My normal morning rounds brought me through campsites busily sleeping off the nights’ reveries, mostly. Any interactions were surly and unpleasant, normally the effect of some kind of hangover or another. I learned to avoid people wherever possible, working there.

I didn’t have a lot of people left in my life when everything started to go wonky. Not a lot of reasons to care. Before BuyMort came I got up and went to work every day because it felt strange not to, more than anything else. Habit, I guess. Indoctrinated more likely. And a need for some sweet financial subsistence.

One of the few bright points in not just my daily workday at the campground, but also my life was one of our few remaining full-time residents. An old, wrinkled angel with a full set of fake teeth and a fondness for LSD, her name was Phyllis.

Phyllis was a sweet old lady I helped care for, the camp’s last remaining retiree. When the campground first opened, it had been a mobile home park filled with seniors. A veritable old folks’ resort, the Miami of Arizona. Mr. Sada couldn’t kick them out, per his legal agreement with the former owner, so he just celebrated whenever any of them died.

It meant he could clear out a new site and bring in more campers, which meant more money. The old folks had their rent locked in as part of the agreement too. Mr. Sada treated it as a long-term investment, even going so far as to call their deaths the more clinical “maturation of assets”. A term that he found funny as hell and would repeat loud and often, thinking people got it. Not malicious. Just childish and spoiled.

At first, he had left their side of the grounds alone. His construction crews ripped through the rest of the park and expanded it, while outfitting it for recreational use. But soon, he was installing new campsites all around the old folks’ mobile home areas.

It was a medieval siege mentality, they were beset every weekend by shrieking children, rude neighbors, and large diesel engines rumbling constantly. Many left. More died. Mr. Sada celebrated every single one.

Phyllis was our last, and she openly hated Mr. Sada. She had a hearing aid that she would gleefully turn down whenever Mr. Sada came around, to his scowling disapproval. The drugged up old lady was immune to his mercantile wrath, and he knew it. And I knew that when she died, he was going to have the biggest damn party he could throw, and I was going to knock his lights out, decades of therapist talk be damned.

That was never going to happen now. Not with BuyMort here.

Her RV was tucked away behind a grove of Joshua trees, surrounded by campsites that arched out around it in a wide circle. She had lived quietly with her husband, until he died of a stroke one night.

After that, I helped her where I could. Groceries and prescription pickups, things like that. Old lady needed very little to be content, really. She was nice, and she hated the guests as much as I did. We used to sit out on the porch and smoke joints, talking shit about them for hours at night and laughing. She was a cool ninety-two-year-old, and a great neighbor.

And since I was going to head past her place anyways on the way to the campground office, I figured I might as well step off the path and check up on her.

When I approached, I saw her camper was torn wide open, the ceiling was torn back like a can and gave a peek of the interior. Something had erupted from inside the old double-wide Shasta trailer and peeled back the metal siding all around the door area.

As I walked cautiously around the side of it, I saw what. A mechanized suit of combat armor hulked in the driveway next to the ruined Shasta. It was candy apple red, with dark metallic black sections showing through underneath. Where the joints swiveled and hinged, you could see beyond the plating a little here and there. What I saw there looked hardened too. The mech was on its hands and knees in the garden.

Phyllis loved that garden, told me all about what it used to be. Back when she first moved into the campground, in her early seventies, she had gardened up a storm. But then her hands became arthritic, and she let it go to pot. The framework and pathing were all still in place, and she could point with one of her crooked hands and tell me all about the beauty it used to hold. Now something was trying to bury a dead body in it.

I blinked at the sight before me. A young man lay dead on the ground next to the mech, his skull and ribcage partially crushed. The mech was digging at the garden with one oversized metal hand, tearing loose great chunks of the dried earth and tossing them aside. The young man was holding a crushed length of what looked like it used to be a shotgun, and the mech was making a faint grunting sound as it dug. The voice sounded artificial, like it was emanating from a speaker.

As soon as I came around the corner, the mech turned to look at me and my jaw dropped open. Its helm was rolled back internally, showing the interior of the armor. Phyllis’s face looked up at me from inside, eyes blinking rapidly from behind her thick glasses. When she saw me, she visibly sagged and sighed aloud.

“Oh Tyson, thank goodness you’re here.” Phyllis-in-the-mech sat back on the ground, resting on one large metal arm. The arm ended in a three fingered grasper, with thick metal flippers forming the fingers. I watched the ease it sunk into the earth with, eyes wide. “I’m having a difficult morning.”

