The Mall

by Bryant Delafosse

  And he waited.

  “So did you catch the Astros game the other night?”

  Chance squeezed his eyes shut in frustration. That idiot! You don’t ask questions! Silently, he prayed he wouldn’t be stupid enough to try and imitate his voice answering.

  “Well, I saw it and you know what I think?” Jesse came back loudly, his voice growing as his obvious anxiety grew. “I think those bastards are gonna blow another season. I can tell just by the way Biggio is swinging the bat.”

  Chance shut his mouth and took slow, even breaths through his nose. He could clearly hear footsteps now that Jesse’s voice started to trail away. It was coming closer, whatever it was.

  “It’s like after that defeat in LA, the spirit just got sucked out of the team, like they didn’t even want it anymore, y’know?”

  Clearly now, Chance could hear the lift and fall of the shoes, the owner sounding as if he were trying to create as little noise as possible. The source of that sound was almost on him now and he could no longer distinguish the individual words of Jesse. It was simply an indecipherable drone of dialogue—no more coherent than his typical conversation, Chance thought with detached amusement.

  What was he going to do when the other got within reach? Jump him (or it)? Let out a yell to scare him off balance, then jump him? Maybe he should just confront him and ask him what he thought he was doing following them? But then that led to the obvious question of what the two of them were doing here as well.

  Before he could clearly choose a course of action, the owner of the shoes was between him and Jesse.

  Chance silently cursed himself. He slowly turned his head and could see Jesse’s dim pin-light floating like a firefly in the dark, just before the shape blocked it from his view.

  His muscles stood locked in place, incapable of movement, afraid of making a sound and giving away his presence.

  Must wait, he thought. Just a few moments more and I’ll follow at a safe distance, so he won’t hear me.

  Chance reached down and steadied the board resting on his leg with both hands, trying to ignore the sudden cramp in his right calf. Carefully, he redistributed his weight to his left and pain flared through his leg muscle like the tiny teeth of a terrier. Seizing the calf with one hand with the intention of massaging out the cramp, he felt his balance waver. His body started to tip and the board began to slide down his leg. Urgently, he went to one knee with a solid collision that reverberated through his entire body and caused his teeth to come together with an audible “clack.”

  It was the only sound he’d made during the whole awkward maneuver, but it was just enough to attract the attention of their shy admirer.

  Chance looked up and could see for the first time with sufficient distance--from both the dark shape and the pin-light Jesse held--that the figure was small, diminutive in fact.

  It’s just a kid, Chance thought as he rose from his squat, all his lower muscles protesting at once. He grunted and that was all the excuse the figure needed.

  He bolted.

  “Jesse!” Chance yelled, breaking into a run after him. “Now!”

  Trying as he could to locate the kid in the musty gloom, Chance took his eyes off Jesse’s pin-light. For a split second before the inevitable impact, Chance remembered his minor league coach’s almost religious mantra that good players “never ever take their eye off the ball.” As much as he’d hated Coach “Pee-Pants” Parker, he realized that this would have been an excellent opportunity to have heeded his advice, as he and Jesse plunged head-long into each other in the darkness, their skateboards clattering off to both sides of them.

  Having simply stepped off to one side just before the impact, the figure that had been following them made a sound of sympathetic regret deep in his throat as Chance and Jesse rolled off of each other, both clutching their heads.

  “Sorry,” the kid kept repeating. “Sorry.”

  Chance opened his eyes and blinked at the tiny figure hovering over them, his outline more distinctive now that they were closer to the light coming from the entrance to the next tram station about fifty yards away. He was still having problems focusing his eyes however. No matter how many times he blinked, he kept seeing a second figure, a larger figure just behind the first. It seemed to hover over Jesse, who was moaning and rolling in the darkness next to him.

  Chance opened his mouth to speak but couldn’t get his lungs to produce a breath, all of it having been knocked out by the impact. He sucked in lungful after lungful like a dehydrated man at a water fountain, but it was too late.

  The second figure came sharply into focus, lifting a four-foot long object above its head. Chance had only enough energy to point. The smaller figure spun and disappeared into the inky blackness of the shadows.

  The instant before the raised object came down atop his skull, Chance realized that it was Jesse’s own skateboard. The noise it made, amplified in the enclosed space, sounded to Chance like an egg cracking.

  Jesse made only one sound, indistinguishable from a sigh before the enormous figure raised the board again. He brought it down again and again, each time with more force, almost as if he was gaining strength with each motion.

  Chance took one glance down and in the tiny pool of light cast by the dropped pin-light, he could see a single wide, unblinking eye, perfectly captured in its dim luminescence.

  His muscles taking over for his brain, Chance bolted, following the now familiar sound of the other’s footfalls. The tiny figure, he could see, already had a good head start down the tunnel as he dashed toward the only source of light.

  Suddenly his progress stopped and Chance could feel something holding him, the tail of his baggy t-shirt stretching to its limits. He pulled with all his strength, then gave a sudden unpredictable twist. The figure seemed to take a step forward and Chance heard a distinctive sizzling sound—the sound of skateboard wheels. Next, came the thud of a heavy object hitting the concrete floor of the tunnel, an exclamation of pain, and Chance was free again.

