The Mall (44 page)

Albert could feel the kid’s breath on his neck, which he knew was patently impossible, not just because the little punk-ass was a nothing more than a simple troublemaking machine, but also, even if it could
breath
, it was not even tall enough to reach his chest.

“Funny thing Death.
 
When it happens—now don’t take my word for it--you’ll know soon enough, of course.
 
When it happens, you have access to all sorts of things you didn’t before, a storehouse of information that you had no way of knowing in Life.
 
Not talking Heaven or Hell.
 
It’s the in-between that I’m talking about.
 
The ‘Where’ where I’m at, ya dig?

When there was no response from Albert, Jesse continued: “Some people call it the Akashic records or even the Book of Life.
 
Fascinating shit.
 
You’ll see… or possibly, you won’t.
 
Maybe I belong to a club where you won’t be offered membership.”

Albert rushed out of the room and down the hallway to the final doorway, which led to the master bedroom.
 
It was dark and he flung the drapes open to shed light, but the light didn’t quite reach the closet on the far side.
 
There was an unmade queen-sized bed and a stationary bike with a set of dumbbells sitting next to it on the floor.

Pathetic, he thought, lumbering to the nightstand and yanking the drawer completely out and spilling its contents out onto the bed.
 
Sleeping pills, rosary, batteries, flashlight, earplugs, and a half-eaten package of Gummi-bears.

Who the hell was this guy? Albert wondered with amusement.

He pulled out the flashlight and tried it.
 
Dead.

Stepping over to the closet, Albert reached into the darkness.
 
As he groped methodically around on the top shelf of the closet, the dead boy slipped back into the room, though this time it kept its distance.

“It’s waiting for you back inside.
 
You know that, don’t you?” he asked with a sneer.
 
“For whatever reason, it can’t leave the perimeter of the Mall.
 
You were either very smart or very lucky when you decided to come here and we both know you’re no Mensa, Clyde.
 
Question I have is why
did
it
let
you go?
 
Could be that it had real big plans, but you were an even bigger disappointment.”

The kid leaned casually against the doorjamb and watched the other rummage.
 
“Do you have even a vague idea what it is you have breathing down your ass, Lynch?”

Evil Otto

Then, as if the spook could read his thoughts, it said, “No, you poor silly sack of shit.
 
That’s a friggin’ video game.
 
The thing that’s out there was created by human beings, but the building-full of programmers who wrote the code imbued it with the sorts of responsibilities that would give those geeks at Atari wet dreams.
 
It gave this monster the power and authority to run a city.
 
A kingdom.

“Once it monitored the power flow to millions of appliances and fixtures every day.
 
Controlling the temperature by adjusting the amount of sunlight entering from the glass ceiling.
 
Locking and unlocking doors.
 
Starting and stopping that stick-up-my-ass elevator Muzak they pipe in here.
 
Activating the thousands of Bots that serve the customers during the day and controlling the hundreds of Bots that clean and stock when shopping traffic dies down late at night.”

Albert dumped the folded stacks of sweaters, tossed an empty duffel-bag across the room, and then touched a shoebox with something heavy inside.

“And it did these things twenty-four hours a day since that first morning the Mall opened for business,” the kid continued.
 
“When a machine, any machine, builds up that kind of momentum, it doesn’t stop all that easy.
 
Here’s a bit of basic junior high physics that I’m sure you don’t remember, jerk-off.
 
A body in motion tends to stay in motion.
 
Newton’s First Law.”

Albert dug his fingers beneath the shoebox and tested its weight.
 
It felt about right for a gun.
 
Gently, he took down the box, carrying it in two hands, almost reverently into the square of light thrown across the floor by the window.

“The beauty of Newton’s law is that it transcends the simple motion of the physical.
 
They can be applied to intelligences as well.
 
But of course, using that logic, the Mall should just keep on doing what it’s always done.
 
But it can’t.
 
Not without power.
 
So what does it do?
 
It learns a new trick.
 
It protects itself.
 
It attempts to remove from its body the parasites--the ones using up the resources, sucking down all the power.
 
But it can’t do all this without a body, so it reaches out to one who can act as its representative in the physical world.”

Albert opened the lid and gazed down into the box.
 
He squinted in confusion.
 
Was that what he thought it was?

“Now let’s take you and apply Newton’s First Law,” Jesse said, stepping closer to the box on the floor.
 
“You’ve murdered two people in cold-blood in less than twenty-four hours.
 
First me, then Kaibigan.
And I can see that you want to kill Chance and the ten-year-old.
 
A compulsion that strong has its own momentum.
 
A momentum of the mind, but real nonetheless.
 
A dark irresistible force that compels that roulette wheel to keep on spinning.”
 
Jesse looked up at Albert, fixing him with hard cold eyes.
 
