Broken Escalator

By Christopher Munroe

On October 5th of last year, the escalators at West Edmonton Mall shut down simultaneously due to what was believed to be a series of mechanical failures, stranding thousands on the second floor. By the time a rescue operation could be organized and mounted, nearly everyone on the mall’s upper level had been killed, and to this day few people, if any, understand what really happened during the period when that area of the mall was cut off from the rest of the world.
My name is Christopher Munroe, and this is the story of what happened to me. This isn't the whole story of what happened at West Edmonton Mall that horrible day, but it is my story. This is the story of the people I met, the things I had to endure, and the lengths I went to, to survive... a broken escalator.

Broken Escalator is a surrealist horror novel by Christopher Munroe, where mechanical failure spirals quickly out of control and human nature is discovered to be by turns nobler and more brutal than anyone could imagine. Or at least, than anyone would like to admit...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christopher Munroe
• Release date: Sep 22, 2012
• ISBN: 9780991715800

Christopher Munroe

Christopher Munroe is an actor/author/comedian from Calgary, Canada, where he lives, works, writes and spends too much time on Twitter with his girlfriend Kat and their puppy, Rusty. While he’s a prolific and occasionally podcasted author of short and flash fiction, Broken Escalator is his first novel and, having spent months of his life working on it, he now finds himself mildly nervous every time he’s inside a mall...

Book preview

Broken Escalator

A Novel By Christopher Munroe

Copyright 2012 Christopher Munroe

Smashwords Edition

My gratitude, before we begin, to the remarkable and talented people who helped me with the design work on this book, with beta-reading my first, incredibly rough drafts, and with the music for the podcast version of this novel. Without them, this would still have been possible, but the end result would’ve been an unreadable embarrassment.

Cory, Bob, Morgan, Taggart, Brad, Alex: Thank you. I cannot express how much help you’ve been to me.

For Kat, who believed in my story and had nothing but love and support for me during its completion.

Chapter 1

How I got here

It’s been said that it’s not until the moments before death that you realize who you truly are. That something about the combination of fear and adrenaline allows for the sort of rapid-fire reflection that lets your true identity suddenly click into place, overriding the façade you’d spent a lifetime constructing. I’m not sure how this would work in the case of wasting illness, I should think a person with cancer would have enough time to reflect at a more leisurely pace, as they’re hooked up to tubes and wires, that they wouldn’t need to wait until the very end. But I’m not dying of a wasting illness, so I can’t speak to that particular realm of experience.

I’m dying violently.

Specifically, I’m dying with cold, metallic hands around my throat, rough hands with hardened, ever shifting ridges just under the skin. I don’t know what the ridges might be, and I’m afraid that if I did know I’d go mad from the revelation, but that’s okay. I’m being strangled after all, and it won’t be long before I lose consciousness, so it’s unlikely I’ll ever be faced with that knowledge.

So: Who am I, really?

It saddens me to admit that I have absolutely no idea.

I have fear, that’s for certain. I’m terrified beyond belief, have been for close to two days. I’ve slept in that time, but not much and not well, and my waking hours have been a walking nightmare. The fear part of the equation is very much present and accounted for.

Adrenalin too I have in abundance. I’ve done things in the past days that I’d never have thought myself capable of. I’ve killed men, eaten human flesh, watched friends die and been powerless to save them. I’ve lived in a constant state of shock, at a sprinters pace, and yes, it’s changed me. Changed me enough that if the version of me that existed twenty-four short hours ago were to meet me now, he’d recoil in shock and revulsion at the sight.

The past two days have changed me into someone of whom I’m not proud.

But I’m the only me I have, so I’ve got to live with myself, for a few more seconds at any rate. After that, the hands crushing my windpipe will have done their work, I’ll drift into whatever oblivion awaits and the world can end without me having to stick around and watch it.

But I still wish I knew who I truly was.

For some reason, the old adage isn’t applying in my case. I feel the fear, I taste the adrenalin, but the combination is providing no insight at all into my true nature, at least none that I can see. All I can see is the Thing above me, hovering inches from my face, Its weight pressing down, keeping me still as It finishes me. It’s become my world, and it’s this world upon which I’ll breathe my last. Upon which I have breathed my last, though my brain hasn’t figured out I’m dead yet so as to shut my body down.

