Take the All-Mart!

CHAPTER 14: LADIES WEAR





The Wound shot out of Sporting Goods into a forest of mushroom-shaped clothes racks freshly stocked with women’s casual business attire. Thousands of shopper zombies — clothed in rags and slobbering — jockeyed for position around the racks, grabbing anything they could reach, tearing and ripping at their fellow shoppers just to get at the cheap gray pantsuits.

“Dear Shatner...” Not taking his eyes off the scene out the windshield, Rudy swallowed and reached for the double-barrel sawed-off on the dash. “It’s like a piranha feeding frenzy.”

“They’re... horrible.” Bernice turned to look at Bob over the pile of beer jugs. “Is that what happened to the Mother Superior and the others? Are they shoppers now?”

“It’s all based on the population of the All-Mart when you’re converted — what you become depends on what the All-Mart needs to keep the population in proportion. Two percent of the population needs to be security. Eight, associates. Ninety percent, shoppers.”

“Ninety percent?” Bernice’s shoulders drooped. “Then they’re probably...”

“Yeah,” Bob said. “Odds are. But they won’t be shoppers, yet. Everybody starts out as a wanderer.”

“A wanderer?” Rudy asked, cracking open the shotgun to make sure it had fresh shells.

Bob nodded. “The All-Mart’s nanochines need a good day or two to really integrate with their host. So while they’re working on that, the host just walks around, more or less aimlessly, definitely mindlessly, picking idly at shelves. Some wanderers can travel dozens of miles before the nanochines fully kick in and transform a wanderer into their ultimate form.”

Bernice sunk back into her seat, looking out the window with a sullen, thousand-yard stare.

“You gonna just drive through them?” Rudy asked Trip, noticing with an alarmed raised eyebrow that the Wound was still roaring straight ahead.

“You got a better idea?” Trip closed his eyes to focus on the Wound’s sensors. “The field’s pretty thick with ‘em, but it’s also about two miles wide. We go around, we’re just losing more time — and who’s to say they won’t just chase after us, anyway?”

Rudy twisted around to ask Bob: “If we go around, will they follow us?”

“Not as long as they have merchandise to fight over,” Bob said. “And even if they didn’t, they’re slow and aren’t allowed to use weapons of any kind, so they’re no threat unless we stop and they can swarm us.”

“See, Bob says it’s perfectly safe to drive through them.” Trip smiled close-eyed at Bob in the rear-view. “Way to be a team player, Bob.”

Bob frowned. “That’s not exactly —”

“Bernice,” Trip said, interrupting him, “Bob’s getting uppity.”

Without taking her eyes off the window, she jammed the tip of the shock baton into Bob’s side. He convulsed, slumping back.

Rudy sighed. “Look, it’ll only take a couple minutes to drive around. It’d be safer.”

“Safer?” Trip scoffed. “This thing’s practically a tank.”

“Sure, but what if the car breaks down and we get stuck in the middle of them out there?

“When has the Wound ever broken down?”

“There’s always a first time,” Rudy said. “Why tempt fate? Just drive around.”

“Fate can suck it.”

“You just want to run over zombies, don’t you?”

“Think they’ll crunch or squish?” Trip twitched and the Wound leapt forward, her adaptive tires softening for traction. “People might want to hold on to something,” Trip announced just as the Wound slammed into the nearest zombie at eighty miles per, flipping it over the hood and roof like a slobbering, gnarling rag doll.

The Wound plowed deeper into the forest, the clothes racks and zombie horde thickening. The zombies remained focused on their shopping frenzy, most not even noticing the oncoming car until they were bowled under or knocked aside.

Trip sat back and opened his eyes to light a cigarette as he rammed the Wound through a rack, two dozen shoppers swarmed around it, bashing at each other for the last orange-cream sleeveless blouse. Zombies went flying or were churned into pulp under the car’s wheels. “Man, this is a great show. Where’s some popcorn when you need it?”

A severed zombie head splatted against the Wound’s windshield. Rudy threw his arms over his spike-helmeted head and in the back, Bernice screamed. Bob grunted in disgust.

Trip shot him an arched eyebrow in the rearview. “What, did you know him?”

Bob glared at him, visibly straining against his bindings. Then convulsed in pain, Bernice snapping the sparking tip of the stun baton against his temple.

Rudy cleared his throat. “You know...”

“Oh, Vishnu’s late Sunday dinner,” Trip sighed. He threw up his hands in exasperation at Rudy. “Every time the heads go rolling — without fail — you chime in with the party-pooping.”

“Knocking ‘em around some, I’m pretty sure karma can forgive since they heal so fast... but killing them? That has asteroid repercussions written all over it.”

