The Art of War-Mart
A Military SF story by MadMikeMarsbergen
"Clean up on aisle three," came a screechy, phlegm-heavy voice through the Wal-Mart's store-wide speakers. Might've been a woman, but just as easily some withered, wrinkled man standing stock-straight behind the microphone, howling until his lungs fell out.
Maggie giggled to herself at the mental image, coasting her still-empty shopping cart through the so-far-pristine store. Why was she even here? She didn't need anything, hadn't thought of even one thing she could possibly find some kind of use for. She did this most days of the week. Didn't really know why, either. It was a reason to do something, she supposed. To get out.
Besides, there was usually some kind of drama to enjoy. It was as addictive as a cocaine-coated Krispy Kreme donut. Yesterday, a kid got caught stealing a video game and then proceeded to piss all over the side of the building in protest. He was beaten to death by a mob of angry Baby Boomers, disappointed in themselves for helping to raise today's generation of children wrong. The day before that, an old man had a heart attack and his just-as-old wife blamed it on an apparently attractive woman walking through the store—though Maggie had thought she looked rather plain. As good as they were, though, neither events were even close to her top-ten list of IRL Netflix-Worthy Moments.
What kind of mess had happened this time?
Making her way over to aisle three—glassware and other dull things, according to the sign overhead—Maggie wondered what bit of juiciness she was in for. Broken cups? Maybe an expensive vase had been knocked over by a bratty kid? Surely nothing too crazy.
She glided around a corner and barely reacted to what she saw. A fat man lay dead on the floor in a pool of his own blood, cups and vases around him and beneath him and stuck inside him in slivers and jagged shards. His throat had been slashed, making a black-red mess from about his neck down. His bloody hand gripped one particularly large piece of triangular-shaped glass.
Surely enjoying his first after-school job and thankful to be in the workforce for roughly seventy more years, a teen attempted to shovel the obese corpse out of the aisle. He wasn't having much luck, red-faced and groaning about what a fat fuck the dead guy was. Puffing, he spotted her watching him and shouted, "I'm gonna be a doctor someday, bitch!" Then he booted the body.
Maggie backed away, slowly, carefully, when the teen started sobbing and yelling into the guy's blueing face about how he was going to be grounded from pulling another twenty-hour marathon on his Nintonysoft XStation PiiNES Pro video-game system.
"Greetings, shoppers," came the speaker again. "Due to a sudden emergency, we'd like to ask you to finish your shopping and to please leave. This is not a drill. Thank you. And have a capitalistic day!"
Panic set in all around her. People threw aside their shopping carts and pushed and shoved one another to try and be the first—the only—to make it out of each aisle.
A woman stumbled out from the pottery section with her hands on her cheeks, shell-shocked, glancing left and right like she was in slow motion, hopping from foot to foot. She shrieked and then ran over to a seventy-inch flat-screen TV on display, tried to lift it up and was promptly crushed to death. Her right arm waved and then didn't.
Further down, a man ripped a briefcase off the wall, opened it up and grabbed the electric drill inside, threw his head back and laughed, pumping the drill's trigger to no avail, only realizing after the fact that the drill's battery wasn't charged. Another man came by and struck him in the head with a regular, non-electric hammer, bludgeoning him over and over.
Over in gaming, one kid wrapped his controller's retro cable around another kid's neck. The choking failed when the purple-faced one snapped a retro game disc in half and stabbed the choker in the eyeball with one serrated piece of it.
Maggie's eyes glazed over. She sighed and aimed her cart vaguely towards the exit. Just when it was getting good, too.
In no rush to get home to her mundane life, she took her sweet time getting to the doors. A red sweater caught her eye, which seemed to fit well enough after sizing it up by draping it over her front. But then she realized it was red with blood, and it would probably bleed into her other clothes in the wash, and although she liked red, she didn't really want her whole wardrobe to consist of it.
When she finally got to the doors, she found they were closed. The windows dark. Even the artificial lighting was gone, casting a gloomier-than-normal atmosphere over her local Wal-Mart store.
A bang from the far back. Then shouts, audible from eighty or ninety metres away.
"THIS ISN'T SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN WHILE THE DRONES ARE OUT!" A moment of what seemed to be silence, then: "SHUT UP! THIS IS THE THIRD INCIDENT THIS WEEK, ALVIN! THEY'RE TALKING! THEY'RE CREATING WEBSITES ABOUT THE PEOPLE OF WAL-MART!"
When she realized the one audible voice had gotten louder, Maggie ditched her cart and ran to hide in the feminine-hygiene section.
A man in a suit with slicked-back hair and a training-sized bulge in his pants led the pack. He had the expression of a man who knows his shit actually does in fact stink, but he long ago claimed it didn't in some fugue state of needless embellishment, so now he had to go around pretending it didn't and that he actually liked the smell of his own shit. He didn't look happy, put it that way.
Stopping at the entrance with his hands on his hips, he paced around for a bit. His entourage looked like a Special Forces hit squad: decked out in black combat gear, their matching helmets all tagged in numerical sequence with white paint. And the hit-squad part referred to their scoped and silenced assault rifles, extended magazines jutting down low like a snaggletooth.
