There was a gasp from the crowd, and a hundred hands pointed to the ceiling of the security lobby, the narrow vestibule leading to the entrance hall. A steel fire door was slowly falling from its housing, shutting out the barricade, the assistant commissioner and his officers.
A deep metallic rumble like the clenching of a giant’s teeth filled the hall as the fire door settled onto the floor. The vibration moved away, a subsonic wave that seemed to take in smaller tremors from the exit doors of the dome, the answering calls from the furthest outposts of a vast vault that was sealing itself off from the world.
I stared at the heavy shield, and helped the elderly man to the chair by the enquiry desk. He thanked me and said: ‘Your foot’s bleeding.’
‘I know. Tell me—are we sealed in?’
‘It looks like it.’
‘The North Gate entrance?’
‘I imagine that’s also closed.’
‘And the side exits?’
‘Everything. The car parks and freight entrance.’ He raised a hand to calm me, seeing that I was agitated. ‘It’s the fear of fire, you see. Any draught would turn a small blaze into a furnace.’
‘Right . . .’ I was surprised by how calm he seemed, as if he had known what would happen and had detached himself from all the excitement long before it began. He stared in a regretful way at his useless mobile, resigned to the prospect of being unable to contact his wife. Trying to rest my foot, I asked: ‘I take it you work here?’
‘In Accounts. We tend to have a good idea what’s going on. Mr Carradine is a very determined young man, but these shopping malls haven’t learned how to cope with violence. When they do . . .’
‘War will move into the world’s consumer spaces? That’s quite a thought. Up till now, being a washing machine has been a safe option. There was a shooting here this evening.’
‘The television actor? I’m very sorry. It’s probably best not to know if it really happened.’ He shook my hand. ‘I’ll rest here for a bit. You’ll need to find a bed for the night. There’s a huge selection to choose from . . .’
He sat in his chair behind the enquiry desk, a grey-haired sphinx ready to answer all questions but ignored by the crowd drifting across the entrance hall and unable to find its bearing. Carradine and his entourage had set off on an inspection tour of their new domain, apparently uninterested in the fate of all those trapped inside the dome.
I walked over to the steel fire door, so massive that it muffled all sounds of police and army activity. An emergency escape panel was set into the fire door, and I was tempted to make a run for it, but its electrical locks would be too much for me.
Besides, a new and more interesting world was waiting for me inside the dome, a self-contained universe of treasure and promise. The crowd was drifting back into the mall, resigned to a future of eternal shopping. The republic of the Metro-Centre had at last established itself, a faith trapped inside its own temple.
PART III
33
THE CONSUMER LIFE
IN AN HOUR I would be leaving the dome. For the last time I crossed the deserted terrace of the Holiday Inn and stepped onto the beach beside the lake. Within the lobby the latest group of hostages to be released was checking out of the hotel, ready for their transfer to the South Gate entrance. Guarded by their marshals, they shuffled through the doors, several almost too weak to walk. I waved to them, trying to remind them that in a few minutes they would breathe a different air, but none of them noticed me. There were tired mothers with restless teenage daughters, wives steering elderly husbands, a pallid McDonald’s assistant whom Dr Maxted had treated for hysteria, and a young couple barely coping with a fever picked up from the polluted water.
Julia Goodwin had selected them the previous evening from the pool of five hundred remaining hostages, insisting that the disease risk they posed made them urgent candidates for release. When I presented the list of names to Tom Carradine he rejected Julia’s choice out of hand. Fanatical in his defence of the Metro-Centre—and, according to Maxted, showing the first clinical signs of paranoia—he sat in his make-up chair at the mezzanine studio, tapping the sheet of paper with his eyebrow brush. He spent hours preparing himself for the camera, but had never actually appeared on the in-house channel, saving this moment for his last stand. I assumed that deep in the race memory of PR managers was the belief that when they appeared live on television a miracle would follow. The seas would part, and the sky would fall.
Carradine stared cautiously at the list, searching for any coded message to the police and journalists waiting behind the security cordon around the dome. Finally he gave in, silencing Julia when she graphically described the symptoms of typhoid and typhus. He edged away from the exhausted doctor with her feverish corneas, a model of all the diseases that the police negotiators warned would soon break out in the dome, and signed the list with one of his dozen Montblanc pens.
As he knew, Julia held the trump card, at least for the time being. Severely injured, David Cruise lay in her makeshift intensive care unit, holding on to life by an effort of will long after his body had decided to call it a day. But once this card was played, and the ventilators and transfusion pumps were disconnected, Julia Goodwin would lose her authority. She and I would join the hostages in the squalid basement of the Holiday Inn.
At that point the real game of the dome would begin, as Carradine and his henchmen stabilized their rule. The micro-republic would become a micro-monarchy, and the vast array of consumer goods would be Carradine’s real subjects.
I STOOD ON the sand, staring at the oily surface of the lake as the hostage group shuffled away. The marshals still saw me as David Cruise’s media adviser, and reined in their abuse. A Zimmer frame scraped the marble floor, but the group was silent. An hour later they would step through the emergency hatch and face the world’s television cameras. In return, the police would hand over a portable air-conditioning plant that would cool the intensive care unit.
At the last moment I would slip in among them, after Julia added my name to the list. I wanted to stay with her, and help with the rougher chores at the temporary clinic she had set up in the first-aid unit. But she was concerned for my ankle infection, which had resisted all the antibiotics available in the Metro-Centre’s thirty pharmacies. Beyond that, she worried about the larger infection incubated within the dome that had begun to affect all of us: a deepening passivity, and a loss of will and any sense of time. The treasure house of consumer goods around us seemed to define who we were.
I hobbled along the sand to a deckchair set up on the water’s edge. I rested here every evening, when the endless sports commentaries in David Cruise’s recorded voice at last died away, ringside accounts of long-forgotten matches relayed through the public address system. Then the dome’s ceiling lights were dimmed and a grateful silence fell over the Metro-Centre.
I sat in my tilting chair and drank enough whisky from my flask to blunt the fever in my swollen ankle. The silence was even more soothing, before the night patrols began to swear and stamp their way around the dome, torches searching the empty stores and cafés for any intruders. The artificial twilight lasted until the morning. During the long night hours, the ghost creatures of the dome, the thousands of cameras and kitchen appliances and cutlery canteens, began to emerge and glow like a watching congregation.
I reached down to an empty beer can at my feet, and tossed it into a nearby waste bin. Beyond a three-feet radius of my chair, the beach was littered with bottles and empty food cartons. The water never moved, but a scum of cigarette butts and plastic wrappers formed a tide line. At least for the moment, consumerism had beached itself on this filthy sand. Within a few hours, once the police had debriefed me and the doctors confirmed that I was free of infectious disease, I would be back in my father’s flat.