by Paul Jones
Jim's confusion deepened as two balding middle aged men who had been walking hand-in-hand now turned and faced the other, regarding each other as though they had not seen the other in years before throwing their arms around the others neck and falling to their knees together locked in their embrace.
A teenage boy sprinted up to the store window. He stopped for a second in front of it and placed his forehead against the glass. Using his hands to shade the glare from the store's reflected light, he gaped at the people inside, a look of frantic desperation on his face as his eyes darted from one face to the next. Then, just as suddenly as he had appeared, he sprinted off out of sight leaving only a grease stain where his forehead had contacted the glass.
A keening began from a woman who sat crossed legged on the industrial carpeted floor an aisle or so away from him. Her low moaning voice set a beat to the under-swell of fear Jim could feel seeping into the air.
"What is going on here," a large man in a business suit demanded, in a loud pompous voice.
The store assistant, still calling forlornly for Steven and Alison, ran past him towards the exit at the far end of the shop.
Jim followed her.
He pushed through the double glass doors of the store and stepped out into the mall. A tsunami of sound struck him as a wave of anguished voices washed over him, soaking him in its confusion. Here and there, intermingled with the dissonant buzz of voices Jim could occasionally make out an ecstatic cry of laughter or the rapid chatter of happiness. It floated through the confusion, emotional flotsam riding on a sea of panic. All of this playing to a background score of Muzak that wafted down from speakers set high up in the latticework of white metal braces holding the glass ceiling of the mall in-place overhead.
The noise amplified as it bounced from floor to ceiling, wall-to-wall until finally turning into a mind numbing cacophony that forced Jim to make his way across to the aluminum safety barriers that prevented shoppers from falling through the open space to the floor below, his already assaulted mind unable to handle the sudden extra input.
He took a deep breath and leaned on the horizontal grab bar like a nauseous passenger gazing sickly over the side of a storm-rocked liner. He could see he was on the top floor of a shopping mall, three stories up. The floors beneath were just as packed with people too, all as equally disoriented as those on his.
A thought struck him: Maybe this was a terrorist attack. He remembered back in the late nineties of the last century, some Japanese religious cult had begun gassing people on the Japanese underground, and then in 2019, that home-grown terrorist group, what the hell was their name? Radical America, Freedom America? Whoever they were, they had managed to dump a ton of genetically modified respiratory Syncytial virus into the water supply of some mid-western town and killed all those people. Maybe that’s what was going on here, a terrorist group had loosed a chemical agent in the mall and that was why everybody was acting so harebrained.
But, he reasoned, there hadn't been any real terrorist threat in the world for the last fifteen years or more. Who the hell was there left in the world with a grudge?
There was a subtle change in the air that drew his attention away from thoughts of terrorist attack. Like the smell of ozone just before a thunderstorm, Jim could sense a change in the feeling of the crowd. Fear had replaced panic and that now was mutating into terror. Looking up from the bar he was leaning against he saw a wave of horrified faces and bodies flooding towards him.
He was transfixed: hypnotized by the crowd surging towards him. His eyes flickered from face to face, each one as pale as an avalanche as they rushed towards him. The novelist in him observed with a detached, professional attitude, taking note of everything from the look of panic in their eyes, to the way the front row of oncoming people seemed to ebb and flow with those behind.
The large pompous man from the luggage store had left just after Jim and was making his way in the opposite direction, pushing anybody who stood in his way aside. Seeing the oncoming crowd, he tried to turn and get out of their way but the mob swept over him as if he did not exist, trampling him underfoot. Others, faster than the unfortunate executive, dove for cover in shop doors or were caught up and pulled along too. Those not so lucky ended up knocked aside or smashed through the plate glass storefronts.
For a brief moment, he thought about jumping over the safety banister, holding himself there while the mob ran past but he doubted his arms would hold him long enough and his hands were too damp with perspiration for him not to expect to instantly lose his grip and fall the three stories to the ground below. No! He would take his chances with the mob, thank you very much.
Turning, Jim began to run in the opposite direction to the oncoming mob, hoping to get his legs up to some kind of competitive speed to match that of the mob behind him. To his utter surprise, he found that he was sprinting like a teenager. His legs ate up the ground; his arms were pistons pumping the air, his heart thumped in his chest and the blood pumped through veins unclogged by age.
He chanced a brief look back over his shoulder; he had a lead of five feet or so. If he could just make it to the stairs or the escalator before the horde, he would be okay. Assuming there is an exit this way, of course.
Facing front again he was just in time to see the bewildered woman standing directly in front of him.
In her eighties, wispy gray hair hanging in greasy gray clots around a face that had probably been remarkable in her younger days. Plastic surgery had stretched and pulled the skin until it now looked so parchment thin it would tear and split if she should chance a smile. She wore a skin-tight cat suit that accentuated her overly large breasts; the silicone implants ensuring that even in this late stage of her life her boobs still stoically resisted the effects of gravity.
