Book Six, Chapter 76: Undercover Shopper

As the sun rose on our second day in the storyline, I could feel an energy in the air that didn’t match the beginning of rebirth. It felt like the end. It felt like the finale was about to draw to a close.

It was like when you had a three-day weekend, and you got to take Monday off, but then for the rest of the week, nothing felt right. Tuesday didn’t feel like Tuesday. Thursday didn’t feel like Thursday. And it wasn’t until the following Monday that time fixed itself.

The original storyline was over, and now it was our job to give it a new ending. We had some ideas. But the feeling that the story was coming to a close was in the air.

On-Screen

“You have to go check this out,” Kimberly said, holding the Eternal Savers Club pin up in my face.

“I have to? Why do I have to?” I asked.

“You’re the only person they won’t recognize,” she said matter-of-factly as she chased me from the living room to the kitchen of her mansion in Carousel Heights.

“You don’t know that,” I said. “What if some of them are horror fans over a certain age? They’ll recognize me eventually.”

“Riley, look at me,” she said as I shuffled through her cupboards looking for a bowl in which to put cereal. “We need to investigate this.”

“We do not need to do anything. We survived. We need to sit back and see what this was all about. Let the cops handle it,” I said.

She smashed the countertop with her closed fist.

“The cops aren’t going to do anything,” she said. “Trust me, as soon as things get weird, the cops just want the simplest answer. And for them, the simplest answer is going to be terrorists or a gang. They still haven’t found any of the missing people. Already on the news, they’ve dismissed every single report of the supernatural as being some sort of hysteria.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “On Channel Four, they were talking about how it may have involved guidewires and cherry pickers, you know, to help them fly.”

But then she laid it on me. She didn’t answer with words, but she lowered her shoulders and huffed in a desperate, pleading gaze.

“Do you know how ridiculous this sounds?” I said. “A magic cult at a bargain store?”

She walked over to one of the cabinets, opened it up, grabbed a bowl for me, and set it on the counter.

I grabbed it up quickly.

“If it’s nothing, then what do you have to worry about?” she said. “But if it’s something, we have to do whatever it takes. Those people might still be alive.”

“What makes you think that?” I asked.

“If they wanted to kill them, they could have right then. Why kidnap them? Why teleport them into those shadows, or whatever it was they did?” Kimberly asked.

“I don’t have a lot of answers,” I said. “Maybe… maybe somebody just drugged the punch, you know? Maybe there was something in the champagne. Do we know that we actually saw what we think we saw? Maybe it really was just a publicity stunt or something.”

Kimberly furiously walked to another cabinet, got a box of cereal, and handed it to me.

“Riley,” she said, “please just check it out.”

She shoved the Eternal Savers Club pin toward me, and I grabbed it.

“How do we even know it’s from Eternal Savers Club?” I asked. “ESC… It could be from… Everest… Sailing… Company. Or something.”

She looked at me like I was crazy.

“Mount Everest Sailing Company. They do sailing tours of a mountain?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said. “People ask them why they do it, and they say, ‘because it was there.’”

She laughed, and I poured my cereal in defeat.

Off-Screen

Following Kimberly’s lead, I had stolen a car from a parking lot near my character’s apartment. Of course, stolen wasn’t the right word because my name was on all the identification cards in the glove box, but it still felt like stealing.

I drove to the Eternal Savers Club parking lot, and as soon as I got there, I went On-Screen.

It was time to act nervous and out of place, my specialty.

As I entered, I grabbed a cart, fearing that they would check for some sort of club membership that I wouldn’t have, though technically, if they asked for it, I could probably say, “Yeah, just a second, let me grab my wallet,” and it might be there. Improvisation was proving to be an important tool in our arsenal.

But they didn’t ask, and as I walked into the store, its enormity struck me all at once. I could have sworn that it was bigger on the inside than it was on the outside, and the burst of cool air from the air conditioning made it feel like I was on a mountaintop somewhere.

The rows and aisles did not lay out in some neat grid like you might expect, but instead, they were more like a maze. I doubted that the camera would reveal that. Instead, the camera was on me and my genuine amazement as I walked around looking at all the things they had for sale.

You could buy a sports boat or mountain climbing gear. People were driving around on golf carts inside there; it was such a massive place.

Food from all sorts of worlds was spread around the store. I had remembered that much from helping carry groceries before, but being here when everyone wasn’t running around panicking or dead under rubble was different.

This was a whole world unto itself.

And everything was so cheap. Discounts to my left and right. They had a plastic tub of cheese balls the size of a water heater for nine dollars and ninety-five cents—fruits and veggies of all kinds for sale for a few quarters per pound. An entire aisle was made up of soda cans, the little six packs stacked on top of each other to make intricate designs based on their colors.

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And the people were eating it up all around me. People were shoving things into their carts. There wasn’t a single person without their cart at least half full, and soon I realized that included me.

I had been grabbing things at first, perhaps because I wanted to look like I belonged. But then I realized it was something deeper, something inside my head. Not a voice, but a feeling so strong it might as well have been one. I heard it, I felt it, like a tremor from the earth.

YOU, the voice said, ringing in my ears deep inside. I fought the voice like I knew there was something wrong with it, but I also very much wanted to give in.

In the food section, rows and rows of refrigerated meat called out to me. Steaks and exotic foods like octopus, all there, neatly butchered and ready for the taking.

YOU CAN HAVE, the voice said, and in another part of my mind I almost asked it if it was sure.

The people around me heard the voice, too. I could see them staring wide-eyed at the huge aisles and the low prices as they filled their carts.

YOU CAN HAVE, the voice said again.

“Can I really?” I asked in my head alone as I traveled up and down the aisles.

Crossbows, half price. Shotgun shells. We needed some of those for Dina’s sawed-off shotgun. If I bought some, it would be so productive. I basically had to buy it at that price.

WHATEVER, the voice said. I didn’t believe it. Whatever?

They had a sale on the red hoodies. I didn’t really need a new one, but at that price, why not grab a backup?

WHATEVER YOU WANT.

That can’t be true. It’s too good to be true, I thought to myself.

They had Doritos. Real Doritos, from our world. I had to grab a bag of those. The other players would kill me if I didn’t.

WHATEVER YOU WANT.