WESTMARKET

BROKEN SHOPPING CART

8:30 am--Wednesday, October 2.

Dan yawned as he answered the phone behind the counter, his instant, company trained response framed around his boredom. “Westmarket. It’s like being at home, without the hassle.” He slouched over the counter, bracing himself with his elbows. “Yeah, I hate the morning shift too. This place is dead.” He yawned again, and stretched his arms out, the phone held tight in the crook of his neck, enough to smart his shoulder. “What’s going on with you?”

Evan popped out from behind a stack of diapers and waved at his co-worker and friend. “Not much,” he said into the phone, giving Dan a strange, double sided conversation. Dan hung up the phone and Evan hesitated, clearly thinking about calling him back, only to realize he could just as easily wander from his post in the baby section to visit his best bud. As usual, Evan was a mess. The blue Westmarket apron they were all forced to wear couldn’t hide his wild shock of curly, dirty blonde hair, nor the ratty condition of his NIN t-shirt. To further add insult, he wore his ripped up sneakers, the ones where you could see his big toe poking out with every step. The apron was draped over his gut in a tight fold, making Evan look pregnant himself. He scratched at the stubble beneath his chin with dirty fingernails and gave Dan a backwards nod as he approached.

“There’s a sale on ass wipes,” he said.

Dan sighed and contemplated the peace of the store, enjoying it while at the same time feeling compelled to complain. “It’s not fair that we had to start half an hour early. Everyone else got a complimentary doughnut This sucks.”

“Not really,” Evan said, scratching at his round stomach. “We’re not the suckers standing out in the rain, chanting the Westmarket song and eating stale crap. Those donuts weren’t worth it, man. I know for a fact, they were supposed to go in the bin a week ago. You’d need to soak those powdery little rocks for an hour in your morning java to tenderize them.” He tapped the side of his head, indicating he actually was thinking. “As for the java...Dude, that’s microwaved leftover Colombian decaff from last night.”

“No it isn’t,” Dan said, making a face.

“It’s true man, they got a real waste not want not freak on in that diner.” Evan leaned against the counter opposite Dan, his shoulders bent back as he braced himself. “I think we ought to count ourselves lucky we don’t have to listen to some motivational bowel mover. How does someone get hired for being some blowhard who kisses his own ass? I don’t get it.”

Good question, Dan thought. Jared Strome, the current Westmarket front man and guru had managed to commandeer most of the store, and save for Dan, Evan and the store manager Gerry Foucalt, they were bereft of sales personnel. A life sized poster of the jerk was on display near the entrance, where it had resided all week. Every day Dan walked past it, giving it a punch in the jaw for good measure. The hatred he had for the guy wasn’t unreasonable, Dan thought. As a representative of Westmarket, he was an easy mark for all the frustration and angst its employees felt at earning slave wages for long hours with unquestioned inertia. Strome was the spearhead of the Westmarket Chant, the stupid song they had to sing every morning, every employee who didn’t have a screw loose embarrassed by the effort. He could hear his co-workers outside, destroying all shred of their dignity as they sang:

’We love you Westmarket, you are so smart,

With your happy smiles, and shopping carts.′

Evan tapped his fingers on the counter, adding his own version, complete with guitar riff. “Piss on you Westmarket, you fucking fart. You’re like a hooker, without a heart.” He belched and punched a fist at his chest in mock salute.

Still, Dan had to admit it wasn’t so bad, especially since it was a weekday and it was raining and thus there were hardly any people in the store. If it stayed this way he hoped they had the company meeting all day long, let them sing their hearts out, the suckers. Him and Evan, they were going to have a blast, flipping through the latest DVDs and playing a few rounds of Call To Duty when Foucalt wasn’t looking. Minimum wage, minimum effort. And so it goes.

“Hey, isn’t that Cheryl?” Evan asked.

Dan glanced up the middle aisle, getting a good view of the young woman who was stuffing her pockets full of candy bars, with clearly no intention of paying for them. He really didn’t care, it wasn’t his department. He blithely watched as she added a few bags of chips to her backpack, her head whipping back and forth, looking for security cameras and secret shoppers.

“She knows we get a discount, right?” Evan asked.

She’d changed her hair, Dan thought. Just a year ago, she was a wispy brunette, kind of cute in a way. Now she had half of it shaved off, dyed it green and blue and added a nose ring made of bone, all punked out to the max. She also did a big redesign on her personality since she’d once been the smartest kid in high school, getting A’s without effort. But all those brains didn’t get her the scholarship she’d been expecting and as Westmarket employees her parents couldn’t afford a local college let alone university tuition. So, here she was, stealing back some tiny shreds of what was supposed to already be hers.

“You should go talk to her,” Evan said.

“I’m not the one going to bust her.”

“Not that kind of talk, loser, I mean *talk* to her.”

Dan stood up, suddenly uncomfortable. “Nah, she’s not my type, you know how it is.”

