“I guess I can handle that,” he said.
“You’ll prevail. You always have. Why wouldn’t you now?” she said with a smile.
But the going wasn’t easy, not by any means, and en masse the normally polite and melancholy Minnesotans became somewhat bellicose. Christmas was do-or-die for them, a full-contact sport, played more vigorously than their beloved if sad-boy Minnesota Vikings had played again this season, and two exotics like Ray-Reyes Fidencio Cruz, Filipino by culture if not by birth-and Molly Chan weren’t going to stand in anybody’s way.
They came to Skate City and he followed her in and watched mutely as she purchased a spool of bright red grit tape so that her nephew could whistle around the streets off Central Avenue aboard a mini-surfboard on jet aircraft landing gear. One look at the shaky conveyance, built for speed, guts, stamina, strong legs, and a fourteen-year-old’s lack of capacity to imagine disaster, and Ray faced his own advanced age. He’d been shot at several thousand times but a skateboard scared him to death. He’d rather face a brace of hadjis than something so lethal.
“See, wasn’t that easy?” Molly asked.
“Not bad,” he said. “I feel myself rallying. We are done now, no?”
“We are done now, yes.”
“So we can move on to other things?”
“Unless,” she said, “you want to ride the Wild Mouse.”
“I’d rather do another combat tour than ride that thing,” he said, as, not twenty-five yards away, the corridor called Colorado yielded to an amazing splurge of space under a wash of late-afternoon sunlight, and in the forefront of that space the single car of a roller coaster called the Wild Mouse slalomed by, shaking screams from its teenaged inhabitants. This spectacle was sited just beyond the rail of the balcony, for the mall at that location opened its central space to provide area enough for an amusement park under a vast skylight shaped to resemble a prominent map icon.
The conceit of America, the Mall of Indian Falls, Minnesota, and the stroke of marketing genius, was that it was no simple doughnut-shaped fabrication. Its designers had contrived it to more or less resemble the shape of the continental United States, a stylized pentagon whose morphic resonance would instantly conjure the association to America in the collective unconscious. It was correctly oriented to the compass, moreover, so that a flat, straight border was actually its northern extremity. Then a Washington-Oregon-California coastline angled downward to a San Diego corner before jutting eastward via a long, long wall engineered to form two crescents, which signified the swoops of the Mexican border and the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. At that terminus, roughly where Tallahassee was located in the real world, its outer wall trekked southeasterly to form a peninsular out-crop that stood in for Florida; to complete the fantasy, from the tip of the Sunshine State to the tip of frosty Maine, a wall ran with only one bend, to honor the Atlantic-side convergence of Florida and Georgia. This of course meant that the amusement park was in the “Midwest” or center of the 750,000-square-foot immensity, and above it the skylights were patterned across the vast roof in the configuration of the Great Lakes.
From the ground, the view yielded nothing of interest: no matter from which direction you chose to examine AtM, it looked more or less like an aircraft carrier hull dumped in the middle of the frozen Minnesota plains. That wasn’t the point, however. The whole thing had been located on the primary flight path to the Twin Cities’ great multihub international airport, so thousands saw it in its full glory every day, from 30,000 feet, as it had been imagined by its builders. Like the Pyramids, it only made sense from the sky.
Inside, besides the corridors designated by river names and zones by compass location, it continued with a zealot’s intensity to have fun with geography. Some wit had been allowed: the multiplex movie theater-fifteen screens-was on the fourth floor of “California,” the higher-end, more sophisticated men’s and women’s shops in the NE, in “Manhattan.” “Florida” contained vacationware shops; around the “Midwestern” amusement park had been clustered most of the many, many food stalls, snack bars, and restaurants; and so on and so on.
Most hellish was the amusement park. It sported not only the Wild Mouse but a batch of other thrill rides, one that whirled seats about at the end of tethered wires, another that replicated somebody’s idea of a log waterway that shunted screamers down aquamarine, chlorine-infused liquid, more like Scope than actual H2O. The yells of the riders, the clack of the vehicles on their tracks, the blur of motion, the whoosh of disturbed currents filling the air of the huge place, all amplified under a roof of skylights designed to let in the wan November Minnesota sun and combined with the din of shoppers, made the place pretty much unbearable. It was all there, the two great things that befit a place calling itself America, the Malclass="underline" shopping and speed.
“Okay,” she said. “Then let’s get out of here.”
“I am so gone,” he said.
“Oh wait,” she said. “Now, if you really want to make Molly happy, let me point you in the proper direction,” and she twisted him forty-five degrees until he came to bear on a place called Boardwalk Fries.
“I smell potato,” she said. “Potato is good. Potato, grease, salt, crispy exterior.”
“Well,” he said, “I have to say, they smell good.”
“They do, but that’s probably not the actual frying-potato odor but rather some chemical product from Monsanto. It probably comes out of an aerosol can.”
“Well, it worked on me. Let’s get some french fries and-”
That was a sound he knew. One, loud.
Then lots of them. Percussions, sharp and hurtful, flashing back among the corridors and crannies, too loud, earsplittingly loud, replicating themselves in the echo unto multiplicity, and drawing the crowd into silence in a frozen instant before panic, screams, and chaos.
“Somebody’s shooting,” Ray said.
The man who shot Santa Claus was named Maahir; he was an unusually large Somali soldier from the militia Hizbul Islam, under command of General Hassan Dahir Aweys, opposed to the brigands and false believers of the militia al Shbaab. The policy differences between them were immense, and one could list them easily if given a year and a half to do so. The shot was about 150 feet, but for him it was nothing. Maahir had taken many other long shots in his time, making most; he’d also taken many close shots, and the spectacle of death as released upon a body by bullet wound was nothing new to him.
But everything else was new. This place, this strange structure, these people in their comfort, their wealth, their fear, the unbearable smells of food, the beauty of the young girls, the data so overwhelmed him he had almost fallen into enchantment.
But Allah had kept him rigorously devoted to mission.
After the shot, which signaled the beginning of this great martyrdom operation, one that would see him happily arrived in paradise before the day finished, he looked around as people fled him in horror. It was so funny. Ha ha, the look of terror on their faces. In wars, you seldom saw such fear because you were always moving. Not so here.
He stood in the center of the collection of crazed speed apparatuses and listened as the gunshots arose from his brothers, as they engaged the infidels for the first time. Before him panic and fear but mostly collision as some ran this way and some that and many went sprawling in the crack-ups that ensued.
He edged backward a bit, to get out of the rush of the masses, and knew that if he wanted, he could fire and fire and kill and kill, but after all, there was no hurry, and there would be ample time for those pleasures.
On the large video screen displaying the SCADA icons, MEMTAC 6.2 purred away placidly, cybertestimony to the fact that all was tidy in the kingdom of AtM.
You could be forgiven for not looking, but Phil Deakins watched anyway. SCADA stood for Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition, and it was the technology by which the mall was ruled, through the auspices of its software program, as designed by Siemens, in Germany, called MEMTAC 6.2. SCADA ran access controls, HVAC, energy consumption, life safety, and all other operational aspects of the mall. It “supervised” through the computer and it “acquired” data needed to tell the computers what to do. It could do the simple (unlock doors at a certain time) or the complex (reroute cash register transactions if the satellite processing system went down). It had no preferences, idiosyncrasies, quirks, glitches, charm, or moodiness and represented the dull, systemized perfection of the German engineering mind. You wouldn’t want to go drinking with it; you’d end up barfing beer in a gutter while yearning to invade Poland.