The Mall (57 page)

“Yes,” she replied weakly, withdrawing inside as he turned away from her and marched into the Mall, bathed in red light.

She slid the door shut with a tug, kicked the bar back into place in frustration,
then
laid her forehead against the glass.

Owen studied her with a concerned expression.

“Mommy?”
Cora called out, an anxious waver in her voice.

“Are you hungry Mom?” Owen asked taking her by the arm and pulling her gently away from the door. “We found lots of food upstairs.”

Owen knew something was wrong, not because of the way his mother sat at the table staring out of the window into the blood red night.
 
Not because she only nibbled at the slice of pizza sitting before her.
 
It was because she didn’t say anything about the fact that they were eating chocolate cake without plates.

Cora sat quietly next to her mother, alternately cranking her flashlight/radio and turning its tuning knob through varying blobs of static.
 
She ultimately acknowledged her concern as well with a single frown at her brother.

“Fifty,” Lara scoffed under her breath, her eyes wandering to the deflated balloons and the banner strung over the double doors.
 
If there was more to the thought, she allowed it to dissolve into the ether.
 
Instead she said, “I wonder where they all are now.”

A silent look passed between Cora and Owen.
 
It was the first sequence of words Lara had strung together since she had earlier uttered, “I’m not really all that hungry.”

“The people who celebrated Nelson’s party,” she clarified.
 
“I wonder if they’re all safe at home.”

 
“Maybe they’re all at another party together,” Cora suggested half-heartedly, she glanced furtively at her brother, anticipating a snide comment.
 
When none was forthcoming, she returned to her monitoring of the white noise coming from the radio.

“Can you please turn that off now?” Lara snapped.

Cora lowered her head and switched the static off with a click.

“I think maybe I’ll go see how Chance is doing with the cars,” Owen offered, rising to his feet and starting toward the door.

“I don’t want you anywhere near those two,” Lara said.
 
“I don’t trust them.”

Owen remained standing in the same position, his back to them.

“Owen, did you hear what I just said?”

Both Cora and Lara turned.

In the center of the room, Owen was watching several streamers gently swaying.

Owen stepped slowly over and raised a hand next to the black-colored paper strips.

Lara rose and joined him, looking up at the ceiling.

Grabbing a folding step stool from beside the cabinets, Owen set it below a vent just in front of the streamers and stretched his arm up as far as it could reach.

“It’s the A/C,” he concluded excitedly.
  
“Do you think the electricity’s coming back on?”

Lara waved him down and took his place.
 
She lifted her hands to the vent, then moved the stool below a separate vent and did the same.
 
“It’s coming from this one too, but not as strong.”

Cora ran over to the light switch and flicked it on and off.

Lara moved the stool a few feet from the first vent and pushed on one of the white ceiling tiles.
 
It popped up.
 
Even on tippy-toes, she was still an inch short of the opening.
 
She lifted her nose just into the darkness beyond, her nostrils flaring.

“I smell smoke,” she offered.
 
“I think it’s coming from outside.”

“Boost me up,” Owen exclaimed, snatching his flashlight off the table and rushing the step stool.
 
“I’ll tell you what I see.”

“No.”

“C’mon, Mom, don’t treat me like a baby,” he pleaded.
 
“I can do this!”

Dugan boosted Chance up through the opening in the ceiling where the tile had been removed.
 
The rest of them watched in silent expectation as the light from Owen’s flashlight bounced around in the darkness.

“What do you see?” Owen shouted.

Chance kicked out slightly and caught Dugan on the shoulder with the heel of his shoe.
 
His legs lifted out of his hands and disappeared up into the ceiling.

Thrusting his head through the opening, Dugan shouted, “Where are you going, kid?”

“I see something, I think.”

Lara rushed up beside Dugan.
 
“Don’t go far!
 
Do you hear me?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the subdued answer came back.

Chance balanced himself on the support beam and slowly rose to a half-crouch and looked around.
 
The crawl-space was mostly ventilation ducts—winding throughout like grey metallic snakes-- and pink insulation.
  
He stood still for a moment and tried to sense the direction of the air flow.

He began to move along the support beam toward the center of the building.

After about thirty seconds, the support beam he was on joined a beam large enough to support both feet.
 
Stepping onto the larger beam, he immediately felt a stronger current of air, flowing perpendicular.
 
