The Mall (23 page)

She spun and watched in adrenaline infused slow-motion as Cora clutched both sides of her head with her chin slightly raised.

Reggie staggered, his hands a blur as they reached up to secure the tiny cargo riding upon his shoulders.

Almost simultaneously, even before the nerve impulses in her muscles could catch up with those flickering across her brain, Simon stood before Reggie, reaching up to retrieve Cora.

Reggie lowered himself to one knee, bringing the child in closer proximity to the mechanic.

In a single smooth motion, Simon had taken Cora off the metal man’s shoulders and swung her around, anticipating Lara’s arrival behind him.

All in the course of seconds, Lara had her arms around her daughter, lowering her gently into her lap even as she kneeled opposite the silver Bot.

The whole display viewed from start to finish might have struck an outsider as some choreographed and well-rehearsed ritual.

Without taking his eyes from the five-year-old, Simon Peter made a slashing gesture in the air at his side and the quivering silver Bot relaxed, the blue light fading from its visual sensors.
 
Simon turned back to Cora, shining the beam of his flashlight over her face and body.

Searching for a wound that wasn’t there, Lara eventually placed her hands on both sides of Cora’s face and tried to shush her, but still, the single long scream continued.
 
Finally, Lara drew her hand back and delivered a single hard slap to the cheek.

Simon, who hovered very close beside them, recoiled.

Cora’s wide unfocused eyes seated themselves and located her mother’s face.
 
The tightly-pulled skin of her face rippled and she began to sob uncontrollably, folding forward into her mother’s bosom, almost seemed to bury herself there.
 
Lara gently rocked her, stroking her long kinky brown hair.

When he was seven years old, only six months after his father’s sudden death, Owen had been diagnosed with night terrors.

Every few nights for almost a month, he would wake up screaming, his pajamas moist with sweat, with his mother usually sitting next to him with a furrowed brow of concern.
 
She would sit with him until he fell back asleep or until he conned her into letting him sleep in her bed for the night.

The first time it happened
,
Owen had awakened in a disoriented state, vaguely aware that he had narrowly escaped something horrendous, but with no image of what his nightmare had been about or awareness that he had even had a nightmare at all.
 
In this confused state, he had lain perfectly still in the twisted blankets of his twin bed, his heart fluttering like the last wing beats of a dying bird and held his breath, trying desperately to hear some sound, some indication that whatever was causing this indescribable fear wasn’t still in the room with him.
 
After five minutes of shallow breathing, the sensation had faded and he saw it for the dark fantasy that it truly was.

But for those five minutes, alone in the darkness, Owen knew, with a concrete belief that adulthood rationality eventually erodes, that he was in grave mortal danger.
 
His mother and sister lay asleep in adjacent rooms completely unaware of the precariousness of his situation.

Not once during that month of waking in a temporary state of panic could he describe what he had just experienced.
 
Not to his mother nor to Dr. Ross, nor to his friend Mikey Baynard, to whom he had eventually admitted his dread secret.

It was beyond his ability to describe what he was feeling in those first few moments of waking from a night terror.
 
Oddly enough, the closest anyone had ever come to hitting the target was a man who had been long dead nearly forty years.

Miss Gershawn had played a recording of a speech by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in American History class.
 
The President had been giving his first inaugural address to the nation when he uttered the now immortal words: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Owen decided then and there that the source of his night terrors, the thing that awakened him every other night for nearly a month, was only “fear itself” and nothing more--a thing unworthy of real consideration.
 

And since that day, the explanation had satisfied him.

Now, as he ran into the dark corridor of the Mall, lit only by a quarter
moon
, Owen believed he knew the origin of those long ago indefinable fears.
 
Now, he was finally able to put a name to what had pursued him in that in-between country of his dreams.

It was a demon in a security guard’s uniform, smeared with the blood of another human being.

And as his feet carried him along almost of their own accord, he could not be sure even now that he was not still asleep in his own bed, his mother sitting beside him with that wrinkled brow of confusion, watching him moan and kick the sheets into tighter and tighter knots.

Then he remembered what he had heard down in that tunnel.
 
In the absence of light, the sound had painted a picture perhaps more vivid than reality could.
 
He’d heard the cracking of bone.
 
The gurgling of the kid’s dying breath.
 
That sharp smell of freshly-spilled blood.

It was real.
 
It was happening.

Owen ran with no destination in mind, just trying to put as much distance as he could between him and the monster.
 
In the dim light, none of the stores looked familiar and he realized that he wasn’t in the blue sector where he had overheard the other two boys saying that they’d left their bikes.
 
Confused by the tunnel, they had traveled in the opposite direction.

He was in the red sector on the complete opposite side of the Mall.

He knew that he had to get back to the movie theater that was also in the blue sector--though the hope that his mom and sister were still there had dwindled to virtually nothing.
 
They were probably outside with the others, but what else could he do?

He had already tried enough exit doors to know that he was locked inside and when he had first heard Chance and Jesse, he had followed, sensing that the three of them might be the last human beings left inside, but was still suspicious enough of them to keep his identity secret until forced to reveal himself.

He knew now what a mistake that had been.
 
Maybe he was even the cause of that kid dying, he thought with numb shock.

The footfalls of running feet slapped somewhere in the distance behind him, and he was sure that they belonged to the other kid, but was too afraid to turn.

He had to find a place to hide.

He made a quick right turn into the open doors of the massive JC Penney store.
 
It was pitch black inside, so he began working his way through the first clothes section to the right of the entrance--Men’s Casuals, his mind vaguely registered.
 
He scurried as fast as he could to the far wall and began to work his way deeper into the store along the wall beneath a hanging rack of Hawaiian-style knit shirts, keeping his eyes on the entrance.

As the sound of the runner began to fade, Owen vaguely wondered if it had been wise to separate.

When Chance noticed that the kid was no longer in front of him, he continued running straight up the corridor deeper into the Mall.

Hey, he can’t go after both of us if we split up, he thought.
 
Better him than me.

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...?”