Take the All-Mart!

CHAPTER 6: BREAKFAST WITH THE NEW GOD





The bloated orange sun was already rising over the hilltop when Roxanne skidded her Vincent Black Shadow to a stop between the Mother Superior’s hard-top Jeep and the coven’s beer-powered school bus, both parked at the top of the hill.

She lowered the kickstand, took off her star-and-moon stickered helmet, and glowered up at the sun. “So you beat me here. Big deal. Bastard.”

She hung the helmet on the bike’s handlebar and reached behind her into the saddlebag, rooting around in it until she found her ceremonial medallion, a golden pair of phalluses intertwined in a double-helix on a braided leather rope. Slipping off the bike, she put the medallion around her neck and headed down the hill, going as fast as dignity and her stilettos would allow on the dry and dead soil.

The coven was lined up thirty feet in front of the All-Mart’s broiling, uneven expansion front. The sacrifices — buckets of cell phone innards, milk jugs of beer, construction riff-raff and spare tires — were piled up a foot away from the broiling wall, directly in its meter-a-day path.

Mother Superior — tall, silver-haired and buxom — was in her official-occasion sequined, cup-less corset. Her phallus-double helix was twice as large as Roxanne’s and lay on her bare chest, glinting in the dawn sun. She stood with her arms and face raised to the sky, her eyes closed, her lips moving in a silent body- and mind-cleansing chant. The rest of the coven — nine women, ranging in age from sixteen to twenty-five — stood flanking Mother Superior, patiently and quietly chit-chatting among themselves while they waited for her to begin the ceremony.

Roxanne reached the bottom of the hill. Brenda was sitting there, crossed-legged with her chin in her hands, obviously bored to tears. She was an acolyte, not yet having earned the right to take the trials and oaths to become a full Sister. Her outfit reflected both her status and her age: instead of a habit she wore a brim-less baseball cap, and her miniskirt was downright dowdy — it reached all the way down to her knees. She looked up and smiled at Roxanne, then raised her wrist and tapped it.

Roxanne mouthed “I know” and plunged her hand into her purse, pulling out a dog-eared and beat-up copy of Vampire Hunter D Vol. 3 she’d found during a scavenger outing to the Three Mile Island land-fill a month back. She tossed it to Brenda. Brenda scrambled to catch it, her face lighting up as she read the cover. She tapped two fingers against her chest, pointed them at Roxanne, then dove in to the manga.

Roxanne chuckled to herself, then spotted Bernice, standing at the end of the line. Practically tip-toeing to avoid calling further attention to her tardiness from the rest of the coven, she slipped into line next to Bernice.

“Nice of you to show,” Bernice whispered. Bernice was freckled, a year younger than Roxanne. Shorter and broader, too — but it worked for her. Her strawberry-blonde hair was braided into pigtails that sprouted out from beneath her habit all the way down to the small of her back. “Hope he was worth it.”

“How’d you...?”

“You smell like cigarettes and sweat.” Bernice’s upturned nose twitched. “And you’ve got that same overly content dopey grin going that you usually get after an orgy. That and there’s that antenna-thingee sticking out of your neck, and you said you weren’t gonna use it ‘till you met a cute guy. Shall I go on?”

Roxanne grinned sheepishly, then glanced over Bernice’s head down the line. “Mother Su say anything?”

“About you? You kidding? She wouldn’t dare.” Bernice slipped a hand-rolled ceremonial joint into a long black cigarette holder and lit it with a lighter shaped like a panther, pulling back the ears to make flame shoot out from its mouth. “But she did say she could only hope the delay in the ceremony doesn’t piss off the New God too terribly.”

Roxanne turned to look deep into the broiling expansion front. Along its base, small tendrils of nanomachine smoke stabbed out at the bare earth, snatching up bits of shrub and rock to pull them in for disassembly into their constituent, raw material molecules. “Like it even notices we’re here.”

