This is the Dollar Hero branch report for October, phoned to voicemail by me, Tabitha Sweeny, manager of Store #138 in Taylorville. Sorry for the late report. As you probably know, the last few weeks here have been a cosmic shit show. But I’m still hanging tough as a hardcore follower of the Dollar Hero Way: We meet every challenge with courtesy, optimism, and hard work!

I’ll lead off this month with our Retail Climate Update.

Sales at the Taylorville store have plummeted to zero since the epidemic. It was about eight weeks ago that a stranger showed up in our town, wandering through the fields. Nobody knows where he came from. His skin was the color of ashes and he had animal eyes. He ran fast and screamed like a banshee, chasing down and biting a couple of our townsfolk before running away.

Over the next few days, more mysterious people were spotted roaming the land. Close up, we saw that they were friends and neighbors who had been turned—we guess—by the stranger’s bite into gray creatures with shiny, blank eyes. Like Ben VanNest, our high school gym teacher.

The gray people multiplied by the day and began to drift into downtown Taylorville, blocking traffic. Mostly, they’re passive and don’t bother anybody. Randomly, though, any one of them can suddenly erupt, screaming and biting citizens in the streets. Brenda, a cashier of ours, cursed the shuffling gray folks as riffraff and said that the biting attackers were troublemakers. The names stuck.

Anyway, the current retail reality is that our store is emptied of merchandise, the village is a ghost town, the Internet is dead, and you people at corporate stopped returning my calls weeks ago.

Moving along, we’ve made a few changes to our store’s Building and Grounds. Because the electricity died a while ago, we power our store’s lights with a gasoline generator we found tipped over outside the fire station. So far, we’ve scrounged enough gas from cars abandoned along Interstate 81 to keep our deluxe Dollar Hero sign lit up all night long.

One problem when it’s dark is that riffraff creep out of a neighboring cornfield and collect in our parking lot to gape at our sign like it’s a full moon. But we light the sign anyway because it puts courage into the hearts of our employees and reassures the few residents of Taylorville still barricaded in their houses that Dollar Hero has their back.

About a month ago, Brenda, our cashier, was outside locking up at closing time when a troublemaker charged out of the darkness and grabbed her. We heard her shrieking as she was dragged into the cornfield.

The next day, me and Zack and Tyrone, our shelf-stockers, hot-wired a flat-bed truck from Silverman’s Garage and drove to a construction site close by, swerving around lurching gray people along the way. We loaded the chain-link fence panels that encircled the site and trucked them back to Dollar Hero to set up as our own perimeter fence. We now patrol it with rifles at night to shoot down any troublemakers that pop up from the riffraff.

We’ve had a lot of turnover recently in our Employee Headcount. When the riffraff first showed up, four of our workers panicked and escaped together down the highway in a minivan. Said they were making for relatives in Wilkes-Barre. Since then, five more employees left our store at the end of their shifts and never returned. They’re all in our prayers, of course.

Us remaining employees—me and Zack and Tyrone—decided to bunk at the Dollar Hero for safety. We hired a promising new worker, Keith, who brought four rifles and buckets of ammo. He’s a crack marksman—from years hunting rats in the barns of the local Magruder Chicken Farm. I appointed Keith superintendent of our night shift, to patrol the store perimeter and shoot any troublemakers he saw climbing the fence.

One employee situation I want to report is that five days ago, Brenda the cashier came back. Keith saw her screaming and clawing at the fence. He called me over because he recognized Brenda’s face from her Associate-of-the-Month picture still posted in the store and felt bad about putting down one of our own.

In the glare of the store sign, I saw a woman scrabbling up the chain-link fence with tangled hair, gray skin, and wet black eyes. It was Brenda, all right. The Dollar Hero manual says only the store manager may terminate an employee. So, I shot her.

I will end this report with Future Projects. The nights are getting colder. We had our first frost last week. Keith said that, with the cold, the riffraff seem more restless when they gather in our parking lot. Sometimes, two or three troublemakers together try to rush the fence. He worried that soon they might swarm and take out the store.

So Keith and Zack and Tyrone decided to leave town. They scavenged gas to fill the tank of a camper and pulled out this morning, with the plan of driving south down Route 81 in search of warmer weather and civilization. They tried mighty hard to convince me to join them, but I’m a country girl at heart and couldn’t leave all that I know in Taylorville. Besides, if I left, who would look after my Dollar Hero?

I admit that I am in a pretty blue mood now, standing alone in the parking lot as night falls. The riffraff emerge from the corn to push up against the fence and eye me. I recognize in their slack faces many of my friends and former customers. Day or night, the customer is always right! But let’s face it, the good times will never come back. No one visits our store anymore, cars now seldom drive down the highway, jets no longer burn comet-trails in the sky, and the rumble of helicopters on the horizon has disappeared. All gone.

My Dollar Hero was like church, and I miss it.

But I’ve planned a celebration for this evening to cheer myself up—what I call my Clearance Event! I spent today buffing the floors inside the Dollar Hero, wiping down the shelves, and straightening what’s left of the merchandise. Then I stacked a bunch of filled propane tanks in the back of the store.

When it’s full darkness tonight, I’ll prop open the front door and unlock the perimeter-fence gate. The riffraff will be drawn like a magnet into the brightly lit store. There will be country music on the boombox, maybe Willie or Loretta. Just like the old days, I’ll be standing at the cash register and greeting my customers as they drift in. On the counter I’ll have my rifle, a pack of Marlboros I’ve been saving, and a lighter.

Oh, forgot to mention … before I invite customers into the store, I’ll open up the valves of the propane tanks.

Clean and bright, my Dollar Hero Store #138 will fill with guests. Sometime in the evening, when we’re all having a good time and the moment seems right … I’ll light a cigarette. 

And be gone in a flash.