The air duct opened up above a raised loft that wrapped around the three exterior walls of the utility room. We sat, shoulder to shoulder, peering through the slits in the air vents, trying to make out as much through the darkness as we could. It wasn't much. There was no skylight overhead, no distant glow from the towers to cast things in silhouette. Beyond a faint grey haze of light coming from the utility room door that leads out into the showroom floor.
"The sun's coming up." I said.
"That's alright," Allison replied "We're almost home free."
"So what's the plan?" I asked.
"There are two ways the power would have gone out, so there are two ways we might need to restore power. Option one, the power went when Riot Mode drew too much power from the mains and triggered the breaker. In that case, it's just a matter of flipping the breakers that control the cameras so the shooting doesn't start again, and then turn the mains back on."
"And we know which breakers do that?" I asked.
Allison shrugged.
"Wells told me which breakers to pull to deactivate the cameras, but there is a non-zero chance he was lying." She looked over to me. "Arthur said I could radio him if needed, he has the maintenance manual, and scattered within those four hundred pages of technical jargon and liability waivers is the combined knowledge of which breakers do what." She looked at me. "The book weighs twenty pounds, I figured it'd be best to radio him with questions."
"Agreed," I said, still peering through the gaps.
"I don't see any movement," I was finally willing to say.
"Denise might still be on the hunt." Allison turned and shuffled towards the end of the pipe, gently removed the grate at the end, and lowered herself down to the floor with the ease and grace that comes from evenings spent lifting your entire body to the ceiling on a vertical pole.
I followed after, dropping to the floor and catching myself flatly on my feet, sending all my body weight through the floor of my pelvis in a way best described as "eye-watering"
"What was option two?" I said, as Allison turned on a flashlight and began scanning the loft for a way down.
"Option two, is that when Denise entered this room, she damaged the mains in some way, in that case, we either need to find a way to repair the mains, or bypass them and access the emergency generator. They should have tripped on when we lost power, but the fact that they didn't tell me it's possible we've only popped a breaker and not lost grid power."
"That would be nice," I said as Allison located a ladder and slid down the rungs to the floor.
Upon reaching the base, Allison moved off towards the back of the room and the breaker wall. It was covered in numbered switches, and there didn't seem to be any reasonable order to their sequence.
"This is a mess!" I said, turning on my flashlight and looking over the jumbled mess of breakers.
Allison took the radio off her hip.
"Arthur, come in, we're at the breakers."
The radio was silent for a worrying amount of time, before a different voice came over the radio.
"Oh, hi Allison!" Sam said into the radio. "Arthur's busy right now, did you need something?"
"We're at the breaker box, it looks to be intact, can you tell me which breakers power the cameras."
"Oh, sure, sure." Sam said, still holding down the talk button as he walked over to wherever the manual was sitting, after a brief exchange with someone over the availability of a chair, his voice came back loud over the speaker.
"Okay, let's see, yes, that'll be under security... here it is..."
His finger briefly lifted from the button and Allison took the initiative in the conversation.
"Keep your finger off the button when you're not talking so we can go back and forth if needed." Allison said, with no malice in her voice, or inflection of any kind, as per usual, but plenty of urgent subtext.
"Right, sorry."
He paused for a moment, finger still on the button.
"Okay, it looks like the breakers for the cameras are broken up by department." He said, "There doesn't seem to be a list, I'll have to find the numbers department by department, is there anywhere in particular you want to start?"
"No," Allison said, "Whatever you've found first."
"Okay," He said "For the cameras for apparel, disable panel 19746."
"Patterson," Allison said, "I'm going to write these down, in the meantime, find the main breaker switches, see if they tripped or not. If they’re tripped, mark the one we want to keep off, if they’re not tripped, start deactivating them."
"Okay." I said, moving past her towards the other side of the panel.
"And see if you can find any rhyme or reason to how this thing is laid out."
"Okay." I said as I walked to the far side of the panel. The mains each had their own electrical box with status lights that'd gone dark. There were two massive switches each connected to a bar. Each pair sat in various esckew positions between "On" and "Off."
"Looks like you were right." I said, "The breakers all popped."
"I guess we're in luck." She said, "Switch them all to off, just in case they didn't trip properly, it looks like some of these switches on the wall tripped, so maybe one of them was jammed.
I made my way down the line, pushing the heavy switches up, each bar was roughly large enough to fit in the palm of my hand, and a few needed both arms to push into the closed position. I was halfway down when I found something odd. A piece of metal, sitting between the two switches, held in place by tension.
