Delon gives me a quick look and adjusts his shoulder bag.
We reach the long street that runs parallel to the beach and he says, “There it is.”
Of course, there it is. It’s pretty fucking hard to miss.
For about ten minutes Kill City was the biggest shopping mall in the country. It was called Blue World Village back then and was supposed to demonstrate peace and harmony for all the countries on the planet through high-end retail consumption.
The developers stole the basic layout from the Santa Monica Pier tourist trap—upscale vomit rides for the kiddies, shit restaurants, T-shirt and crap jewelry shops, a rip-off arcade—and tacked on a glitzy mall bigger than the biggest Vegas casino. It was a whole damned Smurf-size city. Hell, if the amusement park outside wasn’t enough, there was another smaller one inside.
Then, in thirty head-cracking seconds, the place went from Blue World Village to Kill City when part of the roof collapsed, taking down a couple of walls and a hundred construction workers with it. Took down a lot of investors too. The only reason the great white whale is still standing is because of all the lawsuits. The builders claim force majeure, that an act of God, an earthquake, brought the place down. A lot of investors have a lot of detectives claiming that the builders were skimming money off the top by buying inferior construction materials and using unskilled labor. Even the state and the city are fighting over who should pay to knock the damn thing down. Then there’s the families of the dead, suing everyone in sight. The mall was such a mess that they never even found a lot of bodies. They just sort of vaporized under all the concrete and steel.
If anywhere in L.A. is full of ghosts and feral shut-ins, it’s Kill City.
The lights by the mall, even the security lights, burned out a long time ago. There’s a ten-foot-tall chain-link fence around the whole site. I take out the black blade and slice through the wire and we move inside. We stay on the concrete sidewalk around the mall. The amusement park is out on a wooden pier. Half a Ferris wheel and enough of a roller coaster left to make a nice nesting site for birds. But every Pacific storm loosens the pylons a little more. One good blow and the pier will go down, maybe taking the rest of Kill City with it. I checked the weather before we started out tonight. Clear, calm skies. Warm Indian-summer air. Just the weather for a little B&E.
In a circular courtyard by the front doors is the sky-blue globe that gave the mall its name. If they reopen the place they might have to call it Bird Shit City. Most of the northern hemisphere is buried under the white stuff and South America isn’t looking so good. It’s like half the world is encased in a gull-crap ice age.
The glass entrance doors are nothing but bent aluminum frames. We step through and into the pool of light on the floor. This mall lobby is pretty intact. The collapsed section is a football field’s length back. The stars shine down on the rubble of a dead indoor garden.
The L.A. heat and wet ocean air have turned the inside of Kill City into a kind of hothouse. The air is warm and thick. Water drips from the ceiling. Green fungus grows on every surface where it can get a hold. The floor is slick with the stuff. Mold leopard-spots the walls and storefronts. In the center of the lobby is a fifty-foot Christmas tree. The outside lights glitter off enormous ornaments almost lost under a layer of furred fungus.
Something crashes to the floor on the other side of the lobby, hitting hard enough to shake the Christmas tree. Candy and Father Traven have their flashlights out and shine them in the direction of the sound.
A hundred feet away, an enormous helmet has crashed to the floor. The ceiling of the lobby is twelve stories high. A mannequin Santa and reindeer, dusty chrome cherubs, and a shooting star dangle precariously on the few support wires that haven’t snapped yet.
“Did anyone see it fall?”
Heads shake and people mumble no or shrug.
“An auspicious beginning,” says Vidocq.
“One of the crazies might have dragged it here from another part of the mall and left it leaning against something,” says Delon. “They used to have a grand bazaar up here once every couple of months. It was supposed to be neutral ground during the market, but someone always violated it. With all the violence, eventually the market died. That’s when things really fell apart. The last vestiges of an organized society. Now when the crazies trade, the groups do it one-on-one and try to avoid each other the rest of the time. They’re about one inch from tribes of jungle headhunters.”
I say, “We should get moving,” to Delon.
He goes to one of the standing mall maps. It’s as tall as he is, upright and square, like one of Kubrick’s monoliths from 2001. Delon wipes fungus from the front of the map with his jacket sleeve.
“I thought you knew the mall by heart,” says Traven.
“I do,” says Delon. “I just want to make sure we’re oriented correctly.”
Everyone gets out their flashlights and clusters around him, reading off the names of the expensive shops over his shoulder. Candy comes up to me and nods at the tree.
“I told you it was Christmas. You should have given me my present.”
“That’s not a Christmas tree. That’s Swamp Thing’s summer home.”
She heads to where the others are standing. I pop the cylinder on the Colt to make sure it’s fully loaded. It is. I follow her over.
“Got it,” says Paul. He points to a “You Are Here” arrow on the map. “I know where to go from here.”
“Which way?” I say.
He points off to the left.
“Up.”
Through the green-tinged dimness I see stairs and, beside them, a two-story-high pile of garbage.