Doomsday Supermarket

Chapter 6 - A Team

Chapter 6 · 1,476 words

The footsteps came first, a measured cadence, four sets of boots hitting cracked asphalt in something close to formation.

Wren stood behind the checkout counter and counted the rhythm. Four. Maybe five. The sound carried through the flat, dead air of the Store's interior, past the empty aisles, past the shelves of canned goods he'd rearranged three times since the scavenger left yesterday afternoon. He set down the thermos he'd been using to track time (empty now, like everything else useful) and moved to the entrance.

The automatic doors had long since lost their sensors, but they slid open when something approached from outside. System courtesy. Through the glass, the perimeter lights caught the edge of a formation before the people themselves stepped into full illumination.

Four of them. The one in front was a man, maybe thirty-five, built like someone who'd been carrying heavy things for a long time, the dense, ropy strength of work. He wore a jacket reinforced with something that wasn't leather, plates of a dull grey material stitched across the chest and shoulders. Carapace. The same stuff the scavenger had traded yesterday, but shaped, fitted, maintained.

Behind him, a woman with a crossbow made from what looked like a vehicle leaf spring, her movements economical and unhurried. Then two more men, one carrying a pack that sagged with weight, the other sweeping the perimeter with eyes that catalogued everything: the light poles, the shelving visible through the windows, the counter where Wren stood.

They carried weapons that weren't rebar. The front man had a short blade at his hip, the handle wrapped in something dark and textured. The woman's crossbow had a mechanism. Cranked, not bent by hand. The other two had spears tipped with fragments of the same grey material as the jacket plates, hafted with care.

They moved like people who had a routine. Organization rather than military training held them together. A team that hunted together, slept in shifts, divided tasks without discussion.

Wren's first thought was revenue. Four people who moved like this could carry volume. The pack on the second man's back was large enough to hold dozens of fragments, maybe more. His second thought was harder to hold: these people already knew what the Store was. They weren't stumbling toward the light in confusion. They were walking a line they'd planned.

The front man stopped three meters from the entrance. His eyes swept the interior, found Wren behind the counter, and held there. No surprise. No awe. Just assessment, the same look a supplier gives a new account.

"You the operator?" he said. His voice was flat, conversational, the tone of someone who'd already decided this was worth his time.

"Yeah."

"Figured. Saw the lights from two klicks out." He tilted his head toward the woman with the crossbow. "Maeve said it's a real one. Not a glitch."

"It's real."

He nodded once, the gesture of someone confirming a weather report, and stepped forward. The others followed, spreading out inside the entrance with the ease of people who'd done this before, checking corners, reading sight lines, never quite turning their backs on each other. Professional habit.

The front man set his pack on the floor and opened it. The sound of organized materials being separated: carapace fragments wrapped in cloth, grouped by size. Two dark, glistening sacs sealed in a container that hissed faintly when he set it down. Acid glands. Then a bundle of pale, fibrous tissue folded carefully inside a clean shirt. Healing tissue, by the look of it.

The haul was substantial. More material than the emaciated scavenger had brought in his entire desperate existence. Wren's hands twitched toward the terminal. His mind started calculating before he could stop it: volume, potential revenue, transaction count.

"I'm Jax," the man said. "This is Elowen, Malik, and Rook." He didn't gesture at his team. They didn't need it. "We kill things, we sell the parts. You're the first Store we've found that's still running. So let's do business."

Wren looked at the materials on the counter. The Store interface had already begun its evaluation, a soft glow from the terminal, numbers assembling themselves in the display. Carapace fragments: assessed value 2 credits each. Acid glands: 8 credits per pair. Healing tissue: 5 credits per viable sample.

He'd never negotiated anything in his life. He'd stocked shelves, counted inventory, filed damage reports when pallets arrived cracked. The most confrontational thing he'd done before the System descended was tell a customer the store didn't price-match.

"Okay," he said. "The interface values the carapace at two credits each. How many do you have?"

Jax didn't blink. "Depends on what two credits buys."

Wren stared at him. "Two credits is two credits. That's what the Store says they're worth."

"Sure." Jax picked up a carapace fragment, turned it in his fingers. "And what does a credit buy you?"

"A credit is—" Wren glanced at the terminal. The Store's inventory prices were still displayed from the scavenger's transaction. "Water's two credits. Canned food is three. First-aid kit is eight."

Jax set the fragment down. "So a first-aid kit costs four pairs of acid glands. And those glands took my team six hours to extract from a creature that tried to dissolve Malik's arm yesterday." He said it without heat. Just fact. "You think six hours of work and a near-death experience is worth eight credits?"

Wren's mouth opened. Closed. The interface displayed the values. Final. But Jax was challenging Wren's interpretation of them.

"I can't change what the Store assesses," Wren said.

"I'm not asking you to change the assessment. I'm asking what you'll actually pay." Jax leaned forward, one hand on the counter. "Because I've got a feeling those numbers are a starting point, not a finish line."

The negotiation that followed lasted forty minutes. Wren learned things he didn't want to learn about his own ignorance. Jax pushed on every line item with the steady, methodical pressure of someone who understood that the person across the counter had no reference point and would fold under sustained questioning.

The acid glands: Jax argued the extraction risk, the specialized containers required, the fact that the creatures that produced them hunted near the Store's own perimeter. He wanted twelve credits per pair. Wren held at eight. They settled at nine.

The healing tissue: Jax pointed out that viable samples were time-sensitive, that his team had to harvest within minutes of the kill or the tissue degraded. Five credits was an insult for something that required that level of precision. Wren tried six. They settled at seven.

The carapace fragments: Jax argued volume. Two hundred and twelve fragments at two credits each was 424 credits. He wanted two-fifty. Wren held firm at two. Jax smiled without warmth and said he'd take three hundred at two-fifty each, which came to the same total. Wren, confused, checked the math twice before realizing Jax was testing whether he could do arithmetic under pressure.

He couldn't, not quickly. By the time they finished, the total was lower than the interface's assessed value by roughly fifteen percent. Jax's team loaded their credits onto the Store's account system (credits they could spend on water, food, first-aid kits, flashlights) and began repacking their empty containers.

"Same time in three days?" Jax said. It wasn't a question.

"Yeah. Sure."

Jax nodded and walked toward the entrance. At the door, he paused. "You should think about your prices, operator. The interface gives you a number. That doesn't mean it's the right one."

Then they were gone, four sets of footsteps receding into the darkness beyond the perimeter light, and Wren stood alone behind the counter with a revenue total that was significantly higher than anything he'd seen before, and the certain knowledge that he'd left money on the table.

He pulled out the thermos cap and a scrap of paper he'd found in the manager's office. On it, he wrote: *Jax. 4 people. 212 carapace @ 2 = 424. Should have been more? Acid glands 9 not 8. Healing tissue 7 not 5. Total was—*

He stopped. The total was a number. But the number didn't tell him whether he'd been fair or foolish. He had no idea what the materials cost Jax's team to obtain. No idea what other Stores existed, what they paid, what alternatives Jax had. The interface gave him values. Jax had given him a market.

They were not the same thing.

Wren stared at the scrap of paper until the numbers blurred. He'd completed a major transaction. Revenue had jumped from fourteen credits to something that could actually fund operations. The transaction counter had moved meaningfully. By every metric the Store displayed, this was a success.

But Jax had negotiated him in circles, and they both knew it.

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