"What are you?" I said, reaching out. I pulled on the metal, but it was held in place, I pulled down slightly on the breaker, and the piece came free. It was long and narrow, dusty, and broken at two ends. I looked up and behind me at the small, grey vent above the door with a massive hole in the middle.
"Allison," I said, "I think a piece of the vent got stuck in the main." I said, holding up the piece "It kept it from closing, I guess this might have been the thing that took the whole system down."
Allison blinked, then chuckled.
"It's always something small, isn't it."
I pocketed the jagged piece of metal, as a souvenir, and finally closed the breaker.
"There should be some low voltage switches on the tops of the mains, that'll give you status lights, if we're still connected to the grid, those should light up." Allison said as she wrote down another number from Sam.
I put my hand onto the box and fished around for a switch. It was a small flat toggle switch, and I pushed down on it.
In a flash, a number of small red, green, and yellow status lights lit up the board, indicating which breakers were opened, closed, and popped.
"We're on the grid," Allison said in a tone that the casual observer might not have identified as excitement, but I felt like I was starting to pick on the more subtle cues.
I smiled as I looked across the mains. I wiped the dust from the panel to the let the lights shine through. I walked along, beaming with pride at my work. I walked to the last panel, something was blocking the lights, so I reached out and brushed it aside. My fingers felt mesh fabric, and the object fluttered to the ground at my feet. I shown the flashlight down at the ground to see what it was.
It was a really stupid hat. The sort that felt very out of place inside an air conditioned store, but my blood froze and I realized I'd seen that hat before.
I swung my flashlight over to the utility room door. It was still shut, but not closed. The two metal doors were wrenched apart at the lock, and one of the two was slightly misaligned with the other.
"Allison." I said "The door's open."
Allison turned, I aimed my light at her, her face, typically fixed in an attentive glare, was starting to shift, she turned the light back to me, and her facade broke. I was staring into her flashlight, but beyond the blinding beam of light, I could see her mouth fixed into a silent scream of terror as she staggered back, and grasped for the words.
I turned.
The opposite wall of the utility closet was covered, floor to ceiling, in a gelatinous mass of sludge, inside, swaddled in a cocoon of pilfered clothing, where the employees from sporting goods.
"Oh cuss." I swore as I stepped back from the wall, "What is that!" What is this?" My voice was starting to raise.
"I..." Allison stammered, "Oh god..." She said,
"What?" I asked.
Allison spoke "when someone is running out of joy in their life, like when your mind has been rewired to flood your brain with dopamine every time you purchase something, when you become incapable of finding joy in self-actualization, there is only one thing a suburbanite can think to do to break the monotony, to try and squeeze some meaning out of that sort of meaningless, hollow existence."
"What’s that?" I said in a panic.
Allison swallowed.
"Have children."
The ooze started to shift, and the men in the cocoons started opening their hollow eyes, their mouths starting to open wider than natural.
"doooooooo" moaned one of the newly zombified workers.
"Allison," I said, "What do we do?" I urged.
"Sam!" Allison said "I need those numbers, now."
"I'm working on it." Sam said, painfully slowly.
"Patterson," Allisons said "Start activating every breaker you can, Here's the list so far of what not to turn on."
"dooooooyooooo" The zombies moaned as their arms reached up, peeling against the ooze.
I turned to the board and started flipping switches.
"Don't active 17845, 17520, or 18972." She screamed as we started flipping switches.
"doooooyooooowooooooo" Came a chorus of a dozen voices as they started falling from the wall with a wet splat.
"Sam!" Allison yelled "Run to Doctor Wells and tell him that if he doesn't give us the right breaker numbers, you'll strangle him!" Allison barked into the radio, her voice strained as panic was taking hold of us.
"Oh, yeah, sorry, that's actually what Arthur's doing right now."
"Then tell Arthur to hurry up, what's taking so long?" I yelled at the radio.
"Oh, it's just, we're having trouble finding him ever since he broke free of his restraints."
We froze. hands still on the breakers. We looked at each other, then to the pile of zombies, rising from the group, still dripping with the ooze.
"Doooo yooooo woooork heeereee?" They moaned.
"Mains! Now!" Allison roared.
I ran forward, grabbed the switches, and pushed them up into the on position. The board lit up. Fuses popped and sparked, and a red light flashed on, bathing the room in light.
Allison grabbed me by the back of the shirt and pulled me away from the hoard of zombies, my eyes still a blur from the sudden introduction of some much light. We ran through the damaged door and slammed it shut behind us. Allison took her polo off her waist and wrