Doomsday Supermarket

Chapter 11 - Foot Traffic

Chapter 11 · 1,735 words

The processing station hummed its four-minute cycle in the back, and the two remaining tools on the shelf were gone by the end of the first day.

Wren wrote it down on his scrap paper: *Tools sold. 2 blades, 1 scraper. Need more carapace for processing.* Below that, he drew a line and started a new count. The transaction counter on the Store interface had climbed past twenty. Not fast enough. But climbing.

A man came in on the second day carrying a cloth bundle the size of a football. He unwrapped it on the counter with the careful hands of someone who'd been told what the Store wanted and had tried to deliver. Carapace fragments. Twelve of them. Most were the dull grey of standard cave-dweller hide, but three had a faint iridescence that Wren hadn't seen before.

The interface evaluated each piece. Eleven accepted. One rejected, density too low, the edge chalky when Wren pressed his thumbnail into it. The man watched the rejection flash across the display and said nothing. He took the rejected piece back, nodded once, and bought two cans of food with his credits.

"Any of these worth more than the others?" he asked, pointing at the iridescent three.

Wren checked the interface. "Those grade higher. Four credits each instead of two."

The man's eyebrows went up. He didn't argue. Just stacked the three pieces neatly and waited for the adjusted total.

Wren noted it: *Iridescent carapace = higher grade. Ask hunters if they've seen more.*

By the third day, the pattern had shifted. Individual scavengers still came, solitary figures emerging from the darkness at the lighting edge, carrying small quantities of whatever they'd managed to harvest. But now there were others. A woman with two children, the boy no older than eight, carrying a sealed plastic container with three acid gland pairs wrapped in waxed cloth. She'd read the quality guide Wren had started posting near the entrance, scraps of paper taped to the wall with notes on what the Store would and wouldn't accept.

"Sealed containers," she said, holding up the bundle. "Like it says."

Wren evaluated the glands. Two accepted. One had a hairline crack in the membrane. He showed her the rejection reason on the interface display.

"Can you see the crack?" He held the gland up to the overhead light.

She squinted. "Barely."

"That's the threshold. If the membrane's compromised, the contents degrade."

She took the cracked gland back without complaint. "I'll tell the others. We found them near the drainage ditch, past the, where the road bends."

"Thanks." Wren wrote it down. Not the location. The Store didn't need locations. But the detail about the drainage ditch told him something about where ambush predators were operating. He filed it away.

The family bought water and a first-aid kit. The boy stared at the shelves while his mother counted out credits. He was looking at the processed tools section, which was empty.

"Do you have any more of the blades?" the boy asked.

"Not right now."

"My dad had one. From before." He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to.

The family left. Wren watched them walk back into the darkness beyond the lighting radius, the woman's hand on the boy's shoulder, the older child carrying the cracked acid gland like it might still be useful somehow.

On the fourth day, a team of three arrived. Organized. They moved like people who'd done this before. One stayed near the entrance watching the door, another spread materials across the counter, the third hung back near the processing station, looking at the humming equipment with an expression Wren recognized. Calculation.

"Your processing tools are gone," the one at the counter said. Not a question.

"Sold out."

"We brought carapace. Fourteen fragments. And a set of healing tissue, three samples, harvested within the hour."

Wren checked the tissue first. The color was right, pink, not grey. The texture was firm. He placed each sample on the evaluation pad. The interface accepted all three.

"Seven credits each," Wren said.

The team leader, Wren assumed it was the one doing the talking, nodded. "We know the price. We also brought something else."

He reached into his pack and pulled out a container Wren hadn't seen before. Sealed, opaque, about the size of a thermos. He set it on the counter carefully.

"Acid gland extract. Pre-processed. We filtered it ourselves."

Wren stared at it. The interface hadn't listed this as a material category he'd encountered. He placed the container on the evaluation pad. The display flickered, then resolved: *Acid gland extract, filtered. Grade: acceptable. Value: 14 credits.*

Fourteen. More than a pair of raw glands.

"Where'd you learn to filter it?" Wren asked.

"Does it matter?"

It didn't. Wren accepted the batch. The transaction counter moved again. The team bought supplies, water, canned goods, a flashlight battery, and left with the efficient silence of people who measured everything against the cost of the next hunt.

