The Mall (43 page)

Albert nodded.
 
“Yeah.
Yeah. Something
like
that.”
 
Not wanting to seem too hasty, he lingered indecisively, an uncertain grin on his face.
 
“I was hoping there might be some way to get onto my balcony from yours.”

Kaibigan just blinked from inside the foyer of his apartment, his smile disappearing, Albert was afraid he was going to shut the door in his face.
 
Instead, he opened the door the rest of the way and stepped back, allowing the other to enter.

“I doubt it, but let’s go take a look,” he told him, shutting the door securely behind him, enclosing he and Albert in the short, dark foyer.
 
He turned and led Albert up the entryway, which smelled like a comforting combination of cigar smoke and something recently fried.

“Do you have a propane stove, Kaibigan,” Albert wondered.

“So you work security down below in the Mall, right,” the man asked Albert.

“Well, yeah, until the whole thing went to shit.”

The little man stopped and turned on Albert abruptly, almost confrontationally, but the expression on his face displayed only starvation for information.
 
“I’ve been trying to get my Radio Shack transistor to work and the only two batteries that seem to have any vinegar in the whole house give me nothing but static.
 
What’s going on out there?”

Albert simply shrugged.
 
“I know about as much as you do, actually.”

“So what did your bosses tell you?”

He hesitated then responded, “Same old cock and bull story.
 
City-wide power grid outage.
Your business is protecting our investments.
 
Keep your eye on the ball.
 
Etc. Etc.
 
They’re not exactly a wealth of information.”

Kaibigan blinked disappointed eyes up at Albert, turned and headed through the short cozy living room—reaching out and snagging the handheld AM/FM radio sitting on the glass and black steel coffee table--to an open screened-in patio door through which a pleasant breeze blew.
 
He unlatched the screen and pulled it open, gesturing Albert ahead of him.

Albert stepped out and glanced only briefly at the view of the city of Houston.
 
From their perspective, several hundred feet up, the city looked abandoned.
 
Scarcely anything moved.
 
Gone were the steady hum of traffic and the movement of groups of commuters along sidewalks like flocks of dark birds.

The fourth largest city in America lay comatose.

Albert stepped to the eastern side of the patio and stood in front of the full-sized mirror which formed the walls, gazing at the reflection of his little Filipino neighbor as he stepped up to the railing of long narrow balcony.
 
Albert instantly stiffened.

In the mirror, Kaibigan stared off into the distance with the glowing blue eyes of a Bot.

Albert slowly turned away and pretended that he hadn’t seen its true face.

“I’ve been watching since about five o’clock this morning and the only cars that seem to be operating are the older, gasoline powered ones,” he began conversationally, “and they can’t get around so good because of all the derelicts clogging up the streets and highways.
 
It’s a mess out there.”
 
He fiddled with his radio again, got only white noise, and snapped it off with a sour expression.
 
“What kind of a power outage takes out batteries?”

On the horizon, a grey pall hung.
 
Dark smoke funneled into the sky like an unfurling black flag.
 
Oil fire, Albert surmised.
 
Probably one of the big oil company refineries.

Then almost as if in response to this thought, he felt a rumble beneath his feet, like the aftershock of a quake.

“Whoa!
 
That can’t be good,” Kaibigan exclaimed, displaying large white teeth.

Stealing a look in the mirror, Albert saw that the Bot’s eyes were now blazing red.

Albert stepped back and studied Kaibigan in the reflection as the little man leaned out to gaze up into the grey clouds above.

“Y’know, I think it looks like there might be a storm coming,” Kaibigan murmured under his breath, then a bit louder he asked, “What do you think?”

Albert stepped up behind him, grabbed him at the scruff of the collar and belt and tipped him forward over the edge of the railing.
 
He forced himself to watch as the little man pin-wheeled his arms in a panic, striking the pavement several hundred feet below,
color
bursting out around him as he dove headfirst into the ground.

Wow, he thought. They make those H-types so lifelike, don’t they?

Blue eyes turned to red, Albert thought.
 
Probably just received its orders to deactivate me.

He peered down at the empty streets around the Mall and saw no witnesses.

Albert leaned out over the extreme corner of the railing and craned his neck out to glimpse the adjoining deck.
 
There was a good five feet of wall between patio of B-43 and B-42.
 
It would be easier to make a hole through the shared inner wall than to get to his patio from here.

“Why did you do that?”

Dammit, he never considered the possibility that there would be others with the retiree.

Albert spun around and readied himself to confront whoever had spoken.
 
The living room on the other side of the deck was empty, but the Radio Shack transistor lay where Kaibigan had dropped it.

