by Josh Lanyon
His light had toyed with the dark, coming a hairbreadth away from us, then sweeping the glass carpet and the falling ceiling and the stalactite, but never touching our hidey-hole. There was a slim chance he intended to scare us into panicked action. Smoking us from our hole, as it were.
I chanced another look at Jonah. Stock-still and poised to spring. Confident and capable. That’s what I saw in him. Duty-bound. He possessed the noble ability to fend for himself, protect others under his care, and never shy away from the hard task ahead. Teacher, EMT, athlete, role model—the action hero everyone hoped to be.
He’d saved my life.
A high-pitched whistle pierced the air, puncturing the tension holding us. One hundred and ten decibels, and the sound brought Jonah’s gaze to mine, a hint of relief in his face.
Poor Carl’s head whipped against the wall.
The flashlight cut, and from deep within the mall’s catacombs, a Nitecore NWS10—the team’s go-to—piped two more, short, clean, beautiful notes. Tooooot. Toooooot.
Rendezvous.
One of our friends called us to gather. They must have believed the area was safe enough to enter, despite the shooting. Or, they were creating a diversion because they knew we were cornered. Or they had no clue about our circumstance and were still playing the game.
Whichever, the whistle worked magic, and the shooter called into the store again, not quite so carefree. “Don’t you go anywhere, Slim Shady.”
That asshole trotted hulkingly back the way he’d come, slapping through water as we waited, and when the sound of his tip-tappy shoes faded, Carl wilted next to me, a whoosh of air escaping him. “Shit.”
Here’s some useless trivia. Our villain wore dress shoes. Not sneakers or loafers. Hard-soled shoes. Damn dapper of him, considering the water. Also, his reference seemed dated.
Carl appeared sickly and ready to vomit, but we couldn’t waste time nursing him. We needed him quiet, moving in the same direction, and close, otherwise he would be a liability, or worse, he could be lost forever.
I’d checked in with Jonah about his health, so I figured we needed to do the same with Carl. “Did you get hit?”
He shook his head, muttering, “Only with a hammer.”
I blinked. “What?”
“Jesus,” Jonah swore under his breath. “Where? Show me.”
The kid swallowed and touched his left thigh. “I’m okay. He hit me with a fucking hammer when he smashed my phone. Hurt so bad. He has tools. Like for building shit. Straight out of Saw or…something. I don’t watch those. And I don’t think he wanted to break anything, or he would have. I’m okay. I can run.”
I said, “I guess so. You ran faster than me, and that’s something.” The kid must have had a bruise the size of a dinner plate. “You good to move now? Because we need to.”
“Yeah. I’m good. Let’s go.”
Jonah led the way, opening the door, which swung in instead of out, making our exit awkward. No shock, as the place had to be almost four decades behind code, and clearly nothing would be easy.
Case in point, when Jonah shut the door behind us, it latched, locking us onto our new path—and absolute darkness. No choice other than to move forward.
Fine. Good riddance to the coffin room. I squared my shoulders and located my flashlight. The handy gadget had power and didn’t bleed much, so a tight, narrow, direct beam illuminated the corridor.
Jonah spoke from beside me. “I’m starting to believe this place is cursed.”
“That’s fair.” Seriously. “I can buy cursed, but is it haunted?”
“We’re about to find out.”
Carl’s soft voice lanced the banter. “Yeah. I spent the night here. It’s definitely haunted. I’d always heard things about this place—about people going missing and crazy stuff—but after last night, I think it’s all true.”
I wouldn’t correct him. His very presence added truth to the legend.
My flashlight found a merry red lacquer and green plastic upholstered Santa sleigh. “Well, there’s nothing scary here.”
No shit. Ho ho ho. Not the expected dangerous or disgusting obstacle introducing us to the service hallway. Only the ghost of Christmas past. The sleigh sported gilded runners and a nest of faux Christmas holly that were in jolly good shape.
We found more holiday decor and, chock between a forest of artificial Christmas trees, a jumbo pumpkin, and about a hundred pastel basketball-sized Easter eggs were rolling office chairs, paper litter, and a long series of doors.