Mr. Suit shook his head another time and then said in his shout-y voice: "DO YOU EVEN KNOW MY NAME, YOU LITTLE BITCHES? I AM MARK FUCKING WAL-MART, OF THE WAL-MART FAMILY, OKAY. AND I HAVE PULL, GOT IT. MY PULL IS SO FUCKING IMMENSE, THAT I WILL START HIRING BETTER GUYS TO COME KILL YOU. NO MORE INCIDENTS. NOW GO CLEAN THIS MESS UP. WE'VE GOT REAL BUSINESS TO ATTEND TO." His bulge had gotten slightly less amusing as he'd barked his orders, and now it was just large enough to tickle a lady under the armpit and nothing more.
Mr. Mark Fucking Wal-Mart stormed off, scowling extra-hard.
His goons turned to one another and shrugged. They went their separate ways and started pushing tables, putting up posters about the latest military hardware, and filling up a big orange cooler with plain-flavoured, orange-coloured drink. When they were done, they toasted their quick work with a paper cup each of orange drink, discussing one another's wives between sips.
The front doors slid open and a gaggle of gentlemen—and even some ladies—entered like they were oh so important: the centrepieces for a congregation. Minx-fur coats and raccoon purses, shark-skin shoes and alligator wallets. Faces turned up and left and right, they marvelled at the displays, which were on rotating stands, turning into secret openings in the floor. The boring junk disappeared from sight. High-grade, nation-destroying, world-ending military hardware rotated upward and locked into place.
Maggie dashed across an aisle to thick black coats. One with a silvery silk lining was particularly nice. Now she was behind the group of global elite, trailing them on their trip through the store.
They looked at guns, a lot of guns. Machineguns, large assault weapons and small subs. Pump-action shotguns, fully automatic shotguns, shotguns capable of shredding through your leg and leaving a flayed mess behind. Rocket launchers, grenade launchers, bazookas and land mines. Missiles, knives and blunt instruments, too. Large, ancient nuclear warheads, covered in micro-traces of radioactive dust; small, brand-new nuclear warheads, carried in briefcases around the world.
They also looked at more clothes. Fashion was apparently important to ponder when one was waging wars across the worlds.
The whole thing was narrated by a walking-talking hologram named HOLO, who also served as the salesman. HOLO managed to sucker a man into getting a second three-million-dollar Nazi-red turtleneck for the missus to wear at the same time, so they were matching while they praised the Wal-Marty Dollar.
One of the snooty, stuck-up-seeming ladies—or dames, as they surely insisted on being called—bought first dibs on nuking a neighbouring planet. It was a lottery draw as to which one.
An Arab man, having been quite extravagant with his spending, had his fifteen servants collapsing beneath the weight of five heavy machineguns hanging from each of their shoulders. He ordered one servant to kick another who was foaming at the mouth and panting. Then he ordered a third servant to shoot both. The gunfire proved too much for the shooter in his exhausted state. The recoil sent the gun kicking up and up until it blew the third servant's brains out. Now the remaining twelve servants had to carry around dead weight, too. The worst part of it looked like the steaming, pulsating entrails, which draped across the group like a web of worms as they crawled around on the floor.
After a few more purchases, HOLO directed them to the rear doors, Maggie still stalking them from the surrounding aisles. Mr. Mark Fucking Wal-Mart was waiting when they arrived. He had one eyebrow raised and a half-smirk on the opposite side of his face. His bulge was immense, and he looked like he'd finally broken through the shit-stink barrier. "WELL," he said, softly, "I TAKE IT YOU ARE IMPRESSED WITH MY WARES. I AM MARK FUCKING WAL-MART OF WAL-MART ENTERPRISES, AFTER ALL. PLEASE INSERT YOUR CREDITS INTO HOLO'S APPROPRIATE SLOT NOW, THANKS. AND THEN THAT WRAPS UP TONIGHT'S WAR-MART EXTRAVAGANZA, GOT IT. BUT YOU BETTER COME BACK TOMORROW IF YOU WANT TO STAY UP TO DATE WITH THE NEXT DAY'S KILLING TOOLS."
Then he beckoned his squad, whispering: "AND WILL SOMEONE PLEASE GRAB THE FUCKING DRONE WHO'S BEEN SPYING THE WHOLE TIME?"
Maggie shrieked and ran. Tried to run, anyway. She got caught up in barbed-wire sex toys, though, and the men dragged her kicking and screaming back to Mr. Mark Fucking Wal-Mart.
"DID YOU THINK YOU COULD BEAT ME, DRONE? DID YOU HONESTLY THINK I WOULDN'T KNOW WHAT YOU WERE DOING? WHAT YOU WERE SEEING? I AM MARK FUCKING WAL-MART, OF THE WAL-MART FAMILY. I KNOW EVERYTHING."
He pulled out a metallic, ball-like device and flashed her in the eyes with its piercing blue light.
"NOW, YOU'RE GOING TO BE A GOOD LITTLE DRONE AND COME BACK TO WAL-MART TOMORROW, GOT IT. YOU'VE GOT SHOPPING TO DO. MONEY TO BURN."
Everything went black. And foggy.
When Maggie came to, she was ushered out the front doors with someone shouting from behind her, "Have a capitalistic day!" The sun was starting to come up. What a nice day it was looking to be. Maggie could barely remember where she parked, let alone anything else.
But she knew she'd have to come back to Wal-Mart later that day. She couldn't think of what she needed to buy, not one thing, but she had shopping to do.
And money to burn.