And at the heart of the blighted growth, the Coastland Galleria. The mall stood majestic and silent, encircled by a vast and nearly empty parking lot. The sun was setting now, the sky going azure beyond the granite facade, but the big-box signs—Sears, Macy’s, a dirty white J.C. Penney—didn’t light up to meet the dusk. Only a fraction of the parking lot lamps, the ones closest to the mall entrances, bothered to ignite. The others sported broken, burned-out bulbs or empty sockets, dangling cold over the wasteland of concrete bumpers and faded yellow lines.
“Are they even open?” Daniel asked.
“Allegedly,” Nessa replied.
A few cars were parked here and there, mostly clustered up front, a few inexplicably rusting away at the farthest edges of the lot. Daniel circled around, taking the lay of the land, and pulled into a spot near the main entrance. Marie half expected the doors to be locked. Instead, they swung wide open at a touch, welcoming the travelers into the stillness beyond.
The tile floor, patterned to look like white bricks bordered in black, stretched down a broad corridor lined with rolled-down metal shutters and darkened glass. Some of the windows had been papered over; others looked in on empty stores stripped bare, offering nothing but dead flies and scraps of electrical tape. Stone planters spaced down the heart of the corridor bloomed with greenery and tiny blossoming palm trees. Marie took a leaf in her hand, rubbing her thumb over its dusty face. Plastic.
The mall’s PA system was on and a song drifted through the air, mingling with the scent of stale popcorn. It took a second for the synthesizer riff and the steady, comforting drums to register in the back of Marie’s mind: “Africa,” by Toto. The cheap speakers turned the familiar song into a muffled memory, draining its power and leaving the notes to echo, ghostly, along the desolate halls.
No one spoke, by some faintly understood and shared consent. This place was a library, a temple, a tomb, and they walked with respect. Or maybe they just didn’t want to stir up any phantoms. This place isn’t for us, Marie thought, though she couldn’t quite define who was supposed to be here. Not all the stores were shuttered. The mall still had a little life, clinging on here and there. Nessa pointed toward one store up ahead on the left, and her usual frown deepened.
“That isn’t right,” she said, the first words spoken since they stepped inside.
Standing signs out front advertised a clearance sale, though from the looks of it, nothing moved inside the store’s cavernous and pale-lit aisles. The sign above the archway, white on black, read Waldenbooks.
“What?” Daniel asked. “The sale? I figure every store in this place is cutting margins to the bone just to stay alive.”
“No,” Marie said, catching Nessa’s meaning. “Waldenbooks. The entire chain went out of business six or seven years ago. This store shouldn’t be here.”
“Maybe they didn’t get the memo.”
They headed inside.
“Well,” Marie said, “we’re hunting for Carolyn, so…”
Nessa nodded toward the science fiction and fantasy aisle. “Worth a look. I’m going to have a word with the clerk.”
“I’m going to loiter close to the exit,” Daniel said, “because this entire situation feels hinky as all hell. Shout if you need me.”
As Marie rounded a bend, the aisles seemed to stretch and narrow. She wandered through a maze of books laid out with no rhyme or reason. Military history stood shoulder to shoulder with philosophy and romance. Her fingertip trailed along a row of cookbooks interspersed with anthropology texts. Cannibalism in Western New Guinea sat beside Slow Cooking for Beginners.
A whimper caught her ear. She turned another corner, finally in the right aisle. At the end of the row, another shopper stood huddled with an open paperback in her hands and her face turned toward the wall. She wore a denim jacket over a dress twenty years out of date, with high tube socks and sneakers the color of faded rubies. She was whispering something in a broken voice, over and over again, like a prayer. Marie edged closer.
“I want to go home,” the woman whispered, “I want to go home I want to go home—”
“Miss?” Marie said. “Are you all right?”
The book fluttered to the floor. The woman moved in a blur, lurching backward, like a filmstrip played in reverse at high speed. She darted around the corner, out of sight. Marie followed, running after her—but the next aisle was empty. No sign she’d ever been there.
