Tevun-Krus #62 - Best of 2018

The Art of War-Mart - @MadMikeMarsbergen - Military SF

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.