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MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH

spares

For Paula,

who lights up the forest.

Our kind. Us people. All of us that

started the game with a crooked cue,

that wanted so much and got so little,

that meant so good and did so bad.

JIM THOMPSON

‘The Killer Inside Me’

Table of Contents

Wide shot.

New Richmond, Virginia. Not the old Richmond, the historic capital of historical old Virginia, that sprawl of creaking tedium, but the New. The old Richmond was destroyed over a century ago, razed to the ground during riots which lasted two months. After decades of putting up with dreadful shopping facilities, a bewilderingly dull Old Town and no good restaurants to speak of, the residents suddenly went non-linear and strode across the city like avenging angels, destroying everything in their wake. It was great.

Spin doctors blamed downtown decay, crack wars, the cast of the moon.

The MegaMalls are aircraft – five miles square, two hundred storeys high – which majestically transport passengers from one side of the continent to the other, from the bottom to the top; from wherever they've been to wherever they seem to think will be better. The biggest oblongs of all time, a fetching shade of consumer goods black, studded with millions of points of light and so big they transcend function and become simply a shape again.

When oblongs grow up, they all want to be MegaMalls.

Inside are thousands of stores, twenty-storey atriums, food courts the size of small towns, dozens of multiplex cinemas and a range of hotels to suit every wallet which has a Gold Card in it. All this and more arranged round wide, sweeping avenues, a thousand comfortable nooks and crannies, and so many potted plants they count as an ecosystem in their own right. Safe from the rest of the world, cocooned 20,000 feet up in the air.