The Thing above me is leering, Its face distorted by the same shifting ridges I can feel in Its hands, bigger hands than I’d thought they would be, bigger than any hands should be, and Its eyes are glowing red in their sockets, red all the way through, as if something had scooped out the eyes and replaced them with tiny fires. It isn’t human, though I once mistook that It might be, and It won’t rest until I’m dead, and after me, Linda, and after Linda the world.

I’m sorry, Linda. I’m sorry Trent, Terrence. I’m sorry, world. I honestly did try my best to stop this madness; I just didn’t understand properly what was happening around me until it was too late.

I wonder how long it’s been since I last took a breath? My chest hurts and my periphery is beginning to darken. It lends my view a hazy, indistinct quality, as though I were looking up through a picture-frame, or watching my own murder on television. The Thing looks as though It’s laughing at me, though all that’s coming out of Its mouth is an odd, mechanical whine. It’s right to laugh, I suppose. Its victory is assured. Once I’m gone the only one left will be Linda, and she’s too badly hurt to put up much of a fight. It’ll kill her, free Itself from this place and loose Itself on an unsuspecting world. All in all It has much to laugh about.

I’m almost entirely blind now, I think, but I can’t focus my eyes well enough to know for sure. It’s leaning in closer, or is It drawing me up toward itself? Either way, I’m near enough now that I can feel Its hot breath on my face, enough to smell the harsh smell of oil and decaying meat on that breath.

It was a good game, It tells me, voice low and echoing in the empty, blood-spattered hallway, and you played it well. You survived longer than nearly everyone, you have nothing to be ashamed of in your performance. But now the game is at an end, little mortal man, and the time has come for me to leave this place and see the world. Now die.

And as quickly as that, it’s over.

-

The thing of it is, I didn’t even have a good reason to visit West Edmonton Mall. No urgent shopping needed to be done, no movie needed to be seen, and I hadn’t made plans to meet anyone there. I could just as easily have stayed home, played some Playstation, put a load of laundry in, ordered a pizza, and not found out about what’d happened so nearby until I saw it on the news the next day. But I’d finished Dead Rising 2 the night previous and had no new game to begin, I had plenty of clean laundry and I was sick of pizza. That’s a risk you run when you never bother learning how to cook. So I figured a quick jaunt to the mall would be a good excuse to get out of the house for a little while. And really, it was a gorgeous, summery day in early October and I was vaguely aware that there wouldn’t be many more gorgeous, summery days before the first snow of the season came in.

I had an unexpected Wednesday off, and the biggest mall in North America was a fifteen-minute walk from my apartment. Why not pay it a visit?

I arrived with vague plans to do some light shopping, pick up an iTunes card and grab lunch down on Bourbon Street. Chapters was first; it’s always first, though I rarely buy anything there. I cruised their Science Fiction/Fantasy section, waiting for something to jump out and grab my attention, and when nothing did I made my exit and hit Cinzeo for a snack to tide me over until I was ready to eat a proper meal on my way out of the mall. With hindsight I should have eaten first, but that’s hindsight for you...

The Cinzeo was delicious, if a little rich. By the time I reached the end of the cinnamon smothered roll of baked desert-product I was kind of tired of it, but it was delicious nonetheless. I really ought to learn my lesson and get the smaller size, but I doubt I ever will. I’d rather have too much than too little, with something like that. Rather walk away feeling slightly ill than disappointed.

After Chapters and Cinzeo came HMV. The HMV at West Edmonton Mall is massive, two full stories of music, console games, books and DVDs for me to peruse. I could happily spend hours there and still have plenty left by the end that I’d yet to pick through. I buy all my music digitally now, what with it not being the nineteen-nineties anymore, but there’s just something about leafing through rack after rack of compact disks that I find enormously relaxing. It takes me back to my twenty-one year old self, who had nothing better to do with his free time than wander through second-hand music shops looking for unusual imported albums. As opposed to my thirty three year old self, who still has nothing better to do, but no longer has the same trouble finding music.

