Take the All-Mart!

CHAPTER 13: BACKSEAT EXPOSITION





Rudy leaned forward, checked himself in the Wound’s rear-view. He ran his fingers over his cheek and chin. “Am I getting... glow-y?”

Trip twitched to turn on the ceiling light and glanced over. He didn’t see any blue-glowing spiderwebbing, and he hadn’t the other dozen times in the last two hours Rudy had asked. “Your skin does have a certain pallid sheen to it... although that might just be fear and loathing.” Outside, endless shelves of camping gear flashed by at fifty-miles-per with maybe two inches clearance on either side. The steering wheel jiggled back and forth on its own, the Wound making constant micro-adjustments while Trip chain-smoked and played Tetris on a first-gen GameBoy Rudy had converted to draw power from contact with skin. “But maybe I should just put one in your brain now as a precaution.”

Rudy slumped back. “That’s a little extreme, don’t you think?” His hand slipped under his t-shirt to turn his nipple up all the way.

“And hilarious.” Trip returned his attention to the game. “Plus, it’s win-win, either way.”

Rudy’s brow crunched. “How you figure that?”

“If it doesn’t heal, we know you’re not a zombie, and my trust in you will be restored — I’ll even say as much during your eulogy. But if it does heal itself, sure, you’re a zombie, but you might come out better for the deal. Maybe the nanochines can fix the damage from that time you got dropped on your head when you were six months old.”

“Oh, you mean the time you dropped me on the head when I was six months old?”

“Yes, okay, that time.” Trip winced as an L-block landed the wrong way up, cutting off a Tetris he’d been constructing. “But don’t go blaming that on me. Blame mom. Who gives an 18-month old an infant to hold, anyway?”

“She needed her hands free — we were kinda in a firefight at the time.”

“So it’s no surprise I dropped you.”

“More like threw me at the bad guys.”

“Only as a diversionary tactic to save myself. And that’s another thing... who takes her kids on a hit?”

“She couldn’t find a sitter. Again, all your fault.”

“Sure, bite one sitter’s tit and you’re blackballed for life.” Trip tossed the GameBoy onto the dash. “You didn’t see me raising a stink about her boobs being dry wells, did you?”

Rudy crossed his arms over his chest. “She was in her sixties.”

“Still had a nice rack, though.” Trip grabbed the rear-view, re-adjusted it to point into the back seat. Bob the Zombie and Bernice were sitting as far apart as they could, eyeing each other suspiciously over the pile of beer jugs stacked up between them. Bob was tightly bound in loops extension cord, his arms immobile. “So, Bob, what can Rudy expect in his new life as a zombie?”

“Knock it off, will ya?” Rudy sunk further down into his seat, crossing his arms over his chest and sulking.

“Knowing is half the battle,” Trip said back, nodding at Bob to answer the question.

Bob shrugged, kept his eyes on Bernice. “Well, it’s actually not all the bad... when people aren’t shooting or stunning or hitting you.”

“Which reminds me...” Trip balled his right hand into a fist and shot it out at Rudy’s left temple.

Rudy screamed. “What the f*ck was that for?”

Trip chuckled. “Just trying to keep you human, bro.”

“A*shole,” Rudy snarled out, rubbing his temple with the palm of his hand. “You don’t get to hit me. Anybody’s doing anything to me, it’s Bernice.”

Trip shook his head. “Oh, no, you’d both enjoy that way too much. — But that does remind me... Bernice?”

Bernice smiled, reached over the beer jug pile and shoved the snapping and sparking business end of Rudy’s shock baton into Bob’s shoulder, holding it there for a count of three before withdrawing it with a full-toothed smile. Bob went into convulsive spasm, the faint trace of glowing spiderwebbing around his eyes retreating. “Damn it,” he said after catching his breath, “you have to lay it on so hard?”

“Stop being such a baby,” Bernice told him. She laid the baton on her lap, opened a fresh milk jug of beer. “Okay, here’s a question for you, zombie. Where’d the All-Mart come from?”

“What do you mean?” Bob asked warily.

Bernice took a slug then handed the jug over the front seat to an appreciative Rudy. “The Tome of Speculation says the All-Marts were corporate weapons used to aggressively capture market share in Central America, way back in Megacorp War II: The Revengening. But that war ended forty years ago, and long before that all the All-Marts had been neutralized and torn down. But then this one just pops up out of nowhere ten years back — and a couple thousand miles north of Central America — and starts spreading out over the wasteland. Why? The Tome doesn’t even speculate.”

“Give the zombie a break, Cleavage.” Trip smirked at Bernice through the rear-view. “He’s had a rough day. Bad enough we have to shock him every ten minutes —”

“More like five,” Bob noted.

“— whatever.” Trip snorted. “I’m just saying, he probably doesn’t appreciate all the questions.”

“It’s okay,” Bob said. “It’s nice just talking, again. We mostly communicate non-verbally. But truth is, I don’t know.”

