A brown skinned teenager sprinted up to the store window. He stopped for a second in front of it and placed his forehead against the glass. Using his hands to shade the glare from the store’s reflected light, he gaped at the people inside, a look of frantic desperation on his face as his eyes darted from one face to the next. Then, just as suddenly as he had appeared, he sprinted off out of sight, leaving only a grease stain where his forehead had contacted the glass.
Jim’s attention was dragged back to the inside of the store by the weeping of a woman sitting crossed legged on the carpeted floor an aisle or so away from him. The woman’s low keening voice set a beat to an under-swell of fear Jim could feel seeping into the air.
“What is going on here,” a large man in a business suit demanded, his voice loud and pompous.
The store assistant, still calling forlornly for Steven and Alison, ran past the fat man toward the exit at the far end of the store.
Jim followed her.
He pushed through the glass doors of the store and stepped out into the mall. A tsunami of sound struck him as a wave of anguished voices washed over him, soaking him in its confusion. Here and there, intermingled with the dissonant buzz of voices Jim could occasionally make out an ecstatic cry of laughter or the rapid chatter of happiness. It floated through the confusion, emotional flotsam riding on a sea of panic, all accompanied to a soundtrack of Muzak that wafted down from hidden speakers set high up in the latticework of white metal braces that held the glass ceiling of the mall in-place overhead.
The chattering-crying-laughing-yelling-music interference was amplified as it bounced from floor to ceiling and wall-to-wall, until it became a mind numbing cacophony. Disoriented, Jim took a few faltering steps forward to the aluminum safety barriers that prevented shoppers from falling through the open space to the floor below.
He took a deep breath and leaned on the horizontal grab bar like a nauseous passenger gazing sickly over the side of a storm-rocked liner. He could see he was on the top floor of a shopping mall, three stories up. The floors beneath were just as packed with people too, all as equally disoriented as those around him.
A thought struck him: Maybe this was a terrorist attack? He remembered back in the late nineties of the last century, some Japanese religious cult had begun gassing people on the Japanese underground, and then in 2019, that home-grown terrorist group, what the hell was their name? Radical America, Freedom America? Whoever they were, they had managed to dump a ton of genetically modified respiratory Syncytial virus into the water supply of some mid-western town and killed all those people. Maybe that’s what was going on here; a terrorist group had loosed a chemical agent in the mall. It would explain why everyone was acting so harebrained.
But, he reasoned, there hadn’t been any real terrorist threat in the world for the last fifteen years or more, they’d all been either eradicated or disbanded.
Who the hell was there left in the world with a grudge against the US?
A subtle change in the air drew Jim’s attention away from his thoughts of terrorist attacks. Like the smell of ozone just before a thunderstorm, he sensed the demeanor of the crowd begin to change, fear had replaced panic and that had mutated into terror.
Looking up from the safety bar he was leaning against Jim saw a wave of horrified faces and bodies flooding towards him.
He was transfixed: hypnotized by the crowd surging toward him. His eyes flicked from face to face within the onrushing crowd, each one as pale as an avalanche as they fell towards him. The novelist in him observed with a detached, professional attitude, taking note of everything from the look of panic in their eyes, to the way the front row of oncoming bodies seemed to ebb and flow into those behind.
The large pompous man from the luggage store had left just after Jim and was making his way in the opposite direction, pushing anybody who stood in his way aside. Seeing the oncoming crowd, he tried to turn and get out of their way but the mob swept over him as if he did not exist, trampling him underfoot. Others, faster than the unfortunate executive, dove for cover in shop doors or were caught up in the panicked throng and pulled along too. Those not so lucky ended up knocked aside or smashed through the glass windows of storefronts.
For a brief moment, Jim thought about jumping over the safety banister, holding himself there while the mob ran past but he doubted his arms would hold him long enough. His hands were too damp with perspiration for him to not expect to instantly lose his grip and fall the three stories to the ground below. No! He would take his chances with the mob, thank you very much.
Turning, Jim began to run in the opposite direction to the oncoming crowd, hoping to get his old legs up to some kind of competitive speed. To his utter amazement, he found he was sprinting like a teenager. His legs ate up the ground, his arms were pistons pumping the air, his heart thumped powerfully in his chest and the blood thrummed through his veins.
He chanced a brief look back over his shoulder; he had a lead of five feet or so. If he could just make it to the stairs or the escalator before the horde, he might be okay. Assuming there is an exit this way, of course.
Facing front again he was just in time to see the bewildered woman standing directly in front of him.
In her eighties, wispy gray hair hung in greasy clots around a face which had probably been remarkable in her younger days. Plastic surgery had stretched and pulled the skin until it now looked so parchment thin it would tear and split if she should chance a smile. She wore a skin-tight cat—suit that accentuated her overly large breasts; the silicone implants ensuring even in this late stage of her life, that her boobs still stoically resisted the effects of gravity.
“We don’t care about you, only about Michael,” she shouted incoherently as he collided headlong with her and sent both of them sprawling onto the cold floor.
Jim slid on his back across the highly polished tiles and felt the air slammed from his lungs as he collided with something solid and unyielding.
The old woman was on her hands and knees, her lank hair hiding her face until she raised her head on a wrinkled stalk of a neck. Her face distorted into a mask of anger as she stared across the walkway at him, her eyes flashing anger he could not fathom. Her lips moved but he could hear nothing she said over the roar of voices and the thunder of approaching feet, as she spat what he was sure were some choice expletives at him.
Behind her, the crowd bore down.
Fear must have shown in his eyes because she twisted just in time to face the onrush of bodies as they smashed into her. A man in the front row, pushed along by the hundreds behind him, saw her, tried to leap over her scuttling body but mistimed his leap and jumped too late. His foot caught the back of her head and sent him sprawling on his face. Those behind had no time to react. They stumbled and lurched, tripping over her and the sprawled man, grabbing at others as they went down, the old woman and the fallen man disappeared instantly beneath them.
It was a train wreck; bodies flew everywhere as the onrushing mass stumbled and fell and screamed and cried out in pain and surprise, or cursed in anger and fear.
Jim used the dampening of the mob’s momentum to gauge his position and looked quickly around; whipping his head from side to side, he hurriedly assessed his situation.
He had landed near a molded plastic bench. Fixed to the safety barrier of the mall, it allowed three or four people to sit in modest comfort on the curved impact plastic seat. There was a gap between the underside of the seat and the floor, no more than eighteen inches. If he could just squeeze into that gap, he might stand a chance of getting out of this alive. Hardly thinking, he pulled himself hand over hand on his belly and slipped between the floor and the base of the seat. A moccasin clad foot smashed down on his left hand before he could pull it under the shelter. He screamed a curse and whipped his stinging fingers to his chest, scooting himself further under the overhang of plastic until he felt the upright support bars of the security fence pressing into his back.