Marie looked down to the fallen paperback, lying on the thin yellow carpet with its pages rumpled and cover splayed wide. On the cover, above a storm-swept city where all the skyscrapers were made of interlocking antique keys, an ornate header read The Conqueror Worm. And beneath it: Carlo Sosa.
“Carlo,” Marie murmured. She crouched down and reached for the book, gingerly, as if it might burn her fingers. Her eyes drifted over the lurid copy on the back cover: A lost manuscript. A reporter on a mission. A witch with lethal secrets. As the hand of a goddess falls over New Amsterdam, two star-crossed—
“Hey, Marie,” Daniel said, jarring her from her thoughts. He stood at the edge of the aisle and pointed a nervous thumb over his shoulder. “We should go. Now.”
She looked back to the book. To the empty patch of dirty carpet where the book had just been sitting. She stood up.
“What’s going on?”
“For starters, I just got lost, twice, coming to find you. My sense of direction isn’t great, but I’m pretty sure this place is trying to keep us from leaving.”
The way back to the exit wasn’t the same as the way in. They made one left turn, then another, greeted with more stretches of shelving. Marie jolted to a stop as a bright yellow spine caught her eye.
“It’s a first edition of Swords in the Swamp of Blight,” Marie gasped. “And it’s pristine! Do you have any idea how rare—”
“Keep moving, eyes front. I keep spotting books I’ve been wanting for years, including one that was never published outside of a private printing of five copies. And I know where all five of them are because I’ve been planning on stealing one. This isn’t a store, it’s a goddamn Venus flytrap.”
Nessa was up front at the cash register, trying to carry on a conversation with a blank-eyed and smiling clerk as he methodically unpacked a cardboard box. As they spoke, he took each copy of a book with a sky-blue cover—The Life-Altering Power of Tidying Up—and set it in a stack on the counter. Then he took each book from the stack, one by one, and placed them back in the box.
“—but that’s not the point. The point is, this store should be closed.”
“You’d need to direct that to our regional management office, ma’am. In the meantime, can I suggest you take advantage of our amazing Thanksgiving clearance sale?”
“It’s the middle of April,” Nessa said.
“There’s never a bad time to give thanks, or to stock up on books for the long winter to come.”
Marie tugged Nessa’s sleeve. “We need to get out of here.”
“Traveling somewhere?” asked the clerk. “You need a book on travel, then. Aisle five. We have all the books on travel. You can go anywhere in the world in the pages of a book. You don’t even need to go. You can travel anywhere you want, in your imagination, right here in the store.”
“Thanks for your time,” Nessa told him, backing away from the register.
The clerk’s hips jerked, like his feet were nailed to the floor behind the counter and he was trying to tear himself free. His plastic smile didn’t budge, but his eyes turned wet and pained.
“Time? There’s always time for reading! Please buy something. You don’t even need to read it. You can save it. It’s going to be a long winter. You’ll want books when winter comes—”
They emerged from the store and out into the lonely concourse. The clerk’s voice followed them out, faintly pleading, until it was swallowed up by the music on the PA system.
“Just going on the record with my opinion right now,” Daniel said. “We should get back in
the car and get the hell out of here before anything else turns weird on us. This place is…damaged.”
The last song was over, but the ’80s theme kept going. Now the keyboard riffs of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” washed through the abandoned galleria. Nessa curled her hand around Marie’s and squeezed tight.
“Just proves there’s something here worth finding,” Nessa said. “Secrets worth knowing.”
They came to a four-way intersection and a standing map. Big blocks of color marked out store after shuttered store. They turned left, choosing at random, and the corridor bulged to accommodate a food court. A curling ribbon of stalls stood empty, some with open doors looking in on unlit kitchens where disconnected tubing jutted from the dirty eggshell walls. The court still hosted a forlorn span of tables and chairs, waiting for diners who would never arrive. The mall’s playground was still here, too, sporting swings and a plastic slide shaped like an elephant’s nose, laid out across a carpet of Astroturf. The lights over the plastic grass had died long ago.
