Fat Baby Land
I gripped the dashboard with pale knuckles as Slowwalker swung a hard left off the main thoroughfare and skid his screaming, junk-heap hybrid into the overflow parking lot of BuyBuyBuyLand. His bald-ass tires screeched across the synthetic-grip asphalt into a corner parking space and he slammed on his brakes just before hitting the bumper of the luxury electric in front of us.
“Dude!”
“What?”
Slowwalker stared at me with that goofy-ass grin of his.
“Why’re you parking way the hell out here? The store’s like a bazillion klicks away. How are we gonna make our getaway parked way out here? Go park up front, homie.”
I reached into the console and grabbed the Elite Shopper sticker I fabricated before we left and flicked it into Slowwalker’s lap. He smiled and nodded.
“Ooohh, yeah. Gotcha gotcha.”
Slowwalker weaved his beat-up clunker over to Preferred Parking where there was a sea of empty spaces in the Platinum Patron Zone. His car stood out like a fat lip under a bloody nose, but we didn’t give a goddamn. We were there for some righteous chaos and my counterfeiting skills were legendary, so I wasn’t worried about any shop cop scanning our shit.
I had on my “Native Land” t-shirt under a black hoodie I stole especially for that day. Slowwalker had on his favorite leather jacket with some badass earthclan shit he painted on it the day before. His hair was braided in rows with elderbeads and pulled back like he was going to skin some motherfuckers alive or something. Truth is he wouldn’t hurt a flea, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at him.
“You ready to do this, homie?”
“Yeah yeah, I’m ready ready.”
We walked through the gauntlet of automatic sliding doors into the city-block sized store like we owned the place. We had to remind ourselves to stay chill so we didn’t spook everyone right out of the gate. We were going for the scare ’em and tear ’em technique. But we needed to lift a couple of nice, shiny ballistic pistols first. We weren’t planning on actually hurting anyone, but we had to play like we were.
Turns out no one even noticed when we walked in. There were banks of self check-out lanes as far as the eye could see, clogged with overflowing lines of misshapen shoppers of all sizes and distortions. Their carts were all full of cheap-ass, color-coordinated bullshit they probably didn’t need, topped with an excess of on-sale, bargain-basement shit-wipe paper packaged in non-biodegradable plastics. I’m sure not a damn one of them knew they were trampling on sacred ground, but every single one of them was trespassing on our ancestor’s land whether they knew it or not. It was sickening to watch them all bumbling and fumbling over useless tchotchkes and meaningless baubles inside a climate controlled hellscape plopped down on our hallowed place in the middle of their nowhere.
“Look at all these dumbasses.”
“Looks like an ocean of original sin.”
“They’re too stupid to know any better.”
“Don’t matter. They’ll pay anyway.”
“You got that right, homie. C’mon, let’s go arm up.”
We pushed through the phalanx of turnstiles as a mismatched row of lumpy old men in reflective uniforms greeted us with identical sideways grins and robotic waves like a weird gang of glitching automatons.
“Hi there and welcome to… BuyBuy…Welcome to BUYBUYBUYLAND!”
“We hope you have… We wish you a hopeful and pleasant shopping experience!”
Me and Slowwalker just shrugged at each other and gave them the devil sign over our shoulders as we headed for the back of the store toward the gun counter like we planned.
“Ok, Walker, let’s split up and meet back at the gun section in fifteen minutes so we don’t draw too much attention.”
“I thought we were supposed to draw attention.”
“Not like right away. Only after we arm up.”
“Ooohh, okay. What am I supposed to do for fifteen minutes?”
“I dunno, man. Whatever. We talked about this, homie. Go for a spin on the virtual deck or something, but we gotta act like we came to purchase something. At least for a few minutes. Go browse and meet me at the gun counter in fifteen.”
“Okay. I’ll go check out the new Turbo Crank, but you might have to ping me if I get caught up. If I get to the second stage Adrenalin Rush I’m not gonna be able to stop.”
“The what?”
“The last time I Turbo Cranked I almost got to the second Adrenalin Rush, but I didn’t finish. If I do it again, I’m not gonna be able to stop until I finish. It’s so addictive.”
“Walker, we’re not here to Turbo Crank… Or whatever. We’ve got priorities. If you think you’re gonna get sucked into that thing then go browse the holo stalls or something. We need to meet in fifteen at the gun counter like we planned.”
“Okay. I’ll go browse the stalls and see if they have the new holo-stream of Turbo Crank: Adrenalin Rush.”
