"Aisle Nine" by Ian X. Cho, Master

The SmileBrite woman puts more boxes on the conveyor but peeks furtively at aisle nine.

Did you know that thousands of E. coli bacterium can hide on the undersides of your shoes?

I peer at the aisle’s inner left wall and note that the middle of this section has a dark six-foot.wide circle of rippling oil-slick iridescence.

A sinewy guy with freakishly large knuckles, Ollie maneuvers around the aisle and almost manages to use his flamethrower to barbecue the yellow pom.pom.

It seems ready to end my seventeen-year stint on the planet.

She’s got a flamethrower on a crossbody strap, and her Kevlar vest has the yellow words VANGUARD MILITARY.

The rabbit’s fur singes, and it scuttles back, throws its key ring at Kyle.

But even though her stare conveys aggravation, I still get a burst of euphoria and giddy hopefulness.

I flick my gaze back to the blood, only to find the eerie globs are now just innocuous shapes.

Phantasmagoric beasts, the likes of which the world had never seen before, spilled out into streets, offices, homes.

But eventually, the world’s militaries managed to slay the demons and hold back subsequent incursions.

But eventually, the world’s militaries managed to slay the demons and hold back subsequent incursions.

So, Hell Portal Day wasn’t an apocalypse per se.

Governments strained to fight demons and hold back anarchy.

Without thinking, I gingerly rubbed the plastic fur on her neck, and well, you know what they say: cats choose their humans.

All I see is this reedy young guy with floppy dark hair and darker eyes—and I always need to remind myself: that’s me.

Four ghostly silhouettes—wriggling humanoid wraiths that no one else seems to notice—gather around the portal to touch it.

Hundreds of tendrils, claws, and slimy gruesome bodies.

Lieutenant Shiner is talking about a recent battle on Gazer Boulevard—a derelict neighborhood occupied by homeless people.

But everyone knows that those infernal creatures are demons . . . and the ‘HOD’ is nothing other than Satan’s dominion.

“To truly fight evil, we must always denounce the darkness for exactly what it is!”

They’ve developed a condition called Doomsday Delirium.

“Listen up, turds. In retail, timing really is everything. It underpins each shift, rotation, and sale. And now that we’re headed for the end of November, timing is gonna be more crucial than ever. After all . . . what event are we heading toward, people?”

“Yes! Black Friday is only four days away, and I recently received a very interesting email from head office. It seems they’ve decided to challenge each Here For You mart to a ‘Black Friday Bonus Bonanza.’

“To get this bonus, we’ll need to bring in the most profit of any Here For You mart in the country. Ergo, this place will need to be a shopper’s paradise.”

Shiner laughs good-naturedly but then pivots to a more important topic: VC’s plans for Black Friday:
“Unlike last year, Vanguard will not be instituting crowd limits on shopping zones. Instead, we’ll be amping up security and allowing all approved retail venues to partake in this fantastic event!”

They allege that VC let the battle spill out of control in order to clear away homeless folks—and allow them to redevelop the area.

Whenever I interact with Kyle, I spin a Wheel of Fortune wheel with only three labels: AGGRAVATED, BORED, INDIFFERENT.

“Nah, dude. If you are starting to develop DD, then the catalyst event has to be more recent than Hell Portal Day. Like, I dunno . . . maybe something that occurred a few months ago?”

The skater teens are staring at the envelope, rapt.

They turn the postage stamps to ash, then scorch the underlying humanoid.

He means lop off the head just in case.

Suddenly I stand rigid in the threshold of aisle nine.

Gutierrez runs over to Ollie, then pulls out his belt to create a tourniquet to keep Ollie from bleeding out.

The VC app has sensed a monster attack—based on Kyle’s call to Vanguard, or maybe the CCTV—and it’s awarded the boy points to compensate him for witnessing violence.

All around, everything out here looks so normal, people casually walking their dogs and picking up shit in little baggies, and I feel that I’m being gaslit by everyone.

“What’s fucked?” says Gary, a thirtysomething clerk with perennially bloodshot eyes, as he arranges the bestselling item in our school section—the lice comb.

Suddenly I start imagining that I’m a baby sea turtle, wiggling my tiny green ass into an ocean far from all the portals and customers, my body powered by an innate sense of what to do with my life .

In my head, I can practically hear a laugh track.

I get back up, quickly but gracelessly.

Kyle must have been a warrior angel when she slew the monster that killed Gutierrez.

Where he once lay, a plastic bag hovers and eddies, haunting the ground before floating away.

Shiner notices her, but Aaron sidles over to him and says, “Sorry, Lieutenant, I guess we’re all a little starstruck.”

“Head over there to be debriefed about this morning’s mess.”

“I’ll assume you understand why, and I won’t bother to explain the repercussions for violating this order. Also, in light of the recent violence, Vanguard is temporarily assigning me here for a thorough risk assessment.”

The vinyl floor between us might as well be an ocean of black and white squares.

I feel self-conscious that my breathing is way too loud.

Her scrutiny makes me feel like a freak.

“Ominous much?”

Clothes splattered with bloodstains and vomit and other viscera, both human and demon.

He clicks a confidentiality waiver, then gets to a long list of items for sale—antiques, cars, artwork, along with bulk lots of cheaper items.

“Yes. And because of that, there was a lot of stuff left behind. Vanguard tries to relocate stuff to a deceased’s next of kin, but when there’s no one to claim anything, Vanguard stores the stuff in secret warehouses. And I think they use this app to do, like, estate sales.”

Kyle hops down and calls out, “Under directive eighty-nine of Vanguard’s city regulation rules, I hereby dock all your VC accounts of two thousand points each for disorderly conduct.”

