Untaken

by J. E. Anckorn

  We made a hasty breakfast of tinned fruit and chipped beef. It was a weird thing to have for breakfast, but we were down to our last few tins, and the only other choice was soup, which none of us liked drinking cold, especially the chicken noodle which had the flavor and consistency of a big can of cold boogers.

  Once we got to Brandon’s uncle’s cabin, we’d be able to cook without worrying about anyone seeing the smoke, and the thought of a hot breakfast cheered me up.

  “Dawn raid,” said Brandon. His eyes flicked to the quarter in Jake’s hand and his hand shot up to his face. He pretended like he was rubbing his mouth, but I was pretty sure he was hiding a smile. “We’ll be back on the road by noon.”

  The front doors of the mall were smashed. We ducked through the shattered panes, Brandon in front and Jake in back—reluctant, but keeping his cool better than I’d thought he would. Some of the storefronts inside the mall were shattered too, the glass sprayed across the milky marble floor.

  I moved to flick on my lighter, but Brandon grabbed my arm.

  “Scout it out first,” he whispered. “Looks like folks’ve been in here already.”

  “How do you expect us to scout anything if we can’t see?” I asked, shaking his hand away.

  The light from the entry showed the first few storefronts and the edge of a slimy fountain, but nothing more.

  “Listen a while. Then, if we don’t hear anything, we’ll go in,” said Brandon.

  He made us listen for five minutes; timed it on his watch down to the second, then he shrugged. “I sure don’t hear shit. Let’s do this.”

  I didn’t hear anything either, but the silence made it worse. It was a waiting sort of silence, not a peaceful one. Just past the fountain, there was a mall directory with a cheerful smiley face marking the “you are here” spot. Brandon squinted at it.

  “Let me,” I told him. “You always get mixed up with maps.”

  He looked like he wanted to argue, but I pushed in front of him before he could get going. I studied the map for a minute to get a good picture of the direction we needed to take, hoping to burn it into my memory. Just to be sure, I snagged a couple of guide brochures, which showed the map in miniature, plus a list of the different types of stores.

  There was a coupon for $5.00 off if you spent more than $25.00 at the food court, which would have been a pretty swell deal before the world ended.

  New England Mountain Post was on the ground level of the mall, but it was right at the far end and I wasn’t too crazy about walking all that way in the dark.

  If anyone was in here, they’d be able to see the lighter flame a mile off.

  “Do they have see-in-the-dark type glasses at this place?” I asked Brandon. “Is that even a thing?”

  “Hey, that’s a wicked cool idea,” said Brandon. “We’ll be all Black ops and shit.”

  “Keep it down,” I hissed, as his voice echoed around the atrium.

  “Jeez, I’m complementing you here!”

  “Complement quietly.”

  Jake had started to drift back toward the exit doors again, but when Brandon took his left hand and I grabbed his right, he walked between us docilely enough.

  We could see enough ahead not to run into anything or trip, but the flickering flame of the lighter was very small, and the blackness around us was very big. When I looked back over my shoulder, the doorway to the outside already looked far away. I was glad I’d taken the time to grab the guide brochures. It would’ve been pretty easy to get lost in here.

  As we walked, we could see that more of the store fronts were busted open, and it looked like people might have been camping out here once, although who knows how long ago. A mannequin lay splayed across a planter like a dead body, its head staved in, and its legs blackened and melted. I’d seen so many real dead bodies lately, but somehow the busted up mannequin was worse. Who would bother to do that, and why?

  I pointed out a nest of bed rolls and a scatter of candy wrappers in the doorway of Bertucci’s Restaurant to Brandon, who jerked Jake to a stop.

  Brandon looked nervous and that made me nervous too. Brandon was kind of a goof, but he was brave—in a brainless sort of way.

  “They probably left a while back, right?” I said, cautiously.

  “Maybe, maybe not. Too late to turn back now, either way.”

  I knew what he meant—we needed the survival stuff. But I still didn’t like the way he said it.