I suppose my desire to return to the simple pleasures of more than a decade ago is just another sign that I’m starting to get old.

Because I needed another sign of that…

I’m not sure how long I browsed CDs, but eventually something within me decided it had been long enough. After all, I wouldn’t be buying anything from the music section and a man needs to get around to some actual shopping sooner or later. I wandered over to the HMV escalator and it whisked me upstairs to the DVD/gaming section, where I began the process anew.

The DVD section of HMV is a different experience to me than the music section, insomuch as I actually intend to buy things while I’m there, though I never know specifically what until I find it. Sometimes a new release will excite me enough to take it home, sometimes it’s a season of a television series I’d been meaning to watch, but more often than not I wind up with a bad film.

It’s a guilty pleasure, bad films. But only if they’re truly, truly awful. Simply boring or failed doesn’t cut the mustard, they need to cross over into the realm of the fiasco to stir my interest: Waterworld, Popeye, Battlefield Earth, Catwoman; If its very existence ended otherwise promising Hollywood careers, they’ll likely wind up in my collection, such is their perverse sway.

I don’t want to use the word sacrament, but that’s sort of how they affect me.

And this day was no exception. As I shopped, my attention settled on the Nicolas Cage remake of The Wicker Man; a film I’d seen once, been by turns baffled by and angry with, then loaned to a friend and never seen again. I’d been meaning to repurchase it, but would forget to every time I was out shopping for DVDs. Maybe this forgetfulness was my subconscious trying to protect me, but it couldn’t last forever. When my eyes wandered across the Ws in the action/adventure section there it was, staring up at me, and since I hadn’t found anything else that struck my fancy I picked up a copy.

At this point I was faced with a choice, and it was there that I made the decision that the next day would get me strangled. Go back to the ground floor and buy some Booster Juice, or stay on the second and see if the trained seals had started their show. I could, of course, also see the seals from downstairs, that’s where the show took place after all, but for any sort of view down there you had to pay for your ticket, whereas from upstairs you could look down on the whole thing from the promenade for free. The mall had been designed such that a series of giant skylights in the ceiling would also light the ground level, and one of the side effects of this was that from the second floor you were always afforded a view of the first. I hadn’t seen the seals perform in a while, and trained seals are adorable, so on a whim I decided to wander out and see if they’d begun.

They hadn’t, but by the time I got there I’d forgotten all about Booster Juice. And although I didn’t know it yet, my world was mere minutes from falling apart around me.

-

There’s nothing wrong with the upstairs level of West Edmonton Mall, but it’s not designed for me. It’s a little more upscale than the lower portion, a little stuffier. If you want higher-end clothing boutiques it has a lot to offer, but for someone who wears essentially the exact same cargo pants/concert t-shirt/black dress shirt combination every day, it’s a long, wide gulf of very little of interest stretching out between the HMV and the collectables place near the dinner theater and casino. Still, in and amongst the clothiers selling skinny emo jeans to skinny emo teens there are still things worth browsing, if you look hard enough.

I stopped first at the Koodo kiosk, to see if they’d started selling phones cooler than mine yet. The whole point of not to having a contract was, after all, to be able to upgrade my phone whenever the whim struck. My own phone was, however, still working fine, so after a quick look I abandoned them in favor of the T&T Market in Chinatown, where I picked out a bizarre Asian carbonated drink, as is my want when very bored. Canned Gourd this particular time, and it tasted more unpleasant than words can express. Then Starbucks, for a pumpkin-spiced latte to wash the rancid, strangely salty taste of Gourd from my mouth and a side order of mild disappointment that they were out of muffins. After a quick internal debate, I detoured on my way to the collectables place to stop in at the Apple Store. I try not to visit the Apple Store often when I’m at the mall, as doing so tends to leave me depressed about the state of my finances, but I always have to at least have a glance in at the new generation tech-toys they’re stocking. A lot of it looked amazing, and I’m a sucker for electronics advanced enough to remind me that this is in fact the future as envisioned by science fiction authors of old, but there was no way I could afford their higher-end items without months of financial preparation, and I just couldn’t justify the expense. I knew all of that, yet I still had to have a look. Their new prototype had arrived.

