The Mall of Cthulhu (18 page)

A few more hours passed. Since Ted wasn't selling any cell phone skins, he couldn't afford lunch, and Cayenne very nicely offered to buy him a burrito. He minded the cart while she was gone and sold three rings but found that he had no idea how to operate the cash register.

They ate burritos, they talked, they held hands, and just as Ted was thinking that he wouldn't have to save the world today, that today, tonight, he could just concentrate on having fun, he saw Mr. Average again. He was standing here on level three looking out on the atrium.

Well, maybe he needed to resupply at Ye Olde New England Candlery. Ted looked around the mall atrium to see if there were anymore. He glanced down at the food court, and the FBI guys were nowhere to be seen. He looked around the whole mall.

The behemoth who'd bought a cell phone skin from Ted yesterday was standing about thirty feet away. He had a nasty bruise on his neck and looked even angrier than he had yesterday. Ted looked around, and he spotted angry white guys holding sheets of white copy paper standing right by the metal-and-glass barriers, facing the atrium on every level of the mall. The other shoppers just strolled by as if nothing interesting were happening, and Ted supposed that if he weren't looking for exactly this, he wouldn't have suspected anything unusual happening.

Ted panicked. He fumbled for his phone, pushed down on the 1 key to call Laura, and looked at Cayenne's face.

"What is it?" she said, obviously alarmed at the look on his face.

"It's happening, they're doing it, shit, I don't know what to do, I . . . shit! Voice mail! Laura, it's happening, they're in the mall! Help!" He hung up the phone. "Shit, Cayenne, we gotta take these guys out, I don't have . . . Jesus, if you believe me at all, please help me with this, I don't know what to do. How do I take as many of these guys down as quickly as possible?"

He looked and saw that the cultists were all looking at Mr. Average, who held his palm up to his followers like some sort of demented pope.

"Okay, single woman who walks a lot. You want the Mace or the Taser?" Cayenne asked as she rooted through her bag.

"Taser. I'll go right, you go left. Take as many out as you can. If they have this many here, let's hope that means they need this many for it to work. Realistically, we'll never get the ones on the other levels, but we should be able to get all of the ones up here." Mr. Average was counting down with his fingers. Five . . . four . . . three . . .

"Thank you," Ted said to Cayenne.

"Hey, I often fantasize about macing random guys in the mall," Cayenne smiled. Ted kissed her quickly and hard and then ran, and, as Mr. Average got to one, Ted reached the cultist nearest him. He pressed the Taser into the guy's back and squeezed the trigger. He heard a buzz, a crack, and the guy dropped to the ground. Somebody at the Sunglass Hut saw him and screamed.

He continued to run. There were four on this level, so twelve total. How many did they need to get this thing off the ground? He looked across the atrium and saw Mr. Average with his hands over his eyes writhing in pain. A mall security guard was chasing Cayenne.

"Yog-Sothoth!"
the next cultist was chanting, along with his co-religionists.
"Mesha'al . . . Yog-Sothoth . . . agggh!"
he was interrupted, mid-chant, as Ted took him down. More people were pointing and screaming. They really would never make it down the escalators to get the other guys. He just had to hope that four was enough. He looked across the atrium and saw Cayenne wrestling with the cell phone skin guy, who held her wrist in his massive hand, preventing her from pulling the Mace trigger. Ted ran to her, faking out an out-of-shape mall security guard chasing Ted on a Segway, in the process.

In the center of the mall, a rip appeared. Ted tried not to even look at it, because he didn't want to go completely insane, but it was definitely a rip—it looked like the center of the atrium was a sheet that somebody had sliced open in the middle. A sickly greenish-yellow light began to pour out of the rip. Ted was five steps from Cayenne, who was screaming, "OW! Help me, Ted, he's breaking my fucking arm! Ow!"

Ted reached the guy, but he picked Cayenne up and held her over the atrium. "Yog-Sothoth!" he chanted. "R'lyeh . . . Cthulhu." He stopped speaking and let Cayenne go.

"No!" Ted heard himself screaming. "No!" He watched, helpless, as Cayenne fell into the rip in the fabric of space and time, or at least the fabric of the mall, and disappeared.