“Yeah, whatever. Just make sure to meet me at the gun counter in fifteen friggin’ minutes, alright?”
Slowwalker shuffled off mumbling something about the second stage and I looked around to see if anyone heard us. I noticed a kid standing near a rack of clothes like he’d been watching us the whole time. He couldn’t have been more than ten years old, but he looked like a little bloated fullback standing there rocking back and forth and giving me the evil eye like he was about to run a trick play on me. He made a face at me and I gave him my best I’m-not-gonna-stomp-you-out-but-I-definitely-could look.
Just as I did, his mother peeked her injection-inflated face around the summer dress rack and stared dead at me. I turned away and tried to act like I was looking for something, but when I pulled some pants off the shelf I realized it was women’s maternity wear. I looked back at the lady and she was staring at me with hard, squinty eyes like two raisins in a mound of dough. I tossed the pants back on the shelf and headed in the opposite direction and tried to ignore her wanting me to know that she knew that I knew she was watching me.
At some point I completely lost my bearings because of how stinking massive and confusing the store layout was. It’s like they want to get you lost in the sauce and keep you there forever I guess. The blinding tube lights overhead were buzzing hypnotically and drenched me in the milk of confusion. I got completely disoriented and started turning random corners and tripping through cleverly placed “ON SALE” and “BUY IT NOW” traps, looking for some kind of wayfinder inside the Mobius-maze of endless linoleum and blinding light.
I eventually landed in the Bed, Bath, Body, Beauty, and Botox section. I looked around and realized I’d hit a dead end of automatic toilet scrubbers and comfort-molding pillows. I doubled back past the super-absorbent hand towels and mildew-resistant shower curtains and rounded through a section of soaps that smelled like famous people. When I turned the corner, I found myself right back in the maternity section where I started.
I have absolutely no idea how I ended up back there, but that very same damn kid was still standing there staring at me like someone had pushed his pause button. His mom was still there too like she’d never moved. It was super freaky. I gave the kid the meanest look I could before he disappeared into the clothes rack like he was performing a vanishing act. His mother stared at me like she was trying to make me spontaneously combust or something.
I was about to say something I probably would’ve regretted when a purplish pacifier bounced along the floor and rolled next to the lady’s foot. She bent down without taking her eyes off me and popped it back into the mouth of a small child who was squirming around in a stroller next to her like it materialized out of nowhere. She didn’t even wipe the damn thing off. She glared at me while her toddler-spawn grunted and farted. He was squeezed into his seat like a tiny blob of clothed flesh and grabbing at the air with fingers like little pickles. He stared at me with beady eyes just like his mom and brother and his head whipped back as the lady yanked the stroller around and wheeled him over to the baby body-shapers.
I’m familiar with that beady-eye look. All of my people are. They think I don’t belong here, but they’re the real interlopers. They’re just too stupid to realize it.
The infotainment trendcasters say it’s not about race, it’s about class. But how can you think that if you compare this soggy slice of humanity pie to the plight of my entire people? This whole sinking ship of fools is being swallowed in a tsunami of crap they don’t need and can’t afford. Meanwhile I had a friend who died alone of starvation in an abandoned house and his body wasn’t found until a week later because of the smell.
None of the elites give a damn because they’re too busy rocketing up to their orbiting mega-resorts in elaborate booster penises while the rest of us are left to fight over the scraps of their warmed-over leftovers. And all these witless idiots idolize their greed because they think someday they’ll be up there too. They’re too dumb to realize they’re just doing summersaults inside a vicious cycle. But we came to rob them blind and take all we can. It’s the least we could do in exchange for the land they stole from us and their multi-generational socio-economic ultra-scam. Payback is a motherfucker.
I completely lost track of time and figured Slowwalker was already waiting for me, so I climbed up onto a nearby Krazy Kids Kitchen Koop display to get a bird’s eye view and plot my route to the gun department. I saw the towering spires of the gun cathedral poking up next to the Tiny Tots Tinker Tanks section and quickly mapped out the path in my head. As I crawled down off the silicone cages designed for the maximum comfort of unruly children, a flashing red light suddenly went off in the ceiling and a siren blared out like a cat in heat.
My heart started pounding as a huge crowd of shoppers flooded around me from every direction. I started to panic and thought I was done for, but it turned out I wasn’t the target of their attention. They were swarming on two long tables piled high with all manner of remaindered junk like red ants on a honey-fried chicken stublet. A huge sign in loud colors above the tables read: SALE! SALE! SALE! BUY! BUY! BUY! NOW! NOW! NOW!