Bernice drew in a long drag and held it for a count of three, letting it out in a single puff. “It might, you don’t know.”

“We’ve been doing this for how long?” Roxanne waived the heady smoke away from her face. “Three years since it got close. Twice a year. And not so much as a thank you card.”

Bernice took another hit. “It hasn’t rolled over Shunk, has it?”

“Only cause we’re in a whole different valley. It’d have to climb the mount—”

“May we have respectful quiet while I prepare, please?” Mother Superior interrupted, clearing her throat and shooting death-ray eyes at Roxanne.

“Yes, Mother,” Roxanne said, blushing, and raising her hands in front of her apologetically.

Mother Superior growled and went back to chanting silently at the sky.

Bernice grinned, lowered her voice. “Yeah, never mind the All-Mart — she’s pissed.”

“Damn it. You know what that means?” Roxanne asked. “Nothing but sloppy seconds all morning.”

Bernice rolled her eyes. “Somehow I can’t really work up the sorry for you.”

“Here we go again,” Roxanne said. “There’s nothing stopping you from getting laid, you know. I keep telling you, you’ve got a killer bod. Great rack. And the freckles — guys love the freckles. You just need to get yourself out there. Be aggressive.”

Bernice furrowed her brow. “I’m pretty aggressive.”

“With guys.”

“Oh, yeah.” Bernice took a long, thoughtful drag. “How? I’m not you, Rox. I just can’t go up to a guy and boom we’re doing it. I wouldn’t know... How would I even broach the subject? No... it’s not... proper. I should be wooed. I deserve to be wooed.”

“Life’s too short, girl.” Roxanne crossed her arms over her chest. “Sure, you can wait around for some evolutionary throwback of a guy to send you flowers and engraved notes, but the best guys aren’t always gonna be the aggressive ones. Sometimes you’ve got to do the hunting.”

“How about this new guy of yours? You have to hunt him?”

“Oh, no. He totally hunted. He’s a real man.”

“Lovely.”

“Hey, guys, you wanna shush? Looks like we’re starting.” That from Yolanda, standing next to Bernice. She jogged her head in Mother Superior’s direction. Mother Su was lowering her arms, her eyes closed, and drawing in a deep breath. Yolanda then gestured at Bernice’s joint. “Can I get a hit of that, Bernie? Smoked all mine on the trip out.”

Bernice handed it over. “Sure, but you owe me.”

“Pay ya back at the orgy first thing,” Yolanda said with a leer deep into Bernice’s cleavage as she took a drag.

“Hey,” said Lindsay-Joe, standing on the other side of Yolanda, putting her hands on her ample hips. “I thought I was first on your dancecard, Bernie.”

Yolanda handed the joint and holder back to Bernice, and Bernice smiled at them, saying: “You can’t both be first?”

Down the line, Mother Superior cleared her throat, grabbed her double-penis-helix medallion, and raised it high. “Oh great anomaly of the Wasteland, we greet you!”

The coven snapped to attention, raising their hands up, their palms flat to the sky.

“Here we go.” Bernice stuck the holder between her teeth and raised her hands.

Roxanne slowly raised her hands. “All this just to have an excuse for an orgy...”

Mother Superior’s voice boomed over the white-noise of the expansion front’s ceaseless churning. “Behold we bring you gifts to feed your mighty hunger!”

“Oww,” Roxanne exclaimed, her hand snapping down to clamp against her ear.

“What?” Bernice asked in a whisper around the cigarette holder.

“Nothing.” Roxanne cricked her neck, tapped on the antenna. “It’s just this RATpack thing. Forgot to take it out. Gave me a twinge. Feels fine now.”

Bernice looked at it. “It’s blinking all funny.”

“Funny? Funny how?

“Before it just blinked yellow, all slow.”

“Yeah, that’s standby.”

“But now... it’s all red. And fast.”

“Red? Shouldn’t be red... the other unit’s way too far out of range to re-establish contact.”

