Take the All-Mart!

Take the All-Mart! - By J. I. Greco


CHAPTER 1: A SUNDAY DRIVE, WITH CANNIBALS





The tricked-out, inch-thick depleted uranium armor-scaled ‘73 Dodge Swinger called the Festering Wound hauled ass through the Wasteland down the cracked and cratered, debris-strewn remains of I-80 on adaptaplastic tires, her breeder reactor thrumming dangerously close to red-line.

Trip was behind her wheel, plugged into the dash and driving with his mind through the coiled patch cord jacked into the socket behind his right ear. The steering wheel jerked freely on its own, Trip’s eyebrows twitching to swerve the Wound around long-abandoned cars and potentially Dodge-swallowing pot-holes.

“You know,” Trip said, taking a final drag off one hand-rolled cig, jabbing it out in the overflowing dashboard ashtray, and immediately lighting a new one with the car lighter, “I’m seriously thinking about giving up this whole reprobate adventurer thing and going into accounting.”

Trip was 23, tall and wiry, pale and twitchy, with jet-black hair sculpted into a Jack Lord curl. He wore a grime-caked long-tailed tux jacket with the collar popped and the sleeves rolled up to the elbow, a t-shirt that simply read “Game Over”, ripped and faded black jeans, and red canvas hi-tops kept together with duct tape.

“Have you ever given any thought to lion taming?” Rudy asked, along with the sound of a zipper being yanked down, all wet and mushy.

“No good — I’m allergic to chairs.” Trip glanced over at Rudy in the passenger seat, and instantly regretted it. He winced, quickly looked away. “Vishnu’s nipples, man, can’t you keep your hands out of there for five f*ckin’ minutes?”

“Not if I want to keep my buzz going, I can’t, no. I’m burning through mix like nobody’s business today. I blame stress. By which, of course, I mean you.” Rudy was 22, compactly stocky but muscular, with ruddy skin and a flame-red soul patch. He was already balding. What hair he had left jutted out in curly tufts from under a crumpled leopard-print fez. He wore a Peace-symbol t-shirt under an ammo bandolier, forest camo parachute pants, and steel-toed hikers.

Rudy plunged a hand through the zippered opening in his own stomach, pushing aside intestines to rummage around in his guts with practiced abandon. “‘Let’s go East’, you said.” Rudy’s fingers found what he was looking for hiding behind his spleen. “They love us in the Wasteland.’“ A twist and a hiss and he pulled out a thumb-sized cylinder, empty and dripping with viscera. “Ass.”

Rudy tossed the empty over his shoulder into the back seat, then slid a fresh, full cartridge out of his bandolier. Biting his lip, he shoved the cart into his gut, squirmed around to fit it into place. A twist the other way and with a sharp hum the chemical synthesis plant in his belly came back online, refueled, almost instantly re-flooding his bloodstream with fresh THC-analog. Rudy went all content and withdrew his hand, zipping his stomach back up and patting his hairy belly. “Ahh, sweet pseudo-cannabis bliss. I’m ready for death, now.”

Trip snorted. “We’re not gonna die.”

“I don’t see how that’s possible.” Rudy wiped the viscera from his hand on his camos and pulled his t-shirt down. “Unless they’ve all of a sudden given up and gone away?”

Trip glanced into the driver’s side-view mirror. The Magnums were still on their ass, the whole mind-linked, cannibalistic howling mad WOLFpack of them, weaving after the Wound half-a-meter off the road on plutonium battery-powered sonic surfboards. Two dozen of them, maybe more. Obsessed with the old TV private eye, they all looked like prime 1980’s Tom Selleck, even the women, thanks to sloppy amateur elective plastic surgery, cheesy hair-plug mustaches, and tattered Hawaiian shirts. Each one had a whip antenna grafted onto a temple, the tips of the antennas blinking angry red in staccato unison. They brandished a variety of weapons: nail-encrusted baseball bats, crowbars with spikes welded to their tips, sawed-off shotguns, and one severed leg with the foot wrapped in razor wire.

“No, apparently not.” Trip took a long draw from his cig. “We’re out of grenades, aren’t we?”

