[Fiction] Remember That Day At Wal-Mart?

"Where the hell are you?" he said into the phone. He darted around the aisles, perplexed.

"I’m in sporting goods, like I said I would be." She sounded confused.

"Well, that’s where I am, and I don’t see you." He stopped moving, and he surveyed his surroundings. Something wasn’t right.

"What part?"

"What?"

"What part of sporting goods … what’s around you?"

He glanced around. "Um … it’s the fishing section. There’s poles, oars –"

"Hold on," she said. "I’ll come to you." There was a pause, and he could hear her shuffling past other shoppers. "Okay. I thought you said you were here."

Suddenly, he felt cold, flushed. Sweat began to bead around his forehead, but he felt scorching hot.

"Look," he said, "let’s just stick to the original plan. Meet me up at the magazine rack, in about five minutes." He had some difficulty croaking the words out of his mouth.

"What’s wrong?" She was now starting to panic, as well; he could hear it in her voice.

His cell phone began to beep. LOW BATTERY. "Hey, just meet me up there, okay? My battery’s going dead." He hung up the phone, folded it closed and returned it to his jacket pocket. He might need the phone later, so better to preserve as much energy as he could.

Thoughts raced through Jabob’s head. His head felt heavy, and he felt as if he were walking through gelatin. The whole day had not felt right since he got out of the shower, that bright flash of light that seemed to burst in his eyes, its intensity enough to knock him unconscious. Since then, he felt a dull ache in his head and at moments since he and Sheila had come to the department store, he felt as if he could hear her words and understand them, but then he would find himself unable to respond.

Five minutes turned into what felt like an hour. Jacob flipped through his third magazine, mindlessly turning pages without reading a word, thinking of Einstein and relativity and entropy and other topics that he had dropped out of the pre-med program to avoid.

He looked at his watch. The second hand had stopped. Now, there was no telling how long he had waited there. He took out his phone and hit SEND, annoyed by the beep that reminded him that he was low on battery power. His mood was hovering between impatient and uneasy.

"Hello?" Sheila at least sounded more relaxed than she had earlier.

"Hey, I thought we said five minutes?"

A long pause, then, "Who is this?"

"Sheila, are you kidding me? It’s Jake. Where the hell are you?"

Again, a pause. "I’m sorry, you must have the wrong number."

"Sheila? This isn’t the time to be fucking around. What’s going on?" Jacob heard a voice in the background; it sounded like someone said, "Give it to me." Someone was taking the phone from his wife.
"Who is this?"

Now it was Jake’s turn to pause. It was his voice on the phone.

"Hello? Asshole?"

Jake could barely respond. "Who –" The call was disconnected.

Jake looked at the phone, as if it were the only sane thing on the planet right now and it was going to provide him all the rational answers he needed. He stood still, his mind searching for even the most abstract of answers for questions that weren’t even fully formed. His eyes scanned the department store, looking for anything out of the ordinary, any one thing that he could find that might explain how things got so bizarre so fast.

"Sir, may I help you?" A sales associate stood in front of him, a concerned look on her face.

Jake looked up, and past the young girl with the ponytail and the red vest, with the nametag that read "Karen," other store employees were huddled, staring at Jake, as if he were some exotic zoo animal.

"No, no. I’m fine, I think." He had no idea what to say. "Yeah. I mean, I’m just browsing." He turned to look as some nearby merchandise, hoping the associate would go away and let him figure things out on his own.

He spotted, on a shelf next to some paperback digest mystery books, was a display of flags, underneath a sign that read, "Remember our triumph." The display, a very patriotic exhibit, was apparently designed to capitalize on the patriotism that grew in the post-September 11 recovery. But Jacob was no longer reading the display. Instead he noticed the flags themselves, and he found some things very odd. The first thing he noticed was that the flags, while ostensibly resembling the usual American design – red stripes, white stripes, blue in the upper left corner – had one disturbing difference, that being a solid black iron cross where the stars were usually located. The other thing that Jake noticed, and this was what made him the most uncomfortable, was that he seemed to be the only person in this store that noticed that, suddenly, things weren’t the way that they were supposed to be.