatigued.

  “Where’s the car?”

  “It got hit,” Val said. “Right after I stepped out.”

  “And you couldn’t drive it back?”

  “It’s in pieces,” she explained.

  “What the hell hit it?” Kurt asked. “A monster truck?”

  Val shook her head and looked only at Michael. “A drone.”

  22

  Val answered every question they threw at her.

  She wasn’t hurt; she wasn’t followed; she didn’t actually see the drone; she hitched two rides — the first in the wrong direction — and walked the last seven miles.

  As they were walking up the main walkway, she had a question of her own for Michael. “Is there something you should be telling us about combat drones?” she asked.

  “I designed four surveillance drones for Amos at Unifield,” Michael said. “Only one of them was ever produced, and none had any offensive capabilities. When I left Sycamore, there were no combat drones in our inventory. Since then, your guess is as good as mine.”

  Val’s guess about the combat drones was better than Michael’s, in fact, given that she had just almost been killed by one.

  “Kurt’s prints were in that car,” Val said as they neared the Coffee Curve. “If they send a forensics team to check it out, they’ll find them.”

  Kurt thought for a second. “I don’t think any part of my skin actually touched the car,” he said. “My hood was up the whole time and my hands were tied on my lap. You opened and closed the doors and everything.”

  Val relaxed a little; it was one less thing to worry about.

  Ernesto then told her about the radio message revealing that Amos knew they were using Barnford Park.

  Val didn’t really react to this, probably because she had discerned as much from the attack. “At least it was there and not here,” she said, voicing what they were all thinking.

  Kurt sent a group Chifi text to everyone who wasn’t there, telling them to unpack their things and get ready to eat some humble pie.

  “Has anything else happened here?” Val asked.

  Kurt shook his head, thinking she wouldn’t be interested in hearing about the drama with the crash revelation.

  “No,” Ernesto confirmed.

  Val looked glad to hear it. “So no one else has…”

  “No one else has what?” Kurt said. He wasn’t being particularly impatient, but Val had just trailed off in the middle of a thought.

  “… been worryi
ng too much?” she said, finishing it eventually.

  “Not really,” Kurt said. He didn’t think Val needed to know that most of the others had been counting down the minutes until five o’clock having assumed that she had been intercepted by Sycamore agents.

  All of those others apart from Joyce and Harry met Val on the walkway. Lisa hugged her, which came as a pleasant surprise. Shock was the overwhelming reaction to the drone news, but there was still a huge feeling of relief.

  Almost everyone felt safer now than they had when Val was missing. Of course the drone attack was concerning, but it was better for Sycamore to attack a location as far away as Barnford Park than it was for them to have Val in their custody.

  Anthony was the only dissenting voice. “Have you all gone crazy?” He asked. “They’re coming after us with drones, and you’re all smiling?”

  Ernesto repeated one of his favourite lines: “If they knew we were here, they wouldn’t be attacking us there.”

  “But they’re one step away!” Anthony yelled. “And now they’re using force. Yesterday we didn’t know they knew about Barnford Park, today they’re firing at it with drones. What happens tomorrow? How can you tell me that we’re safe here? We’re in a glass house surrounded by nothing!”

  “This glass house has kept you safe for long enough,” Ernesto snapped at him. “This mall has kept us all safe, and it still will. It’s not like we’re asking you to spend your life here; Minter is only 16 hours away from getting into the systems.”

  “16 hours?” Ty asked, clearly delighted to hear it. The others had all known about the timelock since Kurt told Ernesto after Amos’s threat to Sabrina, but they hadn’t been counting down the days as intently as Kurt, Minter and Ernesto.

  Kurt was obviously glad that the eight-day lockout would be over after just one more night, but the timing of the truth about the crash lawsuit coming out could hardly have been worse. Once they accessed the Emergency Control Interface, Kurt and Minter planned to lock themselves inside the workstation for a 48-hour, interruption-free marathon of evidence gathering, video editing and AR hijacking. But right now, Kurt couldn’t even look at Minter, much less think about spending two days stuck in a room with him.

  “It’s 16 hours until we get in,” Minter replied to Ty. “Then a few more days to do everything we want to do.”

  Kurt didn’t say anything about the SycaStars United launch event being in five days, which he knew Minter knew, because it didn’t seem wise to push it when people were already on edge.

  “We don’t even have an alarm,” Anthony said, seeing that Val had returned empty-handed, which was perhaps excusable given what she had been through.

  “I’ll do the first shift as lookout from the south monorail station if it’ll make you feel any better,” Kurt said. This was partly a genuine effort to ease Anthony’s quite valid concerns, but after the previous night Kurt knew that he would struggle to sleep, anyway.

  There was something comforting about the idea of the alarm, which offered no real protection beyond a pointless warning that someone was already a minute or two away from the front door. It was like a primal security blanket, Kurt thought, reassuring the group that they would at least be awake to tackle any potential intrusion.

  “I’ll take the second shift,” Ernesto said, nodding to Kurt in recognition of the idea, which he too saw as symbolic rather than practical. Val offered to go third, which would take them through to the morning.

  With no Mary to insist that everyone had something to eat and with other things on their minds, the group didn’t gather for dinner. Kurt went with Ty and Lisa to their room. Their mini-group, previously a six-some, had dwindled to three. Minter had isolated himself after the crash argument, Anthony was alone with only his own fears for company, and Mary was safely away from the mall in her guest house.

  Mary.

