Emperor of Gondwanaland by Paul di Filippo

then.”
    I drove around to the front of the mall. The immense parking lot was three quarters full. Saturday night at Consumerville. Nail painting and arcade action, digitized portrait T-shirts that read world’s greatest dad. Slurpees, burgers, and six screens of Hollywood entertainment. Who’d ever want to leave?
    Tonight we’d find out.
    We spotted the security guard’s Suzuki Samurai parked in the shadows near the closed bank branch. Almost as soon as I killed our engine, he wheeled off toward the mall.
    The search for missing little Jennifer was on. I could almost hear Fiona’s desperate supplications.
    Burr and I emerged. We each wore zippered belly-packs containing fifty tubes of Krazy Glue, their tips already presnipped and recapped. Now we took out one apiece.
    Burr held his up like a sword. “For Duty and Humanity!”
    “Duty and Humanity!”
    We took up our positions on opposite sides of the random first car, Burr on the left and me on the right.
    Like some bizarre precision skating duo, we inserted our tube tips into the car’s keyholes and squeezed.
    “All right!” exclaimed Burr.
    “No time for gloating. Five seconds per car, remember?”
    “Gotcha.”
    We started trotting, sneakers digging into the tarmac.
    Finger the keyhole, insert, squeeze. Jog, jog, jog. Finger, insert, squeeze. Jog, jog, jog
    Our first tubes sufficed for twenty cars, all in a little over a minute and a half. We wouldn’t quite finish the fifty tubes in the time allotted, unless we picked up the pace.
    “Are you game for speeding things up?”
    “Lead on, MacDuffer!”
    We began to seriously haul some ass.
    After about the two hundredth car, Burr began to chant a eulogy for the dead with every hit.
    “Inner cities! Downtown theaters! Vanished wetlands!”
    I joined in. “Country roads! Independent bookstores! Public transit!”
    “Clean air! Mom ’n’ pop markets! Pushcart vendors!”
    We had to quit chanting as we began to breathe harder. We were squirting locks shut about every three seconds. Security was still nowhere in sight. Hardly any mall patrons had emerged either. They were probably all gawping at Fiona’s simulated distress.
    At a bit under the halfway mark by our watches we reversed direction, heading back toward the Toyota, down another aisle.
    “Shit! A keypad!”
    “Cement the fucking wipers!”
    We arrived back at our car almost breathless.
    “We crack a thousand?”
    “Think so. C’mon, Fiona’ll be waiting.” We pulled up outside the emergency exit. “—four, three, two, one!”
    No Fiona.
    A minute crawled by like a slug on ’ludes.
    Burr began to mutter. “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, you beautiful crazy bitch. Don’t blow it—”
    The door burst open, and Fiona dashed out.
    I peeled out as soon as she had one leg and half her body in the car.
    Beneath the absurd makeup, her face was pale. “They sent a lady cop to the john with me. I had to slug her.”
    “With what?”
    Fiona cracked her purse. Inside was a brick.
    “Remember Shepherd’s Department Store, down on Main? They knocked it down last year—?”
    “Way to go, girl!”
    All the local stations had remote crews at the mall for the eleven o’clock news. The mayor of Malltown was ranting about harsh justice for the perpetrators of this “outrage against all decent consumers.” Approximately fifteen hundred very fussy and irate people were stranded. Every tow truck in the state was lined up to haul their useless vehicles away. Cops earning copious overtime juggled the wreckers with the incoming rescuers: family members in second cars, as well as several hastily commissioned school buses for those without extra wheels. The mall management had coerced several restaurants into dispensing free refreshments to quell the indignant bitching. Liability suits were expected to total several millions.
    Fiona wiggled her sore toes atop the hassock, her face pink from scrubbing. She raised a glass to the television.
    “Shop till you