Part I
Shop4All Supercenter, Bliss Creek, Utah, 2003.
Greg Sattler stood up straight at the Customer Service booth, awaiting total disaster smiling.
It was 2 PM on Saturday, and families by the dozens had already started pushing through the doors. Especially the eagle-eyed hyperconscious who eyed the shelves for the slightest missed stain, or an expiration date a day over on the smallest packet of flour, all for the sake of the spotless health of their children or children-to-be or possibly saving a few bucks. It was only a matter of time.
Greg was not a man to piss and moan about any of this, however. In fact, he was looking forward to it.
In his usually grueling unpleasant position taking complaints from the most entitled confrontational people on the planet, he had found a way to actually amuse himself with the complaints he would receive, especially the absolutely absurd ones.
Spilled milk? Did your mud-handed two-year-old somehow get a hold of it? Absurd prices? Want me to take a Sharpie and change it? He never said these things out loud, of course, but he found it helped him keep his head, especially if they were screaming 2 feet away from his face.
Sure enough, they came. And they were definitely like the rest.
“What, so you charge me to develop one photo, but my son can’t have a candy bar for free? What kind of business are you trying to run here?”
One where people go to the store for the sole purpose of developing a single photo, of course.
“This is ridiculous, I paid good money for this t-shirt and it rips! I demand a refund!”
Yeah, because we make it so all of our shirts rip once you leave the store, especially if it looks a size too small for you.
Greg could almost laugh after they stormed off with the answer they didn’t want. It just got easier and easier by the day, and by now, he actually liked his job. It had good perks to start, good enough pay, and now the free entertainment.
It definitely wasn’t going to last forever, though. In fact, today was his last day there, and he didn’t even know it.
He didn’t even know that the complaint of a customer almost running over to the counter, even as nice as she was about it, would prompt him to walk out and never come back. She had to catch her breath as she rested a hand on the counter to even her stance.
“Ex…excuse me…there’s a…there’s a…the…the…electronics department…it’s…it’s…”
Her voice and breath quivered, almost like she was starting to cry, and as he paid closer attention to the look in her eyes, they were clouded by fear.
“Please…please just come see…I can’t…it’s…it’s horrible, I can’t stand the sight of…please…”
Greg immediately walked around the counter and asserted himself in front of her.
“Alright, I’ll go see. I’ll fix the problem right away. It’s alright, we can fix it.” By now, her voice had broken, and she was sobbing against him.
“Okay! Okay…okay…” He turned away and sped towards the west end of the building, towards where the flat screens were on sale, near the phones and video games. The electronics aisle was at the south end of this area, so he immediately turned and marched towards where the PC’s and gaming consoles were.
No sooner than he did, the strangest smell entered his senses. He was expecting a total blowout of a mess: vomit, shit, perhaps battery acid, but the smell was simultaneously metallic yet almost pleasant, like flowers.
Following the smell, sure enough, it led him directly to the electronics, and as he turned towards it to look at th--oh, my God.
Greg fell silent.
He’d seen a lot of things before in the aisles of this store, but never something like this. What awoke in his senses was just like what he had seen in the eyes of the poor woman who’d seen this first: primal unbridled fear.
There was no disarray, there was no shit, no vomit, no battery acid. What oozed out of the PC’s was much worse than any of that.
The computers were bleeding.