“What does it matter?” Trip lit a cigarette. Not that many left in the tin, he noted with a sour frown. “It’s here, it’s not bothering anybody.”

“Except the people it turns into zombies,” Bernice said.

Bob shook his head. “Not bothering us, either. It’s saving us. Before I walked in, I had nothing —”

“Wait a second.” Rudy wiped beer from his lips with the back of his hand and handed the jug back to Bernice. “You walked in? Voluntarily?”

“Yeah. And it was the best decision we ever made.”

“We?” Rudy asked.

Bob looked out the window at the shelves flashing by. “There were about two dozen of us at the end — all that was left after our town got taken over by a WOLFpack. We’d been doing the nomad thing for a while, but it was hard. Real hard. The things we did for food and shelter... I don’t like remembering. And that was when we could find either. We never knew when one of us might go missing in the middle of the night — kidnapped by raiders or dragged off by an animal. But then we came across the All-Mart. We’d heard the stories about being turned into zombies, but at that point, we were desperate. We figured it was better being a zombie than what we were.”

Bernice took a slug of beer. “I’d rather be dead in the wasteland than a zombie in here.”

Bob turned away from the window towards her. “You say that, but you don’t know. I mean, my old life, it seems unreal, and right now, I feel okay — but unnatural. Like I’m dreaming — more like I’m having a nightmare. I can’t wait to wake up and be myself again.”

Bernice smirked. “My friends didn’t ask to be zombies. They aren’t better off.”

“I’m just speaking for myself,” Bob said. “I’m part of something. I’ve got a job, a reason to exist. Plus, I eat regular. And I’m safe. My family’s safe. Hell, if it wasn’t for the All-Mart, I wouldn’t have met my wife.”

“You met her in here?” Rudy asked.

“Yeah, of course. She’s security. She was working Tween board games, same as I was, and we hit it off just about instantly over a game of ‘Sparkly Mystery Dude.’ Nine months later, we had Ty.”

“A zombie baby?” Trip asked.

Bob smiled proudly. “He’s gonna be an associate, just like his dad. His little sister, Denise, we won’t know for another year when the specialization kicks in, but her mom’s already hoping for security. Made her a little badge and everything.”

“Weird.” Bernice took another sip of beer.

“What’s so weird about it?” Bob asked. “We have lives here. Good lives. We don’t get sick. We live practically forever... and the All-Mart provides everything we need.”

“See, there you go.” Trip raised an eyebrow at Bernice through the rear view. “However this thing ended up being here — let’s just say it sprang up spontaneously from the desert — it’s a good thing. And if any one individual played a minor and quite accidental part in it, they should probably get a medal or something.”

Bernice scowled at him. “Or a good punch in the temple. With brass knuckles. Or one of those spikey things.”

Rudy shot Trip a sideways glance, and Trip cleared his throat, tapped on the GameGear display. The wireframe showed miles of shelves around them, with a few dozen blue dots scattered around. “Anybody else thinkin’ it’s odd we haven’t seen any security? Zombie — you weren’t kidding about the Voice knowing we’re here, right?”

“The Voice knows everything,” Bob said. “Because we tell her everything.”

Trip twisted around, put his arm up on the back of the front seat, and smirked at Bob. “So why hasn’t it sent somebody to convert us? Or fetch us like it did Roxanne? “

“In all my time here, the Voice has never asked that anyone be brought to it before today. Your friend must be special.”

“Special how?”

“The Voice didn’t say. Only that it wanted her.”

“And it didn’t want us?” Rudy asked.

Bob shook his head at Rudy. “It didn’t say anything about you — but that’s normally how it works. The Voice doesn’t get involved. Us associates are programmed to convert any people we come across by force-feeding. But since the All-Mart is so big, and there’s only a few thousand associates, the food’s all laced with conversion nanochines, too. So, even if by chance somebody doesn’t run across one of us, they’re going to eat eventually, and join us. Everyone just sorta joins us, one way or another, and the Voice doesn’t have to intervene.” His face darkened. Not with blue spiderwebbing but with remembered dread. “If the shoppers don’t get them first, that is.”

“‘Get them’?” Trip asked.

“Shoppers are... you just want to avoid them, okay? Every day I thank the Voice I was converted into an Associate and not a Shopper. They’re ravenous. Like animals. They’re programmed to consume, and that’s about it. They’ll go into an area and pick the shelves clean — and then when they are, they’ll then turn on each other or anybody else around, non-converted and Associates, even their fellow shoppers, doesn’t matter, until the shelves are restocked. Unless Security’s around. They won’t mess with security.”

“So, anywhere there are a couple thousand of them just standing around, we shouldn’t go anyway near, then, I take it?” Trip asked.

“Definitely,” Bob said. “Even Security runs the other way when there are more than a few dozen in one place.”

“Man,” Trip said, twisting back around to gesture out the windshield. “I wish you’d told me that about thirty seconds ago.”