Dead mall euphony

Short tale

Mallrats

The rats burrow up from a crack in the floor, which derives from a leaking pipe that’s dripped constantly onto the concrete for eight years now. The rainwater runoff has carved a groove between the roughened floortiles, and with the pouring-in of the sun through the skylight every summer morning, a crack opened in the furrows between tiles. That which was below the surface can now scurry out through this fracture.

And here they are, by the dozen: dark gray and brown, sniffing and whiffling their whiskers in the mildewed air, scuttling their tiny claws on the smoothness where the tiling remains uncracked, the scrabble of it a maddening sound which you feel in that soft place in the back of your brain. Medulla oblongata or hypothalamus: the place inside your skull where the whispery scratch-scratching of many rodent claws cuts fine and raw.

What the rats see in the huge deserted atrium is a strange thing indeed for their two-centimeter minds to process.

Clear glass panes smeared over with black mold where the elevators stand empty. The enormous staircase buckled here and there and overgrown with lush green weeds. And lighting rigs set up to carve a radiant cave of bright light, there in the center of the space. The rats are distrustful of all this light, and they scatter round it. They stick to the skirt of penumbra and look into the light.

Here a number of human bodies writhe, men and women and others, all dirty and smeared with slime and mud. There's a great deal of fucking, which the rats can recognize from their own lives, though the many permutations and combinations of organ and orifice are novel to their innocent rodent eyes.

Two fully-clothed humans circle round this heap of soiled flesh and grab many angles and closeups on their small video devices. They bark short instructions to insert this in here and straddle that there, and their brusque callouts startle the rats, which scurry away into the darkened corners.

The hollow space of the atrium echoes with shouts and with choked-off cries of simulated delight amid slithering sounds of oozy flesh on flesh. You could imagine the phantoms of shoppers from twenty years before, nestling their slurpee buckets in the crooks of their elbows, dressed in quaint plaid shirts tied round their waists, cotton cargo shorts and sandals, applauding this spectacle of gross vitality on the central floor of the mall.

Thus the filthy porn performers, the barking cameramen, the startled rats, and the enthusiastic ghosts of consumers long gone, together form concentric circles of desire and horror and delight in this derelict space that is crumbling away into our future.

---

Exploitation

Helmut is the director of Mall Zombies 3: Degradation Derby and Istvan is his Director of Photography, though budgetary constraints mean that both operate the cameras for critical scenes of mass action. Like this orgiastic scene of limitless undead carnality in the deserted mall, a centerpiece of the film.

Further budgetary restraints mean that there are no craft services, no catering. Instead the performers' drinks and snacks are clustered to one side on a mat of flattened cardboard boxes, out beyond the lights and the place where the fuck n' suck scene is being filmed.

Helmut is mostly happy with the shots he's been getting this afternoon. Though he has no illusions about the strictly commercial nature of the product he's creating, he nevertheless considers some of the compositions he's achieved today, with the writhing mass of zombified porn actors in the foreground framed against the cavernous empty space of the mall atrium, glints of starspangle dust floating in the sunburst of the skyight, as art in its purest state. Surely a Jarman or a Kubrick could do no better.

When he'd received the script last week, he doubted that he could pull off a scene of zombies getting themselves lathered into a limitless tangle of lust. In the world of adult-horror entertainment it was conventional wisdom that zombies would attack and kill young people engaging in sex acts — not that they themselves would get horny and collapse into a heap of grunting orgiastic desire. Something about not mixing your Eros with your Thanatos, they said.

Yet Helmut now believes that this genre-busting move of having the zombies themselves become the focus of the most intense eroticism will be a threshold in the history of low-cost exploitation cinema. He's taken a risk by accepting this project, by sinking nearly all of his own money into the shoot, but he considers that the risk will be vindicated by enormous streaming success to come.

Already ideas are brewing in his imagination of a mashup of zombieporn with nazisploitation, staying within the umbrella of the Mall Zombies franchise. Perhaps a scenario where Nazi zombies explode across the rural US, snatching their victims from the streets and taking them to abandoned shopping malls to perform sexual experiments. Helmut could see that working.

---

Enforcement

Phyllis the dispatcher at the county sheriff's office labors under two serious impediments to her work: first is her old-lady's name 'Phyllis', which makes her seem a bimbo in a 1950s monster movie. Second is her resemblance to Pamela Anderson - not the Pamela Anderson of the Baywatch years, but rather the Pamela Anderson of recent times, with understated makeup and an authentic middle-aged demeanor. People kept saying that to her: Hey, Phyllis, you really look like Pamela Anderson, but not the bimbo of the Baywatch time, I mean today's Pammie with comfy sweaters and a genuine lived-in look.

You might think that these things are not really impediments to a backroom employee in a small law-enforcement office in a rural town, but the fact is that Phyllis has always yearned to be a glamorous bikini girl and a gritty young urban poet, so to her both that 1950s middle-America name and her resemblance to a woman who has come to accept middle-age gracefully are like bitter gall. She's only twenty-eight, after all.

At this moment, 7.30pm, with official sundown just three minutes away, she's making a callout to Sandhurst Sheriff Rasmus K. Hynlin. He's sitting in his police cruiser outside Bobbie's Diner on Short Street, noshing on a meatball sandwich with a rather mediocre marinara sauce. Despite the lack of good Italian cuisine, there are other advantages to a law enforcement career in a place like Sandhurst. One of them is that you don't need to stick to strict police protocol in communications, and you can even talk on the radio with your mouth full and nobody will mind.

