The Clearance Stickers Appeared on Us at Midnight

I tried to peel it off. The corner lifted my skin with it.

There were six of us counting inventory at ValeMart 114 that night. The store had closed at ten, and by eleven the manager had chained the entrance carts together and left us with cold pizza in the break room. We were contractors, not employees. Our scanners fed quantities into a central tablet while the store's lights dimmed aisle by aisle behind us.

Annual counts are boring enough to make any strange thing feel entertaining at first. When I showed the label to Nia, our team lead, she laughed and asked who owned a pocket printer. Nobody admitted it. She scanned the barcode as a joke.

The scanner beeped.

My left hand went numb.

Not pins and needles. Gone. I could see the fingers and watch the tendons move, but I felt nothing below the wrist. When I grabbed a shelf, there was only the sensation of my arm stopping in empty space.

Nia stared at the scanner. Its screen displayed ITEM ACCEPTED. SHELF LIFE TRANSFERRED.

Then the sticker printer in Produce began chattering.

ValeMart 114 had not used that printer in years. It sat beneath an old scale between the apples and potatoes, unplugged, its cord looped around the base. Still, yellow labels poured from its slot and curled across the floor.

We followed them. Each label named something the store did not sell.

A CHILD'S TRUST, $0.18. THE SMELL OF YOUR FATHER'S COAT, $1.06. THREE MINUTES BEFORE THE ACCIDENT, $4.99. A NAME SPOKEN ONLY BY THE DEAD, FINAL SALE.

Nia yanked the roll free. The printer continued clicking with an empty mouth.

Cal, who was counting frozen foods, called us over the radio. He sounded irritated rather than scared. 'Who moved aisle thirteen?'

The store had twelve aisles.

We found him standing where the dairy wall should have been. A new aisle stretched into the distance between two freezer cases, much longer than the building. Its overhead sign read 13: RETURNED ITEMS. The shelves were stocked with objects sealed in cloudy plastic trays: wedding rings, house keys, children's drawings, clumps of hair, hearing aids, urns, and hundreds of phones displaying missed calls.

Every package wore a yellow clearance sticker.

Cal held one of the phones. Its lock screen showed a photograph of him at age nine, missing both front teeth. 'This was my mother's,' he said. 'We buried it with her.'

The phone rang.

Nia told him not to answer. He did anyway.

His expression softened. 'Mom?'

A label emerged from the dead printer behind us. It skittered down the polished floor and adhered to Cal's throat. VOICE, FAMILIAL REGISTER. WAS $8.50. NOW $0.00 WITH COUPON.

The store intercom chimed.

In Cal's voice, it announced: 'Attention shoppers. One voice has been returned without receipt.'

Cal opened his mouth. No sound came out.

The fluorescent lights over aisle thirteen switched off one by one, beginning at the far end. In each darkened section, a shopping cart squeaked. We saw no one pushing them, but the carts rolled toward us in two orderly lines. Their baskets were full of black plastic bags that shifted as if breathing.

We backed into the main store. The dairy wall slid shut, sealing aisle thirteen behind cartons of milk. Cal kept pounding on his chest and trying to speak. Every few seconds, the intercom used his stolen voice to advertise another item.

'Fresh memories, never frozen.'

'Names reduced for quick sale.'

'All remaining years must go before dawn.'

Nia called emergency services. Her phone displayed a checkout prompt instead of a dialer. DID YOU FIND EVERYTHING YOU WERE LOOKING FOR? YES / NO. She tapped NO. The screen asked, MAY WE SUBSTITUTE?

Before she could answer, the automatic doors opened.

Outside was not the parking lot. Beyond the glass lay another ValeMart, dark and empty, facing ours entrance to entrance. Beyond that store was another, and another, repeating under fluorescent lights toward a vanishing point. In every copy, six inventory workers stood near the doors, staring back at us.

One of the other Nias raised her phone. Her screen read YES.

Our Nia vanished.

The other one appeared inside our vestibule with a shopping basket over her arm. She looked almost right. Her hair was parted on the wrong side, and her smile showed too many lower teeth. A yellow label covered her forehead: STORE BRAND SUBSTITUTE, SAVE 40%.

She picked up Nia's scanner and told us to resume counting.

That was when labels began appearing on everyone.