“Sure Mr. Hunter McRealMan didn’t follow you?” Bernice twisted to look back up the hill.

“I would have noticed the protocol chatter. Nah, must be fritzing out on me.” Roxanne eased it out of her ear, slipping it away in her satchel purse. She shrugged, lifted her arms to the sky again. “Surprised it worked this long.”

“Please, guys...” Yolanda glared over at them, but with a hint of a smile. “You’ll get us in trouble.”

“Oh, I’ll get you in trouble.” Bernice pinched Yolanda’s ass, making her burst out in an involuntary giggle as she slapped Bernice’s hand away.

“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Roxanne whispered at Bernice. “If you could just work up the courage to do that to a guy, you’d bag one, for sure.”

Bernice blushed and gulped, then turned towards the expansion front.

Down the line and out of earshot, Mother Superior continued the ritual, “Hear us, insignificant as we are, as we beseech thee —”

A rumble from somewhere deep inside the All-Mart stopped Mother Superior cold.

It was a sound they’d never heard before. A deep growling lion-bear-Gojira roar reverberating out from the expansion front through the valley, echoing off the distant mountains.

The coven immediately broke into a din of confused and worried voices, sisters asking each other what was going on.

Roxanne shot Bernice a playful grin. “I’m late one time.”

Bernice gave her back a worried look.

“Calm down, everyone,” Mother Superior ordered. “Just because something’s never happened before doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a bad thing. For all we know, this is perfectly natural, if unprecedented.” She turned back to Brenda. “Acolyte, fetch the Tome of Speculation!”

Brenda jammed Vampire Hunter D Vol. 3 under her armpit and leapt to her feet. “I’m on it, Mother Su!”

“That’s Mother Superior, acolyte!” Mother Superior called after Brenda, darting up the hill, then turned to address the rest of the coven, smiling reassuringly at the worried faces staring at her. “We’ll see what wisdom the Hallowed Ancestors have for us, all right?”

That calmed the coven. Or at least brought their frantic murmuring down to whispers. For about two seconds, until the All-Mart growled again, bone-shakingly loud this time. A moment later a tendril of dust and debris as thick as a tree-trunk shot out from the expansion front and wrapped itself around Mother Superior’s waist.

She didn’t even have time to scream before the tendril yanked her into the air and drew her away into the dark, churning depths of the expansion front.

The rest of the coven, though, they had time to scream, and they did, watching helpless as Mother Superior, arms flailing, disappeared behind the roiling clouds of debris.

Bernice just stood there, staring at the expansion front. Roxanne grabbed her hand and yanked her along with her as she made for the hill, yelling “Run!”

Roxanne’s command was loud enough and forceful enough the rest of the coven snapped into action, spinning around and heading for the hill themselves, but it was too late. Other tendrils were already shooting out from the expansion front — and these tendrils were faster than Sisters in stilettos. One by one the Sisters were snatched up, drawn screaming into the All-Mart.

Roxanne didn’t look back, just kept pounding for the hill, Bernice in tow. And then suddenly Bernice wasn’t slowing her down anymore.

Roxanne glanced behind her to see Bernice being reeled through the air into the expansion front, clawing futilely at the nearly insubstantial tendril wrapped around her waist. Roxanne stopped, stunned, as Bernice vanished into the roiling wall, a pleading, desperate look on her freckled face.

Knowing there was nothing she could do but start running again, Roxanne swore under her breath and got moving.

She was inches from the base of the hill when her feet were yanked out from under her. She went down hard, barely managing to break her fall with her forearms. Laying there, half-dazed, she twisted to look up the hill. Brenda was just reaching the top.

“Brenda!” Roxanne yelled at the acolyte. “F*ck the Tome — go get help!”

Then Roxanne was in the air, lifted high by her ankles, drawn quickly back into the expansion front and surrounded by occluding clouds of swirling dust and debris, not sure if Brenda had heard her — or if the acolyte would even be able to get away herself.