The Store

  The Store

  Bentley Little

  In a small Arizona town, a man counts his blessings: a loving wife, two teenage daughters, and a job that allows him to work at home. Then "The Store" announces plans to open a local outlet, which will surely finish off the small downtown shops. His concerns grow when "The Store's" builders ignore all the town's zoning laws during its construction. Then dead animals are found on "The Store's" grounds. Inside, customers are hounded by obnoxious sales people, and strange products appear on the shelves. Before long the town's remaining small shop owners disappear, and "The Store" spreads its influence to the city council and the police force, taking over the town! It's up to one man to confront "The Store's" mysterious owner and to save his community, his family, and his life!

  THE STORE

  by Bentley Little

  PROLOGUE

  The DeSoto drove along the rutted dirt road through the series of low desert hills that signaled an end to the Texas flatlands. A cloud of dust accompanied the car -- enveloping the vehicle, not merely following in its wake -- but the dust was preferable to the heat, and the windows remained open.

  It was the third day of their honeymoon, and although Nancy didn't want to admit it, she and Paul seemed to have run out of things to say to each other.

  They had not spoken since Houston, save for Paul's occasional requests to hand him the map, and though she tried to come up with something that they could talk about, there seemed to be no subjects that would sustain a conversation more than a few minutes. She figured she'd better save those for El Paso and dinner.

  She fanned herself with the map. The unbearable temperature didn't help any, either. She couldn't think in weather like this. She'd never been so hot and uncomfortable in her life. She would've liked to take off her top and her bra. The old Paul would've liked it, too. It was the type of wild spontaneity that newlyweds were supposed to engage in, the sort of madcap antic that would make the honeymoon memorable, that they would be able to look back at and laugh about years later. No one else would see her -- they hadn't come across a single other car for the past two hours -- but even without asking, she knew that Paul would not approve.

  They were supposed to have been married three years ago, but he'd been drafted, sent off to Korea, and though she'd wanted to marry before he shipped out, he wanted to wait . . . just in case. Each time she mentioned it, he'd remind her of Scarlett O'Hara's first husband in _Gone With the Wind_, the boy she'd married just before he'd gone off to his death in the Civil War, and though Nancy knew he was joking, his underlying meaning was serious, and it terrified her to think that he might not return.

  Return he had, though. Alive and unharmed. But there'd been something different about him after the war. He seemed changed somehow, although it wasn't anything she could really put her finger on. She'd noticed it immediately, had considered asking him about it, but she figured if he wanted to talk he would, and she decided to let him be. She was just happy that they were together again.

  Man and wife. And if the silences were a little too long, they were comfortable silences and she knew that once they started their new life in California, once they made friends and had kids and settled into marriage, those silences would disappear.

  Ahead, at the foot of a sandstone cliff on the right side of the road, was a small brick building that appeared incongruous out here in the middle of nowhere. A strip of green grass fronted the structure, bisected by a short white sidewalk. There were no windows on the building, only a large black-on-white sign on the wall to the right of the door.

  "That's odd," Paul said, slowing the car.

  Nancy nodded.

  This close, they could read the words on the sign:

  THE STORE

  GROCERIES -- PHARMACEUTICS -- MERCANTILE

  Paul laughed. " 'The Store?' What kind of name is that?"

  "It's straightforward and honest," she pointed out.

  "Yeah. I guess it is that. But you'd never make it in a big city with a name like 'The Store.' You'd need something catchier, something with more pizzazz." He laughed again, shook his head. "The Store."

  "Why don't we stop?" Nancy suggested. "Maybe they have cold soda. A nice cold soda sounds real good right now."

  "Okay." There was no parking lot, but Paul pulled off the side of the dirt road and stopped directly in front of the small building. He turned toward Nancy. "What do you want?"

  "I'll go in with you," she said.

  He placed a firm hand on her arm. "No. You stay here in the car. I'll get us the sodas. What do you want?"

  "Yoo-Hoo," she said.

  "Yoo-Hoo it is." He opened the driver's door, got out. "I'll be back in a flash."

  He smiled at her, and she smiled back as he walked down the short sidewalk, but her smile faded as she watched him open the glass door and step into the store, disappearing into the murky dimness of the building. She suddenly realized just _how_ odd this place was. They were fifty, maybe a hundred miles from the nearest town, there were no visible telephone lines or electrical wires, she could not believe that there was water, and there certainly was not any traffic. Yet the store was open and ready for business as if it were in the middle of downtown Pittsburgh and not in the middle of the Texas desert.

  Something about that made her uneasy.

  She stared hard at the door, trying to see into the store, but she could make out nothing. No shapes. No sign of movement. It was the glass, she told herself, and the angle of the sun. That was all. Besides, if the interior of the building were really as dark as it looked from out here, Paul would not have gone inside.

  She tried to make herself believe it.

  Paul emerged several minutes later looking stunned, carrying a large paper sack. He opened the driver's door of the DeSoto and sat down, placing the sack between them.

  "You were just supposed to get sodas," she said.

  He started the car.

  "Paul?"

  He didn't respond, and she began digging through the sack. "Light bulbs?

