Chapter Text
Part 1: Under your breath
Prequel I: Seven people walk into a bar
Saturday, January 1st, 2011
Vicky was having a lovely day, Amy figured. Her sister needed reminding every so often to keep the aura down, but her eyes glittered, her smile was radiant and fucking hell get a grip.
Amy forced herself to pay attention as Vicky quizzed her on the virtues of four near-identical shades of lip gloss. Stupid, small things like that were very difficult to pay attention to, today more than usual. Vicky had insisted that they go out shopping despite the weather being as cold as it ever got in Brockton Bay, because the malls generally sold their leftover Christmas stock in the week after New Year’s with the price cut a fair bit.
Amy was less interested in shopping than most, and would have preferred staying home, wrapped up in a blanket with a book or a movie. But Vicky had asked, and Amy had a very hard time saying no to her sister.
They moved on from the makeup sections and drifted into one of several stores which seemed to be in the business of selling too bright or too tight clothing for too much money. Vicky very nearly floated along, once flying up to face a mannequin mounted on top of a shelf, critically examining the outfit from several angles. Five minutes later, Amy was herded into a changing room with what felt like a third of her body weight in pink, light blue and similar friendly shades.
She was just about ready to show off the second piece, a buttoned yellow blouse bright enough to give her a sunburn, when the lights went out. Moments later, she felt the shockwave through her feet before she heard it.
-o-
Henry accepted the two coffees (one black, two sugars, the other so drowned in cream it was barely even coffee anymore). The barista had misspelled his wife’s name. Savana, the girl had written.
Who the fuck could not spell Savannah? He briefly looked back as he made his way to their seats, calling up the mix of smell, taste and feeling which was how his sixth sense described the skillsets of those around him. Ahh, there it was, the low hum of English language, weak and tinged with the scratchy peach and charcoal which denoted dyslexia. Or idiocy. There was little difference.
Not even bothering to snatch up any part of that tainted reservoir, Henry slid into his chair. Savannah accepted her coffee with a murmur of thanks and blew on the drink before taking a careful sip. She needn’t have bothered with that, of course. The mixture could hardly be hotter than the inside of her mouth, but whatever.
The mall was not packed, but there were a lot of people. Neither of them did very well with moving in large crowds, but it had been two weeks since they last had some time alone and he needed a new pair of shoes. The call of the special offers in the clothing stores appealed to Savannah, as well.
Empty pleasantries filled the air around them, nuggets of substance buried deep and sparse. Nothing like that between them. They had been married for nearly a year and a half, even if there had been little dating beforehand. They talked about things that needed talking about, usually behind closed doors. This was not the time, and she knew that as well as he did.
Above them, the lights went out in a flash. All around, vapid gossip turned to surprised and fearful cries, and Savannah…
He smiled, feeling her hand in his. The gloom of the coffee shop lit up in shades of gray as she granted him one of her least obvious gifts. His girl never panicked.
The structure shook, a boom echoing along beams and floors from the other end of the mall. The other guests suddenly sounded a lot more afraid, and some stood up. Henry joined them, pulling Savannah behind him, acting as a human icebreaker to get her slight frame through the crowd.
No costumes. Probably best to reposition, but stay close to whatever was going on. Kaiser might want a report from a trustworthy source.
-o-
Two men stood on the roof of the building, dressed identically in black slacks, white shirts, and dark leather jackets. The stylish image was ruined somewhat by the items they were carrying; roughly rectangular metallic boxes, around a foot in length and with handles interspersed between a multitude of small, black hemispheres resembling camera lenses.
One man was shorter and skinnier than the other, and was currently fiddling with something small and golden, rapidly assembling it from parts spread out on a small cloth. His rectangular object was beside him on the rooftop.
The taller man, wearing polarized sunglasses and his short hair coloured black and combed back, turned from observing the assembly to glance through the massive, bulging windows into the mall below. “Ready soon?”
“Don’t rush me, man!”
“Sorry.” His voice was deep, sonorous, and slightly worried. “Just- How certain are you of the weapon projectors?”
“Certain enough,” the skinny man grumbled, reaching for a screwdriver. “They should look good enough on camera. If the image is a little blurry, well, the graphics were compressed for Bet import anyways. Make it more genuine.”
“Right. I was thinking more ‘will this explode in my hands?’.”
There was silence for a moment, only broken by faint noises of a screw being turned.
“…Leet?”
“Yeah?”
“Will it?”
“Will it fucking what, Über!?”
“Explode in my hands! I know you said it would work but man, I still think we should have gone with Bomberman instead! That way, if we needed to throw the thing away it would still look okay on cam!”
Leet sighed, frustrated. “And like I told you, getting it to function from a distance would have taken maybe four weeks of work, and we’d need to hit up at least three electronics stores to get the components.” He inspected the roughly spherical item in his hand, turning it critically, before nodding and packing away his tools.
“We could have stolen something expensive, bought the damn electronics. Cars are easy to steal, we could have done GTA!”
Leet shook his head. “This is easier. And higher profile. Our ratings will go way up for this!” He turned around, motioning meaningfully with his free hand. “Well?”
With a significant deal of trepidation, Über reached for a knob on his weapon projector, and gingerly turned it.
