Sycamore 2

by Craig A. Falconer

  They were at a stalemate.

  “What if Joyce comes in the car and Harry follows in the truck?” Minter suggested. “He’s not exactly going to leave her.”

  Val was thinking about it.

  “Or if that’s not enough, what about this,” Minter continued. “Put the handcuffs on Joyce and give Harry the key.”

  Harry looked at Minter with disgust. Kurt was more pragmatic; deranged yet not without logic, this was a textbook Minter idea if ever there was one.

  “No,” Harry said.

  “Now wait a minute,” Joyce chimed in.

  “I said no,” Harry reiterated.

  Joyce ignored him and looked at Val. “How long is the drive?”

  “80 minutes on a good day,” she said, showing no opposition to Minter’s idea.

  “Well, if this is what it takes,” Joyce said. She held out her hands.

  After further assurances from Joyce that she would be fine for a few hours, Harry relented and watched as Val cuffed her hands.

  Val made sure not to hurt Joyce, leaving the cuffs much looser than she ordinarily would have and placing them over a layer of clothing. She then handed the key to Harry and told him to stay within sight of the car at all costs, insisting that she couldn’t tell him where they were going for security reasons.

  Kurt felt oddly at ease as Val tied his hands together with a piece of cord and fastened his seatbelt. In a way, he hoped that she would be typical of the rest of the resistance. She had proven competent and composed in a situation for which there could be no effective training, thinking on her feet and remaining open to suggestions. Unwavering but no firmer than necessary — as evidenced most clearly by the care she took when handcuffing Joyce — Val did what she had to do; no more, no less. There was a professionalism in the way she carried herself which bode well for the challenges ahead.

  ~

  The hand-ties made this the most uncomfortable leg yet in what was becoming an increasingly arduous journey, but Kurt took comfort from the fact that it would also be the last. And having spent so long in the back of Randy’s truck, he was just glad to be surrounded by windows.

  Many of the sights outside drew comment from Kurt and Minter, and Val didn’t enforce her No Talking policy unless one of them dared to ask her a question.

  Kurt wasn’t stupid enough to think Val was letting them chat out of the kindness of her heart; he knew that she was listening intently, trying to extract background information from their idle observations. Because Kurt knew this, he chose his words carefully and steered Minter away from any discussion that might lead to her learning of the hacked Lenses or the Two-Way. Until he was face to face with Ernesto, Kurt wanted to keep his cards as close to his chest as possible.

  This was the first time since leaving the city that Kurt or Minter had seen the outside world during the day, and the unaugmented warts-and-all reality around them was a frequent topic of conversation.

  Almost every physical billboard had been defaced by anti-Sycamore individuals, some of whom had evidently put in more wit and effort than others. Such individuals could be thought of as urban artists, protestors, vandals, agitators, radicals, criminals, or even terrorists; like so much else, it all depended on who you asked.

  Kurt’s favourite piece of ad-killing graffiti came near the beginning of the drive when they passed through a run-down residential area inconveniently located between Barnford Park and the highway. The words “IF YOU CAN AFFORD THIS, YOU DON’T LIVE HERE” had been scrawled in bold red capitals above a picture of an admittedly attractive luxury watch. This amused Kurt on some pointlessly rebellious level, but it was the message underneath the picture that really made him smile: “P.S. IF YOU CAN READ THIS, WELL DONE.”

  Even more esoteric was the multi-line message neatly stencilled on the wall of a derelict pawnshop: “Sycamore = Amos // Amos = Soma // Same Old World.”

  As the car turned out of the street, Kurt caught a glimpse of a detailed artwork which took up the entire side wall of the same pawnshop. A large stickman lay slouched in a desert, surrounded by cacti and vultures. The stickman loosely gripped a dirty needle in his right hand while the palm of his left dripped with blood. The bright red blood provided the only colour in the entire artwork, and the stickman wore a smiling pig mask to complete the picture. No words were necessary. Kurt wished he had been able to look at the artwork properly and thought it was the kind of thing that people would buy as a poster. He especially appreciated the nod to Happy Pigs, the painfully inane app that had so annoyed him when the Seed first launched.

