He checked the mall directory, then headed for Freddy Fisherman’s.
It looked like the mall had been locked down before being abandoned, and that was a good thing. When raiding houses, he usually had to start by dragging the rotten corpses of the former inhabitants out to the back yard, then opening a few windows to wash out the stench of disease and death while he picked through their belongings.
The Cough had taken nearly everyone. Jeremy himself had sat with his mother while the infection consumed her over the course of two weeks. She’d coughed up dark phlegm, and then blood, and finally her frothy, liquified stomach lining. Jeremy’s immunity to the Cough must have come from his father, who had died of a heart attack twelve years ago.
At thirty-four, Jeremy had still lived in his childhood bedroom at his mother’s house. He’d been an assistant manager at Game Stop before the Cough wiped out civilization, taking the video-game market along with it.
He’d left his small hometown in California to look for other survivors, but so far he’d only spotted one rough-looking band of raiders, mostly male, and he’d hidden from them. He took cars and trucks as he needed, and lived mostly on canned food, chocolate bars and bottled soda, whatever he could forage.
Jeremy broke into Freddy Fisherman’s and found the camping department. He stuffed his backpack full of protein bars and canned juices before moving on to the gear. The store had tents, camping stoves, generators, and even fuel for the generators.
“Look at all this, Eight-ball,” Jeremy said. He lifted Eight-ball from his backpack and held it up as if it were a giant eyeball, like the dripping eye shared by the blind witches from Clash of the Titans. “You were wrong, weren’t you? When you told me not to stop here?”
He gave Eight-ball a shake.
“Signs point to yes,” Eight-ball replied.
“Heck yeah they do,” Jeremy said. “You should listen to me more often.”
Jeremy filled a shopping cart with generators, lanterns, a couple of stoves, and fuel, then wheeled all of it out to his camper-top truck in the parking lot. By the time he left the mall, he thought the truck would be groaning under the weight of his booty.
After loading his supplies, Jeremy took a break on a bench inside the mall. He was tired, but not yet sleepy. The mall seemed like a safe, well-provisioned place to spend the night—in fact, after the barns and attics he’d slept in lately, it was practically a five-star hotel.
He stood up, stretched, and started exploring. At Radio Shack, he blasted the Rolling Stones over multiple stereos. Then he switched over to Dean Martin, one of his mother’s favorites. Later, he could come back and watch a Blu-ray on a plasma screen or three. Plenty of entertainment here.
He reached the Macy’s at one end of the mall. The multi-level department store struck him as a kind of vast communal mansion. The bedding department had a number of complete bedroom set-ups, with matching furniture. After that there were rows of living rooms, dining rooms, offices. A large number of people could have eaten at the tables, retired to the sofas, and slept in the beds. Jeremy thought about Goldilocks and the Three Bears.
That night he slept in a California King bed at Macy’s.
Over the next few weeks Jeremy kept planning to leave and kept failing to do it. He had every material comfort at hand. He knew he would never make contact with any other people if he stayed cocooned inside the mall—but then, there was no guarantee that any people he found out in the world would treat him well. The mall was a safe place to be.
On the last day of his usual routine, Jeremy woke, stretched, and made up his bed. He greeted the mannequins as he passed them. He had names for those he saw regularly. The man with the fishing hat and matching pole was Gramps; the guy with the sunglasses perched on top of his head and the sweater arms draped around his neck was Skipster; the snooty women in tennis outfits were Marla and Ivana.
Jeremy brewed himself some stale coffee at Seattle’s Best and read a magazine. Every day he read the final issue of a different newspaper or magazine. Today it was the final issue of Time, and the cover story was, naturally, about The Cough. “Who will cure The Cough?” the headline asked.
“Nobody,” Jeremy said. He read the story anyway, about universities, hospitals, and the CDC working day and night to fight the disease. The tone of the article was cautiously optimistic. The article’s writer, and every person interviewed in the article, were now dead. Jeremy was pretty certain of that.
After coffee, he took a walk through the mall. He picked a few stores each day to thoroughly inventory, jotting down their merchandise on a yellow legal pad. Partly, this was so he wouldn’t leave without missing something he could use, but mostly it just felt productive and cut the boredom.
As he passed the Hot Topic, he slowed his walk and glanced sheepishly at the mannequins in the window. Three women, all dressed in a kind of punk Goth fashion. The one in front had long blond hair and an exceptionally beautiful face, in his opinion, with dark shadowed eyes and dark purple lipstick. She wore a spiked leather dog collar, skimpy mesh shirt, lacy black miniskirt. Jeremy had already memorized her appearance, down to the purple toenails in her spiked black shoes.
“Hi, Melissa,” Jeremy said. Was he actually blushing? “Hi, Kristen, Catelyn,” he said to her two friends. The girls didn’t respond to him at all, as if he didn’t even exist—which was to say, they treated him exactly the way real women always had.
He continued on, all the way to the Sears at the opposite end of the mall from the Macy’s. He was looking at the assortment of power tools when it happened.
The overhead lights blacked out all at once, and the department store fell into darkness. The only illumination was dust-filled sunlight from the row of exterior doors, where metal security mesh sliced the light like prison bars.
Not even the EXIT signs glowed.
Jeremy cursed. This was going to make life less pleasant.
He walked away from the chainsaws, found a shopping cart, and began gathering flashlights and batteries.
Over the next several days—he had long since lost track of time, and didn’t know a Friday from a Sunday—Jeremy became gradually convinced that the mannequins watched him from the shadows, maybe even whispered about him behind his back. With the loss of power, it could sometimes be hard to read the mannequins’ faces or discern where their eyes were looking. Something weird was definitely happening at the mall.
One night, sitting in his easy chair and reading a paperback by candlelight, he thought he heard laughter. He stood up and searched the Macy’s, but he couldn’t find anyone. The mannequins watched him with smug, plastic smiles.
A few days after that, he tried carrying on with his morning routine—Gramps told him that the fish were biting well, Skipster was worried about how the extinction of humanity might impact bond futures, Ivana and Marla gossiped about their wild night at the T.G.I. Friday’s bar on the mall’s first floor.
Strolling through the mall, Jeremy realized he had no excuse to pass by Hot Topic today. He’d already mentally inventoried everything on that end of the mall.
He walked past it anyway, and said good morning to Kristen, Catelyn, and especially Melissa, who just looked back at him with cool, blank eyes. He didn’t hear any of them say good morning back, but then again they never did. He wondered whether they talked about him after he passed by each morning.
He walked down the frozen escalator, and then doubled back on the second floor. This meant he had to pass the Abercrombie & Fitch, and he didn’t trust the gang of suspiciously cheerful adolescents hanging out in their window. Jeremy hurried past them and on down to King’s Jewelry to continue the inventory.