The Mall (48 page)

Confusion instantly followed.

What was his grandmother doing at his bedside?

Then he glanced over her shoulder and saw the arms of the escalator trailing down into the darkness and realized that he was still living the nightmare.

“G-Grandma Charley?”

Lifting him abruptly to his feet, she studied him with a jeweler’s eye, seemed to reach a satisfactory appraisal and asked, “Owen, where is your sister?”

“I don’t know,” he replied, his eyes watching her with a spacey disorientation.
 
“Do you?”

She stepped up to foot of the escalator and scanned the floor below with an eerie similarity to way Simon Peter had the morning before.
 
“I know where your mother took her.
 
Let’s go.”
 
She reached back without looking and snagged him roughly by his hand, tugging him along after her down the frozen metal steps.

Owen followed her out of necessity, thinking for the second time in that many days that Grandma Charley was a stranger to him and that he was beginning to understand why his mother seemed to be so afraid of the woman.

“Owen, why did your mother leave you alone?”

He padded outside after Charley, saw that the crepe paper that he had left behind was indeed still there, and decided that this must have been how she had found him.

There really was no way around it.
 
He would have to tell her the embarrassing truth.

“It was my fault,” he told her.
 
“I got mad and ran away.
 
Then they closed the Mall.”

She was walking briskly and was several yards ahead of him when she switched the shoebox she was holding to her opposite hand and held the empty one out to him.
 
Owen hesitated, staring at the wrinkled long-nailed fingers and slowly relented.
 

The hand was cold.

“Grandma Charley, what’s in the box?”

“A surprise for later,” she said, her tone lacking any of the playfulness the words might have suggested.

“Where are we going?”

“We’ll know very soon,” she replied.
 
She turned and looked him in the eye for only the second time since he’d awakened.
 
“That was very clever, you know, making that trail of paper.”

Owen remained silent.

“Soon, we’ll know where to find your sister as well.”

“And my mother,” Owen prompted her.
 
“They were together.”

“Of course.”
 
She seemed to consider the ceiling of the Mall for a moment.
 
It was closing in on evening.
 

Owen could see that the sky had started to darken, but he didn’t feel that it was nearly late enough for that.
 
He realized with alarm that there was a grey veil of smoke drifting over the Mall.
 
It was dark, of the sort that came from a really big fire.
 
Behind the slate grey of the smoke, there was something oddly “flickery” about the
sky,
a reddish quality that he concluded must also be due to the source of the same smoke.

“Did your mother ever tell you how your father died, Owen?”

Owen looked from the reddish sky to his grandmother.
 
It seemed a very oddly inappropriate question to ask at the moment.
 
“She said that he had an accident.”

“She lied to you,” she stated.
 
“Would you like to know the truth?”

Owen remained silent, contemplating the implications of each possible response.
 
He came up with a third option.

“I’m hungry, Grandma.”
  
He glanced again at the shoebox, held protectively at her side and wondered if the surprise inside was edible.

Sliding the wide double-paned plasti-steel door open, Dugan seized the woman by her sleeve and dragged her inside.
 
The little girl held, tightly in the other’s hand, stumbled in after her.

Dugan pulled the door closed again and peered back into in the slowly darkening west-side corridor outside.
 
He could detect movement and stepped over to the far left side of the glass wall, peering through at a different perspective.

It was just another clueless Bot, moving in this direction.
 
Despite the blackout, the Mall was still crawling with them.
 
He had banked on all of them dropping dead along with the lights, but they still continued to haunt the place, like a persistent roach in the kitchen after the lights went out.

After all these years, they still gave him the chills.

In the course of a minute, two more of them had joined the first, and together the trio had bee-lined it for the dealership.

He reached down with the tip of his Gucci loafer and dropped the locking arm down into the track of the sliding door.
 
It’d been a good thing that the door had had a simple latching mechanism, easily coaxed open.
 
If this arm had been set and the employees had left through a different exit, he’d never have gotten inside.

Behind him, the woman and Chance stared at each other with a mixture of shock and amazement.
 
She glanced at the Mercedes baseball cap—something the kid had found in one of the sales offices--held in his hand by its bill, the dome sagging from the weight of sets of car keys.
 
Her eyes moved to the open driver’s door of the sedan he stood next to, moving along the carpet to spot the keys lying on the floor just outside of other vehicles.
 
