The Mall

by Bryant Delafosse

  Simon gave an appraising look at the shopping cart full of goods, then glanced back at Dugan. A silent look passed between them.

  “It might help us if you can recall everything you remember about what just happened,” Lara coaxed gently.

  Swallowing awkwardly, he peered up at Lara and sighed. “The kid opened the trunk and I stumbled out.” He glanced up and caught Cora’s eye. She grabbed her brother’s arm defensively. “I got pissed off and it felt like something grabbed me, but from the inside, if you catch my drift.”

  Owen looked up in alarm. He recalled feeling the exact same thing when his grandmother had struck him, but the feeling had promptly passed, when he’d focused his thoughts on his family.

  Lara gave Dugan a nod, her eyes shifting to glance at the entrance to the dealership. “I felt something very similar when I got angry at someone too. What else do you remember?”

  Dugan lowered his eyes, avoiding contact with Lara. “All I know, is I felt mad enough to kill. It wanted me to kill someone. Everyone.” He shuddered and glanced down at an object held tightly in Simon’s hand.

  “You’ve had a traumatic experience. I would suggest you rest now,” Simon said, moving toward the entrance, Lara following with Cora close behind.

  As he passed one of the frozen Bots, Simon stopped and peered into its eye with interest. “Total system failure,” he commented.

  “You have something to do with this?” Lara asked.

  “Harming a human being, even by accident, causes irrevocable catastrophic conflicts within its logic processors. When I stopped the Emergency Transmission, every Bot who had attacked you entered full shutdown mode due to the logic paradoxes the transmission caused,” Simon explained. “They knew you were human beings, yet were told that you were not. They inherently protect humans, yet were told to terminate you.”

  “Basically, their brains fried, right?”

  Simon glanced up to pinpoint the source of the voice and found Owen peering at him from behind Lara. “Are you Simon?” he asked shyly.

  “You must be Owen,” Simon said with an almost effortless smile, holding his hand out. “It’s good to finally meet you, Owen.”

  Casting a glance at his mother, Owen reached out and shook the other’s hand, a stern look on his face. He took a quick step back and Simon’s eyes took a quick look down at his feet.

  “Where are your shoes?” Lara said with a bit of a gasp.

  “I left them behind in the Sears,” he replied, in a tone that indicated that it was the most reasonable explanation in the world. “Oh yeah, and I have this and this!” Owen retrieved a sheet of crumpled paper from one pocket and handed it to Lara. Then he took the troll doll from another pocket and handed it to Cora.

  “My trollie!” she cried, snatching it from Owen with a huge smile.

  Lara looked over the page with a sort of amused confusion then handed it to Simon. “He took inventory of all the things he borrowed,” she commented, looking down at Owen with an expression that he didn’t readily recognize. She planted a kiss on the top of his head and gave him a warm, pride-filled hug.

  Simon studied the ten-year-old. “That’s was exceptionally foresighted for a child your age.”

  Owen glanced over Lara’s shoulder at the man, the beginnings of distrust on his face. Though the guy seemed fine on the surface, something was strangely intense about him, he thought.

  When he finally extracted himself from his mother’s arms, he asked, “Can I look around for a food machine?”

  “Okay, but don’t leave this room.”

  Owen nodded and started away in a hurry before his mother could change her mind.

  “And take your sister,” Lara answered, giving her a nudge toward her brother.

  Cora stamped her foot, while Owen patiently held out his hand to her. “C’mon, Smeagol.”

  Snatching her trusty flashlight/radio off a nearby table, Cora dutifully took her brother’s hand and followed him across the showroom.

  With almost identical smirks on their faces, Simon and Lara stood watching the two kids walk away hand-in-hand.

  32

  Dugan studied Simon and Lara as they started toward the front of the showroom, his eyes marking the object in Simon’s hand. “Was that a hand grenade or am I hallucinating?” he asked Chance.

  Ignoring him, Chance held Owen’s flashlight out to him as he passed. The younger boy flashed a glare at him, snatched the flashlight away from him, and continued deeper into the showroom with Cora.

  “Hey, kid,” Dugan called, snapping his finger next to Chance’s ear. “Don’t mind him. We did the right thing.”

  “Did we? That lady that Simon took the grenade from looked crazy enough to kill us all.”

  “He’s alive, right? All’s well that ends well.” Running a hand through his sweat-soaked hair, Dugan growled, “Crazy old coots with grenades. Sounds like I didn’t miss much after all.” He lay back across the seat with a grunt.

  “You still want the gun back?”

  “Yeah, I… Nah, on second thought, you better hold onto that. If I’d had that in my hands when it happened…” Chance nodded and started away in the direction of Owen, but Dugan grabbed his arm. “Kid, we have to get out of this place. I get this feeling in the back of neck, like I’m being followed by an unmarked car, ya dig?”

