Take the All-Mart!

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 f*ck 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 snicked 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.”

“What, again?” Rudy sat up, draining the jug empty before noticing the blinking RATpack antenna. “That mean you’re getting something?”

“Yeah. Decent signal, too.”

“We close enough for contact?”

“Nah, we’re still about three miles off, give or take. But it’s got to be her, and she’s making it easy on us. She’s standing still.”

Rudy nodded, stretched over the back of the front seat to grab another gallon of beer. Sorta-King Morty had stocked them well before sending them off on their mission. He uncapped it, took a swig. “You know, I was thinking... she didn’t get snatched up by herself.”

“Yeah, so?”

“We gonna try and help the others?”

“Hadn’t really thought about it,” Trip said, lighting a cig with the car lighter. He pushed the lighter back into the dash. “I suppose... no.”

“Really?”

Trip shrugged. “I’m focused here. On Roxanne. Everybody else, let them find some other sucker to rescue them.”

“Even the hot ones?”

“Well... okay, but they’d need to have rich dads willing to pony up a reward.”

Rudy scowled. “How we supposed to figure out their parent’s net worth? We gonna screen them?”

“It’s not like we’re gonna make them fill out a multi-page form, no. We’ll just ask them to sign an affidavit.” Trip took his eyes off the road just long enough to see Rudy’s confused expression. “What? You expect me to take their word for it?”

“I was thinking more along the lines of a chick for me, dude... doesn’t necessarily have to be rich. Although it wouldn’t —”

A shrill three-tone klaxon from somewhere in the dash interrupted him.

Trip yelled over the klaxon. “Okay, that’s annoying! What is it?”

“The prox alarm,” Rudy yelled back as he slapped his palms over his ears.

“Since when?”

“Since always!” Rudy yelled, thumbing the GameGear’s D-Pad. The alarm went silent. “You just never hear it ‘cause you’re jacked in and the Wound filters it out for you.”

“Well, it’s awful.”

“Supposed to be.” Rudy pointed at the GameGear display. “Check it out.”

Forgetting that the Wound was doing 120 miles per and needed his actual attention to keep going straight, Trip stared at the display and the blue dots popping up on it. Without the Wound’s interface, it took him a few moments to process what he was seeing — with the interface, he just would have felt the dots, known what they meant, no interpretation needed. “Yay, blips?” he asked as the Wound drifted to the right, sheering a support pole in half. It caromed through another and then another before Trip snapped his attention away from the screen and got her under control again.

“Vishnu’s molars, I hate this,” Trip growled, both hands in a white-knuckle death grip around the steering wheel. “How the f*ck did people drive without interfaces? How the hell am I supposed to multitask? — But hey, we’ve got blips, right?”

“Yeah, blue blips.” Rudy lowered the arms he’d thrown over his head while the Wound was getting pummeled by support columns.

“So?”

Rudy reached over the seat for the shotgun in the back seat. “The scanner’s infrared. Blue blips mean zombies.”

“You assume.”

“It’s a pretty solid assumption.” Rudy cracked the shotgun open over his knees and shoved shells into it from his bandolier. “They’re not warm, human bodies, that’s for sure.”

“Would they be that cold? I mean, they’re not really undead. Just infected.”

“The nanochines probably sink body temp way down to conserve energy.”

“Wouldn’t it be the other way around?” Trip stared out the windshield at row upon row of rack shelving that was seemingly growing out of the floor directly up ahead, like walls. He slammed on the brakes, took a hard right, and hit the gas, aiming the Wound between a pair of racks, barely a half foot of clearance on either side of the car. “Like, wouldn’t they make their hosts run hotter, what with all that symbiotic energy leaching?”

“Do I look like a nano-engineer?” Rudy snapped the shotgun closed. “Wait a second... there’s a red one. Two red ones... More. Lots more.”

“Damn it.”

“What? It’s probably Roxanne and the Sisters. That’s good news.”

“Probably, yeah — expect I just lost the signal.”

“Just now?”

“Yeah, gone, right when I’m about close enough to contact her mind-to-mind.” Trip fingered the RATpack antenna. It was still firmly jacked in. “Like she disconnected.”

Rudy’s voice dropped. “Or got turned into a zombie.”

“Shut up.”

“Trip, all the reds are starting to turn blue.”

“Okay, enough of this nonsense.” Trip yanked the RAT-pack antenna out, tossed it up on the dash, and grabbed the Wound’s patch cord, snicking it in to his skull. “There we are...” he said, smirking like a madman as the Wound’s familiar puppy-dog consciousness laid itself over his. And at the center of his joint consciousness, a half dozen red dots were slowly being surrounded by a whole bunch of blue ones.

A twitch of Trip’s eyebrow and the Wound banked left, into and through a shelving rack, aiming straight for the cluster.

“A little warning next time,” Rudy yelped, ducking low and throwing his arms over his head again.

“Oh, right,” Trip said, as he had the Wound tear through another shelf. “Hold on!”