From there, she lingered on the shopping cart and seemed to come to the logical (and as it so happened) correct assumption.

“You’re thieves,” she stated with obvious disgust, her accusatory glare falling on the kid, who shrank back in obvious shame.

But Dugan’s interest in the woman and her kid was only transitory.
 
The roomful of fresh luxury cars, just off the assembly line, had the majority of his limited attention.
 
Heart rate increasing, he drew the tip of his tongue across the dry crusty corner of his lips and remembered to breathe.
 
If he could only get one of them started and find that transport door they used to get the cars inside the showroom, he’d be home free.

He wasn’t sure where’d he go.
 
Hell, he didn’t really even care.
 
With a V-8 under the hood, he’d cruise the country with a trunk full of goodies and sell off whatever he could whenever he needed to.
 
He could take the ultimate road trip.
 
See America for the first time.

It took him a moment to realize that someone was speaking.

“…my son, Owen?”

The kid was staring at the little girl with a slightly open mouth and the woman repeated the question again.
 
“Where’s my son goddammit?”

“He said he went to find you.
 
At the Sears.
 
We thought you were there.”

Teeth bared, Lara rushed him, casting the flashlight she had continued to clutch to the floor and grabbing him solidly between clenched fists.
 
“You were with him?”

Chance
nodded,
his eyes wide with fear and guilt.

“Why did you leave him alone?
 
Why!”

Dugan snatched the crowbar off one of the “negotiating” tables in the sales area and started toward the door.
 
Three Bots drew closer to the door, watching intently as he reached down with his toe to disengage the security bar.

“No,” the woman shrieked with alarm, rushing him.
 
“Stop!”

Dugan turned a glare on her.
 
“Step back, lady.”

Two more Bots had emerged from the darkness of the escalator and had gathered beside the other three just outside the door, watching them with rapt, patient interest.

They’re not demanding that we surrender or open the door, Lara noticed with dread.
 
They’re just monitoring us.
 
Almost like waiting for some cue, she considered.

“There’s something wrong with the machines,” she stated, her gaze looking past him.
 
“Whatever you do, don’t open that door.”

He recognized an enormous fear in those blue eyes.
 
(And what an interesting shade of blue they were!)
 

“What are you talking about?”

“They attacked us,” she replied, looking at him this time with hope and pleading.

Dugan stared into the woman’s tense but attractive face, an uncertain yet calculated smile slowly creeping up to cover the slow dread edging into his own expression.
 
He laughed uneasily and said, “That’s impossible, sister.”
 
Yet his foot moved away from the bar.

Owen slowed as they passed the Mammals and More pet store, the cries and whimpers of the animals pouring through the drawn gate.
 
He gave an experimental tug on the gate and found that it slid up a foot, making just a big enough crack for him to slide through.

Charlene snagged him by the arm and dragged him away from the store without a word.

“The animals,” Owen declared indignantly.
 
“Can’t you hear them?”

“Not our concern,” she answered with a grim expression, eyes facing forward.

“You know how long they’ve been without food?
 
Almost two days now.
 
They’re starving to death!”

She gave him
a firm push
ahead of her, but he stopped suddenly and faced her, giving her the full force of his ten-year-old anger.

Charlene reached out and slapped him full across the face.

When Owen recoiled in wonder, cradling his cheek in his head, she swept his hand aside and slapped him again, this time harder.

“You may be able to get this kind of behavior past your mother, but you will mind me,” she seethed between clenched teeth.
 
She grasped him by the collar and gave him a short shake.
 
“Do we understand each other?”

Owen swallowed, his muscles frozen in shock.

She reached up and gave his ear a sudden sharp tug down.
 
White hot pain gripped the entire side of his face and a scream tore loose from his mouth instinctively.

“Okay,” he answered in a small voice, taking a step away from her.

She grabbed his arm, spun him around to face the right direction, and sent him forward with a hard shove between the shoulder blades that nearly sent him sprawling.

Once his fear and frustration had congealed into a single dark mass, Owen felt a sharp dagger of pure hate forming in his gut.
 
In that instant, he realized that he had never fully appreciated that emotion--not in all of the times he
thought
he had felt it for his own mother.

And for a brief moment, he was sure someone had seized his arm, and he thought he was under assault again by the woman who called herself his grandmother.
 
But when the feeling had passed just as suddenly, he decided that it had had occurred inside him, within his head.