The Mall (61 page)

Somehow, he remained conscious as the next car exploded.

And the next.

Lara froze in position beside the bumper of the white sedan, feeling the blood drain from her legs.
 
She watched in shock as Charlene appeared at the door with the grenade that she had last seen in Simon’s hands as he had left for the pet store.
 
As it rolled across the floor, Dugan fell to his knees and crawled after it, then past it, as if following the path of a completely different object.

“No! No! No!” he bellowed.

Knowing logically that she should flee, Lara nonetheless watched in morbid fascination as the woman who had vowed to kill her and her children pulled the door open as wide as it would allow and stepped casually into the showroom, welding what looked to her like a short-sword in her hands.

Dugan began to scream, covering his face with his hands as if witnessing some invisible drama playing out before his eyes.

Ignoring him completely, Charlene stepped over to the discarded grenade and prodded it with the tip of one boot, a look of consternation on her wrinkled face.

I’ll be damned, Lara thought darkly.
 
Another defective machine.
 
Just like this entire Mall and everything in it.
 
Useless.
 
Dead.

Fittingly, the machine that currently resided in the body of her former mother-in-law still retained its faith in other machines, she thought with amazement.

Regaining the ability to move at last, Lara unlocked her knees and dropped like a brick to the carpet just out of sight on the opposite side of the white sedan.
 
She peered beneath the chassis of the car just in time to see Charlene step up behind Dugan.
 
Seizing a handful of long hair in one fist, she jerked the head backward, exposing the pale stretched skin of his throat.
 
Slipping the short-sword beneath, she slit him open with a single broad stroke, his blood spewing forth across the floor in a steady torrent.
 

The deed done, she started forward again, opening her fingers and letting the body drop behind her with a heavy thud.

Owen scurried on all fours down the hallway back toward the break room, nearly colliding with Cora standing just outside the double doors, both hands clamped across her mouth as if to keep the screams from leaving her throat through sheer physical force.

Lifting a finger to his lips, Owen seized his sister and pulled her after him back into the shelter of the break room.
 
He slowly peeled her hands away from her mouth.

“He’s dead. He’s dead,” she hissed.

“Who?”

“The dressy man with the gun,” Cora replied.

Prompted by the last word, Owen suddenly remembered the other thing that Chance had whispered to him after the strange bit that he had already relayed to his mother.

He said: “I’m leaving the gun here for you and your mom.
 
Up here, just out of sight,” Chance had told him.
 
Then he had fixed him with a stern look that sought acknowledgement and Owen had given him a single nod.
 
“Don’t let Dugan know,” he had uttered at the last.
 
“Do not trust him.”

Moving around to the front wheel of the sedan, Lara peeked stealthily around the front bumper.
 
Stepping up to the car directly in front of the white sedan, Charlene planted the tip of the sword just under the gas cap.
 
She used all her weight to drive the blade through the metal exterior and into the tank.
 
Gasoline spurted through the crevice and across the floor.

She wrenched the sword out with two powerful side-to-side yanks and continued on to the next vehicle in the showroom.

Watch for the old lady.
 
It’s in her now and can’t get out.

Lara swallowed her fear back and squeezed her eyes shut to think.
 
There seemed to be little choice in the matter, she told herself glancing at the insurmountable steps leading to her children.

She had to kill Charlene.
 
Or whatever she had become.

Lara scanned the area around her for anything that she could use as a weapon.
 
Remembering Dugan’s crowbar, Lara glanced at the closed driver’s side door of the white sedan, gauging the risk of attempting to open it.
 
She then spotted the trunk of the car parked directly in front of the sedan, still open from Dugan’s earlier search.
 
Slowly, she began to crab-walk down the side of the car, keeping Charlene carefully in her sights as the woman stepped over to the car directly opposite her, setting herself beside the gas tank and planting the tip of the sword to the glossy-painted exterior.

Rising just high enough to peer into the trunk, Lara spotted a spare tire, a jack, and a crowbar.
 
She pressed her eyes shut, took a deep breath, and pulled herself to her feet using the edge of the bumper.

She carefully removed the crowbar from its compartment and turned toward Charlene, who was focusing all her attention on the gas tank in front of her.
 
Knowing that timing was crucial, Lara waited until the blade entered the body of the car, before she moved.

Protecting her eyes from the gasoline spraying from the narrow hole in the car, Lara rushed her, swinging the crowbar in a downward arc from over her head with all her strength, as the other turned instinctively toward her.
 