  Kurt thought only now about Mary. How would they reach her again? Val was unlikely to be keen to venture out of the mall anymore given what had happened to her earlier on, and Kurt didn’t know who else could go. By a process of elimination he settled on Harry. It was Harry’s truck, after all, and Harry was unknown to Sycamore. He would have to be the one to drive to Mary with the message from Kurt, giving her the exact time to contact Julian with the warning and the exact script to memorise.

  Lisa suggested that they should all watch one of the movies on Kurt’s computer in full immersion, so they did. The movie was about near-future space travel, and the brilliance of the effects was enough to distract them for two and a half hours.

  When the movie ended, Ty couldn’t stop talking about how good it was. Kurt said it would have been a thousand times better with in-earphones, but Ty didn’t like the sound of having something injected into his ear.

  “It’s more like sticking them on,” Kurt said, instantly realising that he sounded like the doctor who had persuaded him to be the guinea pig all those weeks ago.

  Ty still shuddered at the thought and asked if they wanted to watch something else. Lisa did, but the time on Kurt’s phone told him that it would already be dark outside so he said it was probably time for him to start playing lookout. He invited them to come with him to the south of the mall.

  “What do you think?” Ty asked Lisa.

  “Why not,” she said. “There’s chairs in the monorail station. We could sleep there.”

  Ty shrugged, which was a sign that he didn’t disagree.

  “Help me carry the covers then,” Lisa said. “Kurt, you get the pillows.”

  Kurt put his computer in its carry case and slung it over his shoulder then grabbed a handful of pillows and led the way, glad to still have two friends by his side.

  When they arrived in the monorail station near the mall’s entrance, Kurt Chifi’d Ernesto and Val to say that they wouldn’t have to take shifts as lookout since he was staying in the monorail station all night. Both replied quickly to thank him.

  Ty and Lisa watched another movie while Kurt looked outside at the mind-numbingly empty parking lot. He resorted to counting the posts that marked the different parking zones. Then he looked up.

  It was an exceptionally clear night, with a crescent moon dangling on an invisible string amidst a vast ocean of infinitely more stars than Kurt had ever seen in his light-polluted, city-dwelling life. The sky looked like it did in pictures Kurt had seen online and always assumed were photoshopped. He wished his Lenses had been able to connect to Ernesto’s internet so they could identify the myriad constellations.

  At the end of the second movie, a comedy which Kurt heard but didn’t see, Lisa turned to Kurt with an uncharacteristically serious look on her face. “Do you really think this place is safe?” she asked.

  Kurt hesitated. He didn’t want to unduly worry Lisa, but it would have been a lie to say that he was as comfortable in the mall as he had been the previous night. His concerns were manageable, but they had reached a point where he was no longer missing Mary as much as he was just glad that she was safe somewhere else.

  “We’re safer than we would be in the parking lot,” he said, trying to lighten the mood. “That’s for sure. At least the zombies can’t get us in here.”

  “Shut up,” Lisa said.

  “He’s right, though,” Ty said. “Everyone knows that zombies can’t resist malls. We’ll be fine here since we’re upstairs.”

  Lisa cracked a joke about how Ty would have nothing to worry about since he had no brains for them to eat, anyway. Kurt was glad that his mood-lightening plan seemed to have worked.

  Kurt looked back out at the parking lot and felt the smile drop from his face in an instant. Approaching at moderate speed but already past the unalarmed archway, he saw a car.

  He was frozen for four or five seconds, helplessly watching the vehicle make its way across the parking lot.

  “Car,” he said.

  “Very good,” Lisa replied.

  Kurt turned to them both. “There’s a car,” he said. “There’s a car outside
.”

  It pulled up right at the southeast corner of the mall, where Val had parked on the first day.

  “Who is it?” Lisa said.

  “It could be anyone,” Kurt said, trying to calm their minds and his own to a level at which they could all think rationally. “It could just be squatters or urban explorers or something. You two stay up here. Please, just stay up here and hide. Chifi Ernesto, but just a text. Don’t make a single sound, okay? Whatever happens, don’t make a sound.”

  Lisa lay down flat on her stomach and looked out of the window. Ty joined her. Neither of them liked the sound of “whatever happens,” but neither of them were about to argue with Kurt’s suggestion to hide.

  Kurt ran down the stairs. His plan was not to go unseen or unheard. He didn’t know what his plan was, but he knew it wasn’t that.

  He walked to the automatic doors and waited for them to open. He stood there; right on the threshold of La Plethora, the safe haven that no longer felt quite so safe. He heard a car door open and then close.

  “Stay exactly where you are,” he said.

  After around five seconds and some barely audible footsteps, a soft, female voice replied: “It’s me… Mary.”

  Mary came into view just past the corner of the mall, where enough light could reach her face for Kurt to make it out. She held her left hand up to show a small, neat bandage on her palm, then pointed to her eyes. “No Lenses, either.”

  “What happened?” Kurt asked. “Were you followed? Why did you come back?” He had many more questions, but three at a time was enough.

  Mary ignored all three and waved her hand as if signalling to someone behind her. “It’s him,” she said. “It’s Kurt.”

  This confirmed that Mary wasn’t alone, and Kurt had less idea than ever what was going on. He raised his guard and his fists, desperately hoping that Mary hadn’t been driven to the mall at gunpoint and told what to say.

  The next thing he heard was a steady tapping noise coming from the darkness behind Mary.

  The rhythmic tapping was light but loud, like a mouse in stilettos, and it was getting louder.