  It wasn’t too late. We could turn around and walk out of here any old time we wanted to, and I just had to remember that and not panic.

  “It might be cool if we found other people. Nice people. Like us.” I said. But what I was really thinking of was some crazy guy hidden in the darkness on the upper level of the mall, tracking the three of us through the night-site of a deer rifle.

  Or Drones.

  Brandon shouldered open the automatic doors of a CVS to snag a grocery cart and a few twenty-five packs of Duracell batteries. For the first time, I wondered just how we were going to carry all this stuff to the cabin. If that was part of Brandon’s Big Plan, it was a part he hadn’t mentioned to the rest of us, but I decided I’d worry about that once we made it out of this haunted house of a mall.

  The liberated cart had a squeaky wheel and pulled to the left. Some things never changed. Brandon picked Jake up and plopped him down in the cart, giving him one of the flashlights to hold to light our way, now that we had batteries to spare. I was glad to turn off the cigarette lighter, which was getting hot and uncomfortable to hold. Mom and Dad always told me never to play with—or even touch—lighters or matches, and even though getting a booboo was a seriously pre-Space Man thing for a person to worry about, I still didn’t quite trust the lighter not to blow up in my hand.

  We stuck close to the wall as we walked, so as not to wander off down a branching corridor without realizing it. With a Happy Burger pencil, I marked our progress on the floor plan of the map as we went.

  Our footsteps seemed very loud in the silent corridors, and the cart’s wheels whined an odd little song that sounded like “squee-chickety-squee! squee-chickety-squee!” and set my teeth on edge.

  We found a bench, overturned and blackened with scorch marks. There was a big dried stain nearby that looked unpleasantly like blood.

  “It’s nothing,” said Brandon. “Looters. Or kids messing around. There’s no one here now.” But we stopped and listened again anyway, staring uselessly into the darkness.

  “Nothing,” Brandon repeated after a while. “We’d see their lights. They’d have made contact by now.”

  Again, I didn’t like his choice of words. “Making contact” was what aliens did in the movies. There couldn’t be Space Men here though. There had been no ships for weeks, and there were no people in here for them to be after. It wasn’t like they were going to be chilling in the food court, or shopping for Levis to take back to Alpha Centuri.

  There were people though, I thought unwillingly. There were candy wrappers and beds.

  But they moved on. People can just decide to up and move on without Space Men being involved.

  Brandon thought it was safe. But coming in here was part of Brandon’s Big Plan—would he admit that it was a bad plan even if it turned out that way? Or would he just keep telling us—and himself—that everything was okay, right up until the end? The Mountain Post occupied one whole wing of the Mall, standing at the end of its own forest-green tiled corridor. The door arch was made to look like it was carved from wood, and stuffed deer heads with stern expressions gazed down from either side of the huge shop sign.

  “All your outdoor needs under one roof!” The sign exclaimed.

  This was the place, all right.

  There was a big glass dome in the roof at the middle of the store, casting enough natural light for us to get a sense of the size and layout without having to try to remember what lay outside of the reach of the torch beams.

  Stuffed ducks and geese were arranged as though flying
around the inside dome. It made me think of the time a chickadee got into the sun porch at home, and broke its neck flying against the glass in a panic. There was no need for us to panic though. Everything was going just as Brandon had planned.

  In the center of the pool of sunlight stood a huge stuffed buffalo. A little plaque at his feet gave his name as “Bill,” shot by a Mr. Theodore Ratcliffe in 1967. Jake stood up in the cart on his tiptoes to pet Bill’s coarse fur. I was impressed with how well Jake was handling being inside so long. Was he finally getting better? Maybe he’d been like this back before the Space Men came and he was never going to change, but he’d seemed a little more “here” the past few days.

  “You lean over like that, you’re going to fall out and crack your head open,” Brandon said.

  Jake squatted obediently on his haunches and took out his quarter, turning it over and over in his fingers.

