The crowd thundered by, the floor shuddering with their passing. Jim felt the rolling vibration reverberate through his bones, forcing his teeth into an involuntary chatter. The fact that he was terrified did not help either.
A body crashed to the ground, smashing into the walkway with the sickeningly abbreviated sound of a melon dropped from a great height onto a metal spike. The bloody face of a teenage boy, his eyes lifeless and blank, faced Jim. The poor kid’s body jerked and twitched as countless feet stomped over him, pounding him into the walkway. Unable to turn away from the horror, Jim knew he would never forget the look of terminal shock embossed on the kid’s face.
Time passed.
Finally, the river of feet slowed, became a trickle and eventually dried up completely. The dead boy, crushed and broken, gazed lifelessly at Jim, one shattered arm stretched out across the floor towards him as if pointing to Jim’s hiding place. His mouth hung open and a trail of blood leaked from his split and broken lips, his staring eyes accusatory: why did you live? Why you old man?
The sobbing lament of a woman broke Jim’s trance and he slid his cramped and aching body out from under his plastic sanctuary, careful to avoid touching the dead kid. A pool of congealing blood spread like a crimson lake over the stark white tile of the floor.
Jim rose to his feet and looked around. The source of the weeping was the young mother he had seen through the window of the luggage store earlier. She sat cross-legged in the recessed entranceway of an H&M store. She held her baby, wrapped in a pink blanket, to her chest, rocking back and forth. The baby stroller lay twisted and wrecked further down the walkway.
The low keening of a nursery rhyme floated across the now deafeningly silent mall.
“… Mama’s go’na buy you a mocking bird,” she sang, as Jim began walking stiffly toward her. “And if that mocking bird don’t sing, Mamma’s go’na buy you a—” She stopped singing when she saw Jim approaching.
“Are you okay, Miss?” he asked.
The young woman scooted further back into the doorway, her face suddenly fearful.
Jim lifted his hands, palms out, to head height. “It’s okay,” he said gently, “I’m not going to hurt you. Are you okay? Is your baby alright?”
Her back connected with the door of the clothes store, from inside the store Jim heard the tinkle of bells vibrate faintly. Unable to push herself back any further she instead rounded on Jim; her eyes flashed a mixture of fear and anger. “Stay away from me,” she yelled her voice a high-pitched squeal.
“It’s okay. I just want to help you. I’m not going to—”
“STAY AWAY FROM ME YOU BASTARD!” she screamed. The fear in her voice so overwhelmingly palpable Jim felt as though he had been physically struck.
“I just—” he tried to continue.
The woman dissolved into tears, pulling the child even closer to her chest.
Jim backed away from her. “I’m sorry,” he said, as he turned away.
The woman, her attention already refocused on the pink bundle in her arms, resumed her lullaby. There was nothing more he could do for the poor woman, he would just have to leave her here and hope the paramedics looked after her when they arrived. If they arrived, he corrected himself before turning and moving reluctantly in the direction he hoped he would find an exit out of this insanity.
There were a half-dozen dead bodies strewn across the mall walkway, their trampled forms lay smashed and crushed, broken limbs jutting at odd angles.
All was still.
Shattered glass from storefronts lay scattered all over, crunching under Jim’s shoes as he picked his way through the desolation.
More bodies lay in a disheveled heap around the top of the escalator’s gunmetal-gray stairway, and a second broken and blood-spattered mass of crushed bodies had collected at the bottom of the escalator steps.
They looked like carelessly cast aside dolls, discarded by some hateful child. He avoided looking directly at the unfortunate souls as he stepped over their motionless pale bodies to ride the escalator down to the lower level, leaping over the bodies piled at the bottom of the escalator, like so many dead autumn leaves.
On the ground floor, he found a large illuminated visitors map of the mall. A fat red arrow labeled ‘You Are Here’ indicated Jim’s location, and he traced the route from it to the nearest exit with his index finger before turning and heading in the direction the map indicated.
The sky, a perfect cerulean blue, stretched off into the distance as Jim Baston pushed open the glass exit doors of the mall and stepped out into the fresh air. He stood for a few moments, bent at the waist his hands braced against his knees, sucking in lungful’s of warm air. The heat of the day was astonishing after controlled air-conditioned environment of the mall, it radiated up from the concrete sidewalk in waves, and within seconds of leaving the building, beads of sweat began to pop on his forehead.
A scattering of lifeless birds lay dotted over the road separating the sidewalk from the mall car park. Glancing up at the huge building he had just exited, Jim thought he could make out bloody splotches where the birds had collided with the polarized glass fascia of the mall.
This is all wrong, he thought, raising himself to an upright position and shading his eyes with his hand from the intense glare of the sun. The sky was too blue, the air far too warm. Wherever ‘here’ is, it sure as hell isn’t New Orleans. Not even Louisiana, by the looks of it.
Blocking the road off to his right, were three cars that had smashed headlong into each other. Steam or smoke rose from two of the ruined vehicles. Jim could just make out the body of the driver still slumped against the wheel of one of the cars, barely visible through the hissing fog rising from the vehicle’s wrecked engine.
Every atom of his body screamed at him to leave, run away; get the Hell out of here. But he couldn’t leave the driver to die. At the very least, he had to check if he or she was just unconscious. This is madness. Sheer madness, he thought as he began walking cautiously over to the crashed vehicles.
Two of the cars were empty, their occupants having fled the scene. The third, an unrecognizable compact, was sandwiched between the other vehicles and had sustained the most serious damage. The driver, an elderly woman with blue rinsed hair, was slumped against the steering wheel of her decimated vehicle. The airbag had deployed and the woman’s face rested against the deflated bag. Her jaw hung limply open, a thick clot of congealed blood filled her mouth. Jim assumed her severed tongue probably lay somewhere at her feet. A web of blood-splattered fractures radiated out from the spot where her head had connected with the car’s side window. Jim was sure she was dead but he stretched a cautious hand through the open window, carefully avoiding the pieces of glass still in the surround, and placed two fingers against her throat for a few seconds.