Retrieving the radio, he entered the living room and slid the screen closed behind him, placing the radio neatly back onto the coffee table from where Kaibigan had picked it up.

He stepped out of the living room, past the darkened kitchen and turned left down a hallway, finding three doorways.
 
The apartment seemed to be arranged in the opposite design plan as his.
 
With relief, Albert found the bathroom on the first door to the right.
 
He had to take a piss for the last ten minutes but had been holding it, thinking he’d be home by now.

Home.

As he relieved himself in the darkness, that creeping doubt assaulted him again.

Why did Kaibigan have a toilet in his home if he was a machine?

Why should a designer make a machine that urinates?

For that matter, why make a machine that bleeds?
 
That screams?

“To look more realistic,” Albert murmured into the darkness.

Yes, but why?
 
Whom are they supposed to fool if everyone is a machine?

But Albert couldn’t answer that question, so he tried to concentrate on how he would get into his apartment instead.
 
It was then that he felt the eyes on his neck.

He spun around and fully expected for the second time to see the undiscovered third party, but no one was there.

The second door led to Kaibigan’s office, which appeared to be a converted bedroom, used as storage space.
 
Albert took a quick look around, noting a dust-covered typewriter pushed into one of the corners.
 
The sheet of paper within lay half-filled with faded typeface.
 
He drew close and in the dim light from the window read the first few sentences.

“There was a voice in the soldier’s head which told him that if this was the day, his day to follow his brothers that had gone before him in battle, that he would be part of a proud, disappearing family.
 
But he could only aspire to the degree of heroism that he had witnessed that morning, fighting the Evil that had come to his homeland.
 
In his heart, Private Harrison felt he had been divinely called to fight the invading army.”

For a moment, Albert thought about the book he himself was preparing to write.
 
While he’d been gathering data for a really significant contribution to philosophical thought, this hack was
actually
writing this garbage.
 
Where’s the justice in that?

Albert ripped the page from the typewriter, wadded it and tossed it to the floor, with the single flippant comment of “Shit.”

He was no Vonnegut.
 
That was for damn sure.

The thought of the book spurred sudden panic.
 
He strained to hear the Voice, but there was nothing.
 
No Evil Otto.
 
He was free of its influence, whatever it had been.

“Where are you now, you fuck!” he bellowed so loud the narrow walls rung around him.

He stood for a moment in the darkness and had a brief sensation of vivid loneliness, like a child standing in the busy street of a strange city, alone for the first time.
 
It was in this moment that Albert heard the clearing of a throat from behind.
 
He whipped around, his brows high in puppy-dog panic.

There was a figure silhouetted in the doorway, its features blackened by the light streaming in from the hallway.
 
It was short and narrow-shouldered.

“Who..?” Albert barked in shaky voice, missing the menace he had tried to convey by a mile.
 

It slowly stepped backwards into the hallway, and Albert realized who it was the moment before the daylight revealed the teenager’s features.

He opened his mouth to respond, to hurl an insult at the punk kid, but in a moment of clarity he recognized that this was no longer the same defenseless teenage boy (
machine
) whom he had emptied of life (
charge
) less than twenty-four hours ago.
 
He had become something
else,
something fearsome, though he knew enough to grant it was not this punk’s voice that he had been hearing.
 
Not by a long shot.
 
Whatever was downstairs in the Mall was something much worse than this irritant, but the presence of the kid stirred many more questions than it answered.
 

Could a machine have a ghost?

If the answer to that question was no, had he gone completely insane?
 
He thought of the character Dwayne Hoover from the Vonnegut book and shuddered.

Albert’s mind sat temporarily in neutral, the only sound which escaped his lips was a thin moan.

“What are doing here, pig?”

“I’m going home,” replied Albert, surprised by the feebleness of his own voice in the confined space of the darkened room.

“You know you can’t do that, Lynch.
 
The only place you’re going is Gehenna, where the devouring worm never dies and the fire is not quenched,” Jesse pronounced, giving him a knowing wink.
 
“Or so I hear.”

Ignoring him, Albert turned to the closet, pulling down boxes from the upper shelves and ripping clothes that smelt of mothballs down from hangers, looking for something, anything that could help him break the lock on his apartment door.

He could feel the kid behind him now, but he refused to turn.

“You’re not a machine.
 
You finally got that much, right?”

Albert looked down.
 
Shoe and hat boxes lay about his feet, nick-nacks valuable only to whoever owned them, spilling out.
 
He sifted through the junk with his foot, finding a baseball trophy from 1965 and envelopes full of faded photos of people probably long since dead. Angrily Albert crushed a ceramic angel and punted a glass globe across the room, the contents--a Santa wearing a cowboy hat and riding a horse—exploding against the wall.