Chapter Two

Chapter Two

The first customer whirled around the corner, her body low to the ground like a hunting tigress. Her sunglasses gleamed in the fluorescent lights, her face framed by an inverted bob haircut. She paused for a moment, then her eyes locked onto Justin and the others and she bared her teeth.

“Hold your positions!” Richard commanded them, though Justin couldn’t help but notice the slight quaver in his voice.

The customer pounced, sprinting across the glossy tiled floor straight to the closest employee…

Which happened to be Justin.

“BLAH BLAH!” she roared into his face.

At that moment, Justin wanted nothing more than to turn tail and run. Instead, fighting every instinct in his body, he forced his mouth into a rictus grin—the closest thing he could get to a smile—and said, “I’m sorry, ma’am. Could you repeat that, please?”

The customer grabbed him by the neck and shoved him backwards into the shelf, spilling Janitor Jim action figures all over the floor. “WHERE IS BONNIE BLAH BLAH?”

Something clicked in Justin’s brain, and suddenly all the material he’d spent the last two months studying came flooding back to him. The new Bonnie Blah Blah doll, one of the hottest new toys to come out just in time for Christmas. She was three and a half feet tall, weighed close to a hundred pounds, and contained a voice box that could say twenty different phrases at one hundred forty decibels.

The customer leaned in close, like she was about to bite Justin’s throat out. “WHERRRRRRRE?”

“Aisle seventeen, halfway down, bottom shelf!” he said as quickly as he could.

With an animalistic snarl, the customer cast Justin aside and sprinted toward aisle seventeen.

“You okay?” Richard asked, helping him to his feet.

“I- I think so,” he answered, rubbing his neck.

“Good.” Richard looked in the direction of the doors as the floor began to shake beneath their feet. “Because that was just the beginning.”

Justin’s eyes widened in horror as a veritable flood of customers came surging around the corner. It was like a dam had broken, unleashing the river it contained onto the peaceful, unsuspecting valley below. Some of the customers branched out into other sections of the store, but a truly disturbing number of them kept barreling straight for the toy department.

“Brace yourselves!” Richard yelled just as the tide crashed into them.

The sheer force of the stampede was almost enough to knock Justin on his backside. He grabbed hold of the nearby shelf to keep himself upright, even as dozens of strangers streamed past him. Not a single one of them spared him even a passing glance, and he knew that wouldn’t change even if he were on the floor. The promise of heavily discounted goods had turned these men and women into monsters, and they would happily trample him until he was two dimensional if it meant getting their claws on whatever shiny thing had caught their eye.

“YOU!”

A hand reached out of the river of bodies, and like a siren from the sailor’s legends of old, it grabbed Justin’s vest and pulled him in before he could react. Justin suddenly found himself face to face with a balding, middle aged man. His eyes bulged manically behind his glasses, and though he was thin and lanky, Justin didn’t doubt for a second that he could tear him to shreds in the blink of an eye.

Justin forced himself to smile. “Yes, sir, how can I—”

“THE MAJOR MONKEYTRON MOONBASE PLAYSET! WHERE IS IT?”

“Th- Those are on aisle fifteen!”

To his horror, the customer didn’t let him go like the first one had. Instead, he leaned over Justin, strings of drool dribbling from his mouth, and screamed, “NO! IT! ISN’T!”

Justin’s mind went blank. What did he mean the Major Monkeytron Moonbase Playset wasn’t on aisle fifteen? Of course that’s where they were! Justin had stocked them there him…self…

Oh no.

Breaking free of the customer’s grip, Justin waded through the river of people—which was finally starting to slow down now that all the aisles were clogged—until he reached aisle fifteen. What he saw made his heart drop into his stomach.

The Major Monkeytron Moonbase Playsets, tying with Bonnie Blah Blah as the hottest toy of the season, were gone.

Every. Single. One.

No fewer than twenty customers were standing there, staring at the empty shelf, but as soon as they heard Justin’s dismayed gasp, they all turned their hateful, soulless eyes on him.

“MONKEYTRONNNNN!” they howled in unison.

Justin took a step back as they advanced on him. This was it. His training had failed him. He was going to die here, less than five minutes into Black Friday, and there was nothing he could do about—

A strong hand grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him aside just as the horde of customers pounced. Justin stared, white faced, at the spot where he had just been standing. They had nearly devoured him like a swarm of piranha!

“Justin!”

Someone slapped his cheek, and he shook himself out of his stupor. Turning, he saw Pam, the store manager, standing beside him.

“Stay with me, stocker!” she snapped. “There’s another pallet of Monkeytron Playsets in the back. Grab a pallet jack and get them out here!”

Justin turned frightened eyes on the customers, who were gathering themselves for another attack. “But what about—”

“I’ll hold them off, but you have to go! Now!”

Still feeling short of breath, Justin managed to nod, and began shoving his way toward the back as politely as he could. Greedy hands clawed at him from every angle, demanding voices shouted until his ears rang, but he ignored all of them. Right then, the bright red and white Employees Only sign looked like the most beautiful thing in the world. Freedom was so close he could almost taste it!

With one last burst of strength, he broke free of the customers’ grasp, pushed open the black double doors, and fell to the floor. The cold, hard, but blessedly empty floor.

Come on, come on, he urged himself. Pam, Richard, and Andrew are still out there. Move!

Justin forced himself back to his feet and scanned the back room as quickly as he could. Pallets full of shrink wrapped merchandise formed a maze, but Pam had drilled him on this more times than he could count over the last two months. He just needed to stay calm, think, and—

There they were!

