Savior with Expiration Date

Luna was hitting the zero button on the cash register with her menstrual blood when the first mob smashed the baby's body against the bulletproof glass.

"Son of a bitch savior!" The one-eyed woman's iron hook scraped against the glass, "You've got enough canned goods in your warehouse to feed hell!"

Rule #88: Riots are the most efficient promotional activity.Luna's fingertips slid across the inventory meter, watching the numbers jump on the monitor screen-each curse sent the virtual value of the cans up 17%, while the moral stockpile fell below the red line. She swallowed her fifth radioactive sugar pill, the sweetness mingling with the fetid taste of uterine bleeding exploding in her throat.

Maya's pink hair flickered through the crowd. The girl who once traded sutures for candy is now cutting her abdomen with a hobby knife, spelling "FREEDOM" out of her intestines. As the intestines fluttered in the radiant wind, Luna got a good look at the fluorescent green sutures-the same expired surgical sewing kit she'd traded to the girl last month.

"Price! Price! Price!" The mob stomped and hissed, the sound shaking off ceiling mold.

Luna hit the fire sprinkler switch. As the yellowish liquid drenched the crowd's heads, they thought it was urine until the first person's skin began to blister-an acidic rain mix she'd concocted, with a formula that included detergent, cockroach juice, and a sample of semen left behind by Jax. Screaming in agony, Maya suddenly set her hair on fire, the flames burning down her sutures and into her abdominal cavity, turning her entire body into a screaming torch.

"Gift!" The burning teenager slammed into the glass, "What you hid on the third level of the freezer..."

The bulletproof glass cracked in spiderweb patterns.Luna saw the metal piece stuck between Maya's charred teeth-it was an employee tag from the convenience store's headquarters, numbered to the very same job number of her missing mother.

The warehouse suddenly loses power.

In the seven seconds it took for the backup generator to kick in, Luna heard the vending machines laughing in the darkness. Her flashlight sweeps across the shelves, where all the can labels are oozing blood and the numbers in the "suggested retail price" column are distorted into a countdown. When the light returns, a cross of three charred corpses stands outside the bulletproof glass, the center one with a convenience store ice cream scoop stuck in its chest cavity, the handle engraved with Rule #1:

"Always serve with a smile."

"Time for the game to end." Luna murmurs into the PA system, her fingers brushing over the valve of the gasoline tank.

The mob was suddenly quiet. Their rotting eyeballs turned simultaneously to the northwest - the radiant clouds were torn apart by helicopter propellers, and Jax's figure stood by the hatch, holding a leash made from a human spine. It wasn't a dog attached to the end of the chain, but half of Luna's mother's body, the breasts converted into a megaphone blasting out convenience store promotional ads.

"Sister!" Jax's tongue stud reflected nuclear blast-like light, "Your overdue reign..."

His voice was drowned out by an explosion.Luna ignited the gasoline-soaked price tags, tongues of fire running through the warehouse along the network of alcohol tampons she'd laid out in advance. The first to go up in flames was the Confession Rack, where the barcodes the priest had scratched as he choked to death curled in the flames and turned into ash butterflies that swooped into the crowd.

"Want to be fair?" She ripped open the fire damper, causing the stream of fire to form a vortex, "Come and get it!"

The mob suddenly began to tear into each other. Men in radiation suits stabbed steel through the protective masks of pregnant women, old women shoved dentures into the cracks in their babies' skulls, mangled bodies in suits crawled toward burning piles of canned goods, burning palms seared palm prints into the glass.

Maya's charred corpse suddenly convulses. As the flames burn through her vocal cords, a recording of the convenience store president comes from her throat, "... All saviors are on sale for a limited time..."

Luna's menstrual blood drips onto the main console. The moment the screen lit up, she saw miniature price tags spraying from every pore of her body while the wasteland outside the warehouse was caving in - swarms of drones from the convenience store's HQ circled like vultures, and air-dropped containers blew up, pouring out not food but countless clones of Luna armed with the Employee Handbook.

"Rule number 89." She poured gasoline over the remains of the teddy bear, "When the world asks you to burn, shove the ashes up its anus."

The bulletproof glass finally bursts.

The moment the heat wave toppled the shelves, Luna saw the truth: the so-called mobs were nothing more than bionics dropped by HQ, oozing coolant instead of blood and revealing the circuit boards of the convenience store's logo underneath their charred skin.Maya's mechanical eyeballs rolled up to her feet, their irises projecting a message from the president:

"Good girl, every self you kill is redeemable for employee points."

Jax's helicopter hovers over the sea of fire. He cuts the leash, the remnants of his mother's body crashes into the fire, and the breast megaphone bursts through the heat with a final, "50% off everything!"

Luna rips off her burning coveralls, revealing the factory number on her back. As the flames licked her spine, all the clones suddenly dropped to their knees and chanted, "Your Majesty!" Their voices synthesized the opening bell of a convenience store, sickeningly crisp in the fire.

"Want my can?" She slammed the gasoline barrel into the clone party, "Take your lives!"

As the blast shockwave toppled the roof, Luna saw her own reflection in the mirrored shards - no longer human, but a monster made of price tags, can shards, and menstrual blood. Every strand of her hair is on fire, and the flames dripping from her tresses spell out the final rule on the rubble:

Rule 90: All saviors must self-destruct before shelf life

Jax's parachuting figure skims across the fire. The condom pouch he'd tossed floated into Luna's palm, the first coordinates of the new world written in semen. When she held the bag up to the firelight, the liquid revealed in the heat the location of the bunker where her mother had been imprisoned-right below herself.

"So we're all vending machines." She laughed as she fell into the fire, clutching the employee tag she'd plucked from between Maya's teeth.

A baby cried from deep within the burning shelves. As Luna crawls toward the source of the sound, she realizes that the infant in the radiation zone has a price tag attached to her forehead and her date of birth printed in the shelf life column. She bites through the infant's umbilical cord and finds the microchip wrapped around it - the very same ultimate control key for the convenience store headquarters.

A second before the flames engulfed the warehouse, Luna inserted the chip into her temple. All the clones suddenly stiffened, their eyeballs projecting a map of convenience stores around the globe, each point of light a canned tomb waiting to be lit.

"The promotion has begun." She murmured into the curtain of fire, and the baby in her arms opened its eyes, its pupils glowing with the same blood-colored light as Jax's tongue stud.