I was at the epicenter of a customer feeding frenzy, with moldy old men clawing at whatever item they could get their grubby hands on and mothers fighting other mothers and swinging their purses at anyone who got too close. I elbowed my way out of the mess and tripped over a kid who was flipping around on the floor like a dying fish. Once I managed to get clear of the market madness and finally find my way the gun cathedral, Slowwalker was nowhere to be found.
The firearm counter was staffed by two hapless teens and behind them was a gigantic wall filled with every imaginable ballistic weapon available to civilian consumers. Crowding around the counter was an impenetrable swamp of sweaty, retired men with pregnant guts and balding heads trying to push up past each other to get a look and touch at the new whatever-it-was. Each of them was fondling a different firearm like it was holy. There was no way someone like me was going to get their hands on one without making a scene.
I just needed to figure out how to get something in my hands. It didn’t matter what it was. I had three different types of ammo in my pocket and a palm-jammer that could crack any of the bio-locks on any of the handguns. The jammer would also override their geofencing security protocol and let me activate the gun inside the store. I just needed to hold onto something. Anything really. But I needed to find Slowwalker first.
To my relief, the virtual deck was just around the corner from the gun altar and Slowwalker was right there with his head wired up inside a virtual rig, punching at the air with giga-gloves and knocking boxes off shelves without realizing it. He grabbed at something invisible with a death-grip and yanked at the cords like he was about to pull the entire unit out of the wall. I was about to go over and snap him the hell out of it when a stroller clipped me and rolled over the back of my heel. It was that same damn lady with her two damn kids. She looked at me like she’d stepped in dog shit and her two little monsters gave me gruesome stares as they passed. I just tried to ignore it.
“Walker!”
He was sucked into that thing like his life depended on it.
“Walker!”
Nothing.
“Walker, goddammit!”
Another mother pushing another stroller stuffed with another over-plump toddler walked past and sniffed her nose at me. I stormed over to Slowwalker and whisper-yelled at him.
“Walker! Snap the hell out of it! We’re supposed to be on a mission here.”
He looked up like he was hearing a voice from on high.
“Sorry, sorry. I’m in the middle of something right now, brother. I told you if I got this far I couldn’t give up until I finish. Can you hold on until I get this?”
“Until you get what?”
“The Adrenalin Rush…”
“Jeezus, Walker. We’ve got more important things to do. If everything goes down like we planned, you can buy your own rig. You can buy ten of ’em if you want.”
Slowwalker looked up and down and all around like he was existentially weighing the options of his existence.
“Um…”
“Walker… C’mon, homie. We gotta do this now.”
“Um…”
He screwed his face up like he was pondering life itself.
“Dammit… dammit…”
He pulled the rig off and hung his head like it was the end of the world as I put my hand on his shoulder.
“It’s alright. It’s gonna be alright. We’ve got bigger fish to fry right now, homie.”
“It’s okay… I’ll be okay…”
“C’mon, Walker. We gotta do this now. We’ve already been in here too long and there’s a super creepy lady I think is stalking me.”
Slowwalker nodded silently and looked like he was about to cry.
“The gun counter is right over there, but we’ve gotta figure out a way to get ahold of something. There’s way more people over there than I expected.”
Just then I saw the lady with the scary-smooth face and her two little goblins in tow talking to a manager next to a fifty-percent-off tower and pointing straight at us. She was mouthing something ugly and jabbing her sharply manicured fingernail like she was trying to stab us from a distance. The manager she was talking to was an awkward looking younger woman with olive-tinted skin and glasses so thick they made her eyes look like saucers. Her name tag was crooked and she had on a store apron that was way too big for her.
The manager-lady walked straight over, followed by the glaring woman pushing her stroller and her little lieutenant waddling close behind. The manager-lady looked hard at Slowwalker, then at me, then back at him. I wasn’t sure what to do.
“Michael? Michael Slowwalker? Is that you?”
“Bezzy?”
“Oh my goodness! I can’t believe I see you here. It’s been so long!”
The angry mom-lady let out a stink-breath huff as she wheeled her stroller around.
“For crying out loud! I’m going to get a real manager!”
The short, squatty manager-lady looked up at Slowwalker like she was going to kiss him.
“Me and Michael, we dated in high school.”
Slowwalker was shuffling his feet on the floor like a dummy while the manager-lady beamed at him like a star-struck groupie. I wasn’t sure what to say, but I knew we didn’t have much time until foul-faced meta-mom came back with another manager, so I pulled Slowwalker aside with an idea.
