Dead Mall Report: The Cult of the Eternal Trucker

When I heard the owners of the Illinois Towne Center Mall were hiring security guards to walk its (likely) haunted halls, I thought Vasily would be the one member of the Joliet Paranormal Investigation Club to be able to get his foot in the door, and with it thus cracked open, let the rest of us inside. He had worked as a security guard before. If you ever saw him, you’d know why. Part Russian stock and part Indian, Vasily was six foot six and almost as wide, a gym rat who trained on heavy iron. He had even worked at the coroner’s office for a stint, where his dead lifts were really dead lifts; his main job had been to move bodies from out of emergency vehicles and into the freezers. He wasn’t easily spooked.

We all knew the rumors about the mall since we were kids back in the good old days of the 2030s. Now, the days weren’t so good anymore. The world had move on since then. There were many stories about the mall, but the one that seemed most plausible was about a secret cult that met in the tunnel system beneath its rotting edifice. The people who went there to worship were a cargo cult by most accounts. They thought they could bring back the glory days of cheap plastic goods and cheap plastic manufacturing by worshipping and doing strange rituals with abandoned toys, action figures, and baby doll heads kept on an altar where the occasional runaway teenager was sacrificed. They also thought they could bring back the days of cheap gasoline, and had stolen hood ornaments on their altar. One story claimed they sacrificed an unlucky Amazon delivery driver, when Amazon was still a company, back when they still made deliveries. They thought if they sacrificed him, the flow of goodies ordered off the internet wouldn’t have to end, and their truck driving savior would return. Some people called the Cult of the Eternal Trucker.
 
The mall had been plopped down on a large creek when it was built in the 1980s. For the young ones reading this, that was when the glowing promise of Reagonomic trickle down prosperity sold the lie that we didn’t need to pay attention to our dwindling resources. It was nothing to burn it up in one big orgy of consumption. That’s what a mall was, and why so many of them are empty just now. It didn’t matter none to the developers if they had to redirect a creek, so people could shop. Redirect a creek into concrete tunnels, so people could pick up a new outfit, one of those shiny plastic discs with music on it, a plush doll, and wash it all down with a burger and fries.

The cult met in those watery tunnels. Kids sometimes disappeared into them so they were eventually welded shut, but we figured there must be a way to access them from inside the mall. After Vasily had been on the job for a few weeks, we set a date and he let us inside. It was suspected that the owners of the mall were cult members, otherwise, why hold on to this useless property? When the AI bubble popped, it took down the real estate bubble with it into a second great depression. All of the property that had been eaten up by corporations fell into the hands of whoever could keep it up. Squatters rights. But the people who had the paper deed for this place weren’t keen to let any squatters inside. We wondered what they were hiding.

We didn’t rule out the possibility that there might be ghosts, and so we brought our radio equipment to listen in for any EVP. Tuning between the dead channels on the radio, spirits will sometimes speak out. We set up in the cobwebbed food court and turned on one our modified scanner radios.

A warbling rasp crackled out of the speaker. “10-4 good buddy.” The voice sounded familiar. Had I heard it while scanning the airwaves before? Then the sound of a slide guitar slithered out from behind his voice as if there was a country station on in the background. It kept fading in and out and then the voice came back. “I’m about to back off the hammer and pull into town. I’ve got one more delivery before I retire this rig of mine for good. I’m ready to put my feet up, maybe see if I can finally figure out a way to ease this aching back. Something about this delivery though, it ain’t right. I could swear my cargo was cursed. It’s just been one thing after another, know what I mean Rocket Dog?”

Was it the Eternal Trucker making one more delivery to the dead mall? And who was Rocket Dog? We never found out. They never answered back. Then the radio flickered on and off as it surged with electricity, sparks and died with the smell of ozone.

We barely had time to register the fried gear when we all saw the flicker of a man at the Sbarro counter, whose flesh looked like it had just melted off his face, the same way cheese slides off a greasy slice of pizza. He started to place an order at the empty register, a meat-lovers with extra meat, deep dish, extra garlic butter sauce on the side. After the order was placed, the apparition flickered in a heart attack. The tunnels beneath the place now seemed all the more inviting.

Vasily had figured out a way to get down there, from a hatch he found just inside the loading dock where abandoned Amazon vans and tractor trailers sat derelict. After we checked our batteries, we opened the hatch, went down the iron rungs, into the world below. Cave crickets were the first to meet the glare of our headband lights. Then there were the roaches that scattered everywhere as we stooped a bit to go through the square tunnel as our feet got wet in the trickle of water from the underground creek.

We splashed through, lured by fragments of voices as garbled as the disembodied spirits we had heard whispering in the spaces between the channels on the desolate airwaves. Then we came to a large square chamber spray painted with all manner of symbols and signs. Crude skulls, red hand prints and the names of heavy metal bands adorned the walls. Three passageways forked off. We could not pass through the end of one of these, because of the steel grate. Tangled in amidst the sticks and plastic and stones from storm debris, were pale human bones washed by the runoff. We turned back and headed down the other tunnel.

When we came into the next chamber, the first thing I noticed was the massive altar made of a semitruck radiator grill. On top of it were plastic Sponge Bobs and Star Wars action figures, hood ornaments, Barbies, and more chrome plated hood ornaments. Wax from black candles dripped over the skulls that filled the gaps between the Hot Wheels and the matchbox cars and other toys and cheap consumer goods that covered the grill. Wedged in the jaw of the largest skull was a CB microphone, whose wires trailed down to a crackling radio on the floor. The transmit button glowed red.
​
 Vasily was the first to say, “We gotta get the fuck out of here!”

For previous years pieces of Halloween flash fiction see these very short stories:

The Voice in the Well

Fresh Cut Flowers

A Lingering Sound of Steam

.:. .:. .:.
​
The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You could also buy my book if you want to support me.

☕️☕️☕️ 

​
Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. ​