Authors: Bryant Delafosse
The feet of the Bot stopped moving and for a moment, its eyes
pulsed
a brighter shade of blue.
There was a brief hiss of static within the machines hidden speaker before it began to hum.
“Please head to the north exit,” it exclaimed, the recorded voice amplified in the still, empty space around Chance.
“Please head to the north exit!
Please head..!”
Chance hopped to his feet, turned and made a mad dash up the steps out of the sunken section, casting a look over his shoulder as he ran up the corridor.
The command repeated by the mechanical voice fading as he drew farther away.
When he began to feel that dull ache in his legs, Chance thought distractedly that he could sure use his board right about now, which led instantly to images of Jesse and a renewed sense of disorientation.
As he struggled toward the center of the Mall on wobbly leg
s
, Chance tried to focus on what he would do next.
I need to go north just like we should have when we first heard those security guards, he decided.
I just need to get out of this place and tell the first cop I see what happened to Jesse.
Maybe then I’ll just wake up and have a good laugh about all this.
But in order to do that, he’d have to head back to the Northern entrance, which was one level above the red tram station from where he had just fled.
Back toward that security guard.
And Jesse.
He turned and looked back, but his legs refused to move.
When they finally did, he started and stopped again.
Rushing forward in a burst of confidence,
then
scrabbling backwards to his previous position in fear.
He couldn’t muster the courage to do it.
He was just too afraid.
You worthless piece of shit, he thought, tears of frustration rolling down his face.
You’re gonna die here just like this, running in a circle.
Death by indecision.
He scampered to the bordering wall and peered into the darkness, straining his eyes for any movement.
When he saw none, he slowly crept along the storefronts, feeling like a whipped hound, hugging the border of an enemy’s yard.
Albert used the dropped pin-light to examine the shattered skull-piece of the machine lying between the tracks of the abandoned tram tunnel.
He had discarded his own flashlight an hour ago when he’d discovered that it had been a defective machine unable to fulfill its function.
Feeling oddly disoriented and uncertain how he had gotten down here, he moved the tiny beam over a bit to the right and examined the bright red flower of color covering the teenager’s face, obliterated except for one clear and undisturbed wide eye.
Scattered within the blood were stark white bits, that might have been pieces of the splintered skateboard lying broken beside him or shards of the kid’s own shattered skull.
Every sense he possessed told him that the corpse before him was real.
Of course it looked real, how else would they have passed for machines all those years?
Hey, Hollywood did it all the time and some of that stuff in movies looked pretty realistic!
Albert’s mind seized on the concept like a piece of flotsam passing a drowning man.
He thrust the weight of his entire psyche onto that idea and prayed that it would support him.
Just below the mass of blood and dark hair, shiny with sweet-smelling gel, he thought he could make out something bluish-grey in color.
There!
That’s metal!
Momentarily considering the prospect of examining it closer, he shook his head in revulsion and backed away from the disabled unit.
If anyone were to see him down here with this…
Slowly, his present situation came back to him.
The Mall was abandoned, right?
There was an evacuation, wasn’t there?
Something bad must have happened outside and the Mall was locked-down.
But why exactly did he choose to stay behind instead of leaving with the others?
There was something he had to do.
Some work he had to finish, but what that task was he was having problems remembering.
And who had given him those orders?
Had it been his boss, Jason Marrs?
Why was he having so much trouble concentrating all of a sudden?
He shut his eyes for a moment, took a deep breath, counted to ten in his foggy mind, and let it out.
When he opened his eyes again, he discovered that he was standing at the closed set of double doors marked “Authorized Personnel Only,” a large ring of keys gripped tightly in his right hand.
With utter confusion, he stared down at the keys, still swinging as if from forward momentum.
He felt an icy numb sensation rush up his back.
He glanced over his shoulder offhandedly and was surprised to find a flat-bed cart from the House-Wheres store parked at his heels.
The machine that looked like the kid from the tunnel sat atop the flat-bed, a single wide eye aimed accusingly at Albert.
Albert threw a hand over his mouth, stifling a frightened moan.
How had all this gotten here?
He turned his back on the ghastly image and giving it a wide berth, walked out into the middle of the corridor.
He recognized that he was at the fore-end of Red sector, the familiar scaffold-like structure of the Wheel of Time looming in the shadows above him.
The last thing he remembered, though, was standing in the abandoned tram tunnel over a quarter mile away.