  He ran faster than he’d ever run before in his fifteen years.

  12

  Owen didn’t remember scrambling up the platform to the subterranean level of the Mall or through the open plasti-steel partition. It was almost as if he had been transported from the darkness into the light, instantaneously.

  His legs had had a mind of their own, almost like two machines with a pre-assigned program to flee. He had started to doubt if he were even capable of stopping them, when he heard the scream.

  All of a sudden, he could feel his legs again, his tiny firm muscles tingling with the furious exertion he had just put on them. He felt weak and foggy.

  Maybe this is all dream, he thought for a moment. I fell asleep in the theater watching Back to the Future a second time and now I’m dreaming all this. As he strained to hear the dialogue of Michael J. Fox, the older kid’s voice rung out again—this time louder--shattering all illusions.

  “Help!” the kid cried over and over. “Help me!”

  Owen turned and found the eyes of the older kid, maybe as old as sixteen, he couldn’t tell. He wasn’t good with ages. All he knew was that he wasn’t quite a grown-up like the man in the arcade. He was, just like him, a kid.

  He watched as the other slid to a stop a few yards from where he was standing at the foot of the escalator leading to the upper levels of the Mall, just panting and staring with wide, bulging eyes—the sort of eyes he only seen before on the faces of zoo animals. Terrified, trapped animals. In the dim emergency lights along the wall, Owen could see speckles of red on his forehead and down along one cheek.

  It was the blood of that other kid who had been with him… and that other kid was still in the tunnel with the big dark thing.

  The sight of the blood crystallized the reality of what he was experiencing.

  This was no dream.

  That other kid wasn’t coming up out of the tunnel. Owen knew this, but he could tell by the way the teen had turned back, that he wa
sn’t quite so sure. Or at least, he hadn’t really accepted that fact yet.

  13

  Stopping at the foot of the escalator, Chance turned away from the little kid and stared at the open plasti-steel door leading down into the dark hole. A dim sound came from within, growing louder. It was the footsteps of something big, growing closer, each step amplified by the natural acoustics of the tunnel until his legs began to tremble in fear.

  It’s not human, he thought.

  Then a shadow appeared on the far wall of the tram tunnel and he could see the top of a head appear at the entrance, then one hand and the other gripping the edge of the platform, each one stained red.

  It rose from the depths, its eyes hallow but intense as they scanned methodically from left to right, capturing all and recording every minute detail of the scene before it.

  The thing pulled itself up into the light, its face covered with swatches of blood. It eyes rolled and fixed on them.

  For the first time, Chance recognized that face. It was the security guard that Jesse had taunted back at the Wheel of Time Ferris wheel. Or at least, it used to be. Somehow, he had changed in a fundamental way. Whatever sat behind those eyes—those cold, mechanical eyes—no longer appeared human.

  When something grabbed his arm and yanked him backwards, Chance came close to letting go of his barely controlled bladder. It was then that he realized that the kid was still with him. He was not alone and that momentarily gave him renewed strength. He stumbled a few steps back in a dreamy daze, his eyes still unable to detach from the creature rising from the hole.

  All that blood. All that came out of Jesse, Chance couldn’t stop thinking. He’s still down there and…

  “C’mon!” the kid screamed in his ear, the sound shocking him with its volume, making his whole head ring.

  Unable to wait for him any longer, the kid ran up the steps of the frozen escalator. At the sound of his retreating footsteps, Chance finally broke out of his reverie. He turned and saw the other retreating. A second later, he found his legs again and followed.

  14

  Cora began to scream, a sound high and piercing, pitched at a frequency honed through thousands of years of evolution to assault the mature human ear in just such a way that made it impossible to ignore. At the sound, every thought and inclination deserted Lara’s mind and the moral imperative “Protect the child,” pulsed like a red neon sign through every fiber of her body.

  She spun and watched in adrenaline infused slow-motion as Cora clutched both sides of her head with her chin slightly raised.

  Reggie staggered, his hands a blur as they reached up to secure the tiny cargo riding upon his shoulders.

  Almost simultaneously, even before the nerve impulses in her muscles could catch up with those flickering across her brain, Simon stood before Reggie, reaching up to retrieve Cora.

  Reggie lowered himself to one knee, bringing the child in closer proximity to the mechanic.

  In a single smooth motion, Simon had taken Cora off the metal man’s shoulders and swung her around, anticipating Lara’s arrival behind him.

  All in the course of seconds, Lara had her arms around her daughter, lowering her gently into her lap even as she kneeled opposite the silver Bot.

  The whole display viewed from start to finish might have struck an outsider as some choreographed and well-rehearsed ritual.

  Without taking his eyes from the five-year-old, Simon Peter made a slashing gesture in the air at his side and the quivering silver Bot relaxed, the blue light fading from its visual sensors. Simon turned back to Cora, shining the beam of his flashlight over her face and body.

