by J. I. Greco
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 fuck was that for?”
Trip chuckled. “Just trying to keep you human, bro.”
“Asshole,” 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.”
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, tha
t 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.
