Take the All-Mart! - By J. I. Greco Page 0,18

broiling wall, directly in its meter-a-day path.

Mother Superior — tall, silver-haired and buxom — was in her official-occasion sequined, cup-less corset. Her phallus-double helix was twice as large as Roxanne’s and lay on her bare chest, glinting in the dawn sun. She stood with her arms and face raised to the sky, her eyes closed, her lips moving in a silent body- and mind-cleansing chant. The rest of the coven — nine women, ranging in age from sixteen to twenty-five — stood flanking Mother Superior, patiently and quietly chit-chatting among themselves while they waited for her to begin the ceremony.

Roxanne reached the bottom of the hill. Brenda was sitting there, crossed-legged with her chin in her hands, obviously bored to tears. She was an acolyte, not yet having earned the right to take the trials and oaths to become a full Sister. Her outfit reflected both her status and her age: instead of a habit she wore a brim-less baseball cap, and her miniskirt was downright dowdy — it reached all the way down to her knees. She looked up and smiled at Roxanne, then raised her wrist and tapped it.

Roxanne mouthed “I know” and plunged her hand into her purse, pulling out a dog-eared and beat-up copy of Vampire Hunter D Vol. 3 she’d found during a scavenger outing to the Three Mile Island land-fill a month back. She tossed it to Brenda. Brenda scrambled to catch it, her face lighting up as she read the cover. She tapped two fingers against her chest, pointed them at Roxanne, then dove in to the manga.

Roxanne chuckled to herself, then spotted Bernice, standing at the end of the line. Practically tip-toeing to avoid calling further attention to her tardiness from the rest of the coven, she slipped into line next to Bernice.

“Nice of you to show,” Bernice whispered. Bernice was freckled, a year younger than Roxanne. Shorter and broader, too — but it worked for her. Her strawberry-blonde hair was braided into pigtails that sprouted out from beneath her habit all the way down to the small of her back. “Hope he was worth it.”

“How’d you...?”

“You smell like cigarettes and sweat.” Bernice’s upturned nose twitched. “And you’ve got that same overly content dopey grin going that you usually get after an orgy. That and there’s that antenna-thingee sticking out of your neck, and you said you weren’t gonna use it ‘till you met a cute guy. Shall I go on?”

Roxanne grinned sheepishly, then glanced over Bernice’s head down the line. “Mother Su say anything?”

“About you? You kidding? She wouldn’t dare.” Bernice slipped a hand-rolled ceremonial joint into a long black cigarette holder and lit it with a lighter shaped like a panther, pulling back the ears to make flame shoot out from its mouth. “But she did say she could only hope the delay in the ceremony doesn’t piss off the New God too terribly.”

Roxanne turned to look deep into the broiling expansion front. Along its base, small tendrils of nanomachine smoke stabbed out at the bare earth, snatching up bits of shrub and rock to pull them in for disassembly into their constituent, raw material molecules. “Like it even notices we’re here.”

Bernice drew in a long drag and held it for a count of three, letting it out in a single puff. “It might, you don’t know.”

“We’ve been doing this for how long?” Roxanne waived the heady smoke away from her face. “Three years since it got close. Twice a year. And not so much as a thank you card.”

Bernice took another hit. “It hasn’t rolled over Shunk, has it?”

“Only cause we’re in a whole different valley. It’d have to climb the mount—”

“May we have respectful quiet while I prepare, please?” Mother Superior interrupted, clearing her throat and shooting death-ray eyes at Roxanne.

“Yes, Mother,” Roxanne said, blushing, and raising her hands in front of her apologetically.

Mother Superior growled and went back to chanting silently at the sky.

Bernice grinned, lowered her voice. “Yeah, never mind the All-Mart — she’s pissed.”

“Damn it. You know what that means?” Roxanne asked. “Nothing but sloppy seconds all morning.”

Bernice rolled her eyes. “Somehow I can’t really work up the sorry for you.”

“Here we go again,” Roxanne said. “There’s nothing stopping you from getting laid, you know. I keep telling you, you’ve got a killer bod. Great rack. And the freckles — guys love the freckles. You just need to get yourself out there. Be aggressive.”

Bernice furrowed her brow. “I’m pretty aggressive.”

“With guys.”

“Oh, yeah.” Bernice took a