"Wells!" Allison said as the zombies slammed against the door behind us, "What are you doing?"
"It's simple, really." He said, tapping at his tablet, "When Denise broke containment and showed up here, Prendick said we'd need to contain and trap Denise." Wells gestured towards the doors as a zombie tried to reach it's hand through the gap before pulling it back as the door closed around it.
"The ability to replicate like this, we thought that Denise might be able to produce the serum we used to make her like this, but we'd never anticipated that it could be done at this scale."
"Steve!" I said, pleading towards one of the managers in their sharp uniforms and hood "Steve! He's going to kill us all, you have to stop this?"
"Speak not to me, chronic shirker of the uniform protocol."
"What's their deal?" Allison said.
"Cult of Managers, they're trying to get a religion going."
"Honestly," came the sad voice, "Now that the lights are coming on the hoods just feel silly."
"Quiet you!" Steve boomed, "Doctor Wells has shown us the path to retail nirvana!"
"Someone who isn't insane, translate." I demanded.
"Oh," Came the sad voice, "We're going to let the zombies out of that closet, kill all the associates left in the store, open the store normally for the holiday weekend rush, and let Denise and everyone inside there turn them into the perfect customers."
"Wells," Allison said, her voice level again, "Somewhere in that mind of yours, even you have to see that this is madness."
"Oh, I know," Wells said "I'm insane, these morons are all insane, but you know what else is insane? Having a Ph.D. and having to work for a middling five figures a year. It's insane to live in an apartment, alone, because I can't afford the life I was promised, that I'm owed. So I'm investing everything into Walton's World, and on Monday when it's reported that their company shattered sales records when those brainless idiots in that closet wiped out their life savings at the self-checkout, I'm going to retire. I'm going to buy a nice piece of land, in a nice untouched part of the Alaskan wilderness, and I'm going to bulldoze it flat and build a nice McMansion with a pool in the back, and I'm going to leave all of this bullshit for the flunkies like you to deal with."
"You don't think that maybe you could use your position to, I don't know, direct studies to make the world a better place?" I offered.
"And wouldn't you have issues maintaining a pool in Alaska?"
"Don't care, didn't ask." Wells said, tapping at his tablet, "Time to outsource some jobs, courtesy of the security firm of Smith and Wesson."
Wells tapped at his tablet with a smile, then frowned, looking up at the nearby cameras.
"Oh what the hell." He said.
"What?" I asked.
"Why aren't the camera's responding to my command?"
Allison and I shared a look. The breakers!
"You can control the cameras from that tablet?" Allsion asked.
"No shit." Wells said "Who do you think put the store into Riot Mode?"
He tapped again at the tablet, then grumbled in frustration, lowered the tablet, and pinched his nose.
"Screw it, Steve, slit their throats and release the customers."
Steve pulled a standard issue box cutter from his sleeve as the rest of the managers joined him in chanting "the customer's always right, the customer's always right."
Allison and I pressed ourselves against the door as the cultists chanting under the blood red lights mixed with the banging on the doors and the frustrated groans of the zombies.
A sudden burst of noise from behind the cultists made us all flinch. The doors suddenly fell back an inch as the zombies recoiled, we all ducked as another burst of pops and cracks sounded behind us. Wells spun on his heels.
"Gunfire!" Steve screamed "It's a code red!"
"Oh shit!" The twisty voice screamed as it ran for cover, "The workers have armed themselves, run for your lives!"
"This is why we shouldn't celebrate labor day!" Another manager yelled as the gunfire continued. Allison and I dropped to the floor, looking up as nothing stood between us and Wells. He scowled, but without his army between him and us, he turned and sprinted away from the scene. As he disappeared into the racks of clothing, an electric whir replaced the sound of gunfire as a badly mangled electric scooter rolled up, its basket overflowing with fireworks.
"Good morning, dearies." Maggie said, removing her red white and blue sunglasses, "Everything going well?"
"Maggie!" I said, running up and throwing my arms around here.
"Oh, I am glad to see you two as well, how are things going?"
"The closet is full of zombies, the store managers have turned against humanity, Wells is trying to create a suburbanite grey goo scenario."
"Caucasian goo?" I offered.
"You should take off your work vest." Allison said, "The security system is currently calibrated to shoot anyone wearing one."
Maggie rolled her shoulders back and let the vest fall to the ground.
"Never liked that thing much anyway."
Allison pulled up her radio and started flipping through the channels.
"North tower should be on channel..." She droned off, turned the dial and called.
"Paul, Paul are you there?"
"Allison?" Paul's voice crackled over the radio "Is the power back on? Should I shut down lock down mode?"
"You can try, but someone is using a back door to turn it against the store."
"Oh," He said, "That's bad."
