Bentley Little - The Store

"True enough. But I still think we have a fighting chance."

"They have more money."

"Money isn't everything."

"Isn't it?"

"Remember those television commercials in the seventies? Those beautiful scenes of wildlife and natural beauty that were sponsored by oil companies? We were supposed to think that the oil companies were not hurting the environment, but helping it. Nature was getting itself into all sorts of trouble and the oil companies were fixing it and cleaning it up. They spent millions of dollars on that ad campaign because they not only wanted us to buy their products, they wanted us to love them." He paused. "Did anyone buy into that crap? After all that money and propaganda and airtime, is there a human being in this country who thinks that drilling for oil is good for the environment?"

"And you think the same thing applies here?"

"Why not?"

"I guess you're not as cynical as you pretend."

Ben smiled. "It's all a facade. Underneath this gruff exterior, I'm Pollyanna."

Bill stared out the doorway. "The Store still has a lot of supporters, though. It did bring jobs to Juniper."

"And it took away just as many."

A pickup truck sped by, a dented red Ford filled with teenagers that burnt rubber as it zoomed toward Granite. "Fuck The Store!" a boy screamed at the top of his lungs, middle finger held high in the air.

Bill smiled. He turned back toward Ben. "Maybe you're right," he said.

He should've finished the documentation a week ago, but he'd been stretching it out. Ordinarily, he liked to complete his assignments as quickly as possible, but this time he intended to wait until his actual deadline.

He didn't want to help The Store any more than he had to.

Bill closed his eyes, leaned back in his chair. He had one humongous headache. He didn't know if he was actually getting sick or if it was simply stress, but for the past hour, he'd been concentrating more on the thumping in his head than on the work in front of him.

It was getting dark. The ponderosas outside his window had long since coalesced into a single jaggedly irregular wall of blackness, and the text on his screen had grown increasingly brighter as light drained out of the world around it. From the kitchen, he could hear Ginny taking plates out of the cupboard, and beyond that, the sound of the nightly news from the television in the living room.

He saved his afternoon's work on a diskette and was about to turn off his PC when the phone rang. The sharp sound of the ring intensified the pain in his forehead, and he closed his eyes against the noise, waiting for Ginny to answer the phone, hoping it wasn't for him.

"Bill!" she called a beat later.

Damn. He picked up the phone on his desk. "Hello?"

"It's me," Ben said.

"Yeah?"

"The mayor and the council. They're dead," Ben said. "All of them." There was a pause, and Bill could hear him exhale. "I've never seen anything like it."

"Back up. Where are you? What happened? Were they killed?"

"Suicide. I'm on the cell phone, and I'm looking at them right now. You've got to come out here. You've gotta see this."

"Where are you?" Bill asked, though he was afraid he knew the answer.

"The parking lot of The Store," Ben said. "Better hurry. The ambulance just arrived."

He didn't want to go. Or part of him didn't. But another part of him had to see what had happened, and he grabbed his wallet and keys from the bedroom and told Ginny he was going out, he'd be back in a half hour or so.

"Where are you going?" she asked. "It's almost time to eat."

He didn't answer but dashed out the door, hopped in the Jeep, and took off. He was at The Store five minutes later, and he sped across the parking lot toward the flashing blue and red police lights until he was stopped by a cop putting up yellow crime scene ribbon to cordon off the area.

Bill parked the Jeep, jumped out, and was almost stopped again by the same policeman, but Ben came to his rescue. "That's my reporter!" the editor yelled.

"He's with me!"

The cop nodded, waved him through, and Bill followed his friend across the asphalt, between the ambulance and police cars.

To where the council lay.

He was not sure what he'd expected, but it had not been this. There was no blood, no guns, no weapons of any kind, only the nude bodies of the mayor and the other council members, lying faceup in a circle, holding hands. Their eyes were all open, staring upward, reflecting the light of the parking lot streetlamps.

For the first time in a long while, he thought about the deer, the animals, the transient.

He looked toward Ben. "Suicide?"

The editor shrugged. "What else could it be? Pills, I figure. Poison. They won't know for sure until they do the autopsies, though."

Bill shook his head. "I don't think it was pills. I don't think it was poison."

"Then what was it?"

He shivered. "I don't know."

Ben was silent for a moment. "It was suicide, though. This had to be intentional. Right?"

Bill looked at him. "I don't know."

On _20/20_ that night, there was a report on Newman King and his growing Store empire. There were token references to the rash of shootings that had been plaguing The Store for the past year, but the report was basically a fluff piece and King was portrayed not as a whacked-out loon but as a down-to-earth self made millionaire.

Or billionaire.

The exact numbers could not be substantiated.

King had not agreed to a sit-down interview, but he did allow _20/20's_

cameras to follow him around on a "typical workday," and the reporter went with the CEO to a series of meetings in the black tower, a surprise inspection of a Store in Bottlebrush, Texas, a tour of a factory that was making generic Store products, and a negotiating session with a textile manufacturer.

Finally, at the end of the day, King went home, but the camera was not allowed to follow him to his house, and the last shot of the report was of King getting into a chauffeur-driven limousine in front of the black tower.

He waved good-bye as he smiled folksily at the camera. "God bless America," he said.

TWENTY-ONE

1

Doreen Hastings closed her eyes as she held Merilee to her breast. The baby suckled happily, and Doreen thought how different this felt than when Clete did it. Of course, that was a sex thing and this wasn't, but the physical act was basically the same. Now, however, there was milk flowing through her nipple, feeding her child, and somehow that bond made the entire act more intimate, more satisfying, more fulfilling. Sex seemed juvenile compared to this, like child's play, and she understood that her relationship with Clete, as great as it was, could never be as important to her or as emotionally gratifying as her relationship with this baby.

She would never be as close to Clete as she was to Merilee.

She opened her eyes. It was late, after midnight, and the hospital room was dark. Even the corridor outside was dark, the fluorescent lights dimmed so as not to disturb sleeping patients. She heard no sound, but neither was there silence. Instead, there was white noise, the hum of the hospital's twenty-four hour activity: machines, nurses, patients, doctors.

She closed her eyes again, smiling as Merilee's little fingers pressed instinctively against the fatty flesh of her breast.

"Mrs. Hastings," a deep-voiced man said. "Room 120."

Doreen opened her eyes and looked toward the doorway.

Her heart lurched in her chest.

Outside, in the corridor, were five men dressed entirely in black, pale men who stared at her with blank, expressionless faces.

They were accompanied by Mr. Walker from The Store.

Mr. Walker smiled at her and strode into her room, flipping the light switch next to the door. The lights in the ceiling blinked on, but they did not appreciably illuminate the figures who followed the Customer Service manager toward her bed. Their garb was still blacker than black, their skin as pale as if they'd been dusted with flour. Mr. Walker himself continued to smile at her, but there was something in that smile that caused her to press the button on the side of her bed and call for the nurse.