The Bloodiest Black Friday

Warning: Contains scenes of death and violence (and references to them) that some readers may find disturbing or upsetting.

People have always thought that being a mall security guard is one of the easiest jobs in the world. One where you just have to stand round and look intimidating to share off shoplifters or have to break up alcohol-fuelled teenage fist-fights in the multi-storey parking lot after hours.

It was also what I’d been expecting, being a police officer with a trick knee because he caught a bullet there once when responding to a callout.

I’d seen some pretty horrible things during my time on the force. Entire families burnt alive in arson attacks and their charred corpses sitting upright on the couch; ex-gang members being given a “Columbian necktie” for turning informant or being willing to testify; watching people bleed out in-front of me helplessly with a number of their body parts detached.

But nothing could have prepared me for the chaos that was Black Friday.

The start of it looked like something from one of those zombie apocalypse movies they show on the movie channel late at night: crowds stampeding through the automatic doors as soon as the timer hit 8:00AM. Moving like a herd of buffalo through the bottleneck where the weak were left to be trampled to death or crushed against the decorative glass until cracking point.

The staff in the stores didn’t stand much of a chance, neither did the unfortunate cleaner who had decided to empty out one of the garbage cans at the last second.

Shoppers grabbed and groped at every item that sat on a shelf or display that they could lay their hands on. Multiples of the same item, items they didn’t need and even the items they didn’t know the function of—if it was on the shelf, they wanted it. Badly.

The checkout workers scanned as quickly as they could manage, forgoing any chance to upsell case and speakers and warranty plans, weekly quotas be damned!

I sat and watched the whole thing from the security control room, up by the administration offices, as far away from the stores as you could get, and armed from floor to ceiling. You could’ve set off a bomb and there’d barely be a ripple in my coffee cup.

This, of course, meant I could do nothing but watch as one of the young retail workers furiously scanned through items with sweat dripping off of him. Then he clutched onto his chest and fell onto the counter, dead.

Somebody in the middle of the fray grabbed the lanyard from off his neck and used it to open the back storeroom, resulting in people pushing through and starting to grab the extra stock that hadn’t even had the chance to be put out on the shelves yet.

That was just one of the tech stores. The clothing stores weren’t too peaceful either. The cardigans, sweaters and scarves that made up the “2018 Fall/Winter Collection” being stretched, pulled and torn every which way.

Close friends who had joined together to fight through the chaos in the name of one-day special offers á la Mad Max: Fury Road style being betrayed in the swift movement of a stiletto heel being jammed into the brain via an eyeball.

In one of the sportswear stores, people knocked the mannequins aside to grab the decorative cinder-blocks (whoever thought of leaving those out on Black Friday, of all days, was an idiot) threw them across the mall and into glass window display of the curtain and bedding store; shattering the window and taking down a number of other shoppers in the meantime.

They practically crawled in on their hands and knees, cutting themselves to ribbons, as they looked to get their Google Homes and bakewell tart-scented Yankee Candles.

Fortunately, the food court had been left relatively untouched. Emergency paramedics set up an emergency hospital, having to walk in carrying a white flag with the red cross on it to get through to the injured and dying and to carry them out of the battlefield again on a stretcher.

Some idiot tried to grab one of the tables out of McDonald’s and made a go for one of the security guards. The guard broke out his baton and managed to kill him with one good strike against the skull.

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An hour later, and silence had fallen across the battlefield.

Those who had survived had been and gone, having cleared out the most of the stores’ items and quite possibly smashing all of the items to smithereens in the process.

Those who didn’t survive the attack from the National Guard (who had arrived to provide emergency reinforcements, order of the governor) lay on the floor, many near-death and ready to bleed out, while others had died long ago.

Causes of death were varied, according to all the news reports. And no particular cause of death seemed to be the same. Some were caught in the cross-fire of battles between shoppers, some were crushed to death where they lay. At least one person was accidentally hanged when their scarf got caught in the upward-going escalator.

Many good people were lost that day. Derek, one of the younger guards and the guy who put himself on corpse duty, got run over by a lady on a mobility scooter. I don’t think they found his other leg yet.

Clarice, one of the cleaners, ended up losing her arm and bleeding out from where she got it caught in a door that was forced open.

There’d been a large number of fatalities in the grocery store, where the shelves got knocked over in the fray and crushed everyone standing in the aisles before crushing the checkout queue and the work experience student.

In-fact, I think it would be much easier to count the survivors (which you could do on both hands if you were missing a couple of fingers) than it would be to count the dead.

But if you think that’s bad, you should see the Christmas rush…

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Based on this   Reddit writing prompt