The Mall (51 page)

Charlene Myers-Cartwright began to scream.

A void had suddenly appeared within her where there had so recently been something else.
 
Something with an overpowering motivation.
 
Without that authority, Charlene felt momentarily confused, which was out of character for her.
 
If there was one thing that defined her, she like to think, it was her strength, and when those around her failed to step up and provide direction, Charlene would inevitably take the reins out of necessity.
 
Not one husband, friend, or colleague had ever offered her the sufficient strength to convince her to surrender that control.

Until now.

Now that presence had departed.

And she needed it back!

Owen knew something had happened even before Charlene let go of his hand.
 
All the Bots that they’d followed—a group numbering fully twenty or more by now—halted as a single unit.
 
Some wandered off in a seemingly random direction like sleepers awakened in mid-dream, while others froze in mid-step, some toppling over like off-balance statues.

For an instant, Charlene simply stood next to him, just as still as the disabled machines around them, staring into the empty vastness of the Mall.

Then finally, she exhaled a breath and stammered, “Wh-Where did he go?”

Owen studied her and, after a moment’s appraisal, asked, “Who?”

She gave no indication that she had even heard his question.
 
Instead, she cocked her head slightly and almost seemed to be listening to a voice; one that he couldn’t hear.

Then suddenly he did hear something!

Run!
 
Go now!

It was his sister!
 
He’d know her voice anywhere.

With Chance’s help, Lara stepped out of the SUV amid the pellets of glass and turned a slow circle, gaping at the frozen mechanized figures standing throughout the showroom.

“Run!
 
Go now!”

Lara turned to see Cora still lying on the floorboard of the SUV, her eyes once again rolled up into her sockets, her chest moving up and down with rapid inhalations of her lungs.

Just as Lara was reaching for her, Cora took an enormous breath as if emerging from the surface of deep water and gaped at her mother’s face.
 
“Owen’s coming,” Cora announced with wide excited eyes.

She scrambled up into her mother’s arms, then leaped down onto the carpet past Chance, around the obstacle course of Bots and through the open glass door like a shot from a pistol.
 
Lara rushed after her with Chance close on her heels.

For one fleeting moment when Owen first heard his name, he thought he had imagined the sound, or perhaps he was still asleep and that everything he had experienced since Grandma Charley had found him was simply a fevered dream.
 
The next time he heard it, though, was much more distinct and was all he needed to convince himself that he was indeed awake.

He increased his speed, running as fast as he could down the western concourse toward the sound of the little screaming voice.

“Cora!” he screamed manically, his voice breaking with enthusiasm.

Darting around the occasional body of a frozen Bot, he could see something moving, running, coming slowly closer from about a hundred yards away.

“Owen!”

He could see her clearly now, her wide excited eyes reflecting the dying light of the sun coming from outside.
 
He dropped the last few yards ahead of her and slid into her arms.
 
She was quivering and crying and a moment later, he realized that she had pulled out of his arms and was striking him with tiny coiled fists.
 
He stared in blank shock at her.

Cora, tears in her eyes and her face wound up in an expression of unidentifiable emotion.
 
He reached out to her but she jerked away.
 
“You left me!
 
You left Mommy!
 
Why did you leave!
 
Why!”

Owen tried to speak, but he couldn’t force the words past the lump in his throat or see past
the sting of tears in his eyes.

“Don’t ever do that again, Owen!
 
Ever!”

“I’m sorry,” Owen heard himself mutter.

Owen lunged forward and pulled her back to him.
 
This time he felt her relax against him, her chest wracking with sobs.
 
Over her shoulder, he could see a second figure stumbling as fast as she was able in the footsteps of Cora.

Owen gently pulled away from his sister and rose.

She stopped several yards away and simply stared, her expression cryptic to her son.

Owen stared into his mother’s eyes, remembering the origins of this situation.
 
How he had run away.
 
How, in his mind, he had wanted to cause her as much pain and fear as he could, and he felt shame.
 
Shame and guilt.

Lara looked into the face of her son.
 