Cool.
We’d entered at the far end of a corridor housing the mall offices and security and whatnot. The thick must of mold spores scented everything. I would have put money on cold air killing mold, but again, all bad things were possible in Parkway Mall, and my sinuses agreed.
Following the hall would circle us back to the arcade, the food court, and the center of the mall. We were either stuck crossing the neutral zone again to find our OG entrance, or we could simply try the exit door directly next to me.
I pushed experimentally on the bar and received a squawk of protest. Of course it wouldn’t budge. Chained from the outside. Locked. Barred. Boarded up. Impassable. Witchcraft or black magic or bad luck or destiny, whichever, all the signs read the same thing: You Shall Not Pass.
If only we had a wizard.
Or an ax.
Or just a goddamn cell phone to call for help.
We hadn’t taken a step, and I turned to Jonah. “You know what? We need to listen to Chris more. Really.”
He poked at a sprig of holly, which crackled with age. “I was thinking the same exact thing. We can take turns mea culpa-ing.”
Carl breathed in my ear, “Who’s Chris? What are you guys talking about?”
“Chris is our friend. And we’re talking about pride,” Jonah answered.
“Spot on.” I mean, why didn’t we ever listen to him? He was such a senior citizen about safety, true, but maybe we needed someone to state the obvious and hold us accountable. Maybe we could lower ourselves enough to take a few basic precautions. We spent all our hours on the job hemmed in by rules and lesson plans and procedures and guidelines and the school board and laws and, oh God, parents. Among our group were two emergency responders. Yet come Friday, we shucked off responsibility and acted as if we were invincible.
With thirty staring me in the eye, I needed to act more like an adult. I could get hurt. We all could. I owed Chris a thousand apologies.
First, I’d have to find him.
Jonah nudged me. “Hey, you with the light. Time to roll.”
“Right.” Woolgathering must be a symptom of concussion or stress.
We navigated the field of Easter eggs and Christmas trees, checking a small, suffocating, windowless room. No exits within, only a jumble of broken equipment. A fax machine. An ancient desktop chopped into pieces. Overturned file boxes and about a million paperclips. Graffiti, paintball, rodent turds. That’s what room number one contained. The empty husk of a snack machine slept on its side, blocking the door.
The fire extinguisher, hose, and ax were unaccounted for in their emergency receptacle.
What a bleak place the hall must have been to work in, with no natural light, and white tile on white walls with mottled white ceiling tiles and white fluorescent fixtures. No-frills. The remaining furniture had once been solid white molded plastic. Of course, now everything was coated in graffiti, and dots of black mold plastered the drop ceiling. The fungus ombreyed everything.
Jonah grilled Carl as we crept along. Volume low, he used the teacher voice, firm and clear and authoritative. You’d think I wouldn’t be into that particular tone. You’d be wrong. “Any info you have would be helpful to us. Is he operating alone? What kind of weapons does he have? What does he want? Anything you can tell us.”
Carl breathed, “He’s got a heap of shit in a store, right near where I fell, but it doesn’t matter. We just need to get out of here. One of the doors has to be unlocked
, or we wouldn’t be inside in the first place. We could break a window maybe. Or climb to the roof.”
I avoided an overturned office chair, Carl practically burrowed inside my pocket. “The window count in this hallway so far is nil. And if you find one not boarded over or covered in bars, then great, we’ll try it. After we find our friends. How are you at climbing?”
“I can outclimb you old fucks.”
“Maybe.” I conceded he was small and agile, but he struck me as impulsive. Call me crazy. “How much do you weigh? Most of the roof is spent, and the skylights are hanging by a wire at best or gone completely. You look pretty light, though.”
Jonah added, “Someone petite could get up there. Like Piper.”
Exactly. She weighed about a hundred pounds and could Spiderman her way to an atrium window. Upper-body strength, flexibility, and leg power the hallmark of her athleticism. “Maybe she’s outside already.”
“Hold on to that hope.”
We passed an empty janitor’s closet. Not even a mop left.
