Wake Up With the Kimellians

Part Three

Leaving the city was both easy and hard at the same time. The easy part was picking a south-bound direction. The alien cities were all square grids, and all he had to do was look up at the sun in order to get his bearings. But there were no street signs, only dark grey number codes that were painted in the streets at the intersections.

The soot-covered intersections.

Nicole tried to explain how the grid address system worked, but it went over Roger’s head. She offered him an extra jacket, advising him to tie it around his waist and use it every few blocks as a “street duster” to clear away the soot.

Roger kept up the effort at first, but while the change in numbers were sequential, it didn’t mean much to him. The numbers couldn’t tell him where he was, nor how close he was to the city limits.

He gave up on dusting and walked with as brisk a pace as he could manage. But fatigue was already pulling at him when he found the first food center, and he decided that he could go inside to grab a meal instead of taking from his stock.

The center was empty, which frustrated him. Roger wasn’t sure why at first, but as he walked around, he realized how he felt like a doctor watching their patients for signs of improvement. But no one showed signs of recovering yet, and he wasn’t sure they could before their time was up.

Roger gathered a can of milk, and another of spaghetti rings with meatballs, and he took them to the checkout lines at the front. He should have just passed through, but he paused to look at a laser barcode scanner beside the computer.

There was no price for food. The aliens just checked the cans out to know what to restock for their slaves. Roger went over the facts to convince himself to just leave and stop worrying. But the act of leaving with the food unchecked still felt like shoplifting to him, and for nearly a minute he looked at the scanner and thought about checking the items out.

He started to laugh over his indecision, because it was funny. He was a thirty-six—no wait, a forty-one-year-old—man standing in an empty store at the end of the world, contemplating whether he should steal food which was free anyway.

Free for all the members of the club, he thought, and laughed harder. But I didn’t bring my shopping card with me.

He was almost out the door when he thought about a can opener and realized the one Nicole gave him had probably drifted to the bottom of his bag. The other utensils were slipped in the back pockets of the bag, putting them within easy reach for his “brunch,” but the can opener kept pulling away the pocket mouth to spill the opener and the other utensils onto the floor in Nicole’s kitchen. It was tossed in with the cloth-rolled rows of food, which gave him both extra changes of clothing as well as a form of padding from the cans.

Walking back through the air conditioned store seemed like a better idea when he stood in the late morning sun and thought about taking off the heavy pack to pull everything out. Then would come the process of carefully repacking and rebalancing his load. So no, walking through the center to look for a new can opener was not a bad idea, in theory.

In theory.

He went back inside and promptly got lost for an hour. He located the utensils aisle only after much random searching. Like the missing street signs outside, the ubiquitous aisle signs listing the items were gone, replaced with numbers on the floor. Apparently, everyone was meant to look down all the time.

Roger laughed, finding himself possessed of a gallows’ humor. “Honey, do we need any 5235s this week or not?” he asked in a loud voice.

Lowering his voice, he ran through variations of the same joke over and over. “Oh look, 5339 is on sale this week,” or “I didn’t know 5342 was in season.”