Chapter Six

wherein the subtitle actually pertains to the story itself for a change and not the stupid self-obsessed author

You walk briskly toward Post-Apocalyptic Spencer’s, trying to remain nonchalant so as not to alarm the other shoppers. Sure, they’re bound to be alarmed anyway once they discover Kimberly or something has been killed, but that will inevitably take quite some time. Partly because everyone seemed so enrapt in their own affairs, but also because it represented only a slight change in Kimberly or something’s demeanor. To the casual onlooker, the only difference was that she now faced up rather than straight ahead, and frankly it was the same way she spent most of her cigarette breaks.

You start tipping your hat to people as they pass, tipping your hat and picking up speed like a special little gentleman in a speed-walking race against his impending diarrhea. There’s Spencer’s, just ahead. You duck into Severed Foot Locker, a corner shop with two entryways, and pretend to peruse, careening and spinning and hurtling into the various displays as you pick up the demonstration shoes and put them immediately back down.

“Afternoon! Too big, too small, too expensive, wrong color, smells funny, wouldn’t be caught dead in this…” carrying on until you’ve lurched out the other entrance.

That ought to lose your pursuer. Though you’d only just seen him go the other way. You reckon he was just now beginning to lick up his Stromboli roll. Still, couldn’t be too careful about these things.

You cut back through the opposing retail space, occupied by the video arcade. And here’s a token on the floor! You pick it up, tip your hat to anyone who might be watching, and try to keep moving. But then you spot your favorite game—Tedious Governmental Survey. Back up on the surface, you’d been known to dominate the leader boards on that one. And you’d never seen an arcade cabinet in such pristine condition. Just one play with your free token…

No. Must remain focused. You dart back into the main promenade, promising yourself you may have a go if the coast is still clear after you grab the doll.

Finally, you made it: Spencer’s. Some douchey sleaze is here chatting up the girl behind the counter, just like in the Spencer’s of your grandad’s day. And oh look, here’s one of those plasma globes! You remove your driving gauntlet and trace an invisible phallus over the globe, giggling as the lightning follows your finger.

Over by the black lights, you see how glowy and kick-ass they make all the metal band shirts look. You look for something in what you suppose is the old man’s size. There’s only one extra small, and it’s Four Non-Blondes. You stare at those depressing hat goggles and get the sense you’re looking into a mirror.

Now to find the aisle you’d have been embarrassed to linger in if you’d come here as a kid, but now that you’re an adult you’re still embarrassed to linger in. Oh but here are the posters. You flip quickly to the ones of Samantha Fox and Lita Ford’s bikini-clad corpses. Might as well make a modest deposit in ye olde banque de spanque. You find the Samantha Fox ones especially compelling. And what is that peeking through her swimsuit, the upper rim of a decomposing areola? Va-va-va…

And instead of voom, you get a loud pew! and a hole where her ridiculous perm used to be. You snap your head toward the entrance.

The assassin!

The douchey sleaze jumps behind the counter with the sales girl and whimperingly chats her up while they cower together.

Reflexively you hunker into a crouch. Here on the bottom shelf, you find them: the blow-up dolls, all deflated in boxes sporting their pictures. You grab the first one you see, a blonde.

Over your head, a second bullet explodes the fake poo shelf. You’re disgusted as bits of it rain onto you. Well… fake disgusted.

You begin a belly crawl around the back of the shelf. Oh but hang on! This blonde isn’t the old man’s type. You put her back and scan the options. For this relationship to work, you really ought to find him someone a bit more Holly Golightly. Someone he’d be proud to struggle to put that evening glove on. Hey, here’s a brunette, but she looks really codependent. And this redhead looks to be just the sort who’s encouraging everyone to keep drinking at the end of the night when everybody’s tired and just wants to go home, all to divert their attention from the fact that she can’t just stop at two bottles anymore, but the others are on to her game and all secretly make plans to hang out behind her back, and when she does go out she has the dance floor all to herself because every cha-cha her Statue of Liberty tiara puts an eye out, and later she goes up to people at the bar and asks if they have a light but when somebody who doesn’t smoke tells her no she says what the f*** is that s’posed to mean and leans down to head-butt them with the tiara, often with other people’s eyeballs still on the spikes, and she ghosted her last boyfriend because he didn’t feel comfortable introducing spatulas into their bedroom roleplay, and she keeps going back to the tattoo parlor to get the same butterfly traced over and over again and again because she hates tattoos but treats the artist like a therapist, her only captive audience, and frankly she feels she’s falling in love with him and maybe she’s just delusional, maybe it’s her third bottle on an empty stomach, but she’s too inside her own head to realize he’s gay, and she gets no fulfillment from her job at the VA hospital information desk yet manages to put up a good front for all the veterans, thank you for your service and all that, but even they’re beginning to see the cracks, and her cat who’s really in tune with people’s vibes doesn’t want to cuddle with her anymore so it’s back to the bottle, and by bottle you probably assume the author means bottles of wine but she’s actually addicted to fingernail polish remover, a habit which always begins with witch hazel and ends with hydrochloric acid, which is what took her mother down in the end, something that ought to have been an early red flag because not being able to hold your hydrochloric acid runs in the family.

