"Bailey-TheMall" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bailey Dale)

DALE BAILEY

THE MALL

ELLIS WATCHED THROUGH the rearview mirror as the city shrank to a jumble of
angular boxes, lit up against the midnight horizon. Ahead, the highway ran
straight through a seemingly endless expanse of shopping malls and reticulated
lawns. At last, however, the suburbs began to give way to rolling pasture and
woodland; a long-suppressed nostalgia for the curve of tree and slope welled up
in Ellis. He felt like a snake, sloughing layers of stress and grime like husks
of faded skin.

"We're off," he whispered. "Vacation at last." Katie shifted restlessly in the
passenger seat, draped her slim hand across his knee, and muttered in her sleep.
The kids did not move. Jason, ten, slumped in the back seat with his fingers
resting lightly on his Gameboy. Donna, fifteen, clad in cut-off jeans and that
damned Guns 'n' Roses T-shirt, pillowed her head against her arm.

Ellis turned his attention back to the road. Despite the long drive ahead, he
could barely dampen his excitement. God knows, they deserved the holiday. Katie
had been working long hours at the catering company and he was exhausted after
months as supervising architect for the new mall going up at city center. This
year, despite the voluble protest of the kids, Ellis had insisted on something
more relaxing than people-chokedbeaches and amusement parks. The camping trip
had been his idea. After all, he hadn't spent a night beneath the sky since he
was Jason's age, when he had spent a summer at his grandfather's farm in Ohio.

During that memorable summer, Ellis had passed his days swimming and fishing,
his nights supine in manure-scented fields, searching out the constellations he
had discovered in an old book on his grandfather's shelves. Ever since, he
supposed, he had taken solace in the heavens. He had missed them during the long
years in the city. How many times during those years had he peered into a night
sky hidden behind a canopy of nacreous city light?

Ellis was startled out of his thoughts when he topped a hill and discovered a
galaxy of blinking lights sprinkled across the valley below. GAS! blazed a sign
from the near end of a vast building. SHOPPING! glared another from the opposite
end, almost lost in the distance. Atop the building, three stories high,
ten-foot-tall letters flashed alternately red and yellow against the night sky:
REST STOP! OPEN 24 HOURS!

Ellis glanced at the fuel gauge; the needle stood at half a tank. He guided the
car down the curved exit ramp and parked beneath the pavilion overhanging the
fuel islands. Across the moonlit parking lot lay the vast building he had seen
from the highway. His headlights glared back at him from a towering glass
vestibule. Beside a battery of revolving doors a sign proclaimed in flashing
orange neon: The American Mall! Amusement Park Inside! The building seemed to
shimmer momentarily in the clear air, wavering like a mirage behind ascending