In the middle of the playground, a little girl in a flowered dress rode upon a rocking horse. The madly grinning horse bounced forward and back on an oversize, groaning spring. Every time she leaned forward it let out a shrill squeak, scraping against the stillness in a steady rhythm.
“Hey,” Marie said, pitching her voice soft. “Are you here alone? Do you know where your parents are?”
The little girl didn’t look at her. She kept rocking, staring into the distance.
“My mommy said to wait for her. She’s shopping.”
“It’s…really not safe to be here by yourself. Do you know which store she’s in? We can take you to her. It’s okay, I’m a police officer.”
Her tiny hands didn’t move, clinging to the horse’s faded plastic mane.
“My mommy said to wait for her,” she said. “She’s shopping.”
Nessa tugged Marie’s sleeve. Their eyes met, and Nessa shook her head. The squeak—squeak—squeak of the horse’s spring followed them, echoing at their backs as they moved on.
They rounded the next bend, the playground slipping out of sight. The squeaking stopped.
This stretch of the mall ended at the wall-length doors and windows of a Sears store. Would have, if the facade hadn’t been covered in biohazard-yellow plastic from end to end. A single entrance stood under the sign, tented and extended under a rubber-sheathed awning.
“That,” Daniel said, “is not ordinary mall decor.”
Thirty-Two
“I’ve seen this before,” Marie said. Her hand reached toward the glossy plastic drape over the entrance, not quite daring to touch it. “Last summer my precinct participated in joint exercises with Homeland Security and the Centers for Disease Control. Terrorist-preparation stuff. This is a CDC-grade containment barrier, for setting up a quarantine.”
“Great,” Daniel said. “So here’s the million-dollar question: is the quarantine in there, or out here?”
“Not in a hurry to find out.” Marie looked to Nessa. “Why don’t we go back the other way? We can maybe save this for later.”
“Prudent,” Nessa said.
She led the way, turning to retrace their footsteps, and froze. A squad of men in concrete-gray urban camouflage, their faces sheathed under gas masks and rifles pressed to their shoulders, clattered into firing position. A cacophony of orders boomed over one another, overlapping voices ordering them to freeze, to show their hands, to not move a muscle. The words were lost in the noise, but the intent was crystal clear. Nessa lifted her open palms, and Marie and Daniel followed her lead.
One of the soldiers swooped in and patted Daniel down, plucking his gun away. Nessa was next, then Marie. His hands, sheathed in tactical gloves, patted against the mirror bag. He didn’t even notice, slipping right past the enchanted tote as his palms moved downward, exploring her waist and then each leg in turn.
He stepped back. “Clean,” his muffled voice declared.
A new figure stepped in from behind the firing line. She was a Latina woman in her twenties, olive skin, short-cropped hair, the same fatigues as the others but no gas mask to conceal her face. The first thing Marie thought of, as the woman sauntered into her personal space, was the FBI agent—Jessie Temple. She had the same eyes. Brilliant turquoise, too bright to be real. She leaned close and her nose wrinkled as she gave Marie’s shoulder a slow, intimate sniff.
“I’ll be goddamned,” the woman said as she lifted her face. “Boss was right. Three-for-one deal.”
Maybe she saw something in Marie’s eyes. Or her scent. She gave her a smile, flashing sharp teeth.
“Relax, sweetheart. Believe it or not, you’re among friends. I’m not going to hurt—” She paused. Then she gave Nessa a sly glance before looking back to Marie. “Oh, it’s not you you’re worried about. You need to work on that poker face. Some tells, you know, they go deeper than the skin. Those are the ones you’ve really got to hide.”
She looked to her men.
“I’ll take them to processing,” she said.
She led the way through the plastic curtain. Marie, Nessa, and Daniel followed, with a pair of riflemen in their wake. The others broke off in different directions on the other side, no sound but their bootsteps and the distant squawk of radio chatter.
On the far side of the quarantine wall, the half-abandoned Sears was strung with a spiderweb of cables and cords, jacketed in a rainbow of colors and sprawling through the store from end to end. Twists of yellow and orange plastic draped along empty countertops, wound around the arms of faceless display dummies, and trailed under racks of clothing. Bright gold signs marked the racks, emblazoned with Store Closing—Everything Must Go. More cables ran up and down the dead escalators, and a sound like a saw carving through sheet metal screeched from the second floor before suddenly going dead.
