He had intentionally worn nondescript clothes, the better to fade into the rabble. On videotapes recorded elsewhere in the mall, he wouldn?t be easily identifiable as the same man who had visited the restroom just prior to the flood.
A gorgeous excess of spangled and frosted holiday decorations further compromised the usefulness of the cameras, infringing upon the established angles of view.
The winter-wonderland theme avoided both direct and symbolic references to Christmas: no angels, no mangers, no images of Santa Claus, no busy elves, no reindeer, no traditional ornaments-and no festive lengths of colored lights, only tiny white twinkle bulbs. Festoons of plastic and shiny aluminum-foil icicles, measured in miles, glimmered everywhere. Thousands of large, sequined Styrofoam snowflakes hung on strings from the ceiling. In the central rotunda, ten life-size ice skaters, all mechanical figures moving on tracks, glided around a fake frozen pond in an elaborate re-creation of a winter landscape complete with snowmen, snow forts, robot children threatening one another with plastic snowballs, and animated figures of polar bears in comical poses.
Corky Laputa was enchanted by the pure, blissful vacuousness of it all.
On the first escalator to the ground floor, on the second to the garage, he brooded over a few details of his scheme to kill Rolf Reynerd. Both as he had shopped and as he had enjoyed his destructive escapades in the mall, Corky had carefully laid a bold and simple plan for murder.
He was a natural-born multitasker.
To those who had never studied political strategy and who also [123] lacked a solid grounding in philosophy, Corky?s capers in the men?s room might have seemed at best to be childish larks. A society could seldom be brought down solely by acts of violence, however, and every thoughtful anarchist must be dedicated to his mission every minute of the day, wreaking havoc by actions both small and large.
Illiterate punks defacing public property with spray-painted graffiti, suicide bombers, semicoherent pop stars selling rage and nihilism set to an infectious beat, attorneys specializing in tort law and filing massive class-action suits with the express intention of destroying major corporations and age-old institutions, serial killers, drug dealers, crooked cops, corrupted corporate executives cooking the books and stealing from pension funds, faithless priests molesting children, politicians riding to reelection by the agitation of class envy: All these and numerous others, working at different levels, some as destructive as runaway freight trains hurtling off the tracks, others quietly chewing like termites at the fabric of civility and reason, were necessary to cause the current order to collapse into ruin.
If somehow Corky could have carried the black plague without risking his own life, he would have enthusiastically passed that disease to everyone he met by way of sneezes, coughs, touches, and kisses. If sometimes all he could do was flush a cherry bomb down a public toilet, he would advance chaos by that tiny increment while he awaited opportunities to do greater damage.
In the garage, when he reached his BMW, he shrugged out of his sports coat. Before settling behind the steering wheel, he donned the yellow slicker once more. He put the droopy yellow rain hat on the front passenger?s seat, within easy reach.
Besides providing superb protection in even a hard-driving rain, the slicker was the ideal gear in which to commit homicide. Blood could be easily washed off the shiny vinyl surface, leaving no stain.
[124] According to the Bible, to every season there is a purpose, a time to kill and a time to heal.
Not much of a healer, Corky believed there was a time to kill and a time not to kill. The time to kill had arrived.
Corky?s death list contained more than one name, and Reynerd was not at the top. Anarchy could be a demanding faith.
CHAPTER 18
FRIC IN THE SUFFACATORIUM, ANXIOUS AND wheezing, and no doubt bluer than a blue moon, dragged himself out of the middle of the room and sat with his back against a steel wall.
The medicinal inhaler in his right hand weighed slightly more than a Mercedes 500 M-Class SUV.
If he?d been his father, he would have been surrounded by an entourage big enough to help him lift the stupid thing. Yet another disadvantage of being a geek loner.
For lack of oxygen, his thoughts grew muddled. For a moment he believed that his right hand was trapped on the floor under a heavy shotgun, that it was a shotgun he wanted to lift, put in his mouth.
Fric almost cast the device away in terror. Then in a moment of clarity, he recognized the inhaler and held fast to it.