Without thinking, without even bothering to tase the guy who did this, Ted vaulted the railing and jumped for the rip. He had a moment of panic when he realized that he might not make the rip, because it seemed to be shrinking, and he had just enough presence of mind to realize that if Lovecraft was right, he'd probably be better off flattened on the food court than making it through the rip. He was actually laughing as he was suddenly surrounded by cold and the mall around him disappeared, replaced with greenish-yellow light.

Laura sat alone in a booth at T. Q. Cholmondley's Pub and Eatery on level two of the mall. The walls were festooned with old tin signs and a bunch of other crap that was supposed to make this place feel jolly. It wasn't working. Laura held up a finger, and her striped-blouse-wearing waitress brought her another beer and another shot of tequila. She hadn't felt the first one at all. She wanted desperately to be drunk, to be able to forget everything, to be able to stop herself from remembering herself running into the mall too late, feeling confused and helpless as she saw only the top of Ted's bald head disappearing into some kind of rip in the fabric of reality. Again she asked herself whether she could have made a difference if she'd picked up the phone when Ted called. Again she remembered the last thing she said to Ted, who, despite everything, she did love. Now he was probably dead, and the last thing she'd said to the person who'd saved her from an eternity of damnation had been some shitty thing about him being a baby, about how hard it had been to be nice to him for ten years when he'd spent the same ten years trapped in a nightmare of blood and fire.

And, while she'd spent the early part of the day remembering every time Ted had pissed her off, she now found that she couldn't turn off the good memories—the movie nights, the disastrous double-date in DC, all the times he'd made her laugh. She tried to remember a time she'd laughed really hard without Ted there, and she couldn't. What the hell had she been so serious about? Jesus, Ted had seen so much worse, had done so much worse than her, and he still never lost that goofy grin, never stopped making the stupid jokes, even when he was sobbing, when he was puking, he'd never lost touch with his sense of humor. Where had hers gone? Right now she felt so bereft that she couldn't imagine ever laughing again.

She tossed back the tequila. It burned her throat, and she was glad to be able to punish herself at least that much, but it did nothing to quiet the chaos and horror surging through her brain.

She felt herself ready to cry, and she took a long slug of beer to try to hold back the tears. She slammed the mug down on the table a little too emphatically. Suddenly there was someone sitting across from her, and she was sure it was going to be the manager telling her that she was cut off, that she didn't have to go home, but she couldn't stay here, her obvious drunkenness was frightening the family diners.

Instead, it was an old white guy with glasses and disheveled white hair wearing a rumpled brown suit. He reminded Laura of a calculus professor she'd had once. "Agent Harker?"

"Sorry," Laura said. "I think you've mistaken me for somebody else."

"Oh, I don't think I have. I'm from the Pentagon—here's my DOD ID," he said. He slid over a laminated plastic card with a digital photo of himself wearing a sickly half-smile. Laura looked at it, then reached down to her bag, pulled out her .38, and aimed it at the guy under the booth.

"Funny—uh, Terry Marrs—but you don't have an up-to-date DOD ID that reflects all the post 9/11 changes. Here's what a
real
government ID looks like these days." She pulled out her ID and slapped it on the table. "So why don't you take your government agent impersonating ass out of here before I go Han Solo on you under the table and splatter your internal organs all over the Mainers Drink Moxie sign over there."

The guy looked bemused, which really pissed off Laura. "I don't really think you're going to shoot me in the middle of T. Q. Cholmondley's Pub and Eatery. You'd be all over the news, for one thing, and your effectiveness as a field agent would be compromised, and you'd probably have a hard time convincing even the most trigger-happy of your superiors that I constituted a threat you needed to counter with deadly force. So if you'll give me a minute, I can explain about the ID. You see, I work for a branch of the Department of Defense that doesn't technically exist, or hasn't since the current administration came to power."

Laura looked at him skeptically.

"Oh, yes, I'm sorry, how silly of me. Let me say first off that I know about how your friend Ted dragged you from a burning house full of vampires ten years ago, and about who really shot up the Queequeg's in Boston, and about what happened here earlier today."