Slowly at first, and then speeding up, the black parts of the object began emitting beams of bright light. At first, this light behaved like normal, but after a moment, a low hum kicked in and the beams condensed into a nearly opaque shape. After a few seconds, Über was holding what looked like a blocky, slightly blurry and metallic propane gas tank, with LP GAS displayed in slightly fuzzy lettering.
“Hey, it worked!”
“Don’t sound so surprised! Now do the chainsaw!”
The now nearly invisible knob was turned again, and this time the change took less than two seconds. A red chainsaw, held at a slightly awkward angle.
“It’s weird, how they don’t have any weight. How much will they hurt?”
Leet shrugged. “By themselves, nothing. Barely solid enough to touch. But I took apart two stun guns and got the prods at the front. When you press this button-”
“All right, I get it. And the blood?”
“Holographic, like the zombification. You’re wearing the harness?”
The big man slapped his leather jacket, and then turned the knob on his projector again. After a slightly glitchy dissolution, he was left holding a large, bulky camera. “Good to go. You wanna do the honors?”
Leet grinned, hiding his nerves behind bravado, behind the mask of a character, as he’d done so many times before. He flicked the switch.
The camera drone zoomed up into the air, coming to hover exactly fifteen feet from Über’s face. Leet produced a remote from his pocket and pressed a button. The snitch began recording, and below, a small drone deployed a circular saw, cut across a mass of cables and thus disconnected all power to the mall.
“Ladies and Gentlemen! We’re coming at you from the Kittery shopping mall, but today, we’ve taken the liberty of renaming it. Welcome, everyone… to Willamette, where, just for today, the dead… are rising!”
Über gestured behind him, and Leet hurriedly flipped up the safety lid and punched a second button. A moment later, a magnificent explosion rocked the building and deployed the storm shutters over three of the four exits. He stepped forward smartly to take his place beside Über. “And we must… investigate!”
On cue, Über shifted his projector to a weed whacker. “Thoroughly!”
“Do you even know how to use that?”
“Of course! I’ve watched my neighbors gardening, you know!”
With the introductory cutscene out of the way, the duo sprinted over to the rooftop door, with the snitch following closely behind them. Finally, the gameplay could begin.
-o-
I’m an idiot. The thought repeated in Taylor’s head, like a broken record, sounding more and more desperate each time. I’m an idiot.
Of course it was a trap. She should have been able to see that, should have seen the fucking pattern.
I’m an idiot.
When the chips were down, though, Taylor was a lonely girl, desperate for some sort of company, something which was not the stilted interactions with her father or the choking feeling of Winslow. Christmas break was welcome, but the last days before school started up again were times of quiet dread, of knowing that soon she would be back in that hellhole.
She had gotten an anonymous account with a new email address, right before the holidays. It had been some chat site, and for a few weeks it had kept her nose above the water. She had made some acquaintances, maybe, but it was more pleasant social interaction than she had experienced in a very long time.
She must have gotten careless. Meeting up with strangers from the internet was something even children knew not to do, but Clarice had been nice, and it had been in the middle of the day, on a Saturday, in the largest mall in town. What could go wrong?
They had been there. Julia, Sophia, Emma. Their cronies had floated behind them, crows circling over the predators.
They had looked at her, and they had laughed.
I’m an idiot.
She had bolted. None of them had followed, but she had not expected them to, either. She had just needed to get away, away from the ridicule, from the eyes of the other mallgoers who had looked on with confusion as she ran past, just away.
She splashed water on her face. The bathroom was one of the large ones, made for a single occupant in a wheelchair or mobility aids, and she could not bring herself to care. She needed to be able to lock the door, to be alone.
She looked up into the mirror. Her face red and puffy, splotchy. She had wet the outermost strands of her long hair, and they clung together and to the sides of her face. She fixed them, dried off her face. She would take the bus home. Clarice was painful, yes, but a lesson. Someone must have tracked her IP, or something. Next time, she could try from a library computer.
If there was to be a next time. The pit in her stomach was not as bad now as it had been, but she was still feeling apprehensive. Skittish.
She shook her head. I can’t let them win.
Taylor washed her hands, dried them off, and unlocked the door. In that moment, the overhead lights went out, and the low, cheery background music they always had on in malls for some damned reason cut out.
The sunlight from cloudy skies filtered through skylights above and made it possible to see, but she was struck by how much of the warmth of the mall seemed to have vanished. In the greyer tones, the formerly so bright posters and store mascots looked more than a little alien.
There were some shocked exclamations around her, but no one screamed, which surprised her at first. Then, several explosions rocked the building, and all hell broke loose.
Now the screaming began, and people, waves of people, more people than she would have guessed fit into the mall, flowed into the previously mostly open throughways. A shouting, crying cacophony, a human river flowing towards exits, or towards dead ends, moving with all the stupidity and dangerous force of a large group of startled herd animals.
Taylor tried to stay close to the wall, tried to escape back into the bathroom, but it was no use. The flow of humanity surged and suddenly she was in it, trying to breathe, trying to stay on her feet because if she fell here she would be trampled. Crushed underfoot. Alone in a sea of humanity.
The air smelled of panic and blood.
-o-