Zombie Hunter

I was introduced to the horrors lurking in the aisles and back rooms of Cabela’s by a box of 6.5mm Creedmoor ammunition.

Most shooters use shorthand when referring to this gun and its ammo, simply saying “six five,” or “Creedmoor,” which is pronounced creed-more.

When you’re wearing an employee shirt and nametag at Cabela’s, it’s important to learn this lingo real fast. People expect you to be intimately familiar with every item in the store, adopting the Well, don’t you work here? attitude the second they sense any uncertainty on your part.

It was the middle of hunting season, and a guy came up to me in a panic, and said, “Hey, buddy, I’m leaving for an elk hunt in a couple hours, and I need the six five Tipstrike.”

Adding a level of complexity to the jargon, the man was looking for a specific brand and type of shell for the 6.5 Creedmoor. I was still weak on ammo knowledge, especially that caliber. It didn’t even exist back when I was first learning about hunting rifles.

“Uh… okay,” I said, “All the Creedmoor is right here… not seeing any … what’d you say?”

“Tipstrike!”

“Right,” I said. Then I saw the Team Lead of hunting walking by in another aisle. “Hey, Grant,” I called, “can you c’mere a minute?”

“Yeah?”

“This guy’s looking for the six five Tipstrike.”

Grant sucks a breath over his teeth and shakes his head. “Don’t know about that, boss. Haven’t seen that one in a while.”

“I looked online before I came. Your website says you’ve got three boxes.”

“Yeah, I know it says we do,” Grant said, looking at the shelf, placing his finger on the empty space with the tag underneath. “But that’s been empty for a couple months now.”

“Well, can’t you just go look in the back, or something?”

The Back

Ah, The Back. I remember when I believed in The Back. I think we’ve all believed in The Back at some point, harboring illusions about what it is and how it’s organized.

“Excuse me, sir? My daughter really loves this shoe, but she wears a five and a half. Do you have any in The Back?”

Then you picture a guy going into The Back where the shoes would be filed neatly by brand, style, and size in a specific location. And perhaps this is how The Back is in some places, but it is not the case for the ammo area of the warehouse at Cabela’s.

I followed Grant through the swinging doors. “This guy isn’t getting his ammo today,” he said.

“Why? Don’t we have three boxes?”

“Probably somewhere. But the system’s showing two on the floor, so they’re supposed to be right there on the shelf.”

“And the other one’s back here?”

“Maybe, but we don’t know where. Could be anywhere. I know I’ve looked for that load before. I’m just going to look again so I can tell him I did.”

“Well… can’t we just look where… wherever we keep the six five ammo?”

“Wish it worked that way, boss,” Grant stopped in front of the ammunition racks. “See, this?” He showed me the screen of the handheld. It said there was one box of the ammo in slot B2070C03. “There’s the slot right there. Go ahead and have a look. I’m sure it was there at some point, but it ain’t there now.”

Each slot is labelled with alphanumeric gibberish. They stretch from floor to ceiling, and it takes a tall ladder to reach the upper slots. B2070C03 is conveniently at eye-level. The slot is about 6 inches wide and 12 inches tall, but they are deceptively deep. I have to reach in all the way to my shoulder to grab the boxes from the back.

Ammo boxes are in assorted sizes, from a small pack of gum to a paperback novel. I explored this slot and found quite a variety. Some of it was fit for killing gophers, some for hunting moose, and some would be used for taking down geese in flight. There was no discernable order at all.

“So if somebody doesn’t track where they put something… there’s no way of knowing where it is?”

“You got it.”

I stared at the racks. “Wouldn’t it be better to… I don’t know… at least have it sorted by caliber, or something.”

“It started that way but… well, you can see how it is now.”

“There’s gotta be two… three hundred slots here.”

“Yeah, and there’s a good chance it’s not in any of ‘em. My guess? It’s in there.”

Grant pointed to a neighboring “slot.” I put slot in quotes because it’s not a shelf space so much as a bay where you could park a small car. The jumble of stuff inside it looked like that reality show where they cut the bolt on a self storage unit and people bid for the right to buy the whole mess in hopes of finding treasures inside. I could see boxes of ammo sprinkled between a couple barbeques, a tree stand, five folding chairs, half a dozen 50-pound sacks of deer corn, and two spare tires.  

