Incident

June 19, 1985. Somewhere in America.

Young Amy sat at the breakfast table. She always made it down there first. Except for Mom of course. Usually. 

Amy was nine. Almost ten. She hadn't napped in years and it seemed to her mom she was getting up earlier and earlier. 

This morning she had found Amy's bed empty. It had happened before that Amy had gotten up so early that she made it to the kitchen before her mom. It still made Mom's heart stop for a moment every time. 

Derick, on the other hand, was getting up later and later. That was perfectly normal for teenagers. Mom used to send Amy up to wake her older brother, but it had gotten to the point where she had to do it herself. 

Amy's father came down at the same time he always did. He smiled at Amy. He was always tired because he stayed up too late after everyone else slept. He worried a lot. So did Mom, but they worried about different things. 

Amy's father worried about the bills. Everything was getting so expensive and everybody around them was spending so much. Both children were growing and constantly needed new clothes and so much food. They were the most important. He knew without Mom nothing would be possible. 

Mom didn't worry about those things as much. There was always enough when they all had each other, she tried to tell her husband whenever he would listen. 

She worried about external influences. She worried about television and shopping malls and kidnappers and Satanic cults and perverts. She worried about malignance. 

She knew her fears were old and she knew that they were true. 

Mom had been looking out the window, considering the iron playground in the backyard and what her own mother had told her about iron's protective properties, while Young Amy had been looking at the two new missing children on the milk carton. 

Arkansas sounded so far away. She heard her father once describe it as "two states over," which sounded far away in the way that he said it. 

Her father had been there before she was born. He had been a lot of places before she was born. He had been in Vietnam even, but he didn't talk to her about that much, and she was afraid to ask questions. 

Sometimes when they walked together he would tell her to change her routes so no one would follow her. But he didn't worry about it. It was just something he remembered. Young Amy did worry though. 

What her dad worried about was Ronald Reagan sending Derick to fight a battle in Siberia as part of some fever dream of ending the Cold War induced by the early onset of dementia. 

The boy's future should be before him as a great expanse of any possibility, Amy's father thought. For both of them it should be that way. 

The summer, at least, did lay before the siblings that way. The family had made no vacation plans. Derick got a job at a local ice cream parlor, but it was only open Thursdays through Sundays. 

Today they could do anything. Young Amy often tagged along with her older brother but on this day she wanted to go to her friend's house to listen to the new Weird Al album.

Young Amy told her mother what she wanted to do. Weird Al sounded, well, weird to Amy's mom, but at least it wasn't heavy metal. 

She would catch up to her brother later. Young Amy knew his routines well. He never listened to their dad about changing up their routes. 

Amy caught up to Derick after listening to the Weird Al album about ten times. She knew by that time Derick was usually somewhere around the half-built canal in their neighborhood with his friends from school. They liked to throw rocks over the wall and Amy liked to watch perched from the wall behind them. 

This went on for some time, when one of the boys had an idea. There was a shopping mall not far from there that had closed the previous winter. It had been a particularly brutal winter and demolition crews couldn't get in to work the interior until the spring. 

There were a lot of stories about what was in the abandoned mall. The closing had been abrupt. 

The mall had opened just three winters previous, thanks to the incentives in the tax cut Congress passed after Reagan came into office in 1981. It let developers mark down the value of their properties for tax purposes. The local developer decided to convert 40 acres into a shopping mall almost as big as the one in Houston, but no city was remotely close in size for hundreds of miles. 

It was one of the only malls to shut down in 1984 and CNN even sent a crew out to cover the closure. The developer sent a cease and desist after one of the cable news channel's photographers snuck into the mall for a few establishing shots. 

One of Derick's friends said his dad's buddy had been contracted by the CIA to sweep the mall after it closed because it had been infested with vampires. The CIA, Derick's friend said, was interested in capturing the vampires and training them for deployment to the Soviet Union, or even to study the vampires and figure out how to turn whatever makes them vampires into a biological weapon.

Young Amy listened intently but the older kids weren't buying it. Vampires didn't exist anymore, not since the vaccine and eradication campaigns after World War 2.

More likely the mall had been used by drifters or even local wildlife looking to ride out the cold winter that year, one of the older girls noted. 

And thieves, because there was so much in there to steal, another kid added. 

They had to go see it for themselves, all of the children agreed on that, and they made their way to the abandoned mall, young Amy following along dutifully.

She would be the only one of them still alive by sundown.