“Yeah, you used them all back at that sports bar in Albuquerque winning that Karel Capek bobblehead alarm clock from those robo-bikers.”

Trip smiled proudly. “Showed them how real men play Candyland.”

“You just had to have it, didn’t you?”

“It was near-mint-in-box. It’s a collector’s item.”

“Which you promptly threw in the trunk and haven’t looked at since.” Rudy scratched his soul-patch, thinking, then snapped his fingers. “What about the autocannon? Just flip us around, charge the bastards and open fire.”

“You traded the last box of shells for two dozen donuts outside of Indy.”

Rudy went sheepish. “Did I?”

“Yeah. In the future, let’s just assume we’ll need ammo more than food and not trade it away.”

“But they had sprinkles.”

“Even for sprinkles.” Trip twitched his left eyebrow to have the Wound avoid the burnt-out husk of a semi cab, then smirked over at Rudy. “You wouldn’t want to throw yourself out the window, would you? If you tuck and roll, maybe you’ll knock a couple over. Probably won’t stop them, but it’ll give me a much needed chuckle.”

“May I suggest a rail gun?” came a clearly fake English-accented voice from the back seat.

Trip huffed. “Yeah, that’d be nice. Too bad we don’t have a rail gun.”

“No. But we do.”

Trip and Rudy looked at each other in surprise, then back at the Higgins, bound in electrical tape and smiling smugly at them from the back seat. The WOLFpack’s hub, he was done up like a proper, prissy English gentlemen about to set off on a jungle adventure, complete with a fraying safari outfit and pith helmet. A pair of extra-long whip antennas grafted onto his temples stuck up through holes crudely cut in the helmet’s brim.

“You ain’t got no railgun,” Trip said, then raised an eyebrow at Rudy. “Do they?”

Rudy shrugged. “I didn’t see any...” His side-view was long-gone missing in action, so to check he had to poke his head out the window, clamping a hand over his fez to keep it from flying off.

In the rear of the pack, a female Magnum was unslinging a long, thin-barreled rifle from her back. She tossed it to a short Filipino Magnum bobbing in front of her. He in turn tossed it to the Magnum in front of him, and so on. The rifle worked its way up through the weaving pack, tossed from Magnum to howling Magnum, finally arcing through the air at the back of the burly, toothless Magnum at the head of the pack. At the last possible moment, the leader spun, clutching the rifle out of the air, and continued spinning, leveling and aiming the rifle at the Wound as he completed the three-sixty.

Rudy pulled his head back in, his face serenely grave. “Looks like a Norwegian special action stock with a knock-off Israeli straight-bore accelerator.” He twisted around to ask the Higgins: “What are they using? Tungsten slugs?”

The Higgins smiled at him. “What else?”

Cig dangling from his lips, Trip looked at Rudy. “Think they’ll be able to get through the armor —”

He cut himself off as, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the Higgins suddenly jog his head to the side. Trip had just enough time to duck himself before the —

POP!

Where the Higgins’ head had been a second before he moved, a half-inch hole had just simply appeared in the armor scaling over the rear window, the edges of the hole glowing white hot. A matching exit hole had appeared almost instantaneously in the windshield, right under the rear-view.

“Vishnu’s aunt Patty.” Trip stared at the hole in the windshield as he sat up. “That missed me by way too little.”

Staring back at the entry hole and past the grinning Higgins, Rudy reached under his t-shirt to give his left nipple a good twist, turning the flow of THC-analog from his belly factory all the way up. “Too late to go to Rehoboth, isn’t it?”

Trip gave him a curt smirk, then twisted to sneer back at the Higgins. “Go ahead, be all smug. They could have hit you, you know.”

“They know exactly where I am,” the Higgins said. “That’s how this works. My pack sees, hears, feels and shares every thought I have.”

Rudy balled a fist and punched the Higgins in the eye. “How’d they like sharing that?”

The Higgins shrugged it off, chuckling even as his eye socket began to redden and his eyelid puffed up.

“What’s so funny?” Rudy asked, kissing his knuckles and shaking his fingers out.

“I’m telling them to put the next one between your shoulder blades.”