He couldn?t breathe, couldn?t think, could only wheeze and cough and wheeze, and seemed to be spiraling into one of those rare attacks that were severe enough to require hospital emergency-room treatment. Doctors would poke him and prod him, bend him and fold him, babbling about their favorite Manheim movies. The scene with the elephants! The airplane-to-airplane midair jump with no [126] parachute! The sinking ship! The alien snake king! The funny monkeys! Nurses would gush over him, telling him how lucky he was and how exciting it must be to have a father who was a star, a hero, a hunk, a genius.
He might as well die here, die now.
Although he was not Clark Kent or Peter Parker, Fric raised the gazillion-pound device to his face. He slipped the mouthpiece between his lips and administered a dose of medication, sucking in the deepest breath that he could manage, which wasn?t deep at all.
In his throat: a hard-boiled egg or a stone, or a huge wad of phlegm worthy of the Guinness book of world records, a plug of some kind, allowing only thin wisps of air to enter, to exit.
He leaned forward. Clenching and relaxing neck muscles, chest and abdominal muscles. Struggling to draw cool medicated air into his lungs, to exhale the hot stale breath pooled like syrup in his chest.
Two puffs. That was the prescribed dosage.
He triggered puff two.
He might have gagged on the faint metallic taste if his inflamed and swollen airways could have executed a gag, but the tissues were able only to contract, not expand, flexing tighter, tighter, tighter.
A yellow-gray soot seemed to sift down through his eyes, the slow fall of an interior twilight.
Dizzy. Sitting here on the floor, back against the wall, legs straight out in front of him, he felt as if he were balanced on one foot on a high wire, teetering, about to take a death plunge.
Two puffs. He?d taken two doses.
Overmedicating was inadvisable. Dangerous.
Two puffs. That ought to be enough. Usually was. Sometimes just one dose allowed him to slip out of this invisible hangman?s noose.
Don?t overmedicate. Doctor?s orders.
Don?t panic. Doctor?s advice.
Give the medication a chance to work. Doctor?s instruction.
[127] Screw the doctor.
He triggered a third puff.
A bone-click sound like dice on a game board rattled out of his throat, and his wheezing became less shrill, less of a whistle, more of a raw windy rasping.
Hot air exploding out. Cool air going down. Fric on the mend.
He dropped the inhaler on his lap.
Fifteen minutes was the average time required to recover from an asthma attack. Nothing could be done but wait it out.
Darkness faded from the edges of his vision. Blur gradually gave way to clarity.
Fric on the floor in an empty steel room, with nothing to distract him but hooks in the ceiling, naturally looked at those peculiar curved forms, and thought about them.
When he?d first discovered the room, he?d been reminded of movie scenes set in meat lockers, cow carcasses hanging from ceiling hooks.
He had wondered if a mad criminal genius had hung the bodies of his human victims in this meat locker. Perhaps the room had once been refrigerated.
The hooks weren?t set far enough apart to accommodate the bodies of grown men and women. Initially, Fric had sprung to the grim conclusion that the killer had collected dead, refrigerated children.
On closer inspection, he had seen that the stainless-steel hooks were not sharp. They were too blunt to pierce either kids or cows.
That?s when he?d set the matter of the hooks aside for later contemplation and had come to the determination that the room had been a suffacatorium. The existence of the interior lock release, however, had proved this theory wrong.
As his wheezing quieted, as breath came more easily, as the tightness in his chest loosened, Fric studied the hooks, the brushed-steel walls, trying to arrive at a third theory regarding the purpose of this place. He remained mystified.
[128] He?d told no one about the pivoting section of closet shelving or about the hidden room. What made the hidey-hole so cool was less its exotic nature than the fact that only he knew it existed.
This space could serve as the ?deep and special secret place? that, according to Mysterious Caller, would soon be needed.
Maybe he should stock it with supplies. Two or three six-packs of Pepsi. Several packages of peanut-butter-and-cracker sandwiches. A couple flashlights with spare batteries.
Warm cola would never be his first choice of beverage, but it would be preferable to dying of thirst. And even warm cola was better than being stranded in the Mojave with no source of water, forced to save and drink your own urine.