The Store

by Bentley Little

  He would have a tough time living with that himself.

  Bill was crying by the time he was finished, but Ginny was stone-faced, and he thought then that their marriage was probably over. He didn't blame her.

  He understood her feelings. He'd feel the same way.

  Still, he was glad he'd told her. It might ruin his life, but at least it liberated him from the influence of Newman King. At least he knew now that he was free to do as he chose without having to worry about his misdeeds coming to light.

  Ginny was still not speaking, still staring at him with that hard, unreadable face, and he continued, explaining what had happened tonight in The Store, describing Newman King's anger, the CEO's inability to break the contract he had made, the possibility that he could be defeated.

  Afterward, Bill collapsed on the couch, exhausted, emotionally drained.

  Ginny continued to stare at him. "I understand," she said finally. "I'm not sure I can forgive and I definitely won't forget, but we'll wait until all this is through before sorting it out. Right now, our first priority is to get rid of Newman King. And to get Sam back."

  _Sam_.

  Bill swallowed, nodded.

  "I think your idea's good. I don't know if it'll bring down his whole corporation, but taking the individual Stores away from him is bound to hurt him. I think you need to contact the other managers."

  "I'm going to."

  They stared at each other in silence. Bill wished he knew what she was thinking, but her face was unreadable to him. He took a deep breath. "Where do you want me to --" He cleared his throat. "Where should I sleep?"

  She looked at him, thought for a moment. "The bed, I guess." She held up a hand. "This doesn't mean I forgive you, but I understand that these are not normal circumstances."

  "I --"

  "And I don't want Shannon to know. As I said, we'll sort it out afterward."

  Bill nodded.

  Ginny sighed, and now there was a tear in her eye. She wiped it away with one strong finger. "Come on," she said. "Let's go to bed."

  3

  He was in his office at The Store the next morning, paging through the rambling, incoherent notes his predecessor had left on the computer, when the phone rang. His personal line. He picked it up immediately. "Hello?"

  "Bill?" It was Ginny. "I got a package from Sam. Federal Express."

  His heart lurched in his chest.

  "I haven't opened it yet. I thought you might want to be here."

  "I'll be right over," he said.

  She'd opened the package by the time he got there, but she had not watched the videotape, and she sat there, solemn and pinched, holding it in her hand.

  She looked at him when he walked in, thought for a moment, then handed him the tape. "I'm not sure this is something I want to see," she said.

  "It's not," Bill told her.

  She nodded. "Do what you want with it."

  He dropped the videocassette onto the floor and stomped on it, breaking it into pieces. He picked up the pieces, unspooled the tape, threw everything into the big garbage can in the garage.

  "Have you called any managers yet?" Ginny asked.

  He shook his head. "I've been trying to get up the courage. I just keep thinking, what if they're on his side? What if they don't want to do anything differently than the way he tells them? What if they decide to come after me on their own, on his behalf. The contract prohibits him from harming me. I don't think it applies to them."

  "Didn't he say his worst enemies make the best managers?"

  "Yes," Bill admitted.

  "Then how about the other managers you met in that training course? You got along with them, right? Why don't you start there?"

  He nodded. "That's a good idea." He sighed. "But King's probably blackmailing everyone. Just in case the training didn't take. He sets us up, then uses it against us."

  "But if they're strong enough to stand up to him, if they're strong enough to admit their mistakes and face what they did wrong and accept the consequences . . ." She left the sentence unfinished.

  "It might work," Bill said. "I'll contact them."

  "But be careful."

  "I know. King's probably monitoring my E-mail, bugging my phones. I need to find another way to get through to them."

  "Mail," she said. "Regular mail. Or Federal Express."

  "The old-fashioned way."

  "It's secure."

  "As long as the other managers don't have a Mr. Lamb opening their mail for them."

  "It's a chance we have to take."

  He was still nodding. "We might be able to pull this off."

  She kissed him. For the first time since he'd told her about his betrayal.

  "Think positive."

  "We _will_ be able to pull this off."

  "That's the spirit."

  He'd been provided with a list of all of the other Stores in the United States, as well as a business number for each, but there were no managers' names listed, and he sure didn't want to talk to them while they were at work.

  He ended up calling each Store, asking the manager's name, then dialing information for each area and obtaining the managers' home phones. Two were unlisted, and he let those slide. He called the rest individually, at night or in the early morning, and though he was awkward and hesitant at first, not sure how to bring up what he needed to say, it became easier as he went along, and he discovered that most of the managers were like him, forced into their positions, unwilling participants, and most of them secretly hated Newman King.

  A few of those he dialed seemed suspicious as he felt them out over the phone, and for those he invented some business-related reason why he'd called.

  They might be willing to go along with the scheme, but they might also be King loyalists, and he couldn't take a chance of trusting them if he wasn't a hundred percent positive.

  He was lucky that the first manager he called, Mitch Grey, the man to whom he'd spoken most often in the training classes, seemed to hate Newman King almost as much as he himself did. Mitch was now in Ohio, and he caught on to the idea right away. He even offered to help contact other managers.