Trip took a long suck of his cig, titled his head back to blow smoke at the duct-taped patched ceiling. “Rudy, I’m going to need a moment to think. Alone.”

Rudy nodded enthusiastically and grabbed the stun baton off the dash. “Goodnight, you prince of mind-sharing freaks,” he said as he twisted around and jammed the baton into the Higgins’ neck, triggering it on contact.

The Higgins convulsed with a gurgled yelp, eyes rolling to white before he gave a final shudder and went limp, unconscious. Rudy kept pulsing him until the Higgins slumped over, cheek slapping against the seat cushion, and his antenna tips started erratically blinking yellow, connection with the WOLFpack lost.

Rudy settled back into his seat, tossing the baton up onto the dash. “Not that that didn’t feel satisfying on a whole number of levels, but they’ve still got that railgun.”

Trip flicked his cig out the window and reached into his tux jacket to take an ancient Bugs Bunny Pez dispenser from one of the dozen utility pockets sewn into it. He tipped the head back to pop a chalky home-made tablet into his mouth, where it dissolved almost instantly, the mix of 500 mg caffeine, 200 mg evaporated distilled iguana urine, and a spritz of bug spray for extra kick and flavor hitting him like a happily runaway freight train. Nerve endings pleasantly on fire and smirking like a madman, he tucked the plastic rabbit gently away, and closed his eyes to commune with the Wound. “They’re not gonna fire without his lordship-eyes-and-ears back there telling them where to aim. They won’t risk hitting him.”

“So that’s the plan?” Rudy asked. “Just keep him knocked out while we drive until we hit the Atlantic and drown?”

Trip’s eyes darted spastically under closed lids. “Let’s call that Plan B for now.”

“Is there a Plan A?”

Trip’s eyes snapped opened. “Grab something.”

Without giving Rudy a chance to actually grab something, Trip sent the Wound swerving hard off the old interstate, plunging down an embankment and into what, a century ago, had been fertile farmland but was now nothing but rocky, withered scrubland. With a twitch of his eyebrow the Wound’s adaptaplastic tires tightened for off-road and her suspension bucked, the car rising up six inches for better ground clearance as it bumped and jostled over the rough ground.

Rudy popped his head out the window for a quick look behind them. “In case you’re wondering, nope, they didn’t fall for it. And look at that — they can move faster and better on those boards of theirs out here than we can. How could we have possibly guessed that? They’re going to catch us. And eat us. Thanks.”

Trip smirked back at him. “For someone with a THC plant in their belly you worry a hell of a lot.” He snapped his fingers at the Wound’s brain, a salvaged, rebuilt, and heavily augmented Sega GameGear, wedged tight into a crude cutout in the center of the dash above the stock AM radio. The game system’s two-inch screen snapped on to show a very low-resolution version of the high-bandwidth, immersive sensor telemetry the Wound was feeding Trip through the patch cord mind-machine link. “MODAR’s picked up something a couple miles past this hill. If it’s what I think it is, it could just be our Plan A.”

Rudy squinted at the tiny, 32-color screen. A blip representing the Wound headed full-tilt towards a solid line. “What, a cliff we can Thelma and Louise off of?”

“You wish.” Trip jogged his chin to point out the windshield just as the Wound crested the hill. “Hell... I wish.”

Rudy looked out. Took a few seconds for his eyes to go wide and his jaw slack. “That’s not? It can’t be...”

“It is,” Trip said, swallowing.

A couple miles ahead a jagged, broiling wall of smoke and dust stretched across the valley from mountain to mountain, thirty feet high. Behind that, for something like a couple hundred miles back, was a rooftop pocked with thousands of HVAC units and triangular solar collectors, panels glinting red in the dawn sun.

Trip nudged Rudy with an elbow. “Wake him up.”

Rudy reluctantly tore his attention away and grabbed the stun baton, twisting and reaching into the back seat to poke its non-electric handle end into the Higgins side until the man grunted.

“We’re off-road?” The Higgins stirred, his antenna tips blinking steady red again as he re-established contact with his WOLFpack. “How thoughtful of you. I was afraid we wouldn’t be able to catch up to you on open road...” His voice trailed off as he sat up and saw through the windshield what the Wound was speeding towards, and when he spoke again, it was practically a whisper. “By Robin Masters... it’s an All-Mart.”

