Page 26 of Exit Strategy

“Callie?”

“Yeah?”

“You didn’t notice the Grand Canyon when we went through a corner of the park.”

“Oh, well… fuck.” I let out a laugh. Seeing her there, spitting out the daintiest curse word, had me smiling.

“Also, we are not going to any of those boutiques that you’re used to shopping at.”

“Where are we going?”

“There was an Omni-Mart we passed about twenty miles back. They sell everything but houses, cars, and military hardware.”

“Omni-Mart? The big box store?”

“The very one.”

“New Eden has an anti-big-box-store initiative because of the environmental impact they have. Their carbon footprint is enormous, and the harm buildings that large cause to local environments, its staggering.” I nodded. It didn’t really matter to me, but the way her demeanor changed, it was impressive, a glimpse of maybe who she had been before. “Did you know that they deliberately buy questionable valued property because it’s cheap and they don’t care if they have to backfill or drain a swamp, or flatten ten acres of forest for parking lots andgreen spaceto be around the store?”

“I know now,” I said. “But we’re going there because the only other options are going to the ski shop in the lobby or driving however many dozens or hundreds of miles it is to find a city with a mall or outlet center. I have some cash, but its limited right now.”

“What about a card? I know that all of the security personnel have a charge account.”

“That is true, and the locations that we’re approved to use it are all in LA. The moment we swipe a card, our location is made, and the bad guys are on top of us. The cards are locked in an RFID sealed container in the bottom of the bug-out bag.”

“You seem to have all this in hand,” she said softly. “Like you’ve done it before.”

“Your safety is my number one priority, and if they find us, it won’t be because of something we did wrong. It will be because of something we had no power over,” I said. “Now, let’s get you ready, throw a braid in that mane, and let’s get some things taken care of.”

She nodded and finished picking at her food while I bolted down what Americans had the audacity to call bacon, a bowl of thick oatmeal, and a few hard-boiled eggs. I missed having proper breakfasts, but that couldn’t be helped; no one here knew about comforting things like black pudding or beans with breakfast… or gammon… Gods how I missed my gammon.

Americans were true savages with how they treated breakfast.

I drove us down from the hotel to the instance of a town that served it and the cluster of other resorts and cabin rental places around the rough bowl-shaped arm of the Rockies. There wasn’t much there – a few sundry shops, a couple of squat apartment blocks, the Omni-Mart and an incredibly basic level of service industry. There were places to eat, but it was all local mom-and-pop operations, and a single token effort from the outside world, a Burger World. It seemed like the most forlorn BW I had seen, flanked by an abandoned retail warehouse and a used car lot with six vehicles for sale.

It had to be off season, so many places were closed.

The Omni-Mart was ancient. It looked like it might have been one of the first generation to be built – the ones that hadn’t been custom built from the ground up with their engineered floor plans and smart design to keep people shopping for an hour when they came in for milk and bread. It was also maybe a quarter the size of a regular store, and everything seemed old, from the patina on the clothing fixtures to the people who worked the registers.

For a bit, Callie seemed lost in the sea of basic offerings.

“Let’s start ground up and move from there,” I said, grabbing a pushcart and moving us through the women’s clothing toward the back corner of the department.

“What’s ground up?” she asked, following close enough to keep a hand on the cart. She sometimes used it to hold herself up, and I made a point of pretending not to notice the moments when her balance faltered.

“Shoes, socks, panties, bras,” I said.

“Oh, well, yeah,” she said. “How do you know about stuff like this?”

“Two sisters, my mum,” I said. She nodded, and I wheeled the cart into the pocket-sized shoe department. Ten minutes later, she had a single pair of pink mock Converse in the cart, a bag of pastel socks, and was in the underwear department, picking at the lacy things and colorful things. “Omni-Mart lace is infamous for being scratchy. Stick to something that comes in a plastic bag.” I gestured away from the racks and toward a wall display of bagged underwear, each displaying a crisply smiling generic-looking woman wearing the contents of the bag like it had been dipped in Valium and rolled in Percocet – serene, smiling, accepting the luxury of ten pair of panties for a tenner.

The clatter of the cart’s one bad wheel was starting to worm itself into my head, and I could feel a tension headache starting. It was hard to keep my vigilance up and help Callie. It was strange; she didn’t have any familiarity with shopping in a regular store. I wondered how much of her life had been like this, trapped inside a gold cage, a prisoner of the wealth and insanity of the New Eden cult.

Regular clothes were less difficult. There wasn’t much difference between designer labels and off-the-rack stuff, other than the price. She ended up with several pairs of leggings, a few oversized sweaters, some shirts, most being more basic patterns, and a single character tee of some anime character.

It made her smile, so good enough.

I wasn’t empty-handed myself, adding a few new shirts, and some new underwear and socks to the cart. The rest of the cart quickly filled up with snacks, drinks, and then entertainment. She grabbed several books, magazines, and other things that I hadn’t been able to keep up with. It was fine, really. I had been able to afford it.

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