  What do we need light bulbs for? We're on vacation. Tissue paper? Whisk broom?

  Masking tape? What is all this?"

  He glanced furtively back toward The Store as he put the car into gear.

  "Let's just get out of here."

  Nancy felt a chill pass through her. "But I don't understand. Why did you buy all this? And where are our sodas? You didn't even buy our sodas."

  He looked over at her, and there was fear on his face, fear and anger, and for the first time since they'd gotten married, for the first time since she'd known Paul, she was afraid of him. "Shut up, Nancy. Just shut the hell up."

  She said nothing but turned around to look as they sped away. Before the car rounded the curve of the hill, before the dust completely obscured the scene behind them, she saw the door of the building open.

  And, in a sight she would remember until her dying day, she thought she saw the proprietor of The Store.

  ONE

  1

  Bill Davis quietly closed the front door of the house behind him as he stepped outside. He walked off the porch and stood for a moment at the head of the drive, doing knee bends and breathing deeply, the air exhaling from his lungs in bursts of visible steam. When he reached the count of fifty, he stopped. Standing straight, he bent to the left, bent to the right, then walked down the drive to the road, where he inhaled and exhaled one last time before beginning his morning jog.

  The dirt changed to asphalt at the bottom of the hill, and he ran past Goodwin's meadow and turned onto Main.

  He liked running at this time of morning. He didn't like the running itself -- that was a necessary evil -- but he enjoyed being out and about at this hour. The streets were virtually empty. Len Madson was in the donut sh
op finishing up the morning's baking as the first few customers straggled in, Chris Schneider was loading up the newspaper racks, and here and there individual trucks were heading off to construction sites, but otherwise the town was quiet, the streets clear, and that was the way he liked it.

  He ran through downtown Juniper and kept going until he hit the highway.

  The air was chill but heavy, weighted with the rich scent of moist vegetation, the smell of newly cut grass. He breathed deeply as he jogged. He could see his breath as he ran, and the brisk air felt invigorating, made him glad to be alive. On the highway, the view opened up, the close-set trees that had been lining the road falling back, making visible the sloping landscape. Ahead, the sun was rising behind broken clouds that floated, unmoving, over the mountains, the clouds silhouetted against the pale sky, black in the center, pink-orange at the edges. In front of the sunrise, a flock of geese was flying south in a morphing V-formation, the shape of the flight pattern varying every few seconds as a different bird moved into the lead and the other members of the flock fell in behind it. Shafts of yellow light slanted downward through the clouds, through the pine branches, highlighting objects and areas unused to attention: a boulder, a gully, a collapsed barn.

  This was his favorite part of the jog -- the open land between the end of the town proper and the small unincorporated subdivision known as Creekside Acres. The dirt control road on the other side of the Acres that looped back to his street was wider and more forested, but there was something about this mile or so stretch that appealed to him. Here, the tall trees ringed an overgrown meadow that sloped up the side of a low hill. An outcropping of rock on the south side of the meadow stood like some primitive idol, its erosion-carved facade giving it the appearance of something deliberately sculptured.

  He slowed down a little, not because he was tired but because he wanted to savor the moment. Glancing to his left, he saw the brightening sunlight captured and amplified by the brilliant yellow aspens that were interspersed among the pines. He shifted his gaze across the highway, to his right, toward the meadow, but something here was different, something was wrong. He couldn't put his finger on it, but he noticed instantly that there was an element in the meadow that was out of place and did not fit.

  The sign had changed.

  Yes. That was it. He stopped jogging, breathing heavily. The weatherworn sign announcing "BAYLESS! OPENING IN SIX MONTHS!" that had been posted in the meadow for the past decade was gone, replaced with a new sign, a stark white rectangle with black lettering that sat solidly atop twin supports sunk deep into the ground.

  THE STORE IS COMING

  FEBRUARY

  He stared for a moment at the sign. It had not been here yesterday, and something about the cold precision of the type and the flat declarative promise of the message made him feel a little uneasy -- although he wasn't quite sure why. It was stupid, he knew, and ordinarily he was not one to go by hunches or intuition or anything so nonconcrete, but the sign bothered him. It was, he supposed, a reaction to the idea of something -- anything -- being built here in the meadow, in what he considered _his_ spot. Sure, a Bayless grocery store was supposed to have been built at this location, but ground for the construction had never been broken and the sign had been there for so long that its promise was empty, its words had ceased to have any meaning. The sign had become part of the landscape and was now merely another picturesque relic by the side of the road, like the fallen barn up ahead or the old Blakey gas station that had collapsed into the brush on the highway west of town.

  He glanced around, trying to imagine a huge, new building in the middle of the meadow, the grass around it paved over for a parking lot, and it was depressingly easy to conjure up such a picture in his mind. Instead of seeing the glistening sparkle of dew on the grass, he'd see black asphalt and white paint lines stretching before him as he jogged each morning. His view of the hill and the rocks would probably be blocked by the square concrete bulk of the store. The mountains up ahead would be unchanged, but they were only a small part of the beauty of this spot. It was the convergence of everything, the perfect integration of all elements that had made this stretch such a special place for him.

