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.
California.
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.
The name rang a bell somewhere in his memory. He repeated the name of the shopping center over in his head a couple of times.
Fallbrook Mall, Fallbrook Mall.
“Got it,” he said, with a snap of his fingers. It was the name of the mall he used to shop at when he still lived in California; when they had still lived out in the San Fernando Valley. There was a great little Italian restaurant that he and Simone would eat at and a Cineplex that they used to take… Lark.
His eyes dropped to ground level again and he began to walk towards the low brick wall bordering the building, hedging in a perimeter of sad looking flowers, wilted and dry under the sweltering sun.
From the corner of his eye, he caught movement, his head turned quickly to focus at what had drawn his attention. Someone was watching him.
On the other side of the doors, standing in the foyer of the mall, a man stared intently at Jim. Dressed in khaki pants, a white open collared shirt and a black leather jacket, the stranger looked to be in his thirties, brown hair swept back over his forehead, eyes locked solidly with his own.
Jim took a step back in surprise. The figure took a step back too. Astonishment crossed both their faces. Jim raised his left hand; the stranger mimicked his gesture. “Christ,” Jim whispered as he stepped forward and placed his hand flat against the doors of the mall, reaching out he touched the face of himself echoed in its mirrored surface. The face of Jim Baston when he was thirty-eight years old.
Eight
I must have fallen asleep at the wheel.
That was all Byron Portia had time to think before the road in front of him turned into a sea of shimmering red as drivers thumped brake pedals to the floor, their vehicles’ brake lights suddenly glowing like hot coals.
This was all wrong. An instant ago he was a half hour outside of LA, his earlier plan of reaching the city by midnight delayed by an unexpected accident outside of Baker. Some fool kid with too much synth-ahol in his system or jacked-up on the latest designer drug had forgotten to turn on their car’s AI, smashed into the support of a bridge and spread both their car and themselves over eight lanes of the highway. The tailback had stretched all the way back towards Vegas for thirty miles and cost him three hours of his time. He had celebrated New Year sitting in in the cab of his eighteen-wheeler. He had not bothered hurrying after that. The time was past for him to find anybody suitable for his purposes that night.
But that was all okay. Everything happened for a reason, he knew.
And so, he had contented himself with the speed limit and tried not to dwell on the missed opportunity. He understood, he was protected.
And then suddenly… this.
Night was replaced by blinding daylight and blue sky. The sparse industrialized outskirts of Los Angeles, shrouded in the comforting shadow of darkness, supplanted by the urban sprawl of… where? He had no idea. Cars everywhere. Confusion followed by a strange sick sensation of abruptly arrested motion in his stomach.
He sucked in an instinctive gulp of air and held it as all around him vehicles began careening and skidding across the unfamiliar freeway in a slow motion ballet of chaos. Clouds of smoke erupted from tires as panicked drivers brought their vehicles rapidly down to zero and stopped dead in their tracks only to be sent careening off by others behind them who could not react quickly enough to the wall of metal that was thrown up in front of them.
He saw one car lurch awkwardly into the air, corkscrewing gracelessly over the concrete median dividing his side of the freeway from oncoming traffic. The face of its terrified driver plainly visible for a moment as the driver’s side window of the airborne sedan passed in front of Byron’s windshield before disappearing in a massive ball of flame as it ripped through a stalled RV, before cartwheeling away out of his view.
Byron had no chance of stopping as his foot smashed in
to the brake-pedal; it was instinctive, it was automatic and intuitive but it was also stupid. The big-rig he was riding wasn’t a car: it took time to slow down. Gentle caressing of the hydraulic breaks was all that would bring one of these metal leviathans of the freeway to a safe stop. Hammering the breaks could only lead to one result and even as the thought slipped through his mind, he felt the dynamics of his vehicle begin to change.
The forty feet of trailer hitched behind his rig began to slide forward and his cab begin to slip off to the left, centrifugal force trying to push the two pieces of machinery together. He tried to compensate by turning the wheel into the skid, trying to avert the oncoming jackknifing of his rig but he could already feel it was too late. He was going too fast and he had hit the brakes too hard. It wasn’t going to matter anyway, too many damn cars ahead of him. All he could do now was hang on.
It was gradual, taking place over the space of a couple of seconds, but it felt as though it was five or six times as long, time stretched out for him by the sudden dumping of the contents of his adrenal glands into his system. He felt the potential energy building in his vehicle, the cabin begin to strum and squeal as the tension resonated through the tortured metal. Energy built furiously in those… long… drawn… out… seconds… before… the rig detonated.
His steering wheel whipped out of his hands and Byron catapulted from his seat, exploding toward the roof of the cab. An empty Coke can flew past him as he smashed into the ceiling, knocking the stored air from his straining lungs. The windshield imploded into the interior of the cabin with the sound of a million shattered bottles, broken glass showering the leather driver’s seat with diamond hailstones.
Through the newly punctured eye of his cab, he felt the numbing rush of freezing air and watched the outside world spinning and tumbling, the scream of twisting metal and the cracking and splitting of plastic a strange but somehow fitting anthem for this disaster.
Extinction Point: The End ep-1 Page 29