“Dudes! Thank you, thank you, thank you!” he exclaims as he reaches out to squish us both with a hug.

VC Klaxons roar.

“Brimstone.”

If he’s right, the horsemen are literal beings, out in the world, doing shit right now.

“No. He was so disillusioned that he started getting obsessed with the Suckerpunch hackers and all their conspiracy theories.”

I proceed to explain how I came across Lara and that she’s an anomalous, pacifist demon.

“Well, okay—the place beyond the portals isn’t actually hell. It’s a metaphysical abyss that contains humankind’s darkest of thoughts, nightmares, and emotions.”

“Once an abyssal is fully incarnated in a physical body and the physical body dies, they die with it. It’s finito for them.”

“What do you want to see? My imagined version of a Friends revival TV show, with everyone, like, older and shit? Or maybe I could deepfake a version where everyone’s a cat?”

“Okay, dude. For that insubordination, you get the midnight shift.”

“But the hacker was adamant that VC’s head honchos are hiding this knowledge.”

“But the hacker was adamant that VC’s head honchos are hiding this knowledge.”

“Which was an understatement. There’s no way we can get into that building.”

“Dude, I’ve spent such a long time trying not to do or feel anything. Like I’ve been stuck in some bomb shelter, waiting for the fallout to clear. But you reminded me that we can act. We can do something—”
“I had my first waking vision last night.”

Kyle grabs my hand and leads me back toward a shadowy corner of the back room, turning briefly on the way to say, “Let me show you my crazy.”

Throughout the store, the customers are like statues, freeze-framed mid-scream or while reaching for expired cereal.

Fuck me, this demon has the temperament of the typical family dog.

The lights are flickering, and CCTV cams are smoldering.

“Well, I’m glad we didn’t do anything impulsive,” I mutter, and my heart races again as a soldier leaves a security booth to head over.

“Dancing and fighting? Like, capoeira?” she asks.

Someone bumps into my arm, and I stumble backward, losing my bearings.

“Remember what we discussed about your emotional clarity and sensitivity and depth—all the things that have caused you to be afflicted by Doomsday Delirium. Use that . . . here.”

“Remember what we discussed about your emotional clarity and sensitivity and depth—all the things that have caused you to be afflicted by Doomsday Delirium. Use that . . . here.”

“This isn’t just a high-security facility—it’s also a research base,” I seethe.

After a pause he says, “A sky bridge connects the two buildings on level two.
If you can cross over into the asylum, you could wreak some more havoc . . . and force the staff to release the Doomies from their cells.”

We barge into the asylum and fire away.

But all the Doomies are either catatonic or hallucinating.

He’s got short wavy hair, a coppery complexion, and huge bags below his eyes.

He starts to wander off, so I say, “You can still be an honorary member of Team Doomie. We could really use your help—”
“Dude. I’ve got my own shit to worry about on Team Me.”

“It’s not like they’ll miss it,” says Pete with a callousness that makes me flinch.

A long minute later, the Suckerpunch guy throws off the cover, and we all stand to face one another, panting like we’re about to keel over.

The walls are festooned with LCD screens, each scrolling with computer code, and the worktables are littered with half-finished projects.

He says, “Suckerpunching? You mean, cable hacks that I cast out through a series of untraceable proxies to over a hundred different screens across the city at a single go? Yeah, this is where I do my ‘suckerpunching,’ I guess.”

Kyle crouches beside me and says, “Modafinil’s meant to fight narcolepsy. But VC forces guards to take these when they’re doing superlong shifts.”

All the while, the scientist guy narrates: “We’ve known for some time that portal creatures are influenced by human fears and nightmares. But the frequency and timing of invasions has been almost impossible to predict. However . . . when ‘Doomies’ stand close to a portal, they sometimes have the ability to interact with the world on the other side—and the most emotional, most turbulent Doomies can trigger immediate creature events.”

“Is anything alfresco really a good idea?”

The sounds of cars above are a distant, arrhythmic heartbeat.

I spy butt cracks galore as people bend down to grab stuff off shelves.

Eventually, I realize I’m too conspicuous on the ladder, so I reach into my box and turn on the flashlight, then head down into the fray.

Eventually, I realize I’m too conspicuous on the ladder, so I reach into my box and turn on the flashlight, then head down into the fray.

The crowd is starting to seem like a Where’s Waldo? book but instead of Waldo, I’m looking, you know, for heralds of doom.

We have to dart aside to avoid getting sucked into a melee.

We make a beeline to the front.

I rush toward the back room, ready to rendezvous with Kyle in the mini VC office, but as I move beyond the checkouts, I spot Gully clenching a pool noodle, gritting his teeth.

“That young man became the host for an entity your kind would call . . . hopelessness,” says Shiner.

I begin trying to take in deep breaths and center myself, until something flickers in my periphery.

“What the—”
Unearthing the marble causes a scene to play in my mind: I’m sitting on the stoop outside my folks’ apartment building and an orange cat is climbing onto my feet.

Pete is sweating profusely, and I sense that his power is going to fade soon.

It jabs her spine with a proboscis and immediately begins sucking her blood, turning its translucent body dark red.

While Pete needed to touch humans to affect them, the demons seem more susceptible as they halt their charge and face the shelves.

The white tick grabs a red-sequin caftan and tries putting it on.

We gaze around to see demons now motionless on the spot, stunned by the shockwave, and lit only by the flickering emergency lights; their grotesque bodies might as well be melted, distorted mannequins.

I was actually thinking those exact words, and I wonder: Was that sentiment ours, or something sparked by the abyssal still lurking deep inside us?