Take the All-Mart! (11 page)

“Fine,” Bernice pouted, crossing her arms over her chest.

“Well, I’m not on any diet.” Xanadu slipped between Roxanne and Bernice to grab the box. “Pardon me.” She flipped the box lid back, grabbed a donut — one with sprinkles — and started chowing down, the other girls watching to gauge her reaction, hunger in their eyes.

“How are they?” Bernice asked.

Xanadu swallowed the last bit, then shrugged. “A little stale —”

Xanadu’s eyes suddenly went wide with panic. She dropped the box of donuts, her hands grabbing her stomach as she doubled over. Before anyone could step forward to help her, she had collapsed to the floor, writhing in pain.

“What’s going on?” Mother Superior asked. “Is she choking?”

Roxanne crouched down in front of Xanadu. She had stopped writhing and was now curled up in a fetal position, her face buried in her hands. “Xan... are you okay?”

“I... don’t... “ Xanadu’s hands parted and she looked up at Roxanne. A web-work of pulsing blue lines was spreading under her translucent skin from her lips and eyelids. Her eyes were blood-filled, swarming with tiny black dots. “I... don’t... think... so...”

“The food!” Roxanne stood and rushed over to Georgina, slapping a croissant out of her hand just as the sixteen year old was about to bite into it.

Georgina glared at her. “What was that about?”

Roxanne said nothing in reply, only stepped aside and pointed down at an oddly grinning Xanadu, every inch of her skin now turning gray and fully covered in a fine web-work of pulsing blue.

Georgina screamed.

Roxanne looked at Mother Superior. “We can’t eat this food. It’s how they turn you into zombies.”

Mother Superior nodded. “You hear that everyone? No food!” She crouched in front of Xanadu, reached out to stroke her hair, only to withdraw the hand as Xanadu hissed at her, a blood-black tongue darting out to lick blue lips.

“Umm... guys?” Bernice tapped Roxanne on the shoulder. “Not to pile it on, but we’ve got other problems.” She thumbed down the aisle.

Roxanne twisted around to look. “Oh sweet mother of Jebus.”

There, down the aisle a few hundred feet, was a frenzied mass of people making their halting, spastic way up the aisle. Dozens of them. Mostly adult men and women but a few snarling, screeching children. Their clothes were shreds, their skin translucent gray and mottled with pulsing blue webbing. They were pushing carts, biting and clawing at each other as they filled the carts by grabbing boxes at random from the shelves.

“What are they?” Bernice asked.

Her voice carried down the aisle. One of the things looked up, locking eyes with Bernice.

Roxanne was already reaching for Bernice’s hand when the thing shrieked, prompting the others to stop their mindless shelf rifling and rush forward, clawed hands outstretched and mouths slavering.

“Run!” Roxanne yelled, grabbing Bernice’s hand and yanking her up the aisle. Stilettos clicking, they ran for the nearest gap, Roxanne tugging Bernie through it.

And right into the chest of a hulking, seven foot tall... thing. Maybe it was human once, but not anymore, not with that hard dark blue carapace skin and saucer-wide eyes glowing dull yellow. A security badge was set directly in the wrinkled flesh of its chest.

“Welcome to All-Mart,” it said, its voice a deep growl. It reached a gnarled, almost crab-like hand around Roxanne’s head to pluck the RATpack antenna out of her neck. “May I see your receipt?”

CHAPTER 10: TO THE RESCUE?

The
Wound
parked at the bottom of a hillock, Trip sat on the hood, leaned back against the windshield, smoking and staring all contemplative into the churning maelstrom of the All-Mart’s looming expansion front only fifty feet away and growing closer, inch by slow inch.

“We don’t even know if she’s alive,” Rudy said from under the car.

“All-Marts don’t kill.” Trip flicked the cigarette at the All-Mart with a sharp snap. It arced away and fell a little short, landing on his lap instead. 

“You assume.”

Trip sprung up and slid off the hood. The cig butt fell away and he batted at his jeans with both hands until he was sure he wasn’t on fire. “Their original business model was to get market share. This one will have the same, meaning it just turns people into nanochine-filled zombie consumers.”

“Bad enough,” Rudy said between turns of a ratchet. “And begs the question, if we find her... how we gonna un-zombiefy her? Ask the nanochines to leave?”

“Yeah. Politely.” Trip leaned against the fender, lit another cig. “Look, how the fuck do I know? We’ll figure something out. You done under there yet?” he asked Rudy’s hikers.

“Yeah. Give me a hand?”

Trip bent down, grabbed Rudy’s ankles, and pulled. Once he was far enough out, Rudy sat up, slipping the ratchet into his bandolier and pulling a rag out of a thigh pocket. “We’re all set.” Rudy wiped his hands on the rag. “The anti-theft electric shock system will now, instead of delivering a semi-lethal shock of juice, give off a constant low-power, high-oscillation buzz-charge through the frame.”

Trip had gone back to leaning against the fender. “Is that why my ass is tingling?”

Rudy stuffed the rag away and got to his feet. “I refuse to speculate about anything involving your ass.”

“Wise choice.”

“Anyway,” Rudy said, leaning against the
Wound
next to Trip, “it should — maybe — discourage the All-Mart’s nanochines from trying to break the car down into raw materials. Provided we don’t stand still for long.”

Trip smirked. “And the nanochines don’t interpret the juice as a dinner bell.”

“There is that.” Rudy took out his calabash and held it between his teeth as he reached into the open passenger window to grab the tobacco can from the back seat. “But in that case, you’ll have access to the off switch through your mind-machine interface.”