The overheads flickered. The bulbs strobed in a rolling wave of blackouts, from the back of the store to the boarded-over windows up front. Then they flashed on and off in a storm of random light. To their right, a fluorescent tube burst with a violent pop of air, raining shards of glass down onto the grimy tile floor.
“Rosales,” roared a man’s voice from the top of the escalator. As the light-tempest flickered to a standstill, the bulbs glowing soft and steady once more, he stormed down the steps. He was a scrawny tumbleweed of a man wearing a grease-stained mechanic’s jumpsuit, with bright red hair and a wiry beard.
“Oh,” their escort said with a roll of her eyes, “here we go.”
He converged on them like the wrath of God poured into the body of an underfed Irishman.
“Rosales, come here to me. What is it, huh? Were my instructions not clear, straightforward, and so simple even a pack of fuckin’ bollixes like your men could figure ’em out?”
“Not a good time,” she told him. She took a step to the left. So did he.
“The fuckin’ generators! I told these gobshite langers the fill line is there for a reason. Know what happens when you pour too much petrol in? Well, for starters, the whole damn place could go up in flames. Y’know, just for starters. Now, I’m already doing a job with substandard equipment and all the surplus gear I can nick, which isn’t much. On top of that, having to work with your idiot—”
“Bran,” Rosales snapped. He fell silent, wide-eyed. She pointed. “We have guests.”
His mouth hung open. He fumbled for a pair of goggles, dangling by a strap around his neck. He tugged them on and tapped a button on one side. Beams of crisp blue light strobed from a projector at the corner of the goggles, washing over their faces.
“Oh,” Bran said, his mouth still gaping. “Fuck me sideways, so we do. Pardon my manners, ladies.”
Rosales stood there, silent, a statue forged from iron. Bran slowly walked backward.
“I should…get back to work,” he told her.
She didn’t say a word. She just stood there until he slipped out of sight behind a perfume display. Then she started walking.
“Nessa,” Marie whispered. “Those goggles. Same kind Savannah Cross wore, at the Vandemere Zoo. Exact same kind.”
The procession’s final destination was the women’s clothing department. At the end of a stubby hallway, three changing-room doors stood open. Rosales pointed the way.
“Inside,” she told them.
“There’s been a terrible mistake,” Daniel said. “I don’t shop here.”
She grabbed him by the shoulder and shoved him inside, hard enough to slam him against the opposite wall, then yanked the door shut. Someone had made a simple modification and reversed the hardware: the changing rooms latched on the outside. Nessa and Marie didn’t need convincing; they stepped into the second and third booths. The doors pulled shut, one after another, and the latches clicked. They heard the light tread of Rosales’s boots as she walked away.
A moment later, Nessa’s voice sounded out, drifting through the six-inch gap under the changing-room doors.
“Daniel? Do me a favor? Stop antagonizing people.”
“Sorry.” His voice was a low whisper. “Nervous habit.”
Marie paced the floor, as much as her cramped cell would allow it. Two steps from end to end, with a floor-length mirror on one side and a little lacquered bench jutting from the wall on the other. Her heart was thudding like a rabbit on the run and she had to struggle just to fill her lungs. She sat down. Then she stood up again.
Breathe, she told herself. This isn’t normal. What’s triggering this? Take it slow, break it down.
She traced her anxiety along with her footsteps. The goggles. The second that light pulsed across her face, she was back in Vandemere, bound to a chair by steel straps while Savannah tortured her. She felt the electrodes on her skin, the burning along her spine—
I’m here now, she told herself. Her old coping technique, for when a stray scent or sound evoked the wrong memory and she found herself back in her childhood home. I’m here now. I’m safe, I’m not alone, I’m here now. She patted her thighs, her hips, her shoulders, making her world concrete and real again until the past faded away.
Detonation Boulevard Page 22