"We don't care about you, only about Michael," she shouted incoherently as he collided headlong with her and sent both of them sprawling onto the cold floor.
Jim careened on his back across the highly polished tiles and felt the air slammed from his lungs as he collided with something solid and unyielding.
The old woman was on her hands and knees, her lank hair hiding her face until she raised her head on a wrinkled stalk of a neck. Her face distorted into a mask of anger as she stared across the walkway at him, her eyes flashing an anger that he could not fathom. Her lips moved but he could hear nothing over the cacophony of voices and the thunder of approaching feet, as she spat what he was sure were some choice expletives at him.
Behind her, the crowd bore down.
Fear must have shown in his eyes because she twisted just in time to face the onrush of bodies as they smashed into her. A man in the front row, pushed along by the hundreds behind him, saw her, tried to leap over her scuttling body but mistimed and jumped too late. His foot caught the back of her head and sent him sprawling on his face. Those behind had no time to react. They stumbled and lurched, tripping over her and the sprawled man, grabbing at others as they went down, the old woman and the fallen man disappeared instantly beneath them.
It was a train wreck; bodies flew everywhere as the onrushing mass stumbled and fell and screamed and cried out in pain, surprise and anger.
Jim used the dampening of the mob's momentum to gauge his plight and looked quickly around; whipping his head from side to side, he hurriedly assessed his situation.
He had landed near a molded plastic bench. Fixed to the safety barrier of the mall, it allowed three or four people to sit in modest comfort on the curved impact plastic seat. There was a gap between the underside of the seat and the floor, no more than eighteen inches. If he could just squeeze into that gap, he might stand a chance of getting out of this alive. Hardly thinking, he pulled himself hand over hand on his belly and slipped between the floor and the base of the seat. A moccasin clad foot smashed down on his left hand before he could pull it under the shelter. He screamed a curse and whipped his stinging hand to his chest, scooting himself further under the overhang of plastic until he felt
the upright support bars of the security fence pressing into his back.
The crowd thundered by, the floor shuddering with their passing. Jim felt the rolling vibration reverberate through his bones, forcing his teeth into an involuntary chatter. The fact that he was terrified did not help either.
A body crashed to the ground, smashing into the walkway with the sickeningly abbreviated sound of a melon dropped from a great height onto a metal spike. The bloody face of a teenage boy, his eyes lifeless and blank, faced Jim. The poor kid's body jerked and spasmed as countless feet stomped over him, pounding him into the walkway. Jim's eyes met the boy's; unable to turn away from the horror, he knew he would never forget the look of terminal shock embossed on that young face.
Time passed.
Finally, the river of feet slowed, became a trickle and eventually dried up completely. The dead boy, crushed and broken, gazed lifelessly at Jim, one shattered arm stretched out across the floor towards him as if pointing to Jim’s hiding place, his mouth hung open and a trail of blood leaked from his split and broken lips, his staring eyes accusatory: why did you live? Why you old man?
The sobbing lament of a woman broke Jim's trance and he slid his cramped and aching body out from under his plastic sanctuary, careful to avoid touching the dead kid and trying not to slip on the pool of congealing blood that spread like a crimson lake against the stark white background of the floor.
It was the young mother he had seen through the window of the luggage store when he had first awakened to this strange, terrifying, world. She sat cross-legged in the recessed entranceway of a clothes shop holding her baby, wrapped in a pink blanket, to her chest, rocking back and forth. The baby stroller lay twisted and broken further down the walkway.
The low keening of a nursery rhyme floated across the now deafeningly silent mall.
"... Mama's go’na buy you a mocking bird," she sang, as Jim began walking towards her. "And if that mocking bird don't sing, Mamma's go’na buy you a -" She stopped singing as she saw Jim approaching.
"Are you okay, Miss?" he asked, as he approached.
The young woman scooted further back into the doorway, away from him, her face suddenly fearful.
Jim lifted his hands, palm out, to head height. "It's okay," he said gently, "I'm not going to hurt you. Are you okay? Is your baby alright?"
Her back connected with the unyielding door of the clothes store, from inside the store Jim heard the tinkle of bells vibrate faintly. Unable to push herself back any further she instead rounded on Jim; her eyes flashed a mixture of fear and anger. "Stay away from me," she yelled her voice a high-pitched squeal.
"It's okay. I just want to help you. I'm not going to --"
"STAY AWAY FROM ME YOU BASTARD!" she screamed. The fear in her voice so overwhelmingly palpable Jim felt as though he had been physically hit.
"I just --" he tried to continue.
The woman dissolved into tears, pulling the child even closer to her chest.
Jim backed up, "I'm sorry," he said. The woman, her attention already refocused on the bundle in her arms, resumed her lullaby. There was nothing more he could do for the poor woman, he would just have to leave her here and hope that the paramedics would look after her when they arrived. If they arrived, he corrected himself before turning and moving reluctantly in the direction he hoped he would find the exit out of this insanity.