  “Okay,” said Brandon. “Here’s the plan. You take Jake and the cart and pick up the survival shit. First aid kit, compass, maps, anything else you think is gonna be useful. I’ll get us some firepower and we’ll meet back at here at the buffalo and get the cold weather clothes as a group. Got it?”

  The hesitation Brandon had shown out in the mall was gone and he was all business again. “Food, too,” he added.

  “I thought we were going to the Stop’N’Save for food?”

  “Sure, but if you see any survival rations, take ‘em.”

  Oh boy. Eating “survival rations”—which I just knew were going to be some gross kind of moose jerky or something—instead of actual food was just the kind of thing Brandon would insist on doing given the chance, and I resolved not to find any.

  Brandon gave his lame little Commander Lightning signal to move out, and disappeared into the darkness of the store.

  “Be safe,” I whispered.

  But it was going to be okay. There was no one here but us.

  It was going to be okay.

  Brandon

  aybe it had been a dumb idea to split up, but to be honest, the place was giving me the willies, and although I’d been excited about hitting the mall for weeks, now that I was here, I just wanted to get it over with. Splitting up seemed the best way to tackle this mission as quickly as possible so we could get the hell out of dodge.

  The long dark corridors and big empty spaces made me think about the other building we’d been trapped in. And I didn’t mean to think about that place ever again, least of all while we were in here.

  As I walked, the flashlight beam glanced off shelves neatly stacked with bottles of doe piss, and reflective vests that flared and flashed in a trippy way as the beam hit them. Beyond those, were racks of DVDs featuring grinning men standing astride downed bear, moose and elk. The really cool stuff was at the back of the store, and there was some really cool stuff.

  I ran my hand over the smooth curve of a compound bow. It was pretty sweet, but I’d never used one before and it somehow didn’t feel right. There was something kind of romantic about a gun. “The Last Gunslinger” and all that. That’s what Stevie used to say anyway, when he was trying to be charitable about Dad’s ways.

  Stevie’s own dad was a Statistician. No romance there.

  Where was Stevie now? Dead? Chopped into fillet steaks in some green-skinned, alien housewife’s freezer box?

  Another thing I’d be crazy to start thinking on when there was business to attend to.

  When I took a look at the first gun case, my heart sped up and I looked around me wildly. The door of the case hung open, and there were shells spilled across the floor. Someone else had gotten here first.

  A horrible light-headedness overwhelmed me as fear tried to take over, but I was being a doofus. No one was here now, I was ninety-nine percent sure of it. I wasn’t going to faint like a loser.

  Whoever was camped out here, and whoever left behind the bolt cutters and shit they used to open the ammunition cabinets and gun case, had moved on. And when I thought about it logically, they’d done me a big favor, because somehow, it had slipped my mind that the good shit would be locked up. It bothered me for a second that they left their bolt cutters behind, because that’s the sort of thing a person in a terminal hurry might do, but with a whole mall of stuff to pick from, it also made sense that they wouldn’t bother carrying extra kit.

  “It’s fine,” I said out loud. “It’s all just peachy.”

  That I’d started in talking to myself proved I was thinking crazy. I needed to get a grip. If any shit was going to go down, it would have happened by now.

  I looked over the cabinet, spoiled for choice. There was a Winchester M70 like the one Dad had, and I took it, liking the weight of it in my hands. They’d made me leave Dad’s gun behind when they took us to the Center. Having this one wouldn’t be the same as having Dad’s gun back, but it would still put a hurt on anyone who tried to mess with us. I filled the magazine and took as many extra rounds as I could comfortably carry. No need to go overboard, it’s not like we’d need to use the gun much. Probably just for game when we got hungry out there in the woods.

  I thought about snagging a pistol for Gracie to carry, but she’d already told me she didn’t know how to handle a gun, which could prove to do more bad than good. She’d probably end up shooting Jake, or herself.

  The gun was heavy and my arms shook. Just adrenaline. Not fear. No need to be afraid of an empty store. I’d just take it slow and steady.