“You think you can get your girlfriend to get us a couple of those guns?”
“Um… She’s not my girlfriend.”
“Whatever, dude. You know what I mean. Just get us a couple to look at. Like we’re gonna buy ’em or something. We gotta move on this now, homie.”
Slowwalker bent over to the manager lady and shyly whispered in her ear. I’d never seen him like that and it made me uncomfortable, but before we knew it, she walked right over to the gun counter and brought us two of the tiniest pistols on the entire rack. I don’t know why she picked the smallest damn ones from everything there was to choose from, but it didn’t matter. I got to work with the jammer while Slowwalker gave the manager lady a too-long hug just as monster-mommy came around the corner with a beefy male manager who looked like he had something to prove.
“It’s go time, homie. Let’s roll.”
Slowwalker waved at the manager lady like an overgrown schoolboy as she turned to distract her fellow manager while we headed off toward the self-checkouts at the front of the store.
“What did you say to her?”
“Um… nothing.”
Slowwalker had that goofy-ass grin on his face, so I decided I didn’t want to know.
Instead of trying to figure out how to get back to the self-checkout lanes through the middle of the store’s fluorescent-dungeon layout, we went over to the inner wall and followed it along the perimeter of the building so we wouldn’t get lost again.
“Alright, these guns are active now. Just in case we need to use ’em.”
“Rodger that.”
Once we made it to the front of the store, we found ourselves at the far end of the kids’ activity area. Between us and the self-checkout registers was a massive indoor sandbox overflowing with swooping dunes of hypoallergenic fake sand-stuff made to look like a perfectly beige beach. The landscape was littered with a minefield of fat babies and their mothers all crammed together like an infestation. There were armies of plump children all wobbling around on the rolling hills of manufactured particulate matter like a berserk population of over-inflated balloon-animals. I said something to Slowwalker a little too loudly.
“What the hell is the deal with all these goddamn kids?”
As soon as I did, all the mothers turned simultaneously and let out a giant, collective gasp. One woman close by crinkled her nose like she was about to sneeze out a lung.
“This is the children’s section! Child-ren sec-tion! Watch your language!”
Slowwalker and I just beelined through the giant sandbox and plowed past the indignity, straight toward the infinite line of self-checkouts just beyond. Each individual mother desperately clutched their respective offspring like we were going to snatch the little idiots or something. Slowwalker and I gave them the devil horns as we waded through their contempt. At least a dozen of them immediately pulled out their phones to tearfully report the trauma triggered by the two savages who dared to tread on their purchased playtime. But we didn’t give a goddamn. We just galloped on through to the other side.
When we reached the self-checkout registers, Slowwalker and I pulled out our mini-guns and started waving them in the air to create an overall atmosphere of shock and awe. Some of the people in line were likely paying with crypto or credit, but we knew the majority had to be paying with cold, hard cash, so most of the teller-machines were surely stuffed with massive wads of low-denomination paper currency. The trendcasters have been prophesying a cashless society for years, but the thing with poor people, no matter what your race or background, is that cash is still king. Anyone who says otherwise doesn’t know shit about under-the-table jobs or the off-grid economy.
Before I could get my jammer prepped to hack the teller machines and start stacking bills, a loud gunshot went off at the far opposite end of the self-checkouts. Then another. That caused a stampede of panic to ripple out into the entire consumer-sphere and everyone at the front of the store began scrambling for safety. They ran every which way, pushing and pulling each other in a glut of confusion as Slowwalker and I stared at each other in bewilderment.
“What in the actual hell?”
Slowwalker stood on his tiptoes and peeped over the heads of the maddening crowd, then pointed to the far end of the check-out lanes.
“Looks like the Birdfinger twins beat us to it.”
“What? Are you seriously kidding me right now?”
Another shot rang out.
I strained to see through the twisted knot of humanity and caught a glimpse of two distinct figures at the other end of the lanes. Their hair was twisted up in elderbeads at crazy angles like black lightening shooting out from their craniums and they both had on identical tattered leather jackets. It was was the Birdfinger twins, Scooter and Hunter, firing into the air to scatter everyone with their old-timey revolvers. Pieces of ceiling were raining down around them as people skittered about, clutching their dry goods for dear life.
A week earlier we were smoking herb with the Birdfinger twins at Slowwalker’s, talking about how cool it would be to do something like this. For payback. And to teach motherfuckers a lesson. And to put some damn money in our pockets. But they weren’t supposed to be the ones. We were. So now here we were. And here they were. It was a goddamn disaster.
