LIBERTY, IOWA
T
he management company that ran Liberty Mall had a problem: as the recession dragged on, people were choosing to spend their money on things like mortgage payments and heat rather than high-end TemperFoam pillows. That left a lot of inventory on the shelves, which was even more useless to the sellers than it was to the buyers. They had to make room for the shiny new stuff coming for the holiday season, and their storerooms were still clogged with leftovers from the spring lines. People visited the Mall, but they weren’t buying anything. The place was turning into a museum, or worse, a city park. People even brought their own lunches.
The managers held a meeting with representatives of all the stores, including execs from the national chains that anchored the Mall. They offered an idea that would increase foot traffic and clear out the surplus: a one-day sale, involving every store and restaurant, the biggest sale in America for the biggest mall in America. (Sure, sure, Liberty wasn’t exactly the biggest mall, but that was just a detail.)
The retailers were skeptical. The whole thing smelled a little desperate, like the reek of the items laid out on blankets at a swap meet. And the discounts being suggested—fifty percent in most cases—those were brutal. Even kids in the third world had to be paid something to make this stuff.
Liberty’s managers held firm. They needed a big event before Thanksgiving, or they were looking at reducing the Mall’s hours. The food courts, the concession stands, the movie theater, the kiddie rides—the places that depended on visitor numbers—were all running in the red, or close to it.
The retailers balked again, and the managers brought out the secret weapon. They’d been covertly surveying in-store sales, by monitoring the high-speed fiber-optic lines in and out of the Mall. They’d found a disheartening twenty-nine percent of credit-card purchases were being declined at the registers. People weren’t just running out of cash; they were out of credit, too. If the stores didn’t do something drastic, they’d be looking at a ghost mall, and nobody wanted that.
Faced with the hard truth (after the predictable sputtering about privacy and corporate secrets), the retailers caved. One day only. An event, never to be repeated, that would break all sales records. They could sell that to their shareholders. The doors would open early, at midnight on November 1. People would be encouraged to camp out in the parking lot. There would be prizes, TV coverage, T-shirts.
It would all kick off the night of Halloween: a one-time-only “Great Monster Sale.”
It worked better than even the Mall’s managers hoped. Shoppers lined up outside the Mall’s main entrance days in advance. Some fights had even broken out. News copters flew overhead like flies above a corpse, shooting endless footage of the crowds, waiting on the potential riot.
For the most part, however, people were cheerful. Tourists came from as far away as Japan. The parking lot was full of tents and RVs and cars. Three of the surviving members of Night Ranger played their hits and assorted oldies from an outdoor stage.
Kids ran around in Halloween costumes. Mall employees handed out candy while their parents drank cider and ate doughnuts. There was a kind of state-fair feeling in the air.
CADE AND TANIA walked among the throngs of people gathered at Liberty Mall. In his Armani suit, Cade stood out more than she did. Several people complimented her on her “really cool” and “sexy” vampire costume.
“See?” she said to Cade. “
I
look like a real vampire.”
“Yeah, like that chick in
Underworld
,” one girl, maybe fifteen, said to her. “You know, maybe a little bigger than her, but . . .”
Cade held Tania’s hand tightly, to keep her from punching it through the girl’s skull.
“Enough,” he said. “We need a way in.”
He broke through the lines of people along one side of the Mall.
“Hey,” someone protested. “End of the line is back there, pal.” Others around him joined in, secure in the strength of numbers and the rules. Cade gave them a hard look, and suddenly, no one was interested in proper etiquette. They all turned back to the apple-bobbing stall.
“Livestock,” Tania said. “Would you mind if I stopped for a quick—”
“Yes.” Cade pointed. “Look over there.”
She focused her vision on a ramp near the back of the Mall. Its doors were not large—no bigger than the rear of a semi truck—but they were heavy.
In front of them stood two mall cops. At least, they wore the uniforms of mall cops. But everything else about them—their stance, their heavy muscles, shaved heads, and most of all, the pistols on their belts—advertised who they really were.
Archer/Andrews.
No one from the Mall’s celebration was anywhere near them. It was as if the civilians had been trained not to see them, like a dog given beatings every time it even came near the dinner table.
If Graves had his men in front of the doors, it had to be the way inside.
TANIA MADE THE FIRST APPROACH. Her leather jacket was zipped down almost to her navel, offering the guards a distracting view.
Neither of them fell for it. They put their hands on their guns and warned her away from a safe distance. “Back away now,” they said, low and mean. “You won’t get a second warning, honey.”
“Oh for crap’s sake,” Tania said. “I told you this was stupid.”
Neither man knew whom she was talking to.
Cade reached from behind and snapped their necks, so fast it appeared nearly simultaneous.
They were deep enough in the shadows that no one had noticed at the main celebration. Cade checked both men for keys and found none.
He examined the door. There was a palm reader built into the side of the wall. He put one of the guard’s hands on it, then the other, and repeated the process with the other body.
Deactivated.
Cade noticed the metal view-slot. It was eye level and welded into the shutter of the door. It could be pulled back to look outside, or to fire a weapon.
He put his ear to the thick metal and listened. He could hear them. Two sentries, still at their post. Talking fast. The words were indistinct. But they were clearly nervous.
Tania was still messing with her jacket. “You think I should open it more?”
He looked at the corpses again. “I know how we’re getting inside.”
He sized them up by height and picked up the one who was closer.