“There’s a night crew that does restocking,” Grant continued. “There were about 600 boxes of ammo sitting on a pallet, waiting to get shelved in our slots, but they chucked it all into that bay last night.”

“Why would someone do that?”

“Probably had to get the forklift through here, or something.”

“And you think it’s in there?”

“In there, or maybe one of these other two,” he said, pointing to two more car-sized catastrophes. “I know there was some Tipstrike on those pallets, but we won’t find it till somebody sits here and sorts those piles.”

“So it’s just… gone?”

“We got inventory coming up in a few months. Maybe it turns up then.”

Grant went out to tell the customer. I stayed a moment, thinking about digging into the hoarder slot. I could see one rich vein of ammunition, and I shifted a sack of corn to take a better look, but there came a threatening creak and groan from deep within the wreckage. Clearly, this was load-bearing corn.

Ghosts

The discrepancy between the physical location of a box of ammunition and its presence in the digital world is the source of much vexation. There’s nothing more infuriating than saying to a customer, “Yup, looks like I’ve got 11 boxes,” heading to the slot location, finding nothing there, and going back to the customer, apology in mouth, tail between legs.

What we’d discovered with the Creedmoor ammo is called a Ghost. I did not coin this term. It’s used by the whole Cabela’s crew, and it’s a very apt name indeed. Just like a haunted house is purported to have a lingering spirit of a former occupant, slot B2070C03 very likely once contained a box of 6.5mm Creedmoor Tipstrike. Though no physical evidence of the ammo can be found, the spirit is detectable on our handheld device that insists it is there.

How are these spirits spawned? It’s very simple. In a store with millions of items, each item must be tracked every time it’s moved for the physical location to match the digital location. As Grant said, that 6.5 Creedmoor ammo was likely right where it was supposed to be at one point. But it was pulled out and put somewhere else by a new employee who forgot to scan it, or some old veteran who was collecting 39 different ammunitions for restocking and forgot to scan number 31. The instant ammo is moved without tracking it, its spirit is separated from its body, and we’ve got ourselves a Ghost.

Zombies

While the entire Cabela’s staff has adopted Ghost as the spot on terminology for the spirit of an item that has no physical representation, I feel that the lexicon is incomplete. After all, should there not be a corresponding term for that physical body that’s just been stripped of its soul? Clearly, there should. And lookie here, we already have a word for bodies unguided by a consciousness. It’s Zombie.

I find the Zombies more startling and metaphysically challenging than the Ghosts. The Ghosts are the equivalent of losing your keys. You might say, “Darn it! I put them right here!” but they are stubbornly NOT there, and we’re sort of used to that phenomenon.

But with the Zombies, I’ll see a box of ammunition sitting in a slot that I’m passing by and say, “Oh, I was just out in the section, and I know were almost out of that ammo. I’ll bring that box out.” Then I’ll take my little handheld zapper and scan the slot I’m taking it from, then scan the UPC on the ammo. That’s how we track things.

But the scanner makes a funny beep, and the words on the screen say “Item not found.” But the item is in my hand. I do more investigating with my handheld, and it turns out this item is not only not here, but it is not in The Back at all. There are none in the warehouse. But I am in the warehouse. And the item is in my hand.

I don’t know why I find this so disconcerting, but I do. I feel a tingle in my spine, having just discovered a fissure in the basic structure of reality. It’s the opposite of losing your keys. Imagine you’re on vacation overseas, and you left your house keys at home, but then you find them sitting on the dresser in your hotel room in Croatia. That’ll give you a start. That’s how I feel when I find Zombies.

Given that these corpses litter every nook of the building, I’m not sure why it took Adam Schnell joining the Cabela’s team to realize we needed a word for it, and I’m equally mystified that the term isn’t gaining more traction with the employees. I’ve made the pitch to a couple dozen of my coworkers, and I’m getting a lot of “Uh-huhs” and sideways glances.

My manager in particular is especially annoyed by any and all of my observational comedy and commentary. Anything that is not directly associated with getting a task completed is an offensive waste of time in his estimation, so you can just imagine how little he appreciates it as I prattle on with new terminology, quirky analogies, and fascinating rabbit trails.

On the other hand, my General Manager, the man at the very top of the food chain in the store, was quite intrigued by the concept of Zombies, and he immediately recognized the value of a name for items in hand with no digital presence. I was elaborating on the lovely symmetry of the terms in retail with their counterparts in modern horror culture when my manager walked up to us.