'Sheriff, we have a call from some young skaters in the parking lot out at Jellicoe Mall. They say they've sighted some undead walkers, over.'
'?'

'Sheriff, I can't really understand you when your mouth is full, but I'm gonna assume you said undead walkers, what the fuck? Over.'
'!'

'Sheriff, I know that this sounds like some Scooby Doo shit. Zombies goin' for a walk at dusk, young kids callin' it in? Scooby Doo shit for sure, over.'
'?'

'Sheriff, I dunno what to tell you! You yourself said we had to improve outreach among the younger demographic. These young folk from a young demographic called it in and seemed really scared, and they asked me personally to assure them that you personally would check it out and I said: Yeah that you would. Did I do wrong? Over. '
'...'

'Okay then Sheriff, good luck on that and I hope it won't really be zombies but if it is remember to call for backup, 'kay? Out.'

---

Sundown

Setting sun over the vast space of an abandoned shopping-mall parking lot that stretches out to the horizon with only one lampost in every fifteen illuminated, the rest with broken bulbs which were never replaced.

The billboards that mark this place and the derelict stores, lacking letters and neon tubes, spell something in unknown hieroglyphic arrangements.

The purple of sundown itself which marks the edges of the huge box structure of the mall in a sodium yellow.

Bats - actual literal bats - which fly out now to replace the daytime shift of sparrows and shabby starlings that nest in the uncleared gutterings.

There's one store that's still open, kind of, over by the main doors, out on the stripmall attachment or annex that stretches our from the main hulk of the boxy mall like a broken wing. It's a store that specializes in Halloween party items and opens in September and October every year. It being June, it's closed right this moment, but it's never really emptied since the stock is too cheap and unsellable to be cleared out from one year to the next.

The doors have been breached, the stock spilled out, and many rubber vampire masks and spooky plastic jack-o-lanterns litter the parking lot and blow anachronistically in the summer breeze.

As the sheriff - his nice crisp laundered shirt now stained with red marinara sauce and chewed mulch of meatball - pulls into the parking lot, the sun goes behind the trees and the unsold bungalows in the abandoned development at the far end of the parking lot.

Night has come, without ceremony or fanfare. The sheriff’s police cruiser collides with an unseen skateboard which then careens across the open space and hits a lamppost, one of the few that still shines a forlorn yellowish glow.

There's a skaterkid slumped on the ground in the weak cone of light. The sheriff draws his weapon and exits his vehicle. Casting glances and aiming his weapon in a wide arc, he lopes across the vacant space to where the kid lies. He turns the corpse over. The kid's throat has been torn out and rags of flesh hang down into the void mess of the neck and upper chest.

Looking up, the sheriff sees them massed at the edge of the sodium light and approaching slowly. Lurching steps, their unspeakable schlongs swinging, skin greenish glistening, all muddied with blood and feces. Howling with anguish, gobbets of flesh matter spilling from their mouths. Silent, silent where moaning should be. Eyes rolling wild white, or else needle-pupil gaze fixated at some far point beyond the dark horizon.

The sheriff fires his service revolver, but of course he only has six shells in his gun and no reloads on his belt. He is submerged and the silence is broken only by the soft sharp cracking of bones and the slurping of soft tissues. His throat doesn’t ever scream because it cannot.

---

Exposition

Helmut lurks in a glass elevator, where he's been able to force shut the doors and now squats as small as possible in the corner. Nothing about his mind has been allowed to function without some panic lever being pulled to make him and his thoughts shrink smaller and smaller still.

He's been trying to call the authorities, but now he can't get any signal bars, stuck where he is inside the glass box. His cellphone's open at the page he consulted after Istvan called out something to him about rats urinating on the waterbottles and he’d checked the AI for the latest data on rat-piss contamination.

The device blink-blinked for a second and then told him what he wanted to know.

Hantavirus hemorrhagic fever. Hantaviruses are naturally found primarily in rodents. In general each rodent that carries a hantavirus carries one hantavirus species. Sin Nombre virus (SNV) is the most common cause of hantavirus in North America. 

Early symptoms include headache, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, bloody stool, the appearance of spots on the skin, bleeding in the respiratory tract, and renal symptoms such as kidney swelling, excess protein in urine, and blood in urine. Those affected may attack others in the delerium of their disease, and hematophagy or the drinking of blood for instinctive relief has been observed in many acute cases. 

But he never got a chance to tell Istvan what he’d discovered, since Istvan was soon swarmed by a huddle of zombie performers who were either eating him or fucking him, or possibly both at once. Helmut had run straight to this glass place of refuge and sat here, panting and panting, and trying to remember a prayer.

Now Helmut looks up to see a performer outside the glass box where he's taken refuge - a pleasant blonde called Swoozy who he'd taken an early shine to, and designated as Lead Female Zombie, or ‘Queen Z’. He’d planned to get more friendly with her after wrapping this evening.

Now she watches him steadily, gnawing on her forearm and lapping up the blood calm as a puppy at a waterdish. She looks oddly like Pamela Anderson from the early Baywatch days. There's so much more joy in her eyes than he'd noted during the filming of the sex scenes, and he almost desires her now, or at least desires to see what it’s like to experience her joy.

Inside the elevator, staring at Helmut with its tiny black bead eyes, is a plump dark brown rat. Squatting in the catty-corner. Unseen until this moment: an oddity.

The rat seems extraordinarily interested in what this human wants to do next, and twitches its whiskers curiously. The tiny scratch-scratching of its small claws on the smooth floor make little marks in the man’s soft brain tissue, right there at the back where the marks stay forever.

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===== {Dead Mall Euphony / END } =====

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