MARTians (12 page)

Meanwhile, I owe AllMART money. Then I think about compound interest.

I am not alone. Suddenly, short emphatic words punctuate the air above the shelving units and slither along the aisles. That passes, but I can hear a whispered weeping at the other side of the canned soups.

“I shoulda warned you about payday,” says Timmer. “But even when you know how it is, it’s a crap sandwich.”

“How am I supposed to live on
nothing
?”

“Same as you have been,” says Timmer. “Eventually, you will get money. I get money now, which is why we have delicious cereal.” He shakes the box. “Just be glad you aren’t living in the dormatorium. The kids in there will never stop being in debt to AllMART.”

I think about Belly. When she complained about the dorms, she complained about everything — except the rent. Maybe she didn’t know. Maybe she thought she was living there free, like a squirrel in a tree. How much does an emergency ambulance cost? What about stitches? When Belly gets back from the SpeedyMed clinic, she is going to find that the dial on the suck-o-meter goes way beyond what she thought was infinity.

If I had a vote, I’d sell it. I won’t have a vote to sell until my eighteenth birthday, and that’s 619 days away.

Hey, I know that building. It is Frederick Winslow Taylor High School, where I spent 2,942 hours in Room 2-B. I guess it is empty and useless now.

I can see a black, flapping shape rise up from behind Sallie Lee’s perfectly coiffed hair.

It jerks
smack!
right into her face.

“This here is a matter of life or death.” He waves his arms wide so I know he means his department, the Great Outdoors, Aisles 123–131. I put on my yes-sir-I’m-paying-attention-sir face and look around: shelves that reach to the metal rafter beams where the indoor sparrows nest, a taxidermied polar bear squishing a taxidermied seal, guns in glass display cases, guns on the wall. “Life or death. You get that, zombie?”

“Zoë, I’m Zoë,” I say, and touch my name tag. It doesn’t help much. My tag says ZERO. “You know how it is with the name tags, right, Karl?” I give him half a smile and a tilted-head shrug.

“I’m Kral. My momma named me Kral. You got that, zombie girl? And when I say zombie, I mean you’re one of them that’s not ready. You got you a bugout bag, zombie? You got you a bag that’s got what you need to survive when it hits the fan?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I do.” I’m not even lying.

“You got a secure shelter? Someplace to go when you can’t go home?”

I think of the Warren. It isn’t home, but it’s shelter. “Yeah.”

“You got food stores?”

I think about the wall of cereal boxes back at the Warren. “Yeah. We have food.”

“The world is full of crazies.”

I’m looking at one, but I’m not going to mention it.

“You got a gun?”

“No. But I’ve got friends.”

“Unless they’re friends with guns, they aren’t friends.”

I can see the gears shifting in Kral’s head. I’m nothing but a trainee-employee so young I can’t be bonded to handle money — even worse, I’m a gunless zombie. I’m worthless. And he is cursed with the thankless task of teaching me what I need to know to be useful in Aisles 123–131, the Great Outdoors, where it’s a matter of life or death if somebody doesn’t find the vacu-packed dehydrated celery.

At 9:45 p.m., the lights dim. Reducing the lights to 60 percent is a signal to the shoppers that they need to head for checkout. Their shopping day is over. By 10:30 the lights are down to 30 percent and the registers have been closed out and the lot wranglers are rattling long snakes made of carts with wobbling wheels home for the night. The store grows silent; the little sparrows close their wings and settle on the beams.

Kral calls me to the register station and inventory comm-terminal. With the main lights down, I notice that there are halogen beams focused on the handguns. I’ve seen that trick before, in the jewelry department: Sparkly, sparkly, don’t you want me? Except here there is no sparkle. The beams of light are swallowed up by gun-shaped chunks of darkness. Then that’s it. That light is gone forever.

“You did good today. You stayed busy.” The praise is grudging, but I earned it. I scurried up the ladder to the top shelves like a squirrel. I sorted out the squid-body fishing lures from the flashers and the dodgers and never once gave in to the urge to pretend they were earrings. When consumers passed through, I made sure I directed them to our special sale item, the Red-E-2-Go emergency kit. When I took my ten-minute bathroom break, I was back in seven. If Kral wanted an excuse to bash me in the training eval, I didn’t give him an obvious one. He starts to type, putting stuff into my permanent employment record. Then he stops and points to the stock cases behind him where the ammunition boxes are stacked behind lock and key. “You see how short the inventory is there?”

I do, and I wish I didn’t. It looks like there’s a lot of work to be done, filling the empty shelves, scanning the bar codes, and placing orders. I don’t get paid for overtime — not during training. And I don’t especially want to be stuck here, in the 30 percent gloom with a dead polar bear and Kral, doing unpaid after-hours work.

“We keep ’em short stocked,” says Kral. “It improves sales. Heightens the perceived value. Know what I mean?”

“Yeah.” I learned about short-stocking in Retail Psychology, but this is the first time a department supervisor at AllMART has suggested anything that deviated from the customer-happiness-comes-first AllMART way. Full shelves signal bounty and free choice, and empty shelves trigger anxiety and paranoia. That’s classroom knowledge. I’m not in a classroom anymore. The customer psychology of purchasing ammunition may differ from the psychology of purchasing radishes.

“You take these.” Kral hands me a stack of business cards:

“Anybody asks you about ammunition, you give them one of these cards before you tell them Aisle 127. You write your name on the back so I know it was a referral. I’ll make sure you get a fair taste.”

I put the stack of cards in my pocket.

“Now, hop up on the counter over there.”

I climb up. I’m almost eye to eye with the dead polar bear. I wonder, is that a real tongue behind those fangs? Or a plastic replacement? Is the polar bear a sort of mannequin, dressed in a fashionable winter-white coat?

“Little more that way,” says Kral. I take a few steps in the direction he points.

“That’s good,” says Kral, and then he unlocks the gun case in front of him.

Crap. I must be in front of the surveillance camera. Kral’s made me into a giant blind spot. He’s going to steal from AllMART, and I’m going to help him. I stand exactly still and shut my eyes so I can be honest when I say I didn’t see anything.