“Won’t be using it.”

“Yeah, right.” Rudy chuckled in disbelief, stuffing tobacco into the pipe with his thumb.

“I’m serious.” Trip’s hand sank into his jeans back pocket to pull out the RATpack antenna. He held it up to show Rudy. “I’ll be jacked in to this instead.”

“A WOLFpack antenna?” Rudy asked, throwing the can back into the car and lighting up.

“RATpack, actually. One of a pair.” Trip blew on the jack plug then
snick
ed it into his socket. He felt it power on. “Roxanne has the other one. It should have pretty decent range. We get within twenty miles, we should get enough of a signal I should sense her, enough to get a general direction, anyway. Within a mile, we’ll be able to communicate mind-to-mind. No memory sharing, though. That was pretty weird, so the firewall’s staying up this time. Should still work.”

“Well, you getting anything?”

“It might not be able to transmit/receive through that.” Trip pointed the cigarette at the broiling dust and debris expansion front.

“Or,” Rudy said, taking a long drag from the pipe and avoiding Trip’s eyes, “those things only draw power when they’re plugged in — and she’s not plugged in.”

Trip pushed himself off the fender and walked around the front of the
Wound
. “She’d better be wearing it, or she’s pretty much screwed herself rescue-wise. The All-Mart’s what, at least a hundred miles deep, ten wide? That’s a lot of retail square footage to search just by driving around randomly.”

“We could set up a grid pattern,” Rudy suggested.

“I’ll grid pattern you, you nerd. No, if she’s half the babe I think she is, she’ll know she should be wearing it.”

“If she’s not already a zombie.”

Trip opened the driver’s door. “Get in the car.”

“Okay, ground rules.” Trip settled in behind the steering wheel. The All-Mart looked even bigger and more menacing framed by the windshield. He forced himself to stop staring at it and smirk at Rudy. “There will be no mention of the irony here.”

Rudy closed the passenger door as he got in. “But I came up with a whole list of one-line cheap shots. Some pretty good ones, too.”

“And the first one you use will get you a karate-chop to the Adam’s Apple.”

Rudy grinned around his calabash. “Might be worth it.”

“Second one, the karate-chop becomes a knife and the Adam’s Apple your balls.”

Rudy frowned. “You take the fun out of everything.”

“That’s what big brothers are for.” Trip popped three caff pills from the Bugs Bunny dispenser onto his tongue. “You ready?”

“One sec.” Rudy set the calabash in the open dash ashtray and reached into the back seat to grab a milk gallon of Morty’s Finest and a spiked motorcycle helmet. He strapped the helmet down over his fez and stuck a bendy straw into the beer jug. He sucked up a good slug while rotating his left nipple all the way up. “Okay, now I’m ready.”

Trip slipped the Pez dispenser away and sat back, lacing his fingers behind his head. “And we’re off,” Trip said, tensing for acceleration and twitching his left eyebrow.

Nothing happened.

Bewildered, Trip crunched his eyebrows at the steering wheel and twitched again. And again. And again, this time whacking his palm against the dash-mounted GameGear.

Rudy cleared his throat. “You’re manual, remember?”

Trip grunted. “And you said I’d never need a second jack,” He grabbed the steering wheel with one hand, shoved the
Wound
into Drive with the other, and stomped down hard on the gas. The
Wound
leapt forward, kicking up a cloud of dry wasteland behind it as launched towards the All-Mart.

“So,” Rudy said, grabbing the dashboard, “pretty ironic, this.”

“Right!” Charged by the caff pills hitting his system, Trip’s hand left the steering wheel and flashed out like lightning into Rudy’s throat, edge-on.

“Worth... it...” Rudy choked out, massaging his Adam’s Apple as the
Wound
hit the expansion front.

Tendrils of nanochines struck out for the
Wound
as it sped through, only to snap back as if in pain, tendril tips sparking from contact with the car’s electrically charged depleted uranium armor plating.

And then they were through. Into darkness that seemed to stretch out forever.

Trip twitched to turn on the hi-beams. When that didn’t work, he swore, then pulled out the physical light knob. Twin beams stabbed out into the dark over endless bare concrete, illuminating row after row of support columns and empty space. He punched the scanner’s activation sequence in to the GameGear — Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A — and after a moment the GameGear’s tiny display screen blinked on, showing a wireframe representation of the All-Mart’s interior.

Rudy released his death-grip on the dash and yawned. “That was fun.” He took a sip from the beer jug and placed it on the seat next to him, then curled up against the passenger door. “Wake me up when we get there.”

“Yeah, whatever.” Trip slowed the
Wound
to around fifty miles per, slotting it between a row of support columns. He checked himself in the rear-view — the RATpack antenna was blinking yellow. He sighed. “Well, it was just an idea —”

He cut himself off as the antenna tip began blinking red, establishing a connection with its paired unit.

Roxanne’s unit. Had to be.

Trip broke into a huge grin and jogged the steering wheel hard left, swinging the
Wound
to point towards the signal, and fishtailing the car’s back end through a support column in the process.

Rudy grumbled, opening one eye briefly. “Hey, keep it down. Trying to nap here...”

Thirty seconds later. A mile deeper into the All-Mart. The ceiling lights were on now and the signal between the RATpack antennas was growing stronger every second.

Now was not the time for Rudy to be peacefully snoring away, Trip thought. He grabbed the jug of beer from the seat between them and poured it out over Rudy’s crotch. Rudy came awake with a start, groggily looked down at his soaking lap. “What the...?”

Trip handed him the near empty jug. “You were drinking in your sleep.”