  “Did you see that painting?” Kurt asked.

  “Yeah,” Minter said. “Too bad no one else will.”

  The houses and stores soon gave way to open highway. Before setting off with Minter, Kurt had never in any of his 24 years crossed a single state line. He had, in fact, only been outside of his home city a handful of times, mainly to visit his parents after they moved upstate. This background made Kurt take for granted the ability to travel by foot or hop on a bus to get wherever he had to be, and the monotony of the highway really brought home to him just how much distance there was between places that looked relatively close together on a map.

  Eventually — mercifully — Val exited the highway. Kurt checked to see if Harry was still close behind. He was.

  The length of the drive, though frustrating, was reassuring. The distance between Barnford Park and wherever they were going meant that no one could find them even if they had the mail locker’s address.

  A faded sign welcoming them to an “exciting new housing development” called Verdant Heights greeted the group shortly after the interchange. Kurt fruitlessly searched the area for evidence of a single hill or tree and could only conclude that words now officially meant nothing.

  The ground was marked where individual houses were supposed to be but there was no sign of any construction machinery, much less the houses themselves.

  “Where are the houses?” Joyce asked, taking the words from Kurt’s lips.

  “They ran out of money before they broke ground,” Val explained.

  “How long ago was that?” Kurt asked, assuming that the moratorium on questions had been lifted.

  Val met his eyes via the rearview mirror. “No questions,” she said.

  Verdant Heights covered a ridiculously vast area. No cars had passed in the opposite direction for several minutes and Harry’s was the only other vehicle in sight. Kurt couldn’t help but wonder exactly where the road would lead, or whether it would even lead anywhere.

  Perhaps the mall was a red herring? Perhaps the resistance was based in a model home converted for their purposes… perhaps Verdant Heights wasn’t completely uninhabited… perhaps Verdant Heights was this drawn-out journey’s ultimate destination?

  But no.

  The car passed a sign facing in the other direction, and when Kurt turned to read it he saw that it too was there to welcome drivers to Verdant Heights. Dusty wasteland lay on both sides of the road.

  A mile or so later, Kurt saw the road up ahead widen. As the car continued on, he realised that he wasn’t looking at the road but rather a section of parking lot. Val drove towards it.

  A giant silver archway came into view. Curved like a rainbow, it read: “La Plethora Mall & Resort”.

  “No way,” Kurt said. He turned to Minter, who was staring straight at the arch, his mouth open in shock. “There is no way…”

  “Oh yes there is,” Val said, grinning. She told them that she had to step out of the car for a second to disarm a hidden alarm that would sound inside if she didn’t enter the correct code. She didn’t explain where “inside” was, but Kurt and Minter knew. They could scarcely believe it, but they knew.

  Kurt was light on the details, but he recognised La Plethora as the name of a hugely ambitious retail and leisure development which had stalled during the financial crash and was officially abandoned just months before its planned opening.

  La Plethora had been
the kind of project normally found only in oil-rich Gulf states, laughing in the face of utilitarian architecture and taking pride in its own ostentation.

  He knew this because the sudden abandonment of such a high-profile project had been a major national news story, not least because construction was almost entirely complete. But the failure of a mall, however unique, became a total non-story when the too-big-to-fail banks began to collapse in spite of that arrogantly self-assigned moniker. And by the time entire European countries were declaring bankruptcy, La Plethora was all but forgotten.

  Protracted disputes over ownership of the land and who had been responsible for the project’s failure continued for a while away from the media’s gaze. As far as Kurt knew, nothing had ever been concluded. And so, years later, this gargantuan structure in the middle of nowhere still lay empty.

  Well, almost empty.

  ~

  Val got back in the car after disarming the alarm. Kurt had questions — a thousand of them — but right now his attention was focused on the mall as the structure revealed itself before his eyes.