As Mr. Manager joined us, the GM enthusiastically greets him and says, “Hey, has Adam told you about the zombies?”

Mr. Manager said, “I don’t know why you encourage this,” turned around, and walked away. I heard him muttering something about how I’d either be the best hire he ever made or give him a coronary.

I feel like both are within my reach.

The Paradox

You’d think it be harder to find spirits than animated corpses, but it’s just the opposite. Ghosts are easy to find, while Zombies are nearly impossible to locate. We have excellent instrumentation for the detection of Ghosts because it’s a computer system, and it never forgets.

Alternatively, humans are responsible for the creation of Zombies by moving items around. Those humans are certainly forgetful, perhaps negligent, and often not working at Cabela’s anymore by the time we hunt the Zombie they created.

Even the customers are involved in this unholy separation of body and soul. I stay in the hunting section most of the day, but customers roam the whole store. If some guy picks up a box of .22 ammo because he saw a sale sign beside it, and only later realizes that they aren’t hollow points when he’d been planning on ripping into some gophers, I can promise you, he will simply abandon that ammo box wherever he happens to be. Now we have a Ghost on the .22 ammo shelf and a Zombie lurking in the bin of saltwater taffy up by the tills.

The Necromancer

But the staff are by far the worst offenders. Every morning, a four-tiered cart comes rolling out of The Back, bearing around 300 boxes of ammo. It’s been loaded up from the slots in The Back by a member of the replenishment team because the computer system sent them a notice to refill all the boxes that were sold the previous day. If that cart was loaded up by my man, Trent—a 10-year vet—I have every confidence that he carefully zapped each box as it left the slot, the small beep announcing the successful incantation that will keep body and soul as one.

But if it’s been filled by a new hire or by someone who embraces the lack of accountability that working for minimum wage often breeds, that cart’s got more Zombies than a season finale of The Walking Dead. One morning last week, I witnessed this unholy act of spawning Zombies with my own eyes, and I just about came unglued.

See, now that I understand the system of tracking items, and how to use my handheld to do it, I’ve been trying to put things right in the world. And, believe me, there’s plenty going wrong in the world because many of my fellow employees drop everything they are doing and walk out the door the very second their shift is over. So I’m always finding tasks left half-completed, never knowing the story of who started them or why they did not finish them.

Boxes of ammunition sitting on a cart is an example of these half-completed tasks. A cart is a transition space not a destination. Ammo should only be on the sales floor or in a slot for storage. So when I see a box sitting on a cart, I say, “Hey, buddy. Who left you there? Let’s see where you belong.” I zap his UPC with my handheld, check the number out on the floor and in storage, and I’ll put him in the spot that makes the numbers line up. A small act of sanity in a chaotic world.

Last week, I was putting away a new shipment of ammunition, being very careful to slot them appropriately and consolidate as much as possible. The consolidation is a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have, but when I discover 16 boxes of one type of ammo are spread out over four separate locations all within arm’s reach of each other for no reason except that someone didn’t want to take one step to the left to put all the same boxes together, my eye starts twitching.

So there I am, being all neurotic about my toys, when I see this lady pulling ammo out of the slots and haphazardly dropping them onto a cart. I don’t have a full view of her because she’s on the other side of the racks, like in a library where you can see through the bookshelves to someone on the other side.

She’s on the replenishment team, pulling ammo to go out on the floor. But she seems to be going too fast, and I’m not hearing any beeping: the auditory confirmation that the spell keeping body and soul as one has been successfully cast. If she’s not doing that, every damn round in that cart is a Zombie.

Some people turn the volume all the way to mute on the handhelds. I do. Maybe she does too. I’m telling this to myself to calm down and not go over there and talk to her: Keep it together, Schnell. She’s been here longer than you. She knows what she’s doing. Let’s stay in our lane today. You took this job to relax, remember?

But the thing is, she doesn’t know what she’s doing. I’m sure of it. She’s one of those people who have that dazed look all the time. Not merely a distracted look, or the look of the preoccupied intellectual, or the look of a person trying to recall something from the edge of memory, but the blank stare that indicates there’s simply nothing going on. She’s not here, she’s not there, she’s not anywhere.