* * *
There were half-a-dozen dead bodies strewn across the mall walkways, their trampled forms lay smashed and crushed, broken limbs jutting at odd angles.
All was still.
Broken glass from shattered storefronts lay scattered all over, crunching under Jim’s shoes as he picked his way through the desolation.
More bodies lay in a disheveled heap around the top of the escalator's gunmetal-gray stairway, and a second, broken and blood-spattered mass had formed at the bottom.
They looked like carelessly cast-aside dolls, discarded by some hateful child. He paid particular attention to avoid looking directly at the unfortunate souls as he stepped over their motionless pale bodies to ride the escalator down to the lower level. He leaped cautiously over the bodies piled at the bottom of the escalator like so many dry autumn leaves.
On the ground floor, near the escalator, he found a large illuminated visitors map of the mall. A fat red arrow labeled ‘You Are Here’ indicated Jim's location, and he traced the route from it to the nearest exit with his index finger before turning and heading in the direction the map indicated.
* * *
The sky, a perfect cerulean blue, stretched off into the distance as Jim Baston pushed open the glass exit doors of the mall and stepped out into the fresh air. He stood for a few moments, bent at the waist his hands braced against his knees, sucking in a lungful of warm air. The heat of the day was astonishing after the air-conditioned environment of the mall, it radiated up from the concrete sidewalk in waves, and within seconds of leaving the building, beads of sweat began to pop on his forehead.
A scattering of lifeless birds lay dotted over the road that separated the sidewalk from the mall car park. Glancing up at the huge structure he had just exited Jim thought he could make out bloody splotches where the birds had collided with the polarized glass fascia of the building.
This is all wrong, he thought, raising himself to an upright position and shading his eyes with his hand from the intense glare of the sun. The sky was too blue, the air far too warm. Wherever ‘here’ is, it sure as hell isn't New Orleans. Not even Louisiana by the looks of it.
Blocking the road off to his right, three cars had smashed headlong into each other. Steam or smoke rose from two of the ruined vehicles and Jim could just make out the body of a driver still slumped against the wheel of one of the cars, barely visible through the hissing fog that rose from his vehicles broken engine.
Every atom of his body screamed at him to leave, run away; get the Hell out of here! But he couldn't leave the driver to die. At the very least, he had to check that he or she wasn’t just unconscious. This is madness. Sheer madness, he thought as he began walking cautiously over to the crashed vehicles.
Two of the cars were empty, their occupants having fled the scene. The third, an unrecognizable compact, was sandwiched between the other vehicles and had sustained the most serious damage. The driver, an elderly woman with blue rinsed hair, was slumped against the wheel of her car. Her jaw hung limply open, a thick clot of congealed blood filled her mouth. Jim assumed that her severed tongue probably lay somewhere at her feet. A spider web of blood-splattered fractures radiated out from the spot where her head connected with the car's windshield. Jim was sure she was dead but he stretched a cautious hand through the open window and checked for a pulse against her throat.
Nothing. She was gone.
Jim stepped back from the destroyed vehicle and its dead driver. His left foot trod on something metallic and he almost lost his footing as the object slid out from beneath him. He blurted an expletive as he barely managed to regain his balance then looked down at what had caused him to slip. It was the crushed car's license plate, battered and dirty, torn from its fastening on the rear of the car but the white background and blue California state name was still visible. Kneeling down he picked up the piece of twisted metal examining it as though he held some ancient scroll or religious relic, as though it held the key to his very existence. In a way it did, he realized. Here he was wondering where he was when the answer was all around him, fastened to the hundreds of abandoned cars that sat patiently waiting for their owners to return.
Still holding the warped piece of metal in his hand, he walked across to the nearest row of parked cars. Moving from one car to the next, he checked the license plate of each in turn. By the time he reached the end of the first row of parked vehicles he knew where he was. There were a smattering of out of state license plates - Nevada and Washington, one from Idaho - but the majority had the same blue on white plates as the one he held in his hand.
Cal
ifornia.
And judging from the blue expanse that stretched out above him, it could only be California. The sun was past its zenith and easing towards the western horizon across the cloudless canvass of the sky, but in the distance, beyond the rows of abandoned cars in the foreground, an evil black plume of smoke spiked high into the upper atmosphere, as hard and expressionless as gunmetal. At its base, Jim thought he could make out the orange flicker of flames leaping high into the air. A faint smell of burning rubber reached his nostrils.
It looked like a big fire. Jim expected to hear the sound of emergency vehicles screaming along the roads towards the inferno. There should be helicopters and camera drones buzzing around the scene of the distant disaster like worker bees buzzing around the bountiful honeypot of disaster. Nothing in the air. Nothing on the ground.
A memory began to tug at his mind. A sense of déjà vu that descended like a mist, confusing him even further. Everything looked so familiar; no that was wrong, everything was familiar.
He knew this place. He was sure of it.
Taking a step out onto the black top he craned his neck to read the name of the mall fixed over its recessed entrance: FALLBROOK MALL, in giant white letters.