  Chance cast another look out through the entrance into the Mall. The sun had completely disappeared from the sky and the aurora borealis was the only light visible.

  To him, it looked as if the floor of the Mall had been flooded with human blood.

  33

  “How about the batteries on the deactivated Bots,” Lara asked as she accompanied Simon to the entrance. “Couldn’t we use the remaining juice to power one of the cars?”

  “For safety reasons, the power source compartment is impossible to open without the proper equipment,” he explained as he slid open the front door. “And even if we could, the type of current we run on would be completely incompatible with a car.”

  Just as he was about to step outside, Lara took him by the hand. He hesitated a moment, while she rested his hand in hers.

  There was a noticeable quiver that wasn’t there before.

  “Are you okay, Simon?”

  “I’ve sustained minimal damage in one of the lower sub-sections of my CPU. Nothing I can’t repair, given time.” Drawing his hand away, he stepped outside and started to pull the door shut behind him, but Lara blocked it with her arm.

  “Will you be okay,” she asked tentatively. “I mean, seeing the blood again?”

  “I’ll be fine, Lara.”

  “Come directly back.”

  He nodded, pushing her arm firmly inside and shutting the door behind her.

  34

  “You look different,” Cora said as she followed her brother up the carpeted steps to the second level landing.

  Owen held his tongue and waited for her just outside the main sales office, casting a look downstairs at his mother and the other man talking close together at the entrance. He wasn’t sure he trusted him. Something about the guy didn’t sit well with him. At least, Mom seemed to like him, he thought.

  “You’re the same color that you were before. Just a shade darker,” Cora stated, stepping past him down the left-hand corridor leading around to another batch of identical glass-walled sales offices. Cranking the dim beam of the flashlight up to a brighter level, she trained its light on him as she walked backwards down the hallway. “When you were all by yourself out there, you saw him, didn’t you?”

  “Saw who?”

  “The Boogeyman.”

  Owen gave her a look and brushed past her to a set of unmarked double doors with panes of glass set at eye level. He pushed himself up on tippy-toes and trained the beam of his flashlight inside. It was a break-room of some sort set with tables.

  “There’s no such thing.”

  “Mommy told me the same thing,” Cora said, pushing into the room past Owen. “But you
saw it last night and we all just saw it again.”

  “Sorry to be the one to break it to you, Cora, but Grandma’s just crazy.”

  Owen followed Cora into large spacious room lined with four varieties of food and beverage dispensing machines. Two couches and two reading chairs sat in one corner of the room, along with a coffee table cluttered with paperbacks and magazines. A television cowered in the shadows.

  Deflated black balloons and streamers were taped to all the walls and fixtures. A banner adorned with skull and crossbones hung over the entrance reading: “Happy Birthday, Nelson! Still Kicking After 50!!”

  The back wall was composed entirely of solar-sensitive glass, of the type that allowed the occupants to dial-in degrees of opaqueness, allowing filtered sunlight inside during the day. Presently, the glass had been dialed to “full open,” casting the room in an alien red glow.

  Setting her flashlight atop one of the tables, Cora wandered over to one of a pair of refrigerators in the back corner of the room. “Something got that security guard I saw this morning outside of Grandma’s apartment and then it got Grandma too.”

  “You know about the guard,” Owen asked, staring at Cora with interest.

  “I saw him along with Chance’s friend Jesse, last night while I was sleeping. Something got them both, then got Grandma Charley, too.”

  “What are you talking about?” Owen asked in a timid voice, wandering over to one of the food machines and staring through the glass with hungry eyes.

  “There are ghosts in here. Ghosts of people. Ghosts of machines,” Cora said, with blunt sincerity.

  “There are no ghosts. And even if there were, a machine wouldn’t have one,” Owen said. He narrowed his eyes at his baby sister, certain she was using this opportunity of perceived weakness to get back at him. “Machines don’t have souls and they’re not alive.”

  “Mr. Simon’s alive and he’s a machine,” she replied, reaching inside the fridge and pushing aside a couple of Chinese food boxes to peek inside a pizza box. “Look! Pepperoni!”

  “What did Mom say about telling stories?” he sighed, trying a faucet next to the fridge and finding that the water still did not work. He rifled through a drawer below the sink.

  “It’s not a story,” Cora continued. “He looks like a man but he’s really a Bot. He told me so.” She carefully set the box of pizza on the nearest table, then returned to the fridge for a plastic jug of orange juice and a half-eaten chocolate cake, again for 50-year-old Nelson.

  Not sure what to make of this new elaborate fantasy Cora had created, Owen held his tongue. Perhaps, it was just her way of coping with everything that was going on.