It was a stunning piece of engineering, all sleek lines and smooth panels, and I’d read about its specs online in the weeks since they’d announced the product release. A lot of people had, it had generated an impressive amount of buzz. It was the sort of thing you’d never expect a company to actually mass produce, and with a three point six million dollar price tag I didn’t imagine Apple planned on selling very many of them. Still, as a prototype, a proof of concept and an ingenious piece of marketing, it was a glorious success. I’d have liked to actually try it on for a minute or two, however I was by no means the only one in the mall fascinated by it, and even on a Wednesday afternoon the crowds of people around the Apple store straining to get a look at the thing made getting anywhere near it impossible.

Plus, really, I don’t have three point six million dollars, I’ll never get three point six million dollars, and I’ll never be able to spend three point six million dollars on a new toy from the Apple Store, however awesome that toy might, on an academic level, be.

So, with some regret, I turned my back to the crowds around the shop and headed toward the collectables place, where the toys are more within my price range.

West Edmonton Coin & Stamp is always well stocked with weird little board games and knick-knacks, and although most of what it carries is, from a practical perspective, useless, it’s always cool to see. And sometimes you can find something there among the bobble-heads of popular HBO series characters, repackaged action figures from the nineteen eighties and Magic the Gathering card binders that you hadn’t known existed, but immediately realize you desperately need.

Obviously, this isn’t the case if you aren’t a massive geek.

However, I am, and proudly so. So a place with life-sized glowing replica lightsabers adorning its walls will always get some of my money. It was only a matter of figuring out what it was I was going to take in return.

I’m not sure, speaking of fandom paraphernalia, who thought it was a good idea to produce and market a version of Dr. Who’s sonic screwdriver that opened to reveal an actual screwdriver, but I commend them on their knowledge of their target market. I’m not sure what I’ll ever do with a screwdriver, I’m not exactly handy, and it was more expensive than an impulse purchase ought to be, but I sure as hell bought one. How could I resist?

With my screwdriver stashed safely away in my Mountain Equipment Co-op bag it was finally time for lunch, so I started working my way back the way I came. There was plenty of the second floor I’d yet to see, but past the casino/dinner theater/collectables store hallway the mall became especially dire, eventually ending at three massive department stores that faced one another like weary gunfighters in a Mexican standoff from the ends of three long hallways. Department stores are fine, I have nothing against department stores, but when you’re at the mall killing an afternoon they aren’t exactly browse around material.

Thus, it was time for lunch. I was feeling a dull ache behind my eyes, which was weird as I don’t normally get headaches, but I chalked it up to hunger. It was closing in on four in the afternoon, and other than Cinzeo I hadn’t had a bite to eat all day. So back out into the hall I went, passing Starbucks once again, toward the Winners and the ice hockey rink escalators that would gently ferry me back downstairs and toward the faux-Creole area where the majority of the mall’s restaurants were housed. I considered stopping for a second pumpkin-spice latte, they were after all only available a few weeks out of the year, but quickly decided that six dollars for a cup of coffee wasn’t something I could justify to myself more than once a day, especially considering the thirty some-odd dollars I’d just paid for a screwdriver I had no use for. I was there to shop, absolutely, but not to hemorrhage money. Early in the month or not, I did have rent to think about, and business at the Humpty’s I was working at had been slowing as summer eased its way into autumn. Just lunch, then. Lunch, pick up something for my headache at the Shoppers Drug Mart near where I came in, and home.

A fine plan in theory, but as I arrived at the escalator I found its steps had stilled. It was, I realized, out of order.

-

What’s wrong? Came a voice from behind me.

I couldn’t have been standing at the top of the broken Ice Palace escalator for any more than twenty minutes, entranced by its stillness, but in my mind it’d felt like an eternity. I was trying to wrap my head around the fact that it had just stopped and that nobody had bothered to come by and start it again, but mostly I was just staring. There was something at the back of my mind, something which seemed like it was important, that I felt like I needed to remember, but between hunger, a now throbbing headache and my confusion at the state of the vital mall equipment in