“No man, I don’t.” Evan crossed his arms and gave Dan a playful grin. “I say the type who shows interest, that’s what you go for. She’s looked right at you twice already, man, just dying for you to go and challenge her or some shit. You should go for it.”

Dan was uncertain. Cheryl’s wide eyed, fierce glare in his direction was hardly indicative of a girl who wanted to have a pleasant chat on a boring weekday morning. He knew she had a reputation in their neighbourhood of being the one with the real pharmacy of fun in that backpack of hers, and that was probably the real reason Evan wanted her called over. A doobie or two out back would be nice, but Foucalt was still in the house, and much as he hated his minimum wage job, at least it paid the interest on his student loan.

A squeaking sound coursed through the store above the muzak, matched with a rattling din as a wonky shopping cart was forced through the store. A well put together woman in her mid thirties approached Evan, her voice clipped with Martha Stewart efficiency. “Excuse me,” she said to him. “I need another cart, this one is broken.”

Evan glanced at her, blinking as though she were a mirage. His sleepy, catatonic study of her suggested he spent many a night alone with an XBox and a joystick, so much so that a woman close to fifteen years his senior looked like fantasy fodder. “Cart looks fine to me,” he said, grinning.

“The wheel. It doesn’t work.”

‘Neither does he,’ Dan wanted to say, but he opted instead to allow his friend to completely immerse himself in his own stupidity. It was an unspoken arrangement they had, one that Evan wasn’t aware of.

Evan pinched his chin and raised a brow, giving the cart a careful once over. “It’s still rolling.”

The woman cursed under her breath and forced the cart with its wonky wheel out into the main central aisle, her carefully painted lips a thin line of angry scarlet. Evan punched Dan in the arm, trying to bring him into the fun, but Dan could only shake his head, and wonder when it was he decided that the people he associated with had to be idiots. “That’s Jason’s mom,” he said, and Evan’s face fell.

“Shit. Man, you could have warned me.” Evan glanced back down the aisle at the well put together woman, his gaze still stuck on the curve of her tall, black boots. “She’s the one you were telling me about? The one all hopped up on Oxycotin all the time?”

“Shut up, man, she’ll hear you!”

“But she doesn’t look like an oxymoron. She looks like she sells insurance. A lot of insurance.”

Dan gritted his teeth, not wanting to go over this yet again. Jason was the kid working the toy section, and he had a heck of shitty home life, a fact Dan heard all about during a smoking session out the back storeroom a few days ago. His mom was always playing the perfect housewife card, but he knew better, especially with Jason’s sad descriptions of finding her passed out on the kitchen floor when he got home from school. Besides, that glassy look in her eyes wasn’t due to the early hour or what Evan routinely smoked. She had a disconnect going on in her head, which was clear the way she continued pushing that broken shopping cart, with all of two small items in it. Dan strained to get a better look and discerned a package of hot dogs and a silk scarf. She kept checking her purse every five minutes, rummaging through it like she’d lost something, then nodding when she found it. He had a pretty good idea what that something was.

Evan had given up on the baby department and was now flicking through the channels on the various HDTVs on display behind Dan, pausing on a rerun of ‘Ellen’ before settling on the news. CNN reporters were worried and tongue tied at their desks, strangely rumpled while they spilled out some very bad news. Neither Evan nor Dan heard what it was. The sound was turned off.

Explosions, gunfire and screaming, bloodied faces sped across the 60" inch screens behind them while Dan stared out into the vastness of the store, gaining a good overview of its current inhabitants. He could see a couple of large black women in the cereal grocery aisle, one of them in nursing scrubs and the other dressed in a sleek pantsuit, hair perfect and nails long, ready to rake over a corporation. They were too odd a pair not to be related, and he assumed they were sisters. A well dressed man pushed a cart behind them, its contents filled with Westmarket’s nastiest brand of discount coffee. His cheek was pressed close to his cell phone, his posture suggesting it was an important call. Everything about the guy suggested he knew a lot about class distinction and carefully cultivated appearance--hell, he could give tips to Ms. PowerTrump, though Dan was sure the woman’s sister wouldn’t give a damn about what either of them thought. She showed as much by giving the well dressed man on the phone a dirty look, then laughed at something he said when he hung up, all pretence at snobbery destroyed.

“Hey, bitch, you can’t open those packages.” Evan suddenly went on the offensive, diving into his baby department with mall cop vigour. “Hey! You got to pay for those!”

He put his hands on the front of the shopping cart, stopping the wheels with the heel of his sneaker. A scabby young woman in her mid twenties wearing too much eyeliner and enough foundation to make her skin crack sneered back at him. In the cart were two small children, one of whom was screaming her guts out, her face a misery of snot and tears. In the front part of the shopping cart, a baby was strapped in, a freshly stolen soother popped in his happily sucking mouth.

“Get your hands off my cart.”

“You got to pay for that stuff first.”