  "I'm going to put together a package," Bill explained. "Send it through the mail to everyone's house. I'll describe what happened here. I'd like to have some sort of simultaneous switchover, a prearranged time when all the managers take over their Stores at once and start rolling back what King's done. I've been doing things gradually here, sequentially, but if we all did that, it might give him time to prepare, time to come up with something, a way to fight us. I'd like to catch him completely by surprise. And I think we really might be able to hurt him if we drain his power all at once."

  Mitch was silent for a moment. "What do you think he is?"

  "I don't know," Bill admitted.

  "Why do you think he's doing this?"

  "I don't know."

  "You really think we can fight something like that?"

  "We can try."

  "But do you think we'll win?"

  "Yes," Bill said. "I do."

  Mass firings, he decided that night, were the best way to signal the start of the war. Get rid of all King loyalists at every Store in one fell swoop, then immediately start cutting back on The Store's power. He wrote out a tentative schedule, an outline, and saved it.

  The next morning, he called more managers.

  Within two weeks, it was all set.

  Videotapes, ostensibly from Sam, had been arriving by Federal Express each day, but he and Ginny destroyed them all without watching them. King called his office daily, left voice mail and E-mail messages, sent unordered merchandise that had to be shipped back, contacted employees at home, ordering them to carry out his will, offering them promotions, did everything he legitimately could to destabilize Bill's power, but Bill had chosen wisely in his Wrings and firings and the loyalty held fast. The Store's influence was almost completely gone outside the borders of its property, and slowly but surely Juniper was sloughin
g off the yoke of Store oppression.

  Not all of the managers were on board, but most were. He and Mitch had together contacted over two hundred managers, and only ten had been so obviously despotic that they hadn't even been approached. Another fifteen seemed borderline, and so, just to be on the safe side, they hadn't mentioned anything to them. But the other 175 were solidly in their corner, willing to do what it took to topple King, willing to endure humiliation and embarrassment, the ravaging of their personal lives, in the service of the greater good.

  Bill was proud of them all.

  The plan was for the participating Store managers to call a special meeting of all their employees Sunday morning at five o'clock Pacific time, six o'clock Mountain time, seven o'clock Central time, and eight o'clock Eastern time, so that all of the meetings would correspond and occur exactly at the same moment, no matter what time zone the individual Stores were in. Sunday was chosen because it was the day that The Store opened latest.

  Besides, Sunday was supposed to be the Lord's day.

  And the God connection couldn't hurt.

  King's people would be fired at the meetings, directors reassigned, security departments dismantled. Inventory should have been taken at each of the Stores by that time, and the managers would sign chargeback forms and order invoices in order to instantly change, at least on paper, the contents of The Stores' stock.

  It was a bold plan, and even if the results didn't turn out exactly the way they intended, it was still a hell of an organizational achievement.

  And it was bound to hurt King.

  The only question was, how much?

  Sunday morning, Bill and Ginny and Shannon awoke early. Ginny made breakfast, Shannon watched TV, Bill read the newspaper, and all three of them tried to pretend that this was an ordinary day, that nothing momentous was going on, but they were all anxious and nervous, quieter than usual, and the countdown to the hour seemed to take forever.

  The time came.

  Went.

  In the kitchen, Ginny washed the dishes; on the television, _Heathcliff_ sequed into _Bugs Bunny_. There was no big change in the fabric of existence, no earthquake or lightning, no killer wind or sonic boom. There was no way to tell if everything had occurred as planned -- or if anything had happened -- and Bill paced nervously around the living room, out of the house, into the garage, down the drive, back to the house, clenching and unclenching his fists, waiting a full forty-five minutes before deciding to call Mitch.

  The phone rang just as he was about to pick up the receiver and dial.

  He grabbed it excitedly. "Hello?" he said.

  "It's done." Mitch. "Everything went according to plan here, and I called a couple other managers and they said the same."

  "Everyone's supposed to check in."

  "They will."

  "Any difference? Any change?"

  Mitch was silent for a moment. "I don't know. I didn't _feel_ anything, if that's what you mean. I don't . . . I don't know."

  "I guess we'll have to wait."

  "You could try calling Dallas, ask to speak to Newman King."

  Bill chuckled. "I think I'll wait."

  "I'll call back if anything happens."

  Over the next hour and a half, they all checked in. Bill didn't know what was going on in Dallas, but in small towns all over the United States, the devolution of The Store's power had begun. He was the impetus behind it, and he felt a surge of pride as the last manager, from a little town in Vermont, checked in.

  "What do we do now?" Shannon asked.

  "Go on with our lives. And wait."

  "For what?"

  "Newman King."

  "What do you think he's going to do?" Ginny asked.

  He shrugged. "We'll have to wait and see."

  He called a meeting himself that night, closing The Store early, in order to tell his employees what had happened. He'd shared the news with a few of them throughout the day -- the ones he talked to, the ones with whom he had come into contact -- but he wanted to let them all know that the managers had rebelled, that Stores all over the country had seceded from the corporation. It was possible there were still some King supporters among his employees, but he had no problem with them knowing what went down. The worst they could do was inform on him, tell King. And he had the feeling King already knew everything.