Out of the blue, Carl threw, “I think I remember you. You’re teachers, right? At Hanover? You had my sister a couple years ago. Sam Halpern.”
Halpern. Halpern. “No. Sorry. Doesn’t ring a bell.” Another door, another disgusting mess.
“I was talking to him.” Carl nodded toward Jonah. “The science guy.”
I snorted and aimed my light toward Jonah, who squinted thoughtfully. If we were in a normal situation, I’d have thought he was cute. Truth? I thought he was cute anyway. “Blonde. Glasses. Short. Eighty-seven average. Good student. Looked like you.”
Holy…he pulled her right out of his hat. Was he bullshitting? I could hardly remember the names of the students in my current classes. He caught my impressed expression, saying humbly, “I have a good memory.”
“Damn. I guess so.”
Carl said, “You’re like a fucking robot.”
Jonah’s smile dissolved, and we soldiered on.
There were obstacles everywhere and the going slow. Jonah had a light in his pocket, I knew, but two lights would be overkill. Yes, the area felt safe, and we were in a sealed corridor. Even the perpetual dripping lay beyond this space. But silence didn’t mean our light wouldn’t create a soft glow and alert the hard-soled guy holding the gun. So we picked our way with the one light.
Mold clung to the ceiling fixtures, every fluorescent tube black. I wouldn’t whine, though my head throbbed as we searched for an exit. Whether from the abundance of spores or from whacking my skull or from listening to Carl unravel, I didn’t know.
As he grew more undone, suggestions fell like prayers. “This is a good place to hide. I think we can fit under that desk. That’s what they say to do. Let’s stop. Where are we going? We should hide here.”
A bit of mental fortitude on my part and careful footwork for all of us, and we neared the bend. Creeping, tall shadows painted the walls.
Jonah stopped at the doorway to the canteen.
“Wait,” he said and fished in his pocket. He produced his mini light, so I cut mine. “Let me check this out.”
He straddled a pile of kindling which, in a former life, had been a ping-pong table. His flashlight swept the short, squat room, finding discarded packages of long-eaten food on the floor, probably devoured by animals and humans alike. And on a shelf, a lone can of SpaghettiOs sat spoiling.
Carl hovered. “What’re you doing? Can’t we barricade ourselves in here with the food and wait for help? I haven’t eaten since that sandwich.”
“The food here will kill you. So that’s a no.”
“Oh my God. Why are you guys being so stupid? We need to hide.”
As if our evening wasn’t hellish enough, Carl reverted to what I suspected was his default mode: sour teen.
Jonah unearthed a narrow box from the pile of debris. “We can hide and hope—that’s what it’s called—but your guy knows where we are. He’s—”
“He’s not my guy,” Carl snapped. “He killed Ricky. He pretended he was going to shoot me half a dozen times. He hit me with a hammer, and he put a gun to my fucking forehead while I ate cheese. He called me a mouse. He’s a psycho.”
Mouse.
Shit. Right. Not a sour teen. A traumatized person who needed my help.
Jonah opened the box. “Yes. He is your guy. He’s looking specifically for you.”
“No. He’s our guy now.” Carl stuffed his hands in his sweatshirt pocket and hunched into himself. “And if he knows where we are like you say, then he’s going to find us.”
As he attempted to make himself into the tiniest target in the hallway, which was smart, Jonah—out of freaking Mars—Jonah asked him, “What do you know about ping-pong balls?”
There are some obscene answers to that question, so I zipped my trap and hoped for the best.
Carl’s gaze flicked to Jonah. “What. The— What?”
Jonah continued mildly, “Ping-pong balls.” His light fell on the box. “They’re made from a composite material containing nitrocellulose, which is…?”
Jonah paused expectantly, and Carl’s expression turned murderous. “You gotta be fucking kidding me.”
I could have defused the situation before Carl launched Jonah into orbit or vice versa, but Carl surprised us both. “It’s an explosive. They ignite fast. Firefighters use them to control burns.”