He shined the beam of his light to his left and for a moment became disoriented.
 
The crawlspace seemed to disappear into infinity.

He heart began to race with uncertainty.

This is too much for me, he thought.
 
I’m just a kid.
 
I can’t do this.

“You candy-ass.”

He glanced over and realized that there was someone standing next to him, obscured by the darkness.

Swinging around, Chance nearly lost his balance, but righted himself just in time.

“J-Jesse?”

The other turned his shadowed face toward him, gave him a cavalier smile and slugged him twice in the meat of his arm.

“Two for flinching.”

Chance’s mouth dropped open.
 
He had felt that!

With scarcely a word between them, Jesse rose and started away, turning back briefly to beckon him onward.
 
After a moment’s hesitation, Chance followed.

He seemed to know exactly what it was that Chance was searching for and took the lead.
 
Eerily, the non-verbal communication was very much like just any other day, any other afternoon that they hung out together.

Somehow, impossibly, Chance found himself accepting it at face value.
 
Inherently, he knew it was no trick.
 
No mind game.
 
No hallucination.
 
It was Jesse.

Leaving the flashlight on, he set it securely into the crook of a cross-section as a marker and followed Jesse down onto slightly wider beam that opened up into a gargantuan passage.
 
He soon realized they were walking along a narrow track, not unlike the tram track the two of them had followed in the tunnels.
  
The reason for the track was unclear to him.

Unsure if he should speak, but knowing that he couldn’t keep the questions to himself any longer, Chance asked, “You know what’s going on, don’t you?”

“Sure, Chancey.
 
You want out and I know how.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do, all right?
 
What’s with the twenty questions?”

Chance relaxed slightly.
 
It certainly sounded like his old friend.

“Do you know what’s going on outside?”

“No,” he simply stated without elaboration.

Silence fell over them and Chance began to spot the occasional Bot—some with legs and some with a sturdy four-wheeled base.
 
They stood frozen in the crawlspace like sentinels guarding a lair.

“What are they doing up here?” he asked aloud without clarification, knowing that his partner would know exactly what he was referring to.

“Repair Bots,” Jesse replied.
 
“They travel along the tracks here and then climb deeper to get to the parts that need fixing.
 
I’ll show you.”

Where they were in relation to the Mall below them, Chance hadn’t a clue, though he was sure that it was an area rarely viewed first hand by the human eye.
 
He was sure that the Bots gave visuals of any damage remotely to their human counterparts on the maintenance crew.

As the two of them moved further away from the abandoned flashlight, the world around them grew darker and slightly redder in color.

“It’s like the tram, isn’t it?” Jesse said next.
 
There was an ache in his voice that sent chills up Chance’s spine.
 
“Did I tell you?
 
I nailed him for good.
 
That fucking pig guard.
 
He won’t be messing with you no more.
 
I’ll tell you that much.”

Chance remained quiet, unsure the proper response to such news.

When Jesse eventually came to a stop, he turned and looked out to his right toward a source of pale red light.
 
A stiff and steady breeze blew from that direction.

“The real problem—the thing that drove the bastard to kill--is still out there.
 
Down there in the Mall.”
 
Jesse glanced back at Chance to see if he was following, both literally and figuratively.
 
“They have to watch for the old lady, because it’s in her now.
 
But this time it can’t get out because the lady was no coward. It settled down in there.
 
Deep.
And now that the lady’s given her spirit up, it’s trapped there.
 
Permanently.”

“I don’t understand what you’re talking about, Jess.”

“You don’t have to understand.
 
You just have to trust me.”
 
Jesse stopped then and turned as if commanding his friend’s full attention.
 
“The important part, the part you have to remember, is this: You have to kill the vessel it’s residing in.”

Chance tried to look away from the other’s eyes but found that he couldn’t.
 
He could only swallow back the fear lodged in his throat and ask, “How do you know that?”

“The same way I knew about this,” he answered waving Chance up ahead of him.

Chance craned his neck to look into the crawlspace that narrowed nearly to an arrow-like point as roof beams connected with support beams.
 
In the bright red light pouring out of a crevice above, Chance could just make out a repair Bot squatting below a section of metal that had come unfastened.
 
On the ends of the machine’s arms were several tools connected to its wrists instead of hands.
 
Its eye sensors were dark and dead.