“Yup,” Rudy said. “And us heading straight for it. Imagine that?”

The Higgins’ voice — and accent — cracked. “You wouldn’t?”

Trip gave the Higgins a sharp, devilish smirk through the rear-view. “Drive straight into it? What a great idea.”

“No, you can’t!” the Higgins yelled, his real accent — a Southern drawl, from around Shreveport — coming through loud and clear. “You know what that is? What happens in there?”

Trip took out a fresh cig and lit it. “Midnight showings of Rocky Horror and Darkstar?”

“People get turned into zombies!” the Higgins yelled. “Anybody that goes in!”

“The living, shopping nano-dead,” Rudy said with a chuckle. “Or so I hear.”

“Well,” Trip said, “that sounds like something I’d like to see.” He twisted around to point the cig at the Higgins. “Of course, your guys will have to follow us in, right? They can’t get too far away from their hub, and even if you commanded them not to, they’d have to come after you, right into the heart of zombie central. It’s the downer flip-side of the WOLFpack tech. They’ll be compelled to follow you to their deaths. Tragic, really. No wonder the military dumped the tech.” Trip shrugged at Rudy. “Well, what ya gonna do?”

“Stop!” the Higgins shrieked, throwing his body around the backseat in absolute panic. “Turn around!”

“Why?” Trip asked. “Just so you can... why are you chasing us, anyway?”

Realizing he was boxed in, the Higgins gave up throwing his body around and sat back, sweating and panting. “There’s a considerable bounty.”

Trip raised an eyebrow at him. “Bounty?”

“Courtesy of the Warlord Hu.”

Rudy glared accusingly at Trip. “She put a bounty on us?”

Trip shot him an unapologetic smirk, then asked the Higgins: “The little minx put a bounty on us?”

The Higgins’s practiced, affected calm returned and he primly smiled at Trip. “The bounty’s on you. Him,” he said, his English accent back, nodding his head at Rudy, “she didn’t mention, so we planned on making a nice summer sausage for the mid-solstice feast.”

“Can’t this thing go any faster?” Rudy asked, turning to glare out the windshield, crossing his arms over his chest.

The broiling wall of the All-Mart’s expansion front was already less than a mile away, slowly and inexorably swallowing and converting everything in its path into raw materials for the massive structure’s slow expansion down the valley, a meter a day.

Trip twitched an eyebrow and the Wound sped up. The Higgins let out a whimper.

“For the record, Rudy, I apologize for nothing,” Trip said, taking a long drag off his cig.

Rudy growled. “You know you’re the first person I’m eating after I go zombie, right?”

“I’d be offended if I weren’t,” Trip said. “I hear my inner thighs are particularly tasty. They’d probably go best with a balsamic and red wine reduction.”

“What doesn’t?” Rudy said, tweaking his nipple through his t-shirt for as much THC-analog as his stomach factory would give him.

Trip nodded, blew smoke at the windshield. “True.”

They were close enough now that they could see the tendrils within the All-Mart’s broiling expansion front. Thick, billowing and serpentine, they flicked out, grabbing rocks, shrubs, anything within reach, drawing it all back into the All-Mart for breakdown and repurposing.

“If you’ve got any last words for your WOLFpack,” Trip said to the Higgins, “I’d think them now.”

“Wait!” the Higgins yelled. “What if we forgot we ever caught up with you?”

Trip twitched. Brakes engaged instantly, sending the Wound into a controlled fishtail on the loose scrubland dirt. When she finally stopped swinging around, her rear bumper ended up mere inches away from the churning expansion front, a tendril snapping out to snatch away her license plate before Trip hit the gas and had her lurch forward a few feet, out of reach.

The Higgins sagged, relieved. “Robin Masters be praised.”

“You the only team after us?” Trip asked.

“For now,” the Higgins said. “She’ll send someone else, eventually.”

“You’ll stall her.”

“As much as we can. But not for nothing.”

Trip gave a knowing sigh and reached for his wallet. “Cash? Or will Rudy’s left arm do?”