“I know you’ve done it before, Lynch.”

Albert moistened his lips.
 
“She was an accident.”

“Is that what you tell yourself?”

“It was an accident!
 
It could have happened to anyone!”

“Was killing the old man an accident or did you enjoy murdering him?”

Trying to ignore the other, Albert reached down into the box to retrieve the object, but the kid leaned close, his greasy long bangs hanging down over his curious unearthly dark eyes.

“No, he was a machine,” Albert stated simply.
 
“Just like you.”

He reached inside the box and picked up the grenade resting atop crumbled wads of multi-colored newspaper, written in a foreign language (probably Tagalog, Albert thought, or some other harsh ear-grating language those dogs speak to each other in the rice patties).
 
The overall effect was like some bizarre Easter egg basket, the prize hidden within while not as colorful, was far more treasured to Albert.

To all appearances, the metal ball was the real thing.
 
Not only was the pin still attached but there was a broad yellow zip tie securing the lever against the body of the device.

Leave it to a gook to keep a live grenade in his house like a souvenir, Albert mused.
 
Maybe it held some special significance to him.
 
Perhaps he had brought it with him on the boat from the islands.

Well, it wasn’t a gun, but it would damn sure blow a hole in the wall big enough to get back into his own digs.
 
From there, he would have all the firepower he’d ever need to take out the rest of those machines before they came after him again.

Then the spook said something that cut through his reverie: “Why don’t you take a real good look at what you have in your pocket and tell me if you still think that came from a machine.”

Albert glanced up at the kid, the characteristic smartass smirk that was so much a part of his face replaced by a hard-focused expression of confrontation.

Slowly, almost as if it had a will of its own, Albert’s hand stole away into his pocket.
 
Two fingers clasped the baggie and drew it slowly out.

Albert gazed at the transparent baggy in his hand.
 
He slowly pulled the zip-locked seal apart and leaned down to get a better look.

A putrid odor wafted out.

It smelt of Death.

The truth that struck him was as unpleasant, as pungent as the odor rising from the bag.

He recalled now that when he gotten to the parking garage after the collision, he had walked slowly around the front of the car, in a secluded spot away from the heavy traffic of others.
 
His flashlight had revealed the corner of the front license plate that had been folded back slightly, the bumper slightly dented.
 
Easily repairable.

Then he had looked behind that folded corner.

How it had gotten there was beyond his limited capacity to imagine.

He looked on it now, the object that he had found there.
 
It was a piece of a little girl’s skull that he had found in the tiny space between the bloody license plate and the dented bumper of his car.

A shard of bone from the dead girl’s body.

The little girl that he had run down with his car was no machine.
 
Was not damaged.
 
Was not “easily repairable.”

She was dead.
 
Here was the proof, resting in his fingers.

“You were never a machine and you never malfunctioned,” Jesse spat.
 
“You’re just crazy.”

So, there it was, Albert thought.
 
I can’t deny the reality of physical evidence.
 
It isn’t metal shavings or gear lubricant; it is bone and blood.

Hands quivering wildly, he carefully closed the baggie.
 
Reverently, he set it just inside the shoebox, set the lid atop, and rose to his feet.

“Here’s another gem from Newton’s greatest hits collection: ‘To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction,’” Jesse stated.
 
“I’ll be seeing you soon, pig.
 
Real soon.”

He stared across at Albert, a devious sparkle appearing briefly in his cold dead eyes, and a moment later, the kid was gone again.

Albert started down the hall, holding the box with the hair and skull fragments straight out before him like the escort of a holy relic.

Like a tiny cardboard coffin.

When Albert stepped into the living room, his attention was so fully on the box in his hands that he never saw the woman until she was close enough to kiss him.

He looked up, confusion in his eyes, and only had a brief moment to formulate one question--“Isn’t that the snooty bitch from B-39?”--before the butcher knife from Kaibigan’s kitchen slid roughly into his gut, piercing his lower intestine, sending liquid fire into his nether regions.

That hurt, he thought in amazement, as white hot fire pulsed like rapid fire daggers throughout the lower half of his body.
 
He expelled a mouthful of breath in surprise, wheezed a whimpering kind of ironic laugh, and thrust the shoebox into the hands of the screaming woman standing before him, gazing down at the torrents of blood streaming through the fingers pressing against his belly.

He cast one last wish out into the darkness that he might really be a construction of metal and electrical charges after all, so that he could avoid whatever pain he had coming to him if anything really lay beyond this life.

Oddly enough he had never truly considered it a viable possibility until this moment.

“Willya look at all that blood,” he hissed, lifting a hand gently to the woman’s face and actually feeling his index finger slide down one wrinkled cheek in a sort of caress.
 
“Almost as real as a movie,” he moaned in a whisper that sounded almost like a declaration between lovers.