You grab the box and stare into the picture of her eyes.

I can fix her, you think.

Wait, what’re you saying?! You’re not here to find yourself a relationship I mean blow-up doll. This is for the old man. You put down the redhead and pick up a sandy-haired one: Plain Jane. Fine. Whatever. He’ll just have to love her for her personality.

’NOW WITH BORING PERSONALITY!’ says the box in a flashy starburst.

Another gunshot, and a collection of fart joke coffee mugs shatters off the shelf next to you. You throw aside Plain Jane and grab the codependent brunette. She’ll have to do.

You dive across the next aisle into a shoulder roll just as another shot bursts into some sort of plastic novelty genitals thing nobody cares about. You peek up over the shelf to get the lay of the land. A roll of toilet paper with funny sayings on it pops into a thousand scraps. You duck.

You’d been up long enough to appraise the situation. The assassin was shooting from the cover of a lava lamp display. You had your cog-driven umbrella but no time to figure out how to operate it.

Right! You grab a waste bin meant to look like an oversized beer can, and use it as cover all the way to the checkout counter, letting it absorb a pelting of bullets as you go. Now you’re behind the counter with the sales girl and the douchey sleaze.

“How much for this?” you whisper, showing her the brunette.

“Two,” she whispers back.

Shards of things from the wall above rain on the three of you.

“Two what?” You still feel the need to whisper.

“What do you mean, ‘two what?’ The same currency we’ve been using down here for years—spirit gum!”

“Two… bottles of spirit gum?” You pull a bottle from your pocket. “I only have this one bottle on me, but loads more topside, in my vehicle.”

“No, silly! Two drops!”

She takes the bottle and peppers two drops onto a piece of card stock, which changes color to verify the spirit gum’s authenticity. The author also meant for the douchey sleaze to say something funny here, but ultimately it would ruin the pace, and this is supposed to be an action scene.

“There you go, all set! Would you like a receipt?”

You wave her off. The shooting stopped and you think you hear the assassin reloading.

You make a run for it! Out of Post-Apocalyptic Spencer’s and back into the arcade, disappearing into a dimly-lit maze of electronic futility. You almost snake around to the opposite exit when you spot it again—Tedious Governmental Survey, glowing and blipping out the notes of its siren’s attract mode. Nobody saw you come in, and you’ve got this token burning a hole in your pocket. Just one game!

You bend over to drop in the token and feel the prod of cold steel against your temple.

“Make it two-player,” says the assassin, holding another token before your eyes. “Loser gets assassinated.”

Plunk, plunk go the tokens, and before you know it, you’re on your first man, conducting a moderately tedious pixelated survey on level one. Oh but here comes the big bad Margin of Error to thwart your surveying efforts and flop you onto your back! Time to relinquish the joystick. The assassin has his first go, first on level one, now level two, then onto level three, still on his first man.

“Wow, I’m having the game of my life here!” he says.

Your eyes move from the screen to his focused countenance, then back to the screen. Time to make another break.

“Hey,” he calls out, halfheartedly reaching for his gun. But there was nothing he could do, and he returned his hand to the fire button. If he kept playing like this, he was destined for the glitch-out kill screen on level 256, something he’d never dreamed would be within his grasp. No way he’d jeopardize it.

Well, that was a bit of a POV-hop, wasn’t it? A better author would have found a way to convey all that without pulling the reader outside his own head and plopping him into in the assassin’s. Chalk it up to poetic license. Now where were we?

You dash from the arcade to a side gangway that appears to lead out to the parking deck, and spotting a passerby, you bring yourself to a quick halt in order to tip your hat. You look around and make for the exit but then stop. To your left is a Burning to the Ground Hickory Farms! With free summer sausage samples under those little glass domes. You can’t resist. Looking back at the arcade, you have yet to catch sight of your pursuer. And part of you wants to go back in and spectate. But then there are those free summer sausage medallions, calling your name.

Do you:

A. Take a slight detour into Burning to the Ground Hickory Farms for a free sample or two, promising yourself you’ll be quick about it?

B. Make haste for the parking deck and try to find a way back up to the surface, where you hope the mechano-farthing still waits?

C. Go serpentine, take the same exit as option B, then hopefully double back through a different entrance, work out how to use the umbrella and sneak up on the assassin? Also the author forgot to include this whole inner monologue about how delighted you were that spirit gum, which is the only thing you have an embarrassment of (apart from your behavior during the udder incident), is their premiere form of currency down here. Sticking around might afford you a little shopping spree, though it may cost you your life.

D. But the assassin’s having such a great game! Isn’t there a part of you that just wants to go back in and see how far he gets? Remember that if he’s still on his first man, it technically means you still have two of your own left to play, and you could theoretically even win. Though who’re you kidding you’d never beat him.

With a three-way tie, voting has ended for this chapter.