Take the All-Mart! - By J. I. Greco Page 0,27

taking Roxanne’s offered hand and pulling herself up. She stomped the fire out with the soul of a stiletto.

Mother Superior cleared her throat. “Gather into a line, girls.”

The sisters did as instructed, standing shoulder to shoulder and all facing the same arbitrary direction Mother Superior was. They raised their arms to the All-Mart’s ceiling as Mother Superior raised her medallion.

“Oh great anomaly of the Wasteland,” Mother Superior began, “again we greet you!”

Her voice was swallowed up by the void stretching out in all directions.

“We hope — “

A noise behind them — a rhythmic hiss of clicking electrical discharges — interrupted her. Almost as one, the coven turned around towards the approaching sound.

“We have really got to stop praying to the damn thing,” Roxanne whispered to Bernice.

“Hey,” Bernice said around the cigarette holder, pointing its tip at Roxanne’s ear. “The antenna, it’s blinking red again.”

“Seriously?” Roxanne’s eyebrows crunched together as she reached for the antenna. “I don’t feel anything... wait a sec. Maybe I do. It’s kinda a tickle, like my leg’s asleep, but the leg is way over there.” She glanced over Bernice’s shoulder. “I think somebody’s on the line.”

“How far away?”

Roxanne closed her eyes. “Not so far. Like, a couple miles. Inside the All-Mart, for sure.”

“Somebody else with a RATpack antenna is in here?”

“These are paired. It’ll only establish contact with the one other unit...” Roxanne’s voice trailed off as the implications hit her and she broke into a grin. “Well, I’ll be an incredibly hot niece of a monkey.”

“He came in after you?” Bernice asked, exasperated. “I don’t fuckin’ believe this. I can’t get a guy to give me the time of day, and you get them coming to rescue you after one roll in the hay.”

Roxanne shrugged. “I think he had a friend. A lawyer, even.”

“Look!” Georgina said, pointing out into the dark — which wasn’t so dark anymore. “Lights!”

And they were coming their way.

Roxanne and Bernice turned and stared as row after row of ceiling arc lights began snapping to life with clanking electrical discharges. They came on in a wave that quickly passed over their heads, illuminating the vast, empty interior of the All-Mart, pock-marked only by thirty-foot high support beams at regular intervals.

“Whoa...” Bernice said.

“Yeah,” Roxanne replied, her voice a reverent whisper.

Mother Superior beamed at the coven. “See, girls? The new god returns our welcome. Now maybe we can convince it to let us out.” She turned her face back towards the ceiling, squinting into the harsh, bare white lights. “We hope you are pleased with the gifts we have provided, and that they have fed your mighty hunger, and now, satiated, you are prepared to forgive whatever transgression we have inadvertently and, I assure you, unintentionally —”

A hiss stopped her this time. A white noise hiss in the distance — from the same direction the lights had swept on. The hiss soon became a rumble, and as the coven watched, dozens upon dozens of columns of smoke erupted from the floor on the horizon and began creeping their way.

“What is that?” Bernice asked.

Roxanne’s eyebrow went up. “I think they’re... shelves?”

The lines of smoke grew nearer and nearer, leaving tall rows of rack shelving in their wake. As they grew closer, it became clear that the individual columns of smoke were clouds of nanochines, extruding the shelving from the store’s floor in a buzzing, single-minded swarm.

Mother Superior lowered her arms and gestured for the coven to huddle around her. “Girls... tighten up, please.”

The girls pressed in towards Mother Superior just as two columns of nanomachine swarms reached them, building shelves on either side of them.

“Okay.” Roxanne watched one of the clouds building a shelf as it passed by. “This is both totally weirding me out but also maybe the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.”

“You’re very strange, Rox.”

The nanomachine columns were soon past, and the girls were left staring at ten foot tall racks stretching back to the horizon, broken by regular gaps every hundred feet. The huddle loosened, the girls relieved. Curious, Roxanne took a step toward a rack and touched one of the empty shelves. It was warm. And getting warmer.

She withdrew her hand just as the shelf began to bubble.

Bernice peered over her shoulder. “What’s it doing now?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s food!” Ophelia yelled. “It’s making food!”

Roxanne and Bernice looked, and sure enough, a little further back down the shelf, All-Mart branded boxes of donuts and iced croissants were emerging from the bubbling shelf tops as if rising from underneath water. Further back,