Jorge received one across his eyelids: NIGHT VISION, LIGHTLY USED. Priya found three on her chest: FIRST KISS, MOTHER'S BIRTHDAY, REASON FOR FEAR OF DEEP WATER. Cal's silent mouth was marked EMPTY CONTAINER, RECYCLABLE. My numb left hand had been reduced again, from $2.40 to $0.03.

The substitute Nia scanned Jorge's eyelids.

He screamed and covered his face. When he lowered his hands, his eyes were still there, but they reflected nothing. He could see only the parts of the store where the lights had burned out. He pointed toward the ceiling and began sobbing.

'They're walking above us,' he said. 'They have carts upside down.'

The acoustic tiles bowed under rolling wheels.

I remembered something the store manager had said while leaving: counts had been short for seven consecutive years. Not money. Items. Every audit ended with more products scanned than existed on the shelves, yet the database insisted thousands of units were missing. Corporate called it phantom shrink.

The store was balancing its inventory.

It did not care whether the replacements were merchandise.

We ran for the stockroom. Substitute Nia followed at a walking pace, scanning labels whenever she came close enough. Each beep took something small. Priya forgot the code to the staff door. Jorge forgot how old he was. Cal forgot that he had ever possessed a voice and stopped trying to speak.

I found a box cutter on a pallet and sliced beneath the label on my wrist. The blade took a thin layer of skin, but the yellow paper came free. Feeling returned to my hand in a burst of agony.

The detached label stuck to a case of canned peaches.

The cans began flexing their metal lids like fingers.

That gave me an idea.

We tore the labels from ourselves and pressed them onto products. Priya's first kiss went onto a jar of pickles. Jorge's age went onto a sack of rice. Cal's voice went onto the rotisserie oven. The store filled with impossible life. Bottles whispered secrets in my coworkers' voices. Oranges blinked. A stack of paper towels began remembering a birthday party and collapsed with grief.

The inventory system could not process it. Scanners across the store beeped without being touched. The intercom stuttered between announcements. Above us, the upside-down carts crashed through the ceiling in a rain of tiles and black bags.

The bags opened.

Hands reached out—not arms, only hands attached to strips of receipt paper. They crawled across the floor, selecting items, turning them over, comparing prices. One lifted the label from the peaches and pressed it back onto my wrist.

Substitute Nia stood at the stockroom exit. 'Damaged merchandise must remain on premises,' she said.

Behind her, aisle thirteen had returned. At its far end waited six refrigerated display cases, each the length of a coffin. Five already contained people shaped like us. The sixth was empty, its glass propped open.

Priya shoved a pallet jack into the substitute. I pulled the fire alarm. Nothing rang, but every price display in the store changed to $0.00. The unseen shoppers surged forward.

They fought over us.

Receipt hands climbed my legs, peeling labels from one another and replacing them at frantic speed. My name became my address, then my pulse, then the memory of learning to swim. Each scan hollowed me out and filled the space with something from a shelf: the smell of coffee grounds, the weight of canned soup, a jingle from a cereal commercial.

Cal reached the emergency exit first. The door asked for a receipt. He had none.

Then the rotisserie oven spoke in his voice: 'Receipt printing.'

A strip of paper slid from beneath its unplugged control panel. Cal grabbed it, scanned the exit, and the door opened onto morning.

Only Cal and I made it outside. The parking lot had returned. Our watches said 6:02, though less than an hour had passed. Behind us, ValeMart 114 looked normal except for six human-shaped packages standing in the front window beneath a banner that read NEW LOWER PRICES.

The police found the store empty. Corporate claimed no inventory audit had been scheduled. The manager denied meeting us. Our contracting company had vanished from the state registry, and every phone number led to ValeMart customer service.

Cal's voice never came back. Mine did, mostly. Sometimes the intercom uses it in stores I have never visited.

I thought the label on my wrist was the only thing I carried out. Yesterday I found another beneath my tongue. It reads CUSTOMER LOYALTY, AUTOMATIC RENEWAL. There is no price, only a barcode that changes whenever I look away.

This morning, my phone asked whether I enjoyed my purchase.

I have not answered.

A delivery truck is idling outside my apartment now. The driver has no face. He is carrying six refrigerated cases, and one of them is labeled with your name.