Grabbing a pallet jack, Justin raised the pallet up off the ground and pulled it back toward the doors.

Are you really going to go back out into that insanity? his common sense asked him.

Taking a deep breath, Justin raised one arm to push the doors open, and stepped outside. The moment he crossed the Employee’s Only boundary, the customers descended on him—or, more accurately, onto the pallet of toys. They didn’t even give him time to remove the shrink wrap, tearing into it with their bare hands like predators clawing open the carcass of their prey to rip out its innards and carry them to the checkout lines. Within seconds, the entire pallet was empty.

“Justin!” Pam’s voice cut through the clamor again. Justin spun to see her force her way through the crowd.

And she looked terrified.

“What’s wrong?” Justin asked.

She pointed toward aisle fourteen. “The Sammy-Truck shelf is empty! There are more on top of the shelves, but even with a stepladder I’m too short to reach them!”

A chill went down Justin’s back. “A st- a st- a stepladder?”

“Richard was dragged away to help in housewares, and the customers have Andrew pinned to the floor. He has seconds, if that! Only you can save him, Justin, but you have to hu—”

“Pam, I’m scared of heights!”

Pam grabbed him by his vest and shook him. “Don’t give me that malarky, stocker! I trained you better than that! Your coworker is in danger, and you’re his only hope! Now get out there and do your job!”

Feeling like he had a Bonnie Blah Blah tied to each leg, Justin shoved his way into the crowd yet again. It was slow going, but eventually he reached aisle fourteen. Just like Pam had said, there were at least twenty customers piled on top of something that was struggling fruitlessly to get free. For half a second, Justin glimpsed Andrew's face in the writhing mass of flesh and greed.

“KILL! KILL! KILL!” the customers were chanting.

The stepladder had already been set up. It was one of the rolling kinds, made to be easily moved from department to department, though how Pam had managed to get it here with the aisles clogged the way they were, was beyond Justin.

You can do this, he told himself, putting one foot on the bottom step. You can do this! Just don’t look down!

The ladder creaked and wobbled with every step he took, carrying him higher and higher. Soon he could see over the tops of the shelves themselves, the whole of Willy-Mart spread out below him. It was like he was a king looking at his kingdom from the highest tower of his castle.

A kingdom that had been overrun by bloodthirsty monsters.

Justin had assumed that the toy department was getting the worst of Black Friday’s wrath. Now, up here, he realized how naive that assumption had been. Hundreds and hundreds of people were flooding through every aisle of the store. Even the grocery aisles, where nothing was on sale, were being pillaged for every can of lima beans and bag of corn chips they could yield. It was like watching the end of the world.

Suddenly, the stepladder shook wildly beneath him, and Justin had to grab the railing to keep from being flung over the side. He looked down to see a wild-eyed customer glaring back up at him.

“SAMMY-TRUCK!” she screeched.

“Y- Yes, ma’am!” Justin yelled, grabbing one of the smiling, plastic semi-trucks off the top of the shelf. “I’ve got them right here! If you’ll please just let my coworker go, I’d be happy to assist—”

“SAAAAAAMMMMMYYYYYYYYY!”

She began to rock the ladder again, and to Justin’s horror, others began to join her.

“SAMMY-TRUCK! SAMMY-TRUCK!” they chanted in unison, like a cult summoning their dark overlord.

“Stop! Please!” Justin begged them, too overcome with vertigo to move. “If you’ll just let me down, I’ll give you the toy!”

But they didn’t listen. Overcome by the carnal need for plastic semi-trucks at bargain prices, they continued to shake the stepladder, until…

For a split second that felt like an eternity, Justin became weightless. Then he landed hard on his back on top of the scuffed tile floor. Pain lanced up and down his spine. He opened his eyes, and they immediately widened when he saw the Sammy-Truck plummeting straight toward him, like a real semi-truck careening down the highway, only with a cheerful grin on its radiator. Justin cried out and threw his hands over his face, waiting for the fatal impact.

Only it never came.

He opened his eyes, but the rogue Sammy-Truck was nowhere to be seen. It was as if a Christmas angel had plucked it out of midair to save Justin’s—a wail louder than a hundred firetrucks rang through aisle fourteen. Justin spun around to look, fearing the worst for Andrew. But what he saw was so much worse.The Sammy-Truck hadn’t disappeared.

It just hadn’t landed on Justin.

The customer who had started shaking the ladder was clutching her forehead with one hand, where an angry red bump was already forming between her fingers. Her other hand was clutching the offending Sammy-Truck.

“Ma’am!” Justin yelped, springing to his feet. “I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to—”

“I WANT…”

Justin’s words died in his mouth.

“TO TALK…”

“Please, no,” he whispered, life flashing before his eyes. “Anything but that!”

“TO YOUR MANAGER!”

As if by magic, the customers parted to reveal Pam standing at the end of the aisle. Her face was pale, her lips pinched. Justin looked at her, then at the customer, then back at her. Surely she wouldn’t do this. Pam was a good boss. She must have seen the customers shaking the ladder! She would know that this wasn’t his fault!

One look at her face told him otherwise. On any other day of the year, Pam would have gladly stood up for her employee. But today was Black Friday. A single display of weakness, and these customers would devour them both alive.

“Ma’am, you can have that toy for free,” she said numbly. Then, refusing to meet his eyes, she added, “Justin, leave your vest in my office.”

“No,” Justin whispered, terror clawing at his heart. “Please!”

“You’re fired.”