  Maybe King was dead, he thought.

  He remembered Lamb and Walker and Keyes, falling to the floor.

  No. It was too much to hope for.

  The CEO would not go so easily.

  If King was not dead, he was undoubtedly pissed, and Bill was not at all sure that his power came solely from the Stores he controlled. He thought of that arm with too many bones, those deep wild eyes in the white plastic face, and he shivered.

  For the first time in several days, he allowed himself to think about Sam.

  She'd never been far from his mind, but she'd had to share space in his thoughts with other concerns, and he'd only been able to contemplate her in short spurts.

  The memories of her were tainted, though, his fatherly feelings for her overlaid with a guilty shame, and he was unable to think of her without seeing that image on the video, without remembering how she'd felt in his bed. It was uncomfortable to think of her now even as a child, and he wondered what was going to happen when she returned, how they were going to act toward each other.

  Maybe she'd been hypnotized and would remember none of it. Maybe the two of them would just avoid the subject, never speak of it, pretend it didn't occur.

  Maybe she wouldn't return at all.

  Maybe King had had her "terminated."

  No, he thought. Anything but that.

  He tried to remember her the way she was before. Before The Store. She'd been a kind and gentle girl. Smart, pretty, thoughtful, nice. Even-tempered even as a baby. A girl with a great future ahead of her.

  And King and Lamb and all of their cohorts had turned her into a conscienceless automaton, willing to do whatever they told her.

  He was glad Lamb had died. And Walker. And Keyes. And if he could see Newman King die as well, he would be a happy man.

  Maybe King would commit suicide, he thought hopefully. Maybe he would kill himself.

  Bill stood before the assembled employees. He climbed atop one of the tables in the espresso bar and faced the men and women, boys and girls, who were packed into the junction of aisles and rows in front of him. He'd gathered them here rather than downstairs in the assembly corridor or one of the multipurpose rooms because he wanted to emphasize the difference between the old Store and the new Store, and he was gratified to see no fear or hatred on any of their faces, only expectant interest and curiosity.

  The tenor of The Store really had changed.

  He raised his hands for silence, announced what had happened, what the managers had done. He explained that nearly all of the stores in the chain had renounced the old ways and that from now on they would be managed and operated individually. "The corporation's power has been decentralized," he said, "and everyone is using us as an example."

  A cheer went up.

  "As most of you know, I have had my little disagreements with the corporate office in the past --"

  Laughter.

  "-- and I am gratified that Newman King will no longer be able to dictate how we operate. His tyranny over Juniper is ended."

  "The King is dead!" someone yelled, and everyone cheered.

  "Long live the King_."

  The voice was like thunder, like that of a god, and it cut through the noise like a knife, instantly silencing the assembled employees. The clapping stopped, the cheering disappeared, and all heads turned toward the source of the voice.

  Newman King.

  He stood in the center aisle, looking toward the espresso bar.

  Looking straight at Bill.

  "You little shit," he said.

  The lights in the building dimmed.

  Bill held his ground as King strode down the aisle t
oward him. The Store was silent, the only sound King's boot heels clicking on the tiled floor.

  The crowd parted nervously before him as he approached. The CEO drew closer, and Bill saw that his face had begun to corrode. The plastic teeth were gone, replaced by decayed stumps. The skin was now yellowish white and stretched thin in places, blackness visible beneath it.

  Only the eyes remained the same, and Bill could sense the burning intensity radiating from them and he was afraid.

  _What was he?_ Bill thought.

  King raised his hand, snapped his fingers, and instantly, from the opposite end of The Store, came the Night Managers. They did not spread out and begin walking past racks and displays like they usually did. but marched forward en masse.

  King was at the front of the espresso bar now, but he made no effort to move any closer. He stood at its edge, looking at Bill on top of the table. "I

  _built_ The Store," he spit out. "I made it! I invented it!"

  "You ruined it!" a brave soul in the crowd called out. A kid.

  King swiveled, turned, cast a withering glance at the assembled employees.

  "I made you!" King said. "I gave you jobs! I made you what you are today!"

  He turned his attention back toward Bill, and Bill was frightened, but he heard the anger in the CEO's voice, felt the panic, the desperation. King was dying, he realized. Just like Lamb and Walker and Keyes. And he felt a small twinge of satisfaction at the thought.

  King advanced slowly. "I should've killed you when I had the chance, pussy boy. But instead I took you under my wing, trained you, allowed you to be a manager."

  "You shouldn't've used my daughter," Bill said, holding his ground.

  "That whore!" King roared.

  Hatred and anger drove away what was left of the fear. "You have no power here," Bill said coldly. "This is _my_ Store. Get the fuck out."

  In front of the espresso bar, the Night Managers were moving forward, passing through the rapidly dispersing crowd. Employees were slinking away, hiding behind racks of clothing, backing up the aisles. Several headed for the doors, making a run for it.

  "I will not allow you to do this," King said. "I will not allow you to take The Store away from me."

  "You killed my friends. You killed my town."