In front of him on the floor, a Red sector Bot lay on its back, its legs still moving up and down as if trying to move forward, unaware of its present orientation.
One eye sensor flickered light blue, while the other was completely dark.
Why the Bot looked so familiar to him, he hadn’t a clue.
Glancing up the corridor, he wondered if he was being watched, if someone was screwing with him and getting a kick out of watching him in this confused state.
He controlled the urge to yell a curse into the darkness.
Instead, he ducked into the open door of the trendy kids fashion store adjacent to the double-doors, the one with all the dark Goth bullshit, and snatched a couple of t-shirts from the nearest display.
Walking back to the flat-bed, he shook the black shirt out and dropped it over the kid’s mangled face.
A grinning skull peered up at him from the front of the shirt, below which read the words “The Misfits.”
What the hell did that mean?
Was it a b-movie or a devil band or something?
Fucking kids and their morbid shit.
He took the other black shirt, reversed it, and draped it atop the first, hiding the grinning skull decal.
There!
He turned back to the double-doors and was confused to see that he was now standing in front of one of the massive incinerators that were in the bowels of the Mall, a couple of levels below the subterranean people-mover platforms.
His stomach did a cartwheel and once again he looked over his shoulder suspiciously.
What crazy ass shit was going on here?
Albert glanced down and was not at all surprised to find the flat-bed with the so-recently departed skater-punk, lying below him.
He nudged the body once with the tip of one boot, feeling the dead weight of it settle to one side.
Albert reached down and took a corner of the dark t-shirt between two trembling fingers. Lifting it up, he looked at the mangled face glistening in the firelight.
Was that blood-stained brain matter or stainless steel?
And maybe that wasn’t blood at all but some sort of Bot-oil or power-steeling fluid or whatever the hell these things excreted.
Not dead, Albert countered defensively.
Deactivated.
As deactivated as this Mall.
He felt the dribble of sweat crawl down his face between his eyes and dribble past his nose.
Not completely.
The incinerators still worked, he thought, swiping a sleeve across his brow.
It was hot as hell down here.
The incinerators in the basement of the Mall of the Nation were half as big as shipping containers, or as Vernon had been fond of saying, “half as big as an Egyptian temple and if that ain’t Tootin’ Uncommon, I don’t know what is.”
Vernon Willowby seemed to have a ready-made joke for every occasion—just like Gillie, his best friend from grade school.
Gillie had been a hoot!
He wondered in passing what had become of Gillie.
Gillie was probably dead, too.
Like his parents.
D-E-A-D.
Not dead.
Deactivated.
D-E-A-D dead.
Dead as a doornail.
“Like a Ford, Found-On-Road-Dead,” as Gillie used to say.
That Gillie was one joke-making machine, he was!
Albert had a sudden brief but powerful desire to talk to Gillie as he stood alone staring at the incinerator before him.
The incinerators converted the tons of garbage generated by those dirty animals that passed as people (
waste-producing machines
) into virtually nothing, reducing the volume by nearly ninety-five percent, the resulting ash carted off in trucks to a solid-waste landfill.
The best part about the process was that the resulting heat and steam was used to supplement the Malls’ energy reserves, some of which was used to power the emergency lighting.
Albert had only been down here twice before.
The first time had been during orientation, the same one where they had explained to all the security trainees the lockdown procedures to be used in case of disasters--a procedure that Vernon Willowby had affectionately called the “Oh shit” initiative.
The second time he’d been forced to come down here was when he had worked the late shift over the Christmas holiday, on one of the few occasions that Marrs had assigned him the acting supervisor position, simply because no one else was available.
That night something had gotten stuck in one of the “tubes” that brought the trash down from the receptacles spread throughout the Mall.
Using the emergency instructions posted along the wall of the basement, Albert had been forced to shut down Central Incinerator #6, disconnect the main tube from the unit, and send one of the heat-resistant micro-Bots up into the maze of duct-work to check things out.
Like everyone else on the job, Albert had heard horror stories of the items customers had sent down the chutes.
One of the stories was that a few months after the Mall opened to the public, the shift officer had dragged out a human leg wrapped in a blanket out of one of the tubes.
There was an extensive investigation conducted by the FBI, assisted closely by the Mall brass, which included the viewing of hundreds of hours of surveillance video but rumor had it that no one was ever convicted.