***

So, let me be straightforward with you about something. I helped that old lady bury that body in her garden. Before I knew any of the specifics, even. I looked at her and just thought to myself. “Fuck it. Me and killer grandma against the world.” Don’t regret it a bit so far.

Phyllis indeed had a difficult morning. Once the body was hidden and we could sit down for a cup of tea and a joint, as we liked to do, she told me all about it. BuyMort had awoken her from a deep sleep, she had missed all the fuss about the aliens entirely. Phyllis watched television like a fiend, but never the news. The news she scoffed at and called dull. She had finished up her latest DVD boxset, Lost, and written a scathing review online before calling it a night. When BuyMort roared into her head, she nearly fell out of bed in shock.

“I’m afraid I don’t understand it very well, dearie,” she confided in me, her gray curls bouncing from inside the mech suit.

I got a good look at some aspects of it as we talked. It was bolted into her skull, and collarbones as well. Metal inserts extended around her forehead like a crown, and I could still see the blood from where it had been surgically implanted to her skeletal frame. The armor hulked out around her chest, in a vaguely humanoid form. Sharp ridges overlapped to form protective armor plating, but it looked like it was capable of dishing out a lot of damage too.

The crushed kid had been evidence of that.

So, she had gotten confused by BuyMort. Asked it for help with a few things once it asked her how it could assist her. It suggested selling a few things for morties, so Phyllis did.

A custom brassiere from the nineteen-forties netted her an absurd payout due to rarity and the stupid-ass store not knowing what things were worth. Then she had ordered the mech without really understanding what she was ordering. An exciting shopping experience was had when it jumped her and drilled itself into her skeleton.

“I only asked for something to help with my medications, I so struggle to remember when to take them. Then I asked for something to help me move around easier and protect against falls. Oh, and that young man in the garden came knocking and was helping himself to my delicates. I strongly suspected he was a pervert, so I asked the store for something to help me get rid of him.”

She leaned in close to whisper the last, giving me a good look down the interior of her nightgown. Aside from a pair of flat, wrinkled breasts I never wanted to see, I got a good look at what the machine had done to her. More braces held her frail body, and more bolting appeared to be anchoring her bones to the machine. All around her chest, small metallic straps extended across her ribs. At several places, tubes and pipes were connected to her frail form. It had appeared from the pod, embraced and engulfed her, and then surgically implanted itself upon her. Then the young man had attacked her with his shotgun, and she crushed him with a single hand.

“Now I can’t seem to get out of this thing, but I can certainly move easier now.” Her eyes rolled in humor, and she snickered into the back of one giant, armored hand. “I suppose it’s a blessing.”

Her eyes went wide as she accidentally activated something and the headpiece slammed into position, covering her from the world. It was a rounded armored helmet reminiscent of medieval armor, with glowing red eyes. Phyllis’s voice emanated from within the armor as the eyes flashed. “Oh dear. Now I have to use the screen thingy again.” She sighed. “I’m just no good at these screens.”

The mech raised an arm and the hand began to spin and fold inward. It created a hollow that looked a little like a jet engine, but when it began to spin, a ball of blue energy formed in front of it.

“Oops!” Phyllis said, as she released the ball of plasma into a nearby fifth-wheel RV. It erupted in a cloud of flames, and the remaining sporadic gunfire across the park ceased. Several vehicles nearby began to pull out of their spaces, in varying degrees of haste. A small C-class motorhome nearly tipped as its tires smoked and screamed.

Phyllis giggled and waved her still-smoking cannon at them. “Another one gone. Maybe it’ll be a nice quiet weekend after all, Tyson.” The armor lowered her helmet again and she blinked at the daylight, before going back to her tea.

After a lovely respite with Phyllis, I carefully stalked through the rest of the campground to the front gate. No one disturbed me. After BuyMort and then Phyllis, most of the campers had cleared out. The place had a few rigs left, but nobody was out and about. I secured the entrance gate and hung the closed sign over it, before checking the office. It had never even been opened.

I rolled my eyes at Mr. Sada’s predictable nonsense, and then at myself for continuously falling for it. Then I decided I was clocked out for the day and started walking home. Phyllis’s weed was kicking in and I wanted to watch some more news. As I walked past Phyllis and her torn up Shasta, she waved a huge, metal arm at me cheerfully.

I thought about the body buried in her garden for a moment but decided there likely wasn’t going to be any kind of governing body to hold us to account for it anytime soon and shrugged. Hefting my sawed-off shotgun, I climbed the ridge to my Airstream, and stopped dead when I reached the top.

A hulking pile of glittering slime appeared to be trying to steal my home.