Jonah sent him a gold-star smile. “That’s right. Plastic explosives are made from nitrocellulose.” Science class with Mr. Theroux could have been better timed, but he’d redirected Carl—and we discovered Carl was smarter than he looked. Both were a plus. Jonah shook the box of ping-pong balls, and, to be honest, I expected an explosion. “We may be able to use these.”
“Or we can hide,” Carl countered. “Hiding sounds good.”
“Nope.” Jonah moved deeper into the room, treading through rubble. He did a quick search of the kitchenette drawers.
I strained to hear any hint of movement from around the bend, and a rush of profound urgency hit me hard. We’d been taking too long, searching, chatting, flashing our light, and beyond us the mall remained supremely, unnaturally, deathly quiet. Not a peep except our hushed conversation. If the shooter knew the mall as well as I suspected, we were fucked. “Find anything?” I asked Jonah.
“Unless we can fence our way to freedom with plastic knives and coffee stirrers, we’re out of luck.”
Carl sweated beside me, his head barely reaching my shoulder, and were it not for his shaggy goat beard and tragic tattoo, I would have pegged him for thirteen or fourteen tops.
He’d been through an ordeal, he had toughed things out, and he was only a kid. I refused to be a dick. I said for his benefit as well as mine, “We need to do the right thing and help our friends.”
Carl clenched his fists, and then surprised me by shoving his sleeve to his elbow. There wasn’t much light, just enough to see an unexpected, grotesque bruise covering his wrist and forearm. “He did this to me. I got away once. He’s not going to give me a second chance.”
“I won’t let anything happen to you.” I hoped I sounded more confident than I felt.
“Sure. Right.” He slumped and wiped his nose again. His lip protruded. “Goddamn it,” he choked. “We’re walking dead.”
“No. We’re not. And we can’t stay here, because this is a trap.”
“You’re both mental. You can’t make me go with you.”
“Sure we can,” Jonah said, gingerly opening the last paint-splattered cupboard and exposing a few Styrofoam cups and a jar of non-dairy creamer. He shook the container, then tossed it to me. “There are three jars in the teachers’ lounge that have been there since before I started.” Jesus, he was chatty. “My grandmother had the same container for as long as I can remember. She gave it to people she didn’t like. Save that.”
I tucked the creamer into the bag—Carl’s former head sack—and the kid balked. “What the hell? My actual blood is on there, and who knows who else’s.”
It did feel crusty. “Hey. We need to use what we have.”
“This is insane. You guys want to meet your people, and I get it. I do. I mean, if we were dealing with a drug dealer or whatever, he’d have bounced by now and we could go on our way and have fucking tea with the Queen and your friends. He wouldn’t like, linger. Or, he’d have a second with him and I’d be dead already.” His words spilled together. “But he’s-not a drug dealer. He’s-not connected. He’s-not even a normal criminal.” Like himself, he didn’t have to add. “I told Ricky the guy’s cruising and he’s-a fucking nutjob. I said so. I said, hard pass. And Ricky called me a whiny little bitch, so I got in the car.”
Ricky should have listened to his friend.
Pot, kettle. I was in league to receive my own Darwin Award for not taking the sage advice of a cautious friend.
Jonah searched the last cupboard, the one under the sink. “What’s your point, Carl?”
“My point? Do I even need one? Oh my God. That dude isn’t normal. He planned something nasty for me. And not sex stuff, because he would have done that shit already. He’s like living here. He had clothes. He was set up.”
“Where you fell?”
Carl nodded. “Right up there. I didn’t get far. I could see a little. It doesn’t matter, though. I’m not going back. We need to run or hide until help arrives. That’s what you fucking teach us in school. You know this. And, I told you, I’m not the first person he’s brought here. He said as much. But I’m going to be the first to leave.”
In the dull light, despite the cool air, Carl’s face shone with sweat. On top of everything else he’d experienced, he’d been two days without drugs. I wasn’t sure which flavor he self-medicated with, but something.
“Well, we can’t leave our friends.” Maybe if I repeated it a thousand times, he’d hear me. “And we’re not leaving you.”
So the shooter wasn’t a random kidnapping psycho. He was a possible serial killer. Great. He was still an asshole.