Market Forces

Prologue

Checkout.

The shiny black plastic swipes through.

Nothing.

The machine fails in its habitual insectile chittering and the screen blinks, as if outraged at what it has been fed. The checkout girl looks up at the woman who has handed her the card and smiles a little too widely. It’s a smile that contains as much genuine emotion as there is fruit juice in a carton of Five Fruit D-Lish.

‘Are you sure you want to use this card?’

Up to her arms in bagged shopping, the woman sets down the two-year-old she has been propping against the checkout flange and looks back to where her husband is still unloading the last of the brightly coloured tins and bags from the trolley.

‘Martin?’

‘Yeah, what?’ Voice irritable with the household task they’ve just completed.

‘The card doesn’t. . .’

‘Doesn’t what?’ He meets her eyes and reads the distress there, then switches to the checkout girl. His voice comes out tight. ‘Run it again, please. Must have glitched.’

The girl shrugs and swipes the card a second time. The screen flickers with the same disdain.

TRANSACTION DENIED.

The girl takes the card and hands it back to the woman. A small pocket of quiet expands around the action, bubbling out past the conveyor belt to the boy at the next checkout unit and to the three customers waiting behind Martin. In a few more seconds it will dissolve into the slither of whispering.

‘Would you like to try another card.’

‘This is ridiculous,’ snaps Martin. ‘That account had funds as of the first of the month. I’ve just been paid.’

‘I can run the card a third time,’ offers the girl with studied indifference.

‘No.’ The woman’s knuckles have gone white around the small piece of black plastic. ‘Martin, try the Intex’

‘Helen, there’s money in that acc—‘

‘Some problem,’ asks the man behind him, tapping his own plastic significantly against the pile of shopping he has assembled so close to the Next Customer divider that it’s in danger of tumbling over into Martin’s space.

Martin’s mouth shuts like a trap.

‘No problem.’

He hands over the blue flecked Intex card and watches at least as intently as the people behind him as the checkout girl swipes it.

The machine chews it over for a couple of moments,

And spits it out.

The girl hands it back and shakes her head. Her smooth, plastic politeness is beginning to degrade.

‘Card’s blocked,’ she says dismissively. ‘Terminal audit.’

‘What?’

‘Terminal audit. I’m going to have to ask you to put those purchases back on the far side of the counter and leave the store.’

‘Run the card again.’

The girl sighed. ‘I don’t have to run the card again, sir. I have all the information I need right here. Your rating is invalidated.’

‘Martin,’ Helen presses forward at his side. ‘Leave it, we’ll come back when it’s cleared u—‘

‘No, goddamn it.’ Martin shrugs her off and leans over the counter, into the checkout girl’s face. ‘There is money in that account. Now swipe the card again.’

‘Better do as she says,’ says the pushy customer behind him.

Martin swings on him, tensed.

‘This got something to do with you?’

‘I am waiting.’

‘Well, wait some fucking more.’ He snaps his fingers in the man’s face, dismissing him, and the pushy customer flinches back. Martin turns back to the checkout girl. ‘Now, you—‘

The prod hits him in the side like a rude elbow. A heartbeat later the charge shocks him off the counter and into a seemingly immense clear space. He hits the floor, smelling burnt fabric.

He hears Helen shriek. Sees confusedly from floor level. Boots in front of him and a voice that sounds like tearing cardboard at a great height.

‘I think you’d better leave the store, sir.’

The security guard hauls him to his feet and props him against the counter again. A big man, swelling at the waist but watchful and hard around the eyes. He’s been doing this for a long time, probably cut his teeth on cordoned zone clubs before he got this gig. He’s shocked men before and Martin is out of office clothes at four-thirty on a Wednesday afternoon, casual in faded jeans and a well-worn crew-neck pullover that doesn’t show what it was once worth. The security guard thinks he has the measure of this one. He doesn’t know, can’t know.

Martin comes off the counter.

The palm heel strike smashes the guard’s nose flat. The knee goes in at groin level. As the guard falls, Martin drives into the base of his skull with one clenched fist.

The guard hits the ground a dead weight.

‘Stand where you are!’

Martin reels around and comes face to face with the guard’s smaller, female partner just as she clears a pistol from her holster. Still scrambled from the cattle prod, he lurches the wrong way, towards her, and the guard blows his brains out all over his wife and son and the checkout and the checkout girl and all the shiny packaged items on the belt that they can no longer afford.