“I’m really sorry about Amy, Rand,” Stucks said loudly, as we hurtled out of the parking lot with unnecessary speed and hit the highway. “She’s such a sweet person. One time she saw me out painting a house, sweating my ba—my butt off, and she drove on to 7-Eleven, got me a giant pop, and brought it back to me, right up on the ladder.”
This was a lie. Amy cared so little for Stucks or his refreshment that she wouldn’t have bothered to piss in a cup for him.
“That sounds like her,” Rand said, and I was flush with unwelcome, ungentlemanly annoyance. Maybe it was the journalist in me, but facts were facts, and people didn’t get to turn Amy into everyone’s beloved best friend just because it was emotionally expedient.
“Middlebury, huh?” Stucks continued, pointing at Rand’s T-shirt. “Got a hell of a rugby team.”
“That’s right we do,” Rand said, the big smile again, and he and Stucks began an improbable discussion of liberal-arts rugby over the noise of the car, the air, the night, all the way to the mall.
Joe Hillsam parked his truck outside the giant cornerstone Mervyns. We all hopped out, stretched our legs, shook ourselves awake. The night was muggy and moon-slivered. I noticed Stucks was wearing—maybe ironically, possibly not—a T-shirt that read Save Gas, Fart in a Jar.
“So, this place, what we’re doing, it’s freakin’ dangerous, I don’t want to lie,” Mikey Hillsam began. He had beefed up over the years, as had his brother; they weren’t just barrel-chested but barrel-everythinged. Standing side by side, they were about five hundred pounds of dude.
“We came here once, me and Mikey, just for—I don’t know, to see it, I guess, see what it had become, and we almost got our asses handed to us,” said Joe. “So tonight we take no chances.” He reached into the cab for a long canvas bag and unzipped it to reveal half a dozen baseball bats. He began handing them out solemnly. When he got to Rand, he hesitated. “Uh, you want one?”
“Hell yes, I do,” Rand said, and they all nodded and smiled approval, the energy in the circle a friendly backslap, a good for you, old man.
“Come on,” Mikey said, and led us along the exterior. “There’s a door with a lock smashed off down here near the Spencer’s.”
Just then we passed the dark windows of Shoe-Be-Doo-Be, where my mom had worked for more than half my life. I still remember the thrill of her going to apply for a job at that most wondrous of places—the mall!—leaving one Saturday morning for the job fair in her bright peach pantsuit, a forty-year-old woman looking for work for the first time, and her coming home with a flushed grin: We couldn’t imagine how busy the mall was, so many different kinds of stores! And who knew which one she might work in? She applied to nine! Clothing stores and stereo stores and even a designer popcorn store. When she announced a week later that she was officially a shoe saleslady, her kids were underwhelmed.
“You’ll have to touch all sorts of stinky feet,” Go complained.
“I’ll get to meet all sorts of interesting people,” our mom corrected.
I peered into the gloomy window. The place was entirely vacant except for a shoe sizer lined pointlessly against the wall.
“My mom used to work here,” I told Rand, forcing him to linger with me.
“What kind of place was it?”
“It was a nice place, they were good to her.”
“I mean what did they do here?”
“Oh, shoes. They did shoes.”
“That’s right! Shoes. I like that. Something people actually need. And at the end of the day, you know what you’ve done: You’ve sold five people shoes. Not like writing, huh?”
“Dunne, come on!” Stucks was leaning against the open door ahead; the others had gone inside.
I’d expected the mall smell as we entered: that temperature-controlled hollowness. Instead, I smelled old grass and dirt, the scent of the outdoors inside, where it had no place being. The building was heavy-hot, almost fuzzy, like the inside of a mattress. Three of us had giant camping flashlights, the glow illuminating jarring images: It was suburbia, post-comet, post-zombie, post-humanity. A set of muddy shopping-cart tracks looped crazily along the white flooring. A raccoon chewed on a dog treat in the entry to a women’s bathroom, his eyes flashing like dimes.
The whole mall was quiet; Mikey’s voice echoed, our footsteps echoed, Stucks’s drunken giggle echoed. We would not be a surprise attack, if attack was what we had in mind.
When we reached the central promenade of the mall, the whole area ballooned: four stories high, escalators and elevators crisscrossing in the black. We all gathered near a dried-up fountain and waited for someone to take the lead.