  Searching for a wound that wasn’t there, Lara eventually placed her hands on both sides of Cora’s face and tried to shush her, but still, the single long scream continued. Finally, Lara drew her hand back and delivered a single hard slap to the cheek.

  Simon, who hovered very close beside them, recoiled.

  Cora’s wide unfocused eyes seated themselves and located her mother’s face. The tightly-pulled skin of her face rippled and she began to sob uncontrollably, folding forward into her mother’s bosom, almost seemed to bury herself there. Lara gently rocked her, stroking her long kinky brown hair.

  Eventually satisfied that Cora was safe, at least for the time being, Lara glanced over at Reggie, temporarily deactivated and kneeling a few feet away. Her eyes then drifted over to Simon. In the darkness a few yards away with his back to them, the mechanic almost seemed to be standing a silent sentry.

  15

  When he was seven years old, only six months after his father’s sudden death, Owen had been diagnosed with night terrors.

  Every few nights for almost a month, he would wake up screaming, his pajamas moist with sweat, with his mother usually sitting next to him with a furrowed brow of concern. She would sit with him until he fell back asleep or until he conned her into letting him sleep in her bed for the night.

  The first time it happened, Owen had awakened in a disoriented state, vaguely aware that he had narrowly escaped something horrendous, but with no image of what his nightmare had been about or awareness that he had even had a nightmare at all. In this confused state, he had lain perfectly still in the twisted blankets of his twin bed, his heart fluttering like the last wing beats of a dying bird and held his breath, trying desperately to hear some sound, some indication that whatever was causing this indescribable fear wasn’t still in the room with him. After five minutes of shallow breathing, the sensation had faded and he saw it for the dark fantasy that it truly was.

  But for those five minutes, alone in the darkness, Owen knew, with a concrete belief that adulthood rationality eventually erodes, that he was in grave mortal danger. His mother and sister lay asleep in adjacent rooms completely unaware of the precariousness of his situation.

  Not once during that month of waking in a temporary state of panic could he describe what he had just experienced. Not to his mother nor to Dr. Ross, nor to his friend Mikey Baynard, to whom he had eventually admitted his dread secret.

  It was beyond his ability to describe what he was feeling in those first few moments of waking from a night terror. Oddly enough, the closest anyone had ever come to hitting the target was a man who had been long dead nearly forty years.

  Miss Gershawn had played a recording of a speech by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in American History class. The President had been giving his first inaugural address to the nation when he uttered the now immortal words: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

  Owen decided then and there that the source of his night terrors, the thing that awakened him every other night for nearly a month, was only “fear itself” and nothing more--a thing unworthy of real consideration.

  And since that day, the explanation had satisfied him.

  Now, as he ran into the dark corridor of the Mall, lit only by a quarter moon, Owen believed he knew the origin of those long ago indefinable fears. Now, he was finally able to put a name to what had pursued him in that in-between country of his dreams.

  It was a demon in a security guard’s uniform, smeared with the blood of another human being.

  And as his feet carried him along almost of their own accord, he could not be sure even now that he was not still asleep in his own bed, his mother sitting beside him with that wrinkled brow of confusion, watching him moan and kick the sheets into tighter and tighter knots.

  Then he remembered what he had heard down in that tunnel. In the absence of light, the sound had painted a picture perhaps more vivid than reality could. He’d heard the cracking of bone. The gurgling of the kid’s dying breath. That sharp smell of freshly-spilled blood.

  It was real. It was happening.

  Owen ran with no destination in mind, just trying to put as much distance as he could between him and the monster. In the dim light, none of the stores looked familiar and he realized that he wasn’t in the blue sector where he had overheard the other two boys saying that they’d
left their bikes. Confused by the tunnel, they had traveled in the opposite direction.

  He was in the red sector on the complete opposite side of the Mall.

  He knew that he had to get back to the movie theater that was also in the blue sector--though the hope that his mom and sister were still there had dwindled to virtually nothing. They were probably outside with the others, but what else could he do?

  He had already tried enough exit doors to know that he was locked inside and when he had first heard Chance and Jesse, he had followed, sensing that the three of them might be the last human beings left inside, but was still suspicious enough of them to keep his identity secret until forced to reveal himself.

  He knew now what a mistake that had been. Maybe he was even the cause of that kid dying, he thought with numb shock.

  The footfalls of running feet slapped somewhere in the distance behind him, and he was sure that they belonged to the other kid, but was too afraid to turn.

  He had to find a place to hide.

  He made a quick right turn into the open doors of the massive JC Penney store. It was pitch black inside, so he began working his way through the first clothes section to the right of the entrance--Men’s Casuals, his mind vaguely registered. He scurried as fast as he could to the far wall and began to work his way deeper into the store along the wall beneath a hanging rack of Hawaiian-style knit shirts, keeping his eyes on the entrance.

  As the sound of the runner began to fade, Owen vaguely wondered if it had been wise to separate.

  Better him than you, a voice in the deep animal part of his brain suggested.

  16

  When Chance noticed that the kid was no longer in front of him, he continued running straight up the corridor deeper into the Mall.

  Hey, he can’t go after both of us if we split up, he thought. Better him than me.