  The front of the mall was a staggering and intimidating sight, one part futuristic prison complex and one part fairytale castle. Kurt couldn’t wait to see inside.

  Val drove across the huge parking lot, stopped right beside the building, and wasted no time in getting everyone out. Standing in the sprawling parking lot gave Kurt a real sense of scale; it was truly gargantuan. There were letters on poles to help shoppers remember where their cars were parked. The pole nearest Val’s car said NN2 but she had parked on a walkway directly next to the mall rather than in one of the marked spaces. Those spaces, however many hundreds or thousands there must have been, showed their age in the form of cracking concrete and peeling paint having been offered no protection against years and years of baking sun. The ground immediately around the marker posts had been reclaimed by grass, which did its best to spread across the vast concrete expanse, seeding wherever the slightest gap presented itself.

  Harry parked his truck right behind Val’s car. He rushed to embrace Joyce and unlocked her loose cuffs. Val took them back.

  “I’m going to have to bind your hands until we get inside,” she told Harry. He huffed and puffed but held out his hands without any real protestations.

  Val then asked Minter for his hands, too. He didn’t know why, but he held them out. Val began to loosen the cord binding his hands.

  “Why does he get out?” Harry asked.

  Val ignored the question. When Minter’s hands were almost free, she closed the metal handcuffs around them.

  “Aaaah!” Minter yelled. “What the hell? Why am I in handcuffs?”

  “I only have three cords,” Val explained. “And I don’t like you.”

  Val finished the job by walking over to Joyce and gently tying her hands together with the cord that had been around Minter’s.

  “There are two rules,” she said. “Rule one: from now on, no one says a word until we see Ernesto. Rule two: when we see Ernesto, you do what he says.”

  No one argued. For his part, Kurt was glad that Ernesto seemed to be in total control. It pleased him that Ernesto was in charge because as the older brother Stacy looked up to he was bound to be tenacious and valiant, and more generally it relieved him that someone was in charge because he knew that every group needed a strong leader.

  Val positioned her charges in two lines; Kurt and Minter side by side, with Harry and Joyce immediately behind them. All four had their hands tied behind their backs like prisoners but they weren’t tethered to each other. Val asked them to start walking and stayed well to the side of the group, watching their every step like a hawk-eyed prison warden.

  “How long has this place been empty?” Joyce asked as she looked at the mall’s still-sparkling exterior.

  Val ordered everyone to stop. “Listen: when I said no more talking, I meant it. It’s very important that you don’t speak to anyone until Ernesto decides how we’re going to deal with this.” She made a point of looking at Kurt, evidently thinking that he was the most likely to break this rule. “Is that clear?”

  He replied with an exaggerated slow nod.

  Val waved a hand for them all to resume walking. After just a few paces, she stopped them again. “You know what? Don’t even look at anyone. Ernesto won’t be anywhere near this entrance, so just keep your heads down and don’t engage with anyone who is. Understood?”

  “Am I allowed to say yes?” Kurt asked. “Or would that count as engaging?”

  Minter snickered under his breath. “Good one, man.”

  Val leaned in close to Minter until their noses almost touched. His grin faded. “Oh, I would smile while you can,” she said. “I would smile while you can.”

  Kurt couldn’t see Minter’s face for his hood, but his head hung low to the ground like a guilty dog’s.

  Val turned to Kurt. “And you. You’re a guest. Act like one.”

  Kurt was used to his mouth getting him into trouble, so he fought the urge to say something stupid; while the juvenile part of his brain was torn between saying “sir yes sir” in an army voice and “must… not… engage…” in a robot voice, the mature part managed to keep his head down as instructed and take his rebuke quietly.

  “Get walking,” Val barked. They did.

  Kurt and Minter hesitated as they neared the sliding doors but, to their surprise, the doors opened automatically when they got close enough. Kurt briefly looked at Val and almost asked her where the power was coming from. Her expression dissuaded him from doing so.