"Yes," Allison said, gritting her teeth. "There's a hoard of undead employees that are trapped in the utilities room. We're trying to shut down the cameras, but we can't access the control panel while they're in there."
Silence filled the line.
"Allison?" Paul said "I can never tell if you're joking or not."
"Paul, this is real, get on the PA system and tell everyone to take off their work vests, we shut down the cameras in apparel, furniture, grocery, and food court."
"Okay..." Paul said, thinking "I'm going to send people to the emergency exits in Grocery, someone might have a backdoor, but if we act quickly, maybe we can try and evacuate some of the survivors? Maybe a little at a time?"
"That's not a bad idea actually."
"Okay," Paul said, "I'll connect with Arthur in grocery and coordinate with him."
"Okay," Allison said "We're going after Wells." Allison clicked off the radio.
"We are?" I asked.
"So long as he has that tablet, he controls most of the store, we get the tablet from him, we can end this."
"I've got you some wheels." Maggie said "he can't have gotten far, we just need to know where he's going."
"I know where he's going." I said. The others looked at me. "He's probably heading for seasonal, with the power back on, that observation hub can probably function as a control room."
"Then we're heading back to Seasonal." Allison said.
"Yeehaw, fuck the law!" Maggies said, spinning the tires with a piercing squeal while Allison and I hoped on.
"How'd you know we were in trouble?" I asked.
"I didn't," Maggie said "I was stealing fireworks when the lights came on, and I saw the managers leaving the tower, I wasn't going to pass up a chance to scare the shit out of them, now would I?"
"Maggie," I said, "I would pay money to live for five minutes in your shoes."
"I'm glad to hear that dearie," She lowered her sunglasses, "Now hold onto your ass."
The scooter took off.
"Attention Walton's World Associates and Staff, the time is now 4:30 am...er...sorry, that part is probably not important... lets see...scroll down... Uhm... I guess there isn't really a script for this... okay... so... uhm... The lights are back on, and I guess the security system is shooting anyone in a work vest, so, please remove your work vests, and start making your way, quickly and orderly, towards the emergency exits, and then...I guess. please stand by? Yeah, let's go with that, please stand by."
"Thrilling," Maggie said, ironically, "My generation had nothing to fear but fear itself, you kids get ‘please stand by’." She gunned the throttle again as we soared down the aisles, the towering, busy mess of cardboard nationalism that was seasonal was starting to come into view.
"So how are we going to deal with the zombies?" I said, yelling over the wind.
"I'm working on it." Allison said, "But we can't let them get out of the store."
"Can you kill them?" Maggie said.
"I'm guessing we're going to have to find out." Allison said.
The cart slowed as we approached the threshold of Seasonal.
"Alright." Maggie said, "This is your stop."
"You're not coming with us?" I asked.
"Those zombies are basically just hyper-suburbanites," Maggie said "They can't tell the difference between gunfire and fireworks, so I was going to drive around and use these bad boys to keep them away from the exits."
"God speed." I said.
Allison grabbed something jangly off her hip and tossed them to Maggie.
"Those are the keys Paul gave me." She said "You'll need them to unlock the overnight doors once the riot control doors unlock, the second the lights change from red to white, get as many people out as possible."
"Will do!" Maggie said "Dearie, I am so proud of you, you're so smart, capable, and confident, you remind me so much of my late husband."
"Uhm. Thanks." Allison said.
"He sounds like a great guy." I offered, trying to change the subject.
"No, not really." Maggie said "They gave him the chair when he refused to testify against the rest of the mob."
"Wait, what?" I said, taking a double take.
"Cheery bye! Try not to die!" Maggie said as she took off in the cart, firing bottle rockets into the air and screaming like a woman possessed.
"I'm choosing to take all of that as a compliment," Allison said.
“Really?” I said “I figured that’s just what you said to someone when you thought they were about to die.”
Allison shrugged.
“All the same.”
We turned back towards the displays of cheap beer, coolers roughly the side of a coffin, Fireworks the size of my chest, a display of collectible train cars modeled after the 1918-1919 US intervention in the Russian Civil War, and a wheely chair with the corpse of Dr. Prendick, still with an arrow jutting out of his face and chest.
"How are we going to reach the center without a guide?" I asked.
"We can try following the black marks the chair left." Allison said, pointing to the scuff marks on the floor, "if those can't get us into the middle, we can drop those collectible trains onto the path at intersections to mark where we've already been."
I reached over and grabbed a handful of the die cast toys and started shoving them into my pockets.
"What are we going to do when we reach Wells?" I asked.
"Get the tablet from him." She said as we hastened into the aisles.
"I doubt he'll just hand it over."
Allison punctuated my statement by slamming her cane into the ground.
"I'm counting on it."
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