The Walmart in our hometown had descended into chaos during the last Black Friday sale, so my friend Sasha and I decided to head out to a more remote store for this go-around. We had stuck a pin in Google Maps and settled on somewhere called North Lamont. The place looked to house only a couple hundred people, but it still had a supercenter resting at the edge of town.
We were driving there separately. It was only supposed to be half an hour away, but Google Maps was giving me a runaround and I had been on the road for far longer now. Sweating, I stared at the clock above the speedometer that now informed me I was twenty minutes past opening time. My phone again rerouted me into another U-turn. At this, I finally snapped and shut it off, deciding that I would have better luck just looking for a store.
After another fifteen minutes on the highway, I saw a sign standing high above the tree line to my left, boasting the blue logo I was looking for. It was somewhat faded, with some of the paint peeling away and revealing the rust-stained metal below, but I made the turn on the exit anyway. An overhead sign informed me that I was turning into the township of Victoria Hall.
The town seemed ordinary in every way. There was light traffic ahead of me, mostly SUVs and pickup trucks, and most of them following the signs to the Walmart like I was. I passed streets filled with typical suburban homes, nearly all well-maintained, and drove through a small main street of brick shops. The only thing missing, as I later realized, was any type of church.
The Walmart wasn’t far from the exit, and it looked nearly identical to the one in my hometown, but didn’t they all look practically the same? More importantly, the parking lot was nearly empty. I parked near the entrance and walked through the automatic doors, feeling a rush of heat as I left the chilled morning air behind. There were no staff that I could see from the entrance, but I could hear the swiveling of cart wheels through the aisles.
I hadn’t remembered to grab a cart from the corrals outside, but there was one standing abandoned in a nearby aisle with a single TV box loaded inside. I dumped it on the floor, staring over my shoulders for the person who might have been using it, and when they didn’t show up, I wheeled the cart off down the aisle.
I saw some other shoppers as I started to look through the offers. They were mostly alone, although there was one man who had a child-carrier strapped to his back with a baby inside. They paid little attention to me as they rushed about to load up their carts, although a man wearing a grey winter coat swore at me when I bumped into him.
There was a toaster on sale for thirty dollars. I tossed it into the cart and pushed it forward, but one of the wheels swiveled and became locked in the wrong direction. Frustrated, I kicked at it hard. That was when things started to go wrong.
My foot smashed straight through the wheel, and for an instant it wasn’t a wheel at all, but some sort of organic growth, like a bloated zit, leaking a dark red fluid out of the hole I had made in its side. Like a zit - or like one of those balls of spider eggs you can find in the woods. I blinked and it was gone, returned to hard plastic and now facing the right way, but I felt a chill rush up my spine.
I fumbled for my phone and called Sasha, deciding that now was a good time to check in with how she was doing. She answered right away and I could tell from the background noise that she was still driving.
“Finally. Where are you?”
“I couldn’t find it. I turned off into - eh - Victoria Hall.”
“Okay,” she replied. “I’ll be there soon.”
“How far out are you? The store here - ”
“Yeah, I can stop by Dunkin’s on the way. What do you want there?”
I had that feeling of waving back to a stranger only to see that they were addressing someone behind you.
“Sasha, can you hear me? Is my connection bad?”
“Got it,” she said. “Maple donuts coming right up.”
“Sasha! Wait - don’t hang up! Can you hear me?”
“Alright, Greg, talk to you soon.”
The call ended and the phone rang in my ear. I stared at it in bewilderment. Could she have possibly misheard everything I was saying?
It wasn’t a logical conclusion, but the feeling of the misinterpreted wave was stronger than ever, and I somehow knew that she had been talking to someone else on the line. Someone that sounded exactly like me.
I started to push my cart back toward the entrance. Something was wrong in this place. I wasn’t in the mood to stick around and watch it escalate. The store didn’t support this decision. I walked back to where I was certain that the exit had been before, but there were only aisles and aisles of discounted goods and rushing shoppers.
The wheel reverted back to the organic lump and the cart abruptly stopped, sending me tumbling into a stack of newspapers at the end of the aisle. I grabbed one as I struggled to my feet. The articles were composed of only the word ‘help’, repeating over and over, the four letters sometimes coming out of order as if someone were frantically typing it on a keyboard. The pictures were far worse. They portrayed the inside of the newsroom, with the same logo plastered over the desk. If that was the writer of the paper sitting behind it, then the hand to type with was about all that he had left. Everything else lay pooled across the surface of the table.
I threw it away and started running blindly down the aisles. I passed a row of flat-screen TVs that had an inky current moving behind the glass, like a layer of roiling tar. One of them had cracked and was leaking the substance onto the floor. It was winding around the leg of a shopper that seemed entirely oblivious. I shouted at her as I ran past but she didn’t seem to hear me.
I collided with the man in the grey winter jacket again, and as I backed away, I saw that his legs were stained with blood up to the knees. I twisted around and saw another shopper go by with blood dripping off of their hands and smeared across their face. Everyone I saw bore signs of gore, some caused by scratches carved into their own skin, but most appearing to come from someone else. I felt something warm pool around my own ankles and glanced down to find my jeans stained red.
It was then that a hand fell on my shoulder and I first saw an employee. She smiled at me, a tall, blonde woman, around thirty, with a name tag reading ‘Melissa’. I saw a photograph of her with two young children sticking out of her front pocket.
“Can I help you?” she asked, putting on an act of cheerfulness although she was clearly very tired.
“Where’s the exit?” I shouted. “You’ve got to let me out!”
She stared at me, and in a moment she changed just like the wheel of the cart had. Her entire body deformed and broke, flattened out like roadkill, with the red imprints of shoe-marks across her skin. Bits of her broke away and fell to the floor as she spoke.
“Do you remember me?”
I screamed and started to sprint away, but she was always a foot in front of me, gliding along and dripping over the floor.
I did remember her. She was from the Walmart in my hometown. I had rushed in with the mob as soon as the doors opened. I had felt something soft break under my feet as the crushing force of humanity pushed me forward, and I had looked down to see a face crushed by the stampede of rushing feet.
Her bloodied name tag had been caught in the laces of my sneakers. I had thrown it away.
I turned a corner and was finally in front of the glass entrance doors, but what I saw outside chilled me to a stop. There was a gathering mob of people, although calling them that was generous. The figures moved like ravenous animals, their eyes horribly wide and empty. A few were rushing forward on all fours, leaving bloodied streaks across the pavement as the skin of their palms burst open.
They were headed straight for the store, and I saw a few more employees circle around, pushing forward the other shoppers that I had seen in the store. The man in the grey jacket was thrown directly beside me, his eyes bulging with terror as he looked at the incoming swarm. The employee who had brought him was little more than a reddish pulp, and he collapsed in a gory heap by our feet.
“Now it’s your turn,” Melissa gurgled, and grinned from a face streaked with red shoe-treads.
The mob outside pushed up against the glass, the figures relentlessly crushing each other, limbs twisting and snapping under the agonizing pressure. The doors buckled but held firm, and I watched as a thirty-minute timer snapped on above the entrance.
It’s at two minutes now. This was all that I could think to do.
Never come to Victoria Hall.
One minute thirty. The man with the grey jacket is trying to run, but the remains of the former employee are binding his ankles solid to the ground.
God help us.