My little corner of the world wasn’t exactly fantastic before BuyMort came to earth and fucked everything up, but it was mine dammit. I liked my Airstream trailer, and I liked having it parked in the middle of nowhere, Arizona.

My name is Tyson Dawes, and I used to manage the Crappy Trails Campground, in the Skull Valley Desert just outside Prescott. It’s actually the Happy Trails Campground, but Skull Valley is the depressingly real name of my zone on the map. Supposedly the name has some big historical relevance.

Dunno, never learned it. Or cared to, really. I keep out of shit that doesn’t directly affect me, as a rule.

Some jackass told me it was a big important name in the campground office one day while I was trying desperately to pay attention to anything else. People talk way too much to complete strangers who hate them in that industry.

Before we go much further, I need to tell you something about myself. I became a warlord, yes. But I did not start out that way. My story starts out at the end, really. The end of my world yes, but also the end of myself. I had burnt out. Stopped trying. Stopped caring. I was already done for, even before the world came crashing down around me.

I used to do normal things with my life but hiding on the edges of the world seemed like a better option after I got chewed up and spit out by it. Worked what most would call normal jobs most of my life.

I was a good employee too. A slacker at life, yeah. Not very involved with stuff, sure. But I always stayed and worked whatever job I had until they decided they got tired of me and laid me off.

Like that time my last boss lost big on the stock market and suddenly 1500 of us weren’t up to performance standards. Boom. Job gone.

But let’s not forget the pandemic. Everybody’s getting sick, so let’s lay ‘em all off to save the CEO’s yacht club membership. Fuck the rat race. I’m happy to leave it to the rats.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

So, I bought my gorgeous little 1962 Airstream Tradewind on loan, towed it out to the first campground to promise me a remote site, and started the last job I would ever have. Well, till the world as we knew it ended, anyhow.

I was a campground attendant.

The work was mostly landscaping, whatever good that did in the land of hot rock and steaming sand. Oh, and picking up empty cans of Thunder Eagle, that piss-water local brand of brew with an American flag-caped Bald Eagle flipping the bird that somehow topped ten percent alcohol content and netted me five cents a can at the recycling plant.

And, of course, the office work. The campground hired strictly minimum wage so there was a steady influx of bubble gum chewing belly shirts who cycled through weekly. It got to the point I didn’t even bother learning their names.

For that workload, I was given a site with generally reliable power, water, sewer, and a monthly stipend that barely covered my necessities.

Still, the owner also owned a local liquor store, and never ‘noticed’ me stealing bottles off shipments, even when he caught me red-handed. Fuck ‘em, the bastard owed me for being the only thing that kept his shitty campground from falling apart.

When BuyMort came to Earth, all of that fell apart within the week, but until then it had been a sweet deal. I was in my early 30’s, no romantic prospects, family, friends, or even pets. I was chill with the spider that lived in my kitchen, but that was about it.

Turns out, all I need is peace and quiet, and the odd occasional bottle of hooch to live life on my own terms. Good enough for me, I can smile and nod with the best of them. And, while Prescott was kind of famous for being crime-riddled, I had my old Mossberg Shockwave, and wasn’t too worried. Criminals around here tended to prefer victims with more stuff to steal than buckshot to share anyway, and nobody wanted my anime stuff but me.

I should probably explain BuyMort. You know those big box stores that show up in your town, sell crappy versions of everything to drive actual small businesses out, then close up and kill the whole town once they’ve sucked all the money out of it? That’s BuyMort, but on a universe-spanning scale.

I don’t understand it all perfectly yet, but literally no one does. That’s the sheer majestic horror of this entity. Nobody really knows what it is or how it works, but it pretty much rules the entire multiverse. With shopping.

Motherfucking shopping destroyed the world.