Trip scowled, and twitched. The Wound slid left, avoiding the next cluster of zombies. “We’re almost past ‘em all, anyway,” he said, purposefully not acknowledging Rudy’s appreciative grin.

The Wound slid around another cluster of zombies and into the periphery of the clothing rack forest, the racks already picked cleaned and empty. Both his eyes and the Wound’s sensors told Trip the shopper zombies were all behind them, for now. He aimed the Wound towards a run of empty shelves, slotting it between racks. He twisted around to smile at everyone. “That wasn’t so bad —”

A crack against the windshield and his head snapped around to see a zombie, clinging to the Wound’s roof, whacking the windshield with an elbow.

“We really need to put a sensor up there,” Trip noted when Bernice’s screaming and Rudy’s even more girlish yelp died down. He smirked at Rudy. “Well, that one’s definitely attacking us,”

Rudy shrugged, caught his breath. “Could be argued it’s acting in self-defense.”

“Shut up,” Trip told him, then twisted around to ask Bob: “Thought you said they couldn’t use weapons?”

“Its own elbow isn’t technically a weapon,” Bob pointed out.

Trip grunted and turned back to Rudy. “Can it break through?”

Rudy shook his head confidently. “The windshield’s half-inch thick polymer. A sledgehammer couldn’t get through it.”

The zombie brought its elbow down again, this time near the hole the Magnum’s rail-gun shot had left in the windshield. A sharp crack, and faint fissures a half-inch long appeared around the hole.

“Oh, yeah...” Rudy cocked his head to the side and stared, curious, at the hole. “Forgot about that. Structural integrity’s gonna be a tad less integral than normal.”

“Well, do something about it,” Trip insisted.

“How am I supposed to patch it while we’re —” Rudy stopped as Trip pointed his cigarette at the shotgun in Rudy’s lap. “Duh, yeah. On it.”

Rudy rolled his window down, then, taking the shotgun with him, wriggled up through.

The shopper zombie looked like she was in her eighties, thin blue-white hair flapping in the wind. She was sprawled out over the roof, the gaunt fingers of one hand clenched tight against the lip of the windshield. She was just barely keeping herself from flying off while still — somehow — managing to bring her free arm’s elbow down, again and again, on the windshield.

Rudy pointed the shotgun at her head, put his finger over both triggers, and closed his eyes. “Sorry about this...” he mouthed.

A snarl, and the shotgun was suddenly moving on its own — and trying to get away from him.

Rudy’s eyes snapped open. The zombie had grabbed the barrels with her free hand. She yanked it back and forth, attempting to wrestle it out of his grip.

Without thinking, Rudy clamped his teeth down on her wrist, tight. The zombie howled, let go of the shotgun. In one motion, Rudy let go of her wrist, pointed the shotgun at the hand keeping her on the roof, and fired both barrels.

The hand disintegrated in a puff of blue blood. The zombie let out a scream of pain and protest as she quickly slid from the roof. Rudy watched her bounce off the trunk and away, then slid himself back down through the window.

“Well, that’s all taken care of,” he said, settling back into his seat and putting the shotgun gently up on the dash. Grinning, he swept his eyes over everyone’s faces. They were uniformly wide-eyed, staring back at him. “Hey, don’t everybody thank me at once...”

Bernice raised a trembling finger, pointed at his mouth.

Rudy crunched his brows together in confusion, wiped his fingers over his mouth. He looked at the fingers. Stained with fresh blue zombie blood. “Oh, this?” he asked, wiping the blood off on his t-shirt. “It’s just blood. Had to bite —”

Trip’s hand clamped over the top of Rudy’s head and twisted it around to face the rear-view.

Rudy took a good look at himself. The faintest of blue-glowing spiderwebbing was just creeping out from around his lips. “Aww, crap.”

“Baton!” Trip ordered, holding his hand out over the seat back at Bernice. After a moment’s hesitation, she slapped it into his upraised palm, and he swung it around into Rudy’s armpit, activating it.

Rudy convulsed. And kept convulsing, his eyes rolling to white and his teeth chattering until Trip was convinced the spiderwebbing had fully retreated. Only then did Trip shut the baton off and toss it back to Bernice.

“Get it under control or next time it’s to the balls,” Trip said.

Rudy slumped back in his seat, gasping for breath. “Working on it,” he panted feebly, twisting his nipple through his t-shirt. “Just need to adjust the ol’ factory.”

Trip nodded at him warily, then smirked into the back seat. “Ok, so from here on in, we drive around shoppers.”

“Yeah, excellent idea.” Rudy banged his forehead against the dashboard. Dazed, he sat back, offering Bernice a reassuring grin. “Just giving the chems a head start.”