  He looked again at the sign. Behind it, between the posts, he saw the body of a dead deer. He had not noticed it before, but the shifting clouds and the rising sun had changed the emphasis of the light and the brown form was now clearly visible, its distended stomach and unmoving head protruding from the meadow grass. The animal had obviously died recently. Probably during the night.

  There were no flies anywhere, no sign of decay, no wounds. The death was clean, and that somehow seemed more ominous to him than if it had been shot, or hit by a car, or crippled and attacked by wolves.

  How often did animals drop dead of natural causes next to construction announcement signs?

  He would have called it an omen, had he believed in omens, but he did not, and he felt stupid for even thinking about it, for even pretending in his mind that there was a causal connection between the two. Taking a deep breath, he resumed jogging, heading down the sloping highway toward the Acres, looking ahead at the mountains.

  But he remained troubled.

  2

  Ginny was already up and had cooked breakfast by the time he returned.

  Samantha was peacefully eating her Cream of Wheat in front of the television, but Ginny and Shannon were arguing in the kitchen, Shannon insisting that she didn't have to eat breakfast if she didn't want to, that she was old enough to decide for herself whether or not she was hungry, Ginny lecturing her about bulemia and anorexia.

  Both of them assaulted him the second he walked into the house.

  "Dad!" Shannon said. "Tell Mom that I don't have to eat a big breakfast every single day. We had a huge dinner last night and I'm not even hungry."

  "And tell Shannon," Ginny said, "that she's going to end up with an eating disorder if she doesn't stop obsessing over her weight."

  He held up his hands. "I'm not stepping into this. This is between you two. I'm taking a shower."

  "Dad!"

  "You're always chickening out," Ginny said.

  "You're not dragging me into this!" He grabbed a towel form the hall closet and hurried into the bathroom, locking the door. He turned on the water, drowning out the noise from the kitchen, then quickly took off his jogging suit and got into the steaming shower.

  The hot spray felt good. He closed his eyes and faced into the water, the tiny streams simultaneously hitting his forehead, his eyelids, his nose, his cheeks, his lips, his chin. The water ran down his body, pooling around his feet. Low rainfall in the spring/summer months and low snowfall last winter had led to a reduction in the water table and rationing for the houses in town, but they had their own water from their own well, and he stood there for a long time, luxuriating in the shower, letting the heated liquid caress his tired muscles.

  The girls had taken off for school by the time he finished his shower, and he walked into the kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee.

  "I could've used some support," Ginny said as she put the girls' dishes into the dishwasher.

  "She's not anorexic, for God's sake."

  "But she could be."

  "You're overreacting."

  "Am I? She skips lunch now. Almost every day. And now she wants to skip breakfast. Dinner's the only meal she eats anymore."

  "I don't want to burst your bubble, Gin, but she's chubby."

  Ginny looked quickly around, as though Shannon might have surreptitiously returned in order to eavesdrop on their conversation. "Don't let her hear you say that."

  "I won't. But it's true. She's obviously eating more than dinner."

  "I just don't like the way she's always worrying about the number of meals she eats and the size of her food portions and her weight and her appearance."

  "Then stop harping about it. You're the one drawing attention to her. She probably wouldn't be as conscious of it if you weren't focusing o
n her all the time."

  "Bullshit. She'd eat one meal a week if I let her get away with it."

  Bill shrugged. "Your call." He checked the pot on the stove. A small dollop of hardened Cream of Wheat lay clumped against one rounded side of the metal cookware. He grimaced.

  "It's not as bad as it looks," Ginny said. "Pour in a bit of milk and heat it up."

  He shook his head. "I'll just have toast." The open bread sack was still on the counter, and he took out two pieces, popping them in the toaster. "I saw a new sign when I was out jogging. It said The Store was coming --"

  "That's right! I forgot to tell you. Charlinda told me about it Friday.

  Ted's company is bidding on the roofing contract, and she said that he stands to make more from this one project than he did all last year. If he gets it."

  "I'm sure a lot of construction workers around here'll be happy."

  "I thought you'd be happy, too. You're always complaining about the high prices in town and moaning that we have to drive down to Phoenix in order to find a decent selection of anything."

  "I am happy," he told her.

  But he was not. Intellectually, he supposed he could appreciate the coming of The Store. It would be a big boost to the local economy and would mean not only a temporary increase in construction jobs, but a permanent expansion of sales and service positions, particularly for teenagers. It would also be good for consumers. It would bring big-city discount prices and a big-city selection of products to their small town.

  On a gut level, however, the arrival of The Store did not sit well with him -- and not just because it was going to be built on his scenic spot. For no reason that he could rationally justify, he did not want the chain store in Juniper.

  He thought of the sign.

  Thought of the deer.

  "Well, I'm sure local shop owners aren't too thrilled," Ginny said. "The Store'll probably put some of them out of business."

  "That's true."

  "Just what we need in town. More abandoned buildings."

  His toast popped up, and Bill took a butter knife out of the silverware drawer, grabbed a jar of jam from the refrigerator.