Lippe Simone - Blank

Tom and Honor and Clint quietly set their loot on the floor and receded into the shadows offered by the pharmacy and credit card kiosk. The roused and ready occupying army marched toward them on a field of crispy toasted corn and the cascading crunching came to them like the sound of a thousand soldiers marching only slightly out of time. There may as well have been a thousand because armed with a single sidearm and a spear gun and the wit to hide in the darkness Tom and Honor and Clint were little match for the fraternity party of twenty or thirty prepared to defend their grocery store with the sharpest objects from Kitchen and Bath.

The army approached blindly, unaware of the nature of the threat to their territory and doubly threatening in their own right because they clearly didn’t care. From the darkness Tom and Honor and Clint watched the portion of grocery store that they could call their own grow rapidly smaller and smaller until the wall came to a confused stop. The wall knew that it was under siege, possibly by heavy and flat-footed monsters, but there they all were almost at the back of the store and so far all they’d encountered was a thick, honey-scented, sticky crust. There was clear evidence of an invasion presently underway but no sign of invaders. They looked about, at each other, at the ceiling and the cereal, and decided with a communal nod to attack the darkness.

And at that moment three mobility scooters zipped out of formation and at a dizzying 20 mph skidded out of sight behind the final row of shelves and again fell silent. A long moment of simmering quiet followed before the fraternity fell into a frenzy and broached the final wall only to be thrown into mass confusion by the whirring and whirling of scooters handled with such a complete lack of skill and planning that they seemed to be attacking in their hundreds.

Tom and Honor and Clint drove wildly off in different directions, running interference for one another and pausing just long enough to draw chase before tracing the aisles and standing like circus acrobats on their mounts to scoop fruit and cereal and snacks off the shelves and into the wide wire shopping baskets fixed to the front of their scooters. When her basket was full of oranges and apples and grapefruit Honor began navigating a circuitous route toward the missing wall, honking the rubber bubble of her mobility horn to which Tom and Clint honked a lively reply from the darkness, like mute clowns playing a frantic, life-and-death game of Marco Polo.

But the wall was impassible and in fact it had reformed itself as the backlit silhouette of a mob of groaning, moaning, mouth-breathers who sensed food and had armed themselves with the implements of the urban harvest — crowbars and axes and razor-thin aluminum parking lot signage that could easily function as either. Honor took a sharp right and honked her new intentions to her colleagues as she found herself herded by the crowd and the meat counter into an almost entirely black corridor which echoed her horn such that she couldn’t say for certain whether or not Tom and Clint were behind her.

So they were all honking emphatically when they escaped the hall into the vast and glimmering gallery of a modern shopping mall and found themselves bombarded with choice, had they been in the market for mobile phones or pressed-tin jewellery or posters or fashions for the dangerously thin or heart-stoppingly fat. Blue light from the gallery skylight made sharp, detective-movie contrasts on the varnished tile mall and its indoor garden and water features and sunglasses kiosks and, above all, the hundreds of shoppers who’d been going about their business when they all forgot everything they ever knew and who were sleeping soundly when three mobility scooters violently woke them with frenzied honking and, in some cases, by driving over their extremities.

Before Tom and Honor and Clint knew where they were or what they were doing, really, they were being pursued through a Del Rey shopping center in the middle of the night by hundreds of starving automatons who suddenly and intractably associated honking and scooters and honking scooters with food, and it was getting away. The mobility scooters offered a top speed of slightly faster than the average person can run and much, much faster than the top speed of the average California mall patron, but were slowed considerably by a retail environment almost wholly unsuited to off-track racing. Consequently the scooters maintained only a thin lead over a snowballing stampede of overweight suburbanites in patterned shirts and Bermuda shorts stumbling over each other in an uncannily accurate impression of a Shriner’s parade that’s spent its entire promotional fund on rum cocktails.

The epicenter of the shopping mall was the junction of four wings of retail and restaurants and beauticians and banks, crowned by a stagnant fountain hosting several people who had managed to drown in it. The scooters approached from the south and circumnavigated the fountain once like a Paris roundabout before selecting the east hall as the least threatening and most likely to provide an exit through the high glass doors swinging freely on their hinges.

And so in a minute they were racing through the hot night air across the obstacle course of a parking lot with the equivalent of the population of a small village for the morbidly obese dogging their wheels. Staying ahead of them, so long as the batteries on the mobility scooters held out, would be exactly as simple as not driving into anything. But Tom and Honor and Clint needed to lose them entirely before trying to return to the boat if they were going to avoid it being overwhelmed and, probably, sunk before they could make way. For the moment, then, they dared not return to the marina but instead followed Honor as she led them to the sidewalk and turned toward the Ballona Wetlands.

And then she stopped. Tom and Clint zipped past before stopping and looking back to see Honor apparently losing her mind. She was throwing her oranges at the crowd or, more precisely, she was lobbing oranges and grapefruit high into the trees, seemingly unaware or unconcerned that the mob was seconds from overtaking her. And then monkeys were dropping from the trees, following the fruit and then joining the pursuit of Honor as she returned to the relatively sober act of driving a mobility scooter into the Ballona Wetlands while throwing oranges and grapefruit over her shoulder. By the time the mad parade turned onto Fiji Way, the border between the marina and the wetlands, it was in chaos. The shoppers were puffing and wheezing and the monkeys were chattering and screeching and the effect was not at all dissimilar to the sound generated in a church basement when a bingo caller announces the same number twice.

It was seconds before Honor’s plan bore its first horrible fruit as a half-dozen hyenas bounded over the shrubbery dividing the road from the wetlands and scurried across the road snatching monkeys up in their jaws like a team of precision-synchronized purse-snatchers. The rest of the parade immediately twigged to the dangers ahead but it was already too late and dangers lay behind them, too. Panthers had invisibly formed in the shadows on either side of the road and were struggling to select the fattest and weakest and slowest in the herd, a challenge the pride of lionesses dispensed with altogether by loitering at the back of the procession.

Even people with no active memories of their own names or loved ones or civic order harbor a hard-coded and healthy feral fear of animals with long teeth and longer claws. And this was the catalyst that effectively disintegrated the already less than streamlined hunting party of monkeys and fraternity siblings and shopping mall parade floats stumbling in pursuit of three mobility scooters through a warm Los Angeles night. Most scampered back to the relative safety of the shopping center and others ran fatally onto the wetlands while those remaining behind occupied themselves with being eaten, and Tom and Honor and Clint whirred alone into the darkness and back toward the marina.