Wren sat down in the manager's chair and wrote: *Filtered extract = higher value than raw. Processing isn't just for the Store. Hunters are doing it too.*

He looked at the scrap paper. It was getting full. Pricing notes, quality standards, material types, processing observations, customer patterns. The paper was becoming something, though he wasn't sure what yet.

The fifth day brought seven transactions. The highest single-day count since the Store opened. The processing station cycled through three carapace fragments, producing two blades and a container seal that sold within an hour. The shelf that had been empty was full again, then empty again.

His lower back ached against the manager's chair. The fatigue of constant evaluation had settled in deep. Every person who walked through the entrance needed attention. Materials needed assessing. Prices needed checking against the benchmarks he'd written. The processing station needed raw materials loaded and finished goods unloaded. The Store interface needed monitoring for quality rejections.

He was the only one doing any of it.

The entrance doors opened again.

Three people this time. Two adults and a child. The adults were thin in the way that had nothing to do with body type, the hollowed look of people who hadn't eaten enough for weeks. The child, maybe ten years old, wore a jacket two sizes too large, the sleeves folded back at the wrists.

They stopped just inside the entrance. The woman looked at the shelves. The man looked at Wren.

"We heard there's a place," the man said. His voice was rough, like he hadn't used it much. "That has food. Water."

"There is." Wren kept his tone neutral. Professional. "What do you have to trade?"

The man's hands were empty. The woman's too. The child held nothing.

"We don't have—" The man stopped. Started again. "We don't have any of those. The parts. From the creatures."

Wren looked at the Store interface. It sat in its passive state, indifferent. The transaction counter displayed its current total. The audit countdown ticked. None of these numbers cared about the hollow look in the man's eyes or the oversized jacket on the child.

"The Store only accepts monster materials," Wren said. "That's the currency. I can't—"

"How far did you walk?" the woman asked. Not at Wren. At the man.

"Three days," he said. "Maybe four. We heard about this place from some people at a gas station. They said there was light you could see from—"

"I know where it is," the woman said. She turned to Wren. "Is there anything we can do? Work for it? Clean, or—"

"No." Wren said it before he'd finished thinking about it. The word came out flat. "The Store doesn't accept labor. It only accepts monster materials as payment. I can't make an exception."

The child had moved closer to the counter. Was looking at the water bottles on the shelf behind Wren. Standard bottles. Fifteen centimeters tall. The child was counting them. Wren could see the eyes moving left to right.

"Dad," the child said.

"I know."

The man's jaw worked. He looked at the Store interface, then at Wren, then at the shelves. "You have all this. And you can't just—"

"I can't."

"You're telling me you'd rather let us walk out of here with nothing."

Wren didn't answer. Because the answer was yes, and saying it out loud to the man's face felt like something he should have a better reason for than *the System won't count it as a transaction.*

The woman put her hand on the child's shoulder. "Come on."

The child didn't move. Was still looking at the water bottles.

"Can I have just one?" the child asked.

The silence that followed was the worst kind. The processing station hummed in the back. The lighting fixtures buzzed overhead. The Store interface cycled through its passive display. Everything functioning. Nothing changing.

"No," Wren said.

The child looked at him then. The flat gaze of someone who already knew the answer.

"Let's go," the woman said, and this time the child turned.

The three of them walked back through the entrance, past the lighting radius, and into the darkness. Wren watched until they were gone. The darkness closed around the space where they'd been, and the perimeter lights kept humming at their fifty-meter radius, and the Store interface kept displaying its countdown.

He sat down. Picked up his pencil. Set it down again.

The transaction counter hadn't moved. The audit requirements hadn't changed. The rules were the same rules they'd been since the designation, and they applied to everyone equally: the organized team with filtered extract, the family with sealed acid glands, the man with iridescent carapace, and the three survivors who had nothing.

Consistent. That was the word. The rules were consistent.

Wren picked up the pencil and wrote: *Day 5. Transactions: 7 today. Total: ~35. Processing: 3 tools made, all sold. Turned away: 3 (no materials).*

He stared at the last entry. Then he turned the scrap paper over and kept working.

The processing station's hum shifted pitch, rose half a tone, the way it did at the end of a cycle. But he hadn't loaded any raw materials. He glanced toward the back. The station's small terminal was displaying a prompt he hadn't seen before, the cursor blinking against the dark screen. He set the pencil down and went to check.

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