  Then, with a thousand questions in his mind and his eyes firmly on the floor, Kurt crossed the threshold into La Plethora.

  8

  La Plethora’s glass roof was extremely high and the walkway between the stores on either side was as wide as any outdoor street Kurt had ever seen. So much natural light came in through the roof that he could easily have believed he was still outside.

  The first thing to catch Kurt’s eye was unmissable: a monorail which ran from one end of the mall to the other. There was no carriage — at least none that he could see — but a stairway to his left led up to a kind of loading station. The concept of an indoor monorail struck him as absurdly decadent until he looked more deliberately into the distance and realised that he couldn’t see the other end of the building. He made a mental note to ask someone exactly how big La Plethora was just as soon as he was allowed to talk.

  This grand entrance alone gave Kurt a strong flavour of La Plethora’s opulence. It was a peculiar kind of opulence; a full-hearted but half-finished opulence like nothing Kurt had seen before. The floor was marble, white down the middle and gold along the paths beside the stores on either side. The huge central walkway was empty but for the monorail running overhead.

  Around 40 metres in, Kurt spotted someone coming out of a store on the right. More importantly, the man saw Kurt’s group and ran over for a closer look.

  Kurt kept his head firmly to the ground and let his hood do the rest.

  “You brought in four new people?” the man asked Val. “Does he know?”

  Val shook her head. “Go and get him.”

  “He doesn’t know? Ohhhh… somebody’s in trouble,” the man grinned. He sounded young; younger than Kurt.

  “Just once, Ty,” Val said through gritted teeth, like a stern and impatient teacher. “Just this once, do what I say.”

  Minter immediately broke protocol, lifting his head to confirm that the Ty who Val was talking to was indeed Tyler Kennedy, the internet celebrity who had turned Amos down and been recruited by Ernesto. Kurt’s head stayed where it was supposed to be, but he deduced from Ty’s sudden intake of breath that he had already recognised Minter.

  Ty now looked more carefully at the rest of the group. Harry and Joyce were too old to hold his attention, but the other man in the hood was a mystery. “Who are you with?” he asked Minter.

  “Just get Ernesto,” Val pleaded. “He’s still at the co
mputers.”

  Ty ignored her again. “I’m talking to you, scumbag,” he growled at Minter. “Who’s your friend?”

  “It’s Kurt,” Minter replied immediately, hoping this might curtail the growing animosity on Ty’s face since his own bound hands would have offered no protection should Ty’s anger have turned physical.

  A hesitant grin spread across Ty’s face. “Shut up.” He turned to Val. “Who is it really?”

  “I’m only going to tell you one more time,” she said. “Get. Ernesto.”

  “Tell me who is it first.”

  Fed up of the same old nonsense and waiting around, Kurt raised his head. “It’s me, alright? Just do what she said.”

  Ty stood in a state of shock, far more animated in his surprise than Harry and Val had been in similar situations which already felt like forever ago. Kurt had been correct in thinking that Ty sounded young; with his boyband hair and wide blue eyes, he didn’t look a day over 20. Ty was dressed scruffily, not unlike Kurt, but he didn’t have the excuse of having spent the past two days in the same clothes while sitting uncomfortably in various vehicles.

  “So you didn’t actually get kidnapped?” Ty asked Kurt.

  Kurt shook his head.

  “Ty…” Val said.

  “Okay, okay, I’m going.”

  “Only mention Kurt,” she said, “and only to Ernesto. And don’t come back with him. Is that clear?”

  “C-c-c-c-clear,” Ty said. He winked at Kurt and jogged away. In the few seconds that Kurt had known Ty, he had already displayed a good range of the exaggerated facial expressions and annoying vocalisations that Kurt imagined would be common among the small population of attention-loving young people who earned their living making videos on the internet. Or had done, at least, before Amos bought them all out.

  The momentary silence brought about by Ty’s departure was almost immediately broken by his excited voice shouting into the distance as he went. “Lisa! Where are you?” … “Val found Kurt Jacobs!”