The first customer's eyeballs were sliding down her cheeks as Luna's strawberry-flavored lipstick melted into the corners of her mouth.
"Miss," the man in the plaid shirt pressed the soggy bill against the register, "can you hurry up? My grandson's in the car..."
His voice was suddenly replaced by some kind of slimy gurgle, and Luna looked up for an instant to see a string of grape-like gunk dangling from the man's left eye socket, mingling with pink fleshy drips in a pile of Snickers bars on sale.
The rainstorm outside the window was lemon yellow.
Three minutes ago it was called "the first rain of summer in Kansas," but now the corrosive liquid is dripping down the neon sign of the QuickStop convenience store, burning "24 Hours" into "4 Hours Corpse Camp. With the soles of her Converse stuck to the melted tiles, Luna grabbed the coyote alarm and slammed it into the fire hydrant - no response. Damn it, HQ had cut off the maintenance of the fire equipment last month.
"Help... Help..." The plaid-shirted man's fingers dug into the cash register slit, his jawbone jabbing out of his skin like a pork rib poking through the plastic wrap in a supermarket cooler.
Luna shrinks into the employee storage compartment under the counter. It's stuffed with expired Playboys and bottles of her anti-anxiety pills. The phone vibrates, Mom calling for the fourteenth time. She's afraid to answer it. The news in Chicago had blown up - three thousand "glass men" stood on the evaporated bed of Lake Michigan, sunlight piercing their crystallized guts and casting church-window shadows on the walls of City Hall.
Tires exploded outside the door.
She peered through a gap in the shelves and saw the Ford pickup bubbling in the parking lot. Acid rain corroded the roof into Swiss cheese as a blonde woman rushed into the rain with a baby in her arms, the baby's cries turning to seething screams by the third second. The woman flings away the swaddling clothes like she's throwing away a bag of stinking garbage, but her palms have fused with the baby's ribs.
Luna bites the tip of her tongue. As the rusty taste mixed with the bitter almond flavor of antidepressants came up, she realized the Pringles potato chip canisters on the shelf were warping. Acid fog seeped through the doorway, and the plastic packaging on the shelves made a ghoul-chewing, zippy sound.
The floor beneath the register suddenly caved in.
The last image she saw before crashing into the darkness was the Marlboro cigarettes on the shelves melting into brown goo like the Red Sea parted by Moses in the biblical story-if the Red Sea were the color of nicotine tar.