  Gracie and Jake were already back at the buffalo, Gracie looking around anxiously, and Jake sitting on the hummock of fake grass between the buffalo’s forelegs, the lucky quarter flashing and winking as he turned it over and over in his hands. Gracie gave the gun a mistrustful glance, then grabbed my arm and pulled me away from Jake a few steps.

  “I think there’s someone here,” she whispered.

  “You’re imagining it.”

  “Brandon, I saw something move. We were looking at the books, and I saw something move out of the corner of my eye. It was gone too fast to see what it was.”

  “It was probably just a shadow. A bird flew over the skylight or something.”

  “Maybe,” said Gracie, but she looked unhappy.

  “Why were you looking at books anyway? We’re on a serious mission here.” I told her.

  “I thought they might come in handy, Brandon. You know, some people learn things from books. People who can read anyway.”

  “I can read!” My voice came out louder than I’d intended. “Let’s just get the clothes and get the hell out of here since you’re being such a baby. Come on Jake, quit fooling around with that thing.”

  The cart was heavy now. I had to admit that Gracie hadn’t done such a bad job picking stuff out. There was a shell tent, water purification kits, a chunky first aid box, fire lighting gear in a neat red case, a camping stove, a big spray bottle of bug repellent and a slithery pile of maps of New England. The books weren’t totally lame either. Sure, there were a couple of dorky looking geek books with spaceships on the cover—hadn’t the chick had enough of spaceships yet?—but there were also survival guides, hunting manuals, and even one on small-hold farming. Not that we’d need that.

  The army guys would fix things way before we needed to resort to anything as crazy as trying to grow our own food.

  The clothing section lay outside of the circle of sunlight cast by the dome, so Gracie held the flashlight while I picked out thick down parkas, fur-lined hats and gloves, and stout snow boots for me and Jake, then I took over holding the light while Gracie made her selection.

  “Quit wasting time—it doesn’t matter what color you pick. It’s not a fashion show,” I told her.

  “I’m not looking at the colors,” said Gracie with disdain. “For your information, I’m reading the temperature ratings.”

  Of course she was. Just my luck to get stuck with a nerd and a crazy kid.

  Gracie was fooling with the map of the mall again, as I stuffed the bulky new clothes into the cart.


  “Looks like there’s a service entrance in the corridor by the restrooms just here.” She pointed to a spot on the map. “I bet we could open it from the inside. That way, we wouldn’t have to walk all the way back through the Mall again.”

  I grabbed the map from her, and squinted at the little squiggle she pointed at.

  “How do you know that’s a service entrance? Last thing we need is to get turned around in here because you think you’ve found a magic door.”

  “It’s marked on the key. It’s totally obvious. You just don’t like it when I think of stuff first,” she added, primly.

  “Don’t be a dingus,” I said, my face flushing. “I just want to get the hell out of here. Jake, climb up in the cart, buddy. Let’s get this show on the road.”

  Jake was squatting on the floor, making worried hooting noises under his breath.

  “What’s wrong with you now?” I sighed. “I said get in, already.”

  Jake continued to scrabble around on the carpet, like I was nothing more than a bothersome fly, so I grabbed him under his arms, lifted him up, and dumped him into the cart.

  Jake didn’t cry or scream, but his whole body went stiff with distress. I felt guilty for a second, but the kid needed to mind me.

  “Take it easy, Brandon!” said Gracie.

  “Yeah, great idea, let’s take it easy. Let’s just stay here all night. Hang out with our pal, Bill the Buffalo, and your imaginary boogie men. Jeez.”

  “There’s something wrong with him,” said Gracie, glowering at me, like it was me who was screwing everything up. “What is it, Jakie?”

  Jake waved his arms in the direction of the floor.

  “He’s just seen some shiny crap he wants to pick up,” I told her. “There’s a whole world of useless junk out in the parking lot, little buddy. But,” I added, turning to Gracie, “if you want to hang out here until he learns to talk and tells us what specifically is chewing his ass then be my guest.”