She put a hand on her hip, her fingers splayed across her acid wash jeans. Her midriff was visible beneath her white halter top, a series of tanned stretch marks dimpled across her skin. “Evan, stop being a dick.”

“Look, just because you’re my cousin doesn’t mean you can march in here and start stealing stuff.” He grabbed the soother back, only for the infant in the cart to start wailing like he’d had a limb removed. Evan hastily put it back, like a volume plug against this kid that was pushing it past eleven. “You can pay for it here.”

“No she can’t,” Dan replied. “I can only ring in stuff from my own department, none of the sku numbers are in my register.” He pointed to Evan’s neglected sales desk. “You ring her in.”

The two toddlers in the cart started scrapping, the bag of chips placed between them torn open to spill its oily, flaky guts onto the floor, a mess Evan was duty bound to clean up himself. He cursed and stormed off to get a broom and dustbin, leaving his cousin to give one of the kids a sharp smack on the arm and a few swear words that Dan was sure weren’t in any parenting books. Debbie, Evan’s cousin, was a regular fixture at Westmarket since she had the latest kid, a product of a drunken night with a barfly who had recently got out of jail. Last Dan had heard the guy had hightailed it to Vancouver to get the hell away from the squealing little hangman’s noose of responsibility. Of course, this was the story Debbie was fond of telling, but it was hard to ignore the fact that her other two kids came into being the exact same way, with no man having the smallest amount of sense wanting to stick around the Debbie crazy train for long.

She smacked her gum, her hair pulled so tightly back with a black scrunchie her eyebrows tugged upwards in Spock-like surprise. “So, I hear you’re out of school.”

“For now.” It was a sore spot he didn’t want to get into, and he turned away from her, doing his best to absorb himself in the news. He’d run out of money and didn’t get his application for a student loan in on time. He’d lost a whole semester, maybe even a whole year. It put his projected plan for finishing his sociology degree in four years on an indefinite hiatus, one he hated himself for. Dan scratched the back of his head, ignoring the way Debbie’s rotten, dirty kids kept shouting, drowning out the volume on the HDTVs as he turned the sound up. Through his peripheral vision he could see Cheryl, hunched over the socks aisle, filling up her backpack with argyle. Over it all, the echo of the squeaky wheel on a lopsided shopping cart broke through the relative peace of the store, its high pitch winning out over the two toddlers’ whines.

“I got more hours at the Cafe Go-Go. The night girl got fired on account of her getting the hep C. I don’t know what the big deal is, I worked with her plenty of times and didn’t get sick or nothing.”

Debbie kept smacking her gum. Dan couldn’t answer her, his full attention diverted by the information spilling out of the dozen or so large screens.

“Well, guess you’re busy doing nothing. Say bye to Evan for me.” She pushed her kids away, clearly annoyed at the fact that her cousin’s friend was ignoring her, and the one thing that got in Debbie’s craw was a man not paying attention to her, even if he was a scrawny geek like Dan. Or so Dan figured, he didn’t know her inner dialogue, he didn’t care. What was important was what was happening onscreen, in gross shades of red and brilliant orange. A world exploding into chaos.

Evan came back with the broom and dustbin and began the slow, methodical process of sweeping dry, crushed potato chips off the floor. He was going to work hard at making this job last a good half hour. Dan, however, had other ideas, and he waved his friend over, gesturing to the carnage ripping its way across the various screens.

“Cool,” Evan said, nodding his head, impressed. “That one’s head exploded most emphatically, yes indeed. Damn awesomesauce, my friend. What movie is this?”

“It’s not a movie,” Dan replied. He felt sick as he watched the screen, a reporter screaming as his hand was bitten clean off by a passerby who had been making a meal of a cab driver. “It’s the news.”

Evan was distracted. He nudged Dan in the arm, his head nodding in the direction of the socks display where two very large, rotund people waddled their way past Cheryl and into the aisle containing the underwear sale bin. They were wearing the same yellow t-shirts, one with a kitten print on the front of it, the other with a puppy. “Westmarket Blobs, at two o’clock.”

Dan forced Evan back in front of the screens, his panic brewing within him as every second passed. The cab driver who should have been dead, since most of his body cavity had been munched away, was now on his feet. The camera was on the ground, the cameraman himself being made a meal of by who knew how many of these...these *things*. They looked like people, except for the way they lurched and yawned, their mouths and hands twitching in perverse hunger. The banner on the bottom of the screen claimed this was Chicago, that this was a scene being played out all across the continent and had been going on for hours since the early morning. People were being told to stay indoors. The CDC was coming in, a state of emergency had been declared. This could be terrorism, some newscasters claimed. This could be war.

“People are dying,” Dan breathed. He tried to swallow, his mouth dry, his throat a coarse gag of thistles. Above the news, the store’s muzak played, an old Creedence Clearwater Revival song, thoughtfully brought to life on a pan flute. Bad Moon Rising, as interpreted by Zamfir.