His hair was ruffled, his face was covered with black dust, but he seemed intact.
 
He was whole, yet he was different too.
 
There was something in his face that she couldn’t identify.
 
Something she hadn’t seen in so long that it was alien to her.
 
When his lips began to quiver, she realized what it was and pulled him to her chest.

Owen threw himself at his mother and held tightly to her in a way he hadn’t done in over five years, in fact, since his father had abandoned him.

As Owen reunited with his family, Chance hung back in the shadows, glancing down at the dented flashlight in his hand.
 
Not only did he feel that he was intruding on something intimate that he was not meant to see, but he couldn’t deny the feelings of jealousy and guilt.

Why didn’t he stay with the ten-year-old?

Had it been ego that made him walk away?
 
Had it been fear that led him to take comfort in the presence of an adult, no matter how incompetent that adult might be?
 
(By the way, where had Dugan disappeared to, he vaguely wondered?)

Then all rational thought left him as he saw a figure appear just behind Owen and his family.

It was Him.
 
The insane security guard.

He opened his mouth to scream a warning but he found that all the air had evacuated his lungs.

Then he blinked and realized that he had been wrong.

It was simply a woman, and an old woman at that, though the word that he would have applied to most women that age—the word “fragile”—didn’t seem to fit this one.
 
If anything, she appeared quite capable.
 
And something else.
 
Something he couldn’t quite identify but troubled him nonetheless.

“Ah, there you are.”

Lara started and looked up with shock into the face of…

The Witch!
 
The Witch had finally come to finish the job she had begun twenty-two years ago when she was a mere child of seven.

Out of all the people left behind (or intentionally staying behind) after the evacuation, what in the world would this particular woman be doing here?
 
And how could she have found her son after all the searching she and Simon had done over the course of the day.
 
(And what time was it really, she wondered?
 
Though it looked as if the sun were fading, the sky had a strange reddish quality to it that sent a prickly warning feeling up her spine.)

On the heels of that thought, she found herself thinking about Simon again as she had for the good part of an hour now.
 
Are you still alive, she wondered--if what you are could ever have been called “being alive?”
 
But he was, she decided, as good a friend to me and my family as I have ever had (or hoped to have had).

And I never had a chance to thank him, she thought with sadness.

It was the sound of Charlene’s voice that pulled her back to reality.
 
“We were beginning to wonder if you had left the Mall altogether,” the woman said, then began to titter in that polite little way that society women adopt at cocktail parties--the quality they often had when forced to make pleasant conversation with strangers tolerated out of necessity.

Suddenly, Lara felt an enormous anger and revulsion for the woman.
 
For the briefest of instants, she felt as if she had been shoved from behind by two brawny hands.
 
In that moment, she felt disoriented and confused, like she had forgotten who she was and where she was.
 
Almost as if this were all a dream and the reality was that she was still seven.
 
Still living under the same roof as her aunt.
 
Still at her mercy of the crazy woman.

The Witch

But that sharp bolt of hate was followed almost immediately by an enormous sadness and pity for Charlene that drove the first impulsive emotion out into the wings of the stage.
 
She was, after all, just a pathetic old woman with no life left to live and no children of her own.

This thought led directly to an unexpected feeling of guilt and thoughts of Ben.

Still holding her children tightly, one pressed against each side of her, she couldn’t help but feel like a gunfighter in one of those classic black and white westerns that they used to show on Saturday morning TV in her youth.
 
But instead of a pair of six-guns, her weapons were her children, one strapped to each hip.

And with this thought rattling around in her head, the words just slipped out of her mouth, “Shall we draw down on each other, Charley?”

And suddenly she was feeling happy again.
 
Giddy.
 
And she found herself giggling.
 
Uncontrollably.

When Owen began to laugh as well, Lara gaped at him in wonder.
 
She couldn’t honestly remember the sound of her son’s laughter.
 
Oh, that’s how it sounds again, she thought, which spurred forth a deeper level of joy and a second wave of convulsive laughter.