Before we had time to react, a high-pitched wail squealed out from the store’s embedded ceiling speakers and flashing yellow lights bounced off the walls as a squadron of security-bots on tripod treads descended from the rafters. We knew how to outmaneuver the bots, but that also meant that the human cops weren’t far behind, so we had to make a snap decision to abort mission and get the hell out of there ASAFP.
The store’s exit doors were clogged with people wedged ass-to-elbow trying to escape with their discount-purchased cargo, so I decided to unload my firearm and shoot out a nearby plate glass window. That only caused more panic, but it worked to our advantage because no one knew what in the living hell was going on, so Slowwalker took the opportunity to grab an abandoned six-pack of beer left on the counter and follow me through the shattered window and head straight for his car.
We stopped dead in our tracks in the middle of the parking lot to catch our breath and watched as an autonomous tow-truck pulled off with Slowwalker’s junk-heap of a ride hitched to the back. There was nothing we could do to stop it, so we just stood there with our hearts pounding in our chests. Two minutes earlier and we would have made it before the truck.
“Dude! What the hell?”
People were pouring out of the store behind us and tumbling over each other in waves as Slowwalker silently pointed into the distance at the truck exiting the lot. I thought he’d gone catatonic for a minute, but then I realized he wasn’t pointing at the truck. Just over the sheer rise of shimmering, synthetic-grip asphalt was a gangly group of young folks from our local tribe headed straight for the store. Their faces were all bathed in corpse-paint and they were chanting in unison as they marched menacingly with a loud call-and-response.
“This is Sacred Ground!”
“Colonial Occupiers Off Our Land!”
Slowwalker and I had no idea about any of it and we didn’t want to get caught up any more than we already were, so we decided to duck and hide between two parked cars in the secondary lot and try to wait everything out. The cops were already arriving from all corners, so there was no way out of the complex and we figured things were about to get majorly messy, so the only thing Slowwalker and I could think to do was hunker down between the cars and pop open a warm beer and watch the oncoming shit-show.
I never saw the Birdfinger twins leave the building, so that made me think they were smart enough to find a way out the back of the store somehow. We fully expected an all-out brawl between the shoppers and the angry youth from our tribe, but everyone coming out of the store just beelined to their cars with their purchases and got the hell out of there while the kids from our tribe ignored them and fanned out around the perimeter of the massive, city-block sized store. About half of them were carrying oversized, neon-glow super-soakers and started squirting down the outside walls with generous amounts of gelatinous goop. That goop turned out to be some sort of extra-flammable accelerant because the other half of the kids came up behind them and began lighting and hurling molotov cocktails and cheering when the flames exploded in a riot and belched up the walls like a righteous hellfire.
For some bizarre reason, the cops completely disregarded the angry arsonists from our tribe because they were so intent on protecting the hordes of innocent consumers and their precious goods. I guess our ancestors were there watching over us and blessing us because that’s the very first time in my entire life I’ve ever seen the cops not take the opportunity be unnecessarily and excessively violent toward my people. It was like they were all blinded by some invisible veil of protection and it weirdly felt almost like some kind of victory.
Slowwalker and I just sat there hidden between the cars and polished off the rest of the warm six-pack as we watched the fire department squadrons arrive and struggle to extinguish the blazing inferno. The kids in corpse-paint quickly dispersed and disappeared into the woods behind the burning building like stealthy spirits of vengeance and the authorities were left scrabbling and scratching their heads at what just happened. After the fire was finally under control, the entire building was left looking like a gigantic, hollowed out pile of smoldering charcoal briquettes.
Slowwalker and I clunked our almost-empty cans together as we watched the collapsing sign on the store sputter out. The only letters left flickering read: “B-Y—B-Y—-”
Maybe it wasn’t exactly the fair and equal justice we deserved. But it felt like something. It felt like a well-deserved fuck-you. It felt like righteous chaos. It felt like maybe it was the start of something bigger. Slowwalker and I decided to celebrate by seeing who could finish their beer first and burp the loudest.
Kristopher Monroe is a freelance writer and full time culture assassin. His writing has appeared in places like The Atlantic, Playboy, Village Voice, NY Press, Dazed & Confused, Beautiful/Decay, and Juxtapoz, among many others. His recent short fiction has appeared in Allegory Magazine and Coffin Bell Journal and he’s currently seeking an agent for his recently completed pre-apocalyptic novel which takes place in the same general universe as this piece.