Laura felt panicky and sweaty. Well, this was how her career ended. She decided to try to brazen it out.

"I really don't know what you're talking about. Vampires? Are you off your meds or something?"

"No," he said, still smiling that smile that, in Laura's current mood, really seemed to be inviting a backhand slap across the mouth, "I'm on my meds, and my prostate has shrunken to a manageable size. Thank you for the inquiry. And I do appreciate the fact that you wish to deny these essential facts about your life to a complete stranger—it shows that you're cautious and suspicious, both of which are assets in your profession. So let me tell you my story.

"When I was a child, my mother was murdered by a werewolf." He paused for a second and looked at Laura as if waiting for her reaction. She remained stony-faced. Did he really think she'd be surprised by this information after everything that had happened to her? "Insisting on this simple truth bought me many years of therapy. Like you, I was spurred by my tragedy into a law-enforcement career. I took a rather convoluted path, but the part of this that's relevant now is that back in the Carter Administration, I joined up with the Supernatural Defense section of the Department of Defense. We were well-funded, and we put out fires all over—vampires here, werewolves there, that outbreak of dog-eating fairies in the Smoky Mountains—the point is, we kept our country safe from all kinds of threats that it was important that the public never know about. And we were only hours away from taking out that nest of vampires when your friend Ted beat us to it. Which I'm sure is cold comfort to both of you, since you certainly wouldn't have lived to see our operation take place, at least not in human form, and Ted—well, on the one hand, he really didn't have to do all that killing and burning himself, but, on the other hand, if he hadn't, the rest of the campus would have been saved while all his friends were dead. All I can say in defense of our tardy response is that a certain senator's daughter was the person we really had to look out for—" Laura glared at him, and he shrugged semi-apologetically—"sorry, but politics is a reality of our work that's possibly even more hateful than all the supernatural realities. In any case, Ashley didn't attend that party, so we felt safe in delaying.

"Be that as it may, our funding got cut under Reagan, but we were still able to operate at a reasonable level, and when Clinton got in, I was appointed director, and we got a big boost. He personally asked me to look into whether there were succubi in the Ozark mountains."

Laura, in spite of her foul mood and her determination to be a hardass, gave a snort of amusement. She thought of it as a little tribute to Ted.

"I know—it has all the earmarks of a joke, but he was correct. What led him to suspect the presence of succubi in his home state is something we can only speculate about. But let me tell you, the demons who seduce wayward men and then steal their souls are just about the least dangerous things that live in the Ozarks. Well, of course, the people are the least scary—I'm speaking of the supernatural beings.

"In any case, once the conservatives took over the congress in '94, there were serious rumblings among several of the representatives and even a senator or two, who should have known better, that they were going to hold closed-door hearings and make sure we only got funded if we used, and I'm quoting here, Bible-Based Supernatural Defenses. Which are fine as far as they go, but when you've got a djinn running around Death Valley, as we did just recently, your bible-based defenses are going to prove completely ineffective. Take our current predicament, for example. Try telling the Old Ones to Get Thee Behind Me. Your best possible outcome in that scenario is being crushed quickly and completely.

"So we resisted, but these lunatics got more powerful, and they were threatening to take us public and tell our constituents that their tax dollars were funding Satanist Rituals or something. So while the outcome of the 2000 election was still in dispute, Clinton signed an executive order taking us off the books. He got some friendly Senators to hide a little trust fund for us in a gigantic appropriations bill, and we officially ceased to exist. I invested this money very wisely, but the fact is that we're stretched very thin, and it's extraordinarily difficult to recruit. Especially if you have to go through the tedious process of convincing people that supernatural threats to their security are real."

Laura took a large swig of beer. She didn't know what to think about this story. But at least he wasn't somebody from DC come to fire and/or imprison her. "Okay. It's an interesting story, but, I mean, so what? Why are you telling me this?"

"I'm telling you this so that you'll understand why you were even working on this operation in the first place. Though our offices are no longer in the Pentagon, I'm of course still plugged into the computer network with the absolute highest clearance—"