Bernice didn’t return the grin. “Stop the car.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Trip asked. “We’ve barely put a mile between us and them.”

“Please. Stop. The. Car.”

Trip shook his head at her through the rear-view. “Sorry, need to make more ground. Just hold it.”

“I don’t have to pee...” she said, then clamped her mouth shut and her hands over her mouth. Her cheeks puffed out.

Trip twitched and engaged the brakes.

Before the Wound could fully skip to a stop, Bernice was pushing on the back of Trip’s seat and pushing her way out of the car, running hunched over for the front of the Wound. Trip shut the door behind her, lit a cigarette. He smirked over at Rudy. “Well...”

“What?” Rudy asked.

“What you waiting for? She’s your girlfriend. You clean up after her.”

“Right.” Rudy popped his door open to get out. His head snapped around. “Wait, what? Girlfriend?”

Trip rolled his eyes. “Just go. And make sure she doesn’t get anything on the grill. Zombie guts is one thing, but puke? That’s just disgusting.”





About ten feet out from the front of the Wound, Bernice was hunched over and grabbing a rack packed with red-striped white tube socks for support while her whole body heaved. Rudy approached her cautiously from the side. He waited for her coughing and gagging to die down, then handed her a mostly clean rag from his back pocket as she straightened.

She wiped her mouth with the rag. “Thanks.” She gave him a weak smile. “I’m such a girl, right?”

“Nah. I was thinking about puking myself. You just beat me to it, is all, and now the novelty’s gone.” He took the rag out of her hand, dabbed it at a stray chunk of something on the side of her lips. “Sorry about Trip. He’s... you know... an a*shole.”

“Yeah, a big one.” Her legs waivered and she reached out to grab his arm and steady herself. “Can we sit? Just for a minute. I need to catch my breath. Or cry. Or something.”

Rudy helped her down, then sat next to her. “It’s gonna be okay.”

“I don’t see how,” she said, half laughing, half crying. “If you haven’t noticed, everyone I hang with just got turned into a zombie. And my best friend... who knows where she is or what happened to her... “

Rudy tossed the rag aside, used his thumb to clean a tear away from her eye. “You don’t know him, but Trip... unquestionably, he’s an a*shole. But he also gets obsessed. Maniacally. And right now he’s obsessed with Roxanne. He won’t give up until he finds her. After that, it’s anybody’s guess how long the obsession will last. Usually until right before a wedding or he spots some new chick, but we’ll be out of here long before that happens.”

“So what if we do find her? She’ll be a zombie. Just like all of them...” Bernice’s voice trailed off with a shiver.

“We don’t know that. And even if she is, they’re just nanochines. They can be turned off.”

“How? Electric shock every five minutes for the rest of her life?”

“Plenty of ways,” Rudy said, grinning. “Permanent ways. Look at me... my chem factory’s already fought off the second wave.”

“She doesn’t have a chem factory.”

“No, but we find her, we can EMP her. One good electro-magnetic pulse should fry her nanochines. Or we get her a blood transfusion. Or I brew her up a cocktail of chems to fight them. Or shit, she’s got a mind-machine interface — maybe Trip could go in and just order them to shut down.”

Bernice’s face went just the tiniest bit optimistic. “Would that really work?”

“If he can get past any security layers they have over their command structure, sure. Probably. Maybe — he’s fifty-fifty on breaking security. Okay, thirty-seventy. But my point is, there are plenty of ways to do it. If we find Roxanne, we can bring her back. And not as a zombie.”

Bernice nodded. “Okay. But how about the rest?”

“The Sisters?”

“Yeah. If we can save Rox, we can save them too, right?”

“If we can find them. At least with Roxanne, we have a general idea where she might be. The others... they could be scattered who knows where by now. Could take weeks... months...” He stopped himself as he saw the effect his words were having on her, that hint of optimism in her eyes fading fast. “If we can... we will. If not now, we’ll come back.”

Bernice just barely smiled, but she smiled. Rudy leaned in to kiss her.

The Wound’s horn went off. Several times in short, impatient bursts. Killed the moment. Bernice scowling, Rudy’s face sagging in disappointment, they both looked back towards the Wound.

Trip’s head poked out through the window, cigarette dangling from his lips. “You done yakking up?”

“Yeah.” Bernice used Rudy’s shoulder to get to her feet. “But now I really do have to pee. All that beer.”

“Well, get pissing,” Trip said. “Bob says were close. And he filled me in on some of what to expect, security-wise.”

Rudy stood, walked up to Trip. “What are we up against?”

“We’re gonna need the goody bag.”