The head of the metal bar caught Charlene between neck and shoulder with an audible crack.

Whatever remained human within Charlene Cartright-Myers shrieked in pain as her body fell against the car.

Lara dropped the crowbar as the painful vibration from the impact rattled up her arm.

Charlene gaped at Lara with incredulous, hated-filled eyes.

Lara hesitated only briefly before lunging for the fallen crowbar, but it was all the time Charlene needed as her leg shot out with supernatural speed and kicked it out of reach.
 
Her teeth parted and revealed the toothy smile of a predator beneath.

Then just before Lara was sure she would lunge, Charlene shifted her eyes to something over Lara’s shoulder.

“Cora!
 
Owen!” Charlene called out in a familiar sugary voice.
 
“Come down here.”

Willing her eyes to remain fixed on the other, Lara bellowed: “Run!
 
Run,” her voice cracking with the force, as she rushed Charlene, seizing her by the neck and forcing her back against the rear cab of the car.

The smile evaporated from Charlene’s face as she grabbed Lara’s wrists.

Cora bolted down the steps ahead of Owen, who was holding Dugan’s gun away from his body with both hands.
 
He took slow deliberate steps almost as if carrying something very fragile.

Taking a single look back at her mother and grandmother, apparently trying to choke the life out of each other in the center of the showroom, Cora bolted directly for the exit, just as her brother had instructed her.
 
In her distracted state, she nearly collided with the object rolling toward her from the Mall outside.

Cora let out a tiny scream and threw her hands protectively up before her face.

Two hands grasped her forearms firmly and gave her a single clarifying shake.

When she opened her eyes, Cora found herself staring down into the face of Simon Peter, lying atop a flatbed cart, his legs a mangled mess of torn artificial flesh and ripped metal.

The gun quaked in his small hands as Owen stepped down onto the ground floor and slowly worked his way around the two vehicles toward the two women.
 
The overpowering smell of gasoline burned his nostrils and he could hear the hiss of the fuel spewing from one of the punctured tanks as he stepped around the bumper of the white sedan.

His mother held Grandma Charley by her throat against the side of the car.
 
Her right hand groped beside her amid the stream of gas, as if trying to reach something.

He tried lifting the gun straight out before him as he’d seen the hero do in action movies but he quickly discovered that the gun was as heavy as a brick.
 
Even if he could manage to fire it, there was no way he’d be able to hold it steady enough to hit his intended target.
 
And did he really want to shoot her, his own grandmother?

But was that really what she still was?

Watch for the old lady.
 
It’s in her now and can’t get out.

Had Cora been correct?
 
Was there, indeed, a Boogeyman?
 
And was it trying to kill his mother as it had killed Chance’s friend?

Finally, he forced himself to lift the gun into position, his tiny arm muscles quivering with the weight of it.

“Mom?” he said tentatively.
 
Then steeling himself, he called out louder, “I have a gun!”

At the sound of her son’s voice, Lara loosened her hold only slightly.
 
I.A.M. seized the opportunity.
 
In a single motion, it used all of Charlene’s weight to tug backwards, slinging Lara away in an arc and back around toward the car, like a dancer spinning her partner.

Lara’s head struck the back window, hard enough for the safety glass to implode.
 
Her fingers loosened but still maintained its hold on the other’s throat.

As she began to slip into unconsciousness, two thoughts occurred to her simultaneously as she blinked up with slowly fading eyesight at Owen holding the shaking gun out before him.

With the smell of gasoline in the air as unavoidable as fear, her first thought was, “my ten-year-old son is holding a gun in his hands,” and the second was “he’s going to pull the trigger and kill us all.”

“Owen. No,” she hissed almost inaudibly, nearly all her breath knocked out with the impact.

Owen set his legs and turned the handgun on his grandmother.
 
He knew he would never get a better opportunity for a clear shot than this moment.

“Owen, don’t fire the gun,” someone yelled from across the room in a commanding voice.
 
Then in a weaker voice, he heard a much dimmer, “T-Too much g-gas.”

As he turned toward the direction of the voice, Owen saw something that his brain couldn’t resolve with what he understood about human tolerance and endurance.
 
His mind told him that he was witnessing the torso of a man dashing at an inhuman pace across the floor of the showroom on its arms—using them like surrogate legs—because his own legs had been reduced to ragged stumps somehow.