He stripped the corpse of its fatigues, and then exchanged his suit with the cadaver’s.
“That’s never going to work,” Tania said.
Cade didn’t reply.
Once he was dressed, he leaned down and gripped the corpse by the hair. He slid his thumbnail around the dead mercenary’s face, starting at the hairline, carefully tracing a line to the ears, the jawline and down the chin, all the way around again.
Thin red drops trickled out from the skin, but not much. Corpses don’t bleed; they leak. Cade was able to resist the sweet stink of the fresh human blood.
He reached in with his fingers, under the cut he’d made in the forehead. He pulled hard and tore the dead man’s face clean off.
He set the flap of skin aside. The lips and nose looked deflated without muscle and bone under them.
Cade steeled himself for the next step. He wasn’t immune to pain.
And this was going to hurt.
He put his thumbnail to his own skin, right where the forehead met the hairline, and pressed down. Hard.
Even Tania was a little disturbed at what he did next.
“Ah. Yeah, okay,” she conceded. “That might do it.”
CADE POUNDED ON THE DOOR. A voice buzzed through the intercom. “What?”
He pounded again and gave an unintelligible bellow of pain.
The view slot slid open. The barrel of a pistol pointed out first. Then a pair of eyes looked at Cade.
“Kemper? What the hell, man?”
Cade had his hand to his nose. That never looked quite right, despite his vampire body’s vessels and nerves worming their way into the dead skin, colonizing it and making it their own. The mottled bruising, the pallor—all that worked in Cade’s favor. He looked—or rather, Kemper looked—like he’d just been on the losing end of a fight.
Eventually, the skinned face would mold and conform to Cade’s features and he would look like himself again. But that would take at least an hour. Until then, he was Kemper, at least from the chin to his hair.
Cade nodded and coughed and hacked, almost bent over. He had no real idea how Kemper had moved when alive. Pretending to be injured would mask that deficit long enough to get him past the door.
He hoped.
“Jesus, man, hold tight, we’re gonna come get you,” the voice on the speaker said.
Cade nodded again and slumped down a little farther. Before the speaker cut off, he heard an argument begin:
“We can’t open this door. Are you crazy?”
“Fuck that, man, I’m not leaving him—”
Cade wondered who’d prevail. He got his answer within seconds. With a heavy thud, the door’s bolts slid free and the door swung open.
One of the guards put out a hand to Cade and helped him up.
“You fucking idiot,” his companion said while pressing a button to close the door again.
“Shut up,” the first guard snapped back. “You’re okay, Kemper, you’re going to be—Jesus Christ!”
Cade straightened up. The guards could see his face now. By their reactions, he assumed it wasn’t pretty.
His fist darted out twice, knocking them both cold.
He didn’t bother killing them, but it was no real mercy.
He hit the button again and Tania came inside, licking blood off her teeth.
He knew she would take the two guards next, and didn’t really care. No one was getting out of here alive, with one exception:
Zach.
AFTER A WHILE, Zach heard the other prisoner talking again.
“What?”
“I said this can’t be Hell.”
“Why not?”
“Because I did my duty. I should be in Heaven.”
“Your duty?”
“I helped kill Americans. Many of them. And other infidels, of course.”
The mild tone and the cultured inflection of the man’s words somehow made them that much worse.
“You did what?”
“I see no reason to lie. I had a background in finance. I facilitated the flow of arms, arranged credit, disbursed cash to the families of the warriors. I directed money to people who used it to buy bombs. To kill Americans. I’ve seen the videos. The bombs really are quite effective. Metal ball bearings are packed into bricks of C-4 or dynamite, and wired to a single trigger. The ball bearings shoot outward, tearing open flesh, crushing bone—”
“Yeah. I’ve seen it,” Zach said. “So you’re just another death-to-America asshole. Color me impressed. Takes a real man to pay a poor Palestinian kid to splatter himself.”
“I asked to become a martyr. I was refused. My talents were better suited to moving the money.”
“How lucky for you. And what do you get out of this? You really believe you’re going to God’s Champagne Lounge with free lap-dances for eternity?”
There was no answer. Zach thought the prisoner had given up talking, then: “Do you have children?”
“Why? You want to threaten them, too?”
The prisoner spoke again, his voice far away.
“Imagine seeing your only daughter running toward you from your front door. She just learned to walk a month ago, and now she’s running. You’ve been out all day, looking for work. You were a banker before. Now you’re lucky to get paid for moving concrete rubble around.
“You know she’s supposed to stay inside. So does her mother. It’s not safe. Your neighborhood was once filled with children playing in the streets. But now, people huddle in their homes as the militias fight for each city block. You know you should scold her and tell her to run back the way she came.
“But you can’t stay mad at her. She only just got her front teeth, and she’s smiling at you. This is what makes your whole day worthwhile. This is the air you breathe and the ground beneath your feet. She has her arms out for you to lift her.
“And then the bullets hit her. You can see the first one. It nearly severs her head from her body. You can’t help remembering how fragile her neck was in your hands after she was born, how carefully you had to cradle her. It took so long for her to be able to raise her head on her own.
“And in an instant, all that care and effort are gone. Shredded. Turned into nothing but bone and meat.
“Your only daughter. And you are still standing there, your arms out for her. Because even though you just saw it, you’re still hoping she will somehow reach you. That you will somehow be able to shield her. To protect her.