  He tore open one of the wet-nap packets he found and handed it to Cora with a smirk. “Wash your hands,” he gently prodded verbally. “You’re filthy.”

  Cora wiped her hands in silence and stared down at the pizza box. “I’m glad you’re my brother,” she said quietly.

  “Yeah, just you keep on talking, Smeagol” Owen snapped, setting his flashlight aside and throwing open the pizza box. “More for me.”

  Still standing, they each grabbed a slice and ate in silence with frozen smiles for the next few seconds. Half-way through the next bite, Owen stopped chewing and stared at his half-eaten slice.

  Cora stopped eating as well. “What?”

  He set his slice down. “When Grandma Charley was taking me here, we passed that pet store again. The one with the chameleons. Remember?”

  Her eyes widening, Cora dropped her pizza down and started for the door.

  35

  When Simon reappeared, he was alone.

  Lara slid open the door, staring at him in blank confusion.

  “She’s gone.”

  Without a word, Lara shut the door behind him. He reached out with his foot, dropped the bar down into the track, and stood looking out.

  “Why don’t you put the children to sleep?” he suggested. “I’ll stay here.”

  Lara lingered a moment, glancing back at Chance helping Dugan out of the sedan. He had found the cap filled with keys again and was pointing to a distant row of cars at the back.

  “You said earlier that something was using my mother-in-law,” Lara commented. “So, if this thing isn’t her, what is it?”

  Simon stared silently outside.

  “Simon?”

  “I have suspected for awhile that this complex somehow augments certain human abilities, allowing for the perception and communication beyond normal capacity.”

  “Simon, what are you saying?”

  “There is a phenomenon in your culture,” Simon began his voice slightly distorted. “I believe it is called a haunting.”

  Lara stared blankly at him, not knowing exactly how to respond.

  Simon’s eyes shifted slightly to glance at Lara before returning to watch the Mall outside. “Perhaps I’m ill-equipped to deal with this situation. I fear I am not operating at full capacity.”

  His previous choice of words had been interesting: “I fear.”

  Lara studied his face as she might study the face of another person to decipher their stress level and she discovered with alarm that she could read anxiety there. Not possible, she decided. I’m reading human emotion into an impassive face.

  Yet she could no longer think of Simon in that way. As a simple machine. Whether she had only invented it within her own mind or not, he was now more than just an automaton following a limited set of commands.

  There was the spark of life in him, and if he had reason to be afraid, she found that she trusted those instincts. Though limited, she would not fault him for that, for hadn’t she once accused herself of having no maternal instincts of her own? The last twenty-four hours had proven her wrong. Call it, fate or on-the-job training, the end results were the same.

  Lara laid a hand on his arm and squeezed. “You’re doing fine by me.”

  Simon gave a nod and glanced again at her, an almost melancholy smile touching his lips.

  A loud noise came from upstairs that sounded like the slamming of a door. Simon and Lara turned to see Cora and Owen running down the steps leading from the second floor level, the ten-year-old, in fact, still chewing something.

  “The animals,” Cora yelled, sprinting across the dealership to them. “We’ve got to save them!”

  Chance’s head shot up from where he stood beside the open driver’s door of a silver convertible. In the sudden silence, Dugan’s curses could clearly be heard inside the cab.

  Lara seized Cora by her shoulders and held her steady as Owen skidded to a stop behind her. “Settle down, you two. What’s all this about?”

  “We forgot about the pet store,” Owen exclaimed. “There are animals trapped inside with no food! I just know it!”

  Lara stroked Cora’s head. “Okay, we need to take a breath here and talk about this.”

  “We have to go and get them before it’s too late,” Cora said with an enthusiastic nod, turning her teary eyes up to Simon. “You promised that we would after we found Owen. You promised. You can’t let them die, Mr. Simon. You’re not allowed to.”

  Lara bit her tongue. Damn the child!

  Simon nodded and turned toward the door. He reached down with the toe of his foot and lifted the bar again.

  “Wait,” Lara said, grabbing his arm.

  “They’re right,” Simon stated, fixing Lara with his eyes. “I must protect all living things from harm.”

  “Maybe there’s a Bot still inside, feeding them as we speak.”

  “Then all that will be wasted is my time,” he responded sliding open the door.

  “You can wait until morning.”

  “They’ve waited far too long already. I can’t run that risk,” Simon answered, stepping outside, turning to close the door back.

  Lara stuck her head out, her eyes reddening. “Don’t leave us again, Be…” A hand flew up to her mouth. She lowered her head, her fingers curling into a fist against her quivering lips.

 
; Simon hesitated, started to reach for her, then stiffened again. “Lara, don’t open this door again until I get back. You understand?”

  “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.”

  Allowing herself to be led by her son, Lara held her hand out to Cora almost mechanically, her eyes fuzzy and distant.

  36

  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.