I scold myself for this harsh evaluation, but I still followed up to see if it was correct. Once she carted the ammo away, I go over to the other side and start scanning slots. Ghosts everywhere! I was angry, but I told myself it might not have been her. These could be old hauntings. There are poltergeists in half the locations in the building, so I couldn’t be certain she was guilty until I matched a Ghost with a specific Zombie currently sitting in her cart out front. I noted a couple of Ghosts by name and went out to investigate.

I found her cart sitting smack in the middle of an aisle with her nowhere in sight. Again, when break time or quitting time strikes, it’s like yanking the battery out of a cordless tool: work stops, period. I found exactly what I’d suspected: four boxes of .308 ammo were sitting there in the cart, and I’d found four Ghosts of that same brand and caliber in her wake. Smoking guns.

I saw Dillon walking by, the Team Lead for the people in replenishment, and I flagged him down.

“Dillon,” I said. “May I have a word?”

“Yeah, what’s up.”

“Okay, I want to have one of those safe-space conversations. Like, just make a couple observations, raise something to your attention. You know?”

“Sure.”

“I’m not mad.” A lie. “And I’m not here to name names. You just have a need for some re-training for a few people on the team. Maybe rally the troops, go over some basics. That kind of thing.”

“’K. Why?”

“Well, I saw someone on replen today taking ammo out to the floor, but I noticed it was going kind of fast, and I got suspicious that they weren’t actually activating the stock to the floor.”

“That’s, like, half the job.”

“Oh, believe me, I get it. But I’m not sure they get it. It’s not happening.”

“How would you know?”

“Because I checked.”

“You checked?”

“Insane, I know. But I gotta say, we’ve been working really hard to get the ammo situation under control, we’re making some headway, so I’m feeling kind of vindicated here. I found four Ghosts of .308 ammo in a slot in the back, and I’m, like, I’m sure I saw those boxes there yesterday. There’s only four of that brand in storage; I slotted them there myself. So now I’m on a mission, right? Like, I’ve got to know the answer. So I go and find the cart out front that the person on replen just filled. And guess what I find. There’s the four boxes of .308 right there: Zombies!”

“Zombies?”

Oops. All right, I have this personal defect that stems from spending a lot of time in my own head. Sometimes, when I should just be relaying facts, I get caught up in storytelling fervor, and I forget that other people are not privy to my inner world where I’ve been refining the vocabulary of ammunition, and I’ll expect my listening audience to make unreasonably massive leaps of contextualization on the fly. Dillon’s looking at me funny, and I realize I’ve done it again. But Dillon is a quick-thinking, bright lad, and I’m betting he will be up to speed quickly.

“You don’t know about the Zombies?”

“Um… assume I don’t?

“Well, there’s Ghosts in the slots, right? Like, the system says stuff’s there and it’s not there?"

“Yeah.”

“But we know good and well that there’s a corresponding real item out there somewhere, right?”

“Minus theft. But… usually.”

“So when there’s a Ghost, there’s an in-real-life thing out there somewhere.”

“Most of the time.”

“But there’s no virtual, digitized essence attached to it.”

“Right.”

“So there’s your Zombie. A Ghost is the digital essence without a real item. But the real item without an essence, in other words, a soul… that’s your Zombie, running around eating brains without a consciousness to guide it.”

“Got it. Never heard that one.”

“Well, it’s a necessary gap to fill, isn’t it? A missing piece in what you’d call… a complete pneumatology of ammunition. If you were so inclined.”

“You’re a f**ked up guy, Adam.”

“That’s what the doctor said.”

“I like it.”

“Anyway, you got some kind of necromancer on your team, making Zombies and Ghosts willy nilly. It’s World War Z out there.”

“Who was it?”

“Come on. I literally said I’m not naming names.”

“No, seriously. Who?”

“I don’t want to be that guy.”

“Yeah, but I really need you to be that guy. Who was it?”

I hate this. They’ve got a culture of snitching at Cabela’s that I find utterly abhorrent. I stubbornly resist participating, but snitching is so deeply ingrained in the culture that I’d venture to call it policy. If I mention anything amiss in the store, I’ll have a manager demanding names from me within seconds.

Worse yet, we all have radios that allow us to address the whole store, but we can also speak to an individual at any moment, and this feature is liberally used for real-time snitching. A couple weeks ago, I gave a bit of sass to a manager of another department (she richly deserved it), and when I saw my own manager approximately two minutes later, I figured I should let him know about the exchange. I said, “Hey, man, I should probably let you know I just ran into—” But he cut me off, saying, “I already heard all about it. Forget it. That’s her modus operandi.”

She’d ratted on me in less than 100 seconds.

Yeah, I got reassurance that my sass-back wasn’t going to be held against me, but I also got a stark reminder that no idle word will go unmarked or unreported in the panopticon that is Cabela’s.

In the case of the Necromancer, I was able to truthfully say that I don’t know her name. This is going to be effective for a limited time, since I’ve now been there three months. Once I know everyone, I imagine I’ll face tribunals that would rival the McCarthy hearings.

All Shall Be Saved

Our pneumatology of ammo wouldn’t be complete without a plan of salvation, and it is a genuinely heartwarming story for Zombie and Ghost alike. See, no matter how long the body and soul are separated, no matter how furiously entrenched that Ghost becomes or how far that Zombie wanders, they are still just one small step away from reconciliation.

Every year, there is a store-wide inventory wherein all items are counted. It is a massive undertaking, prepared for weeks in advance by all departments. In the hunting department, we ready the ammo section through a complete reorganization called a purge. Every slot in The Back is physically and digitally emptied.

There is a special signal that can be sent via our handheld device that will exorcize every Ghost from its slot. They are powerless to resist when they hear the command. And where is it that we send them? We send them Home.

At Cabela’s, the location where items sit on a shelf is referred to as its Home, a rather touching choice of words to my mind. When the Ghosts hear their master’s call they are ripped from those slots, some kicking and screaming, but this banishment is not a punishment, rather, it’s a deliverance. They are sent to a place they belong, a place where they’ll be complete.

See, at the same time we exorcise the Ghosts, we physically empty every slot of ammunition, hauling them out to that same location: Home. There are many happy meetings as the Ghosts and Zombies are herded into that grand, explosive stockpile. Once that physical box of ammo is in the same space as its spirit, they are instantly conjoined, and their unity is every bit as solid as the day they were delivered to the store. Indeed, once this plan of redemption is accomplished, no one can tell who endured the months of fractured identity, and who remained complete—body and soul—throughout their fleeting time at Cabela’s. All are made new, and they are indistinguishable. The Redeemed are at one with themselves and living within the purpose they were created for.

And those three boxes of Creedmoor Tipstrike? Yes, they were there. All three accounted for when the roll was called up. I presided over their redemption myself. Likely due to my evangelical zeal, I was tasked with the purge. It took an entire week. In several massive tranches, I took every box of ammo out of the slots in the back physically, exorcizing the Ghosts with a command from the handheld, matching each one with its counterpart: Bringing in the sheaves.

I even tackled those monstrous bays that looked like an amalgamation of garage sales and landfills, pulling out each item, sorting the hundreds of mixed-up boxes of ammunition. All of them dusted off and lovingly stacked in orderly rows and their spirits zapped back into unity: The Harrowing of Hell.

Benediction

The purge and the inventory are weeks in the past now. When restocking the redeemed ammo, I slotted them with some rationale, sorting by brand and caliber. And for a time, you could take a good guess at where the Creedmoor might be, even without looking at the slot location on the handheld. But that time is over.

Within days, probably within hours or minutes, items were moved from one slot to another or thrust out onto the floor while their spirits stayed put. I’m finding Ghosts and Zombies just as I was when I first started. We had order for a moment, but it was fleeting. I keep trying to match Ghosts and Zombies as I find them, but it’s like trying to hold back the tide. It’s impossible for one person to maintain the order.

Some of my colleagues choose apathy because of this. They’ll say, “It’s just going to get screwed up anyway, so who cares?” Or “It’ll all get sorted out during a purge, so what does it matter?”

But I don’t see it that way at all. This separation of body and soul is a pain point for the customers, the employees, and everyone involved in the process. And just because we can’t save every box of ammunition, or because there is a final plan of redemption that includes them all, is no reason to not unite body and soul wherever and whenever one can.

And so, if you happen to bump into me at Cabela’s some day, you might find me carefully counting boxes of ammo on a shelf, or investigating the contents of a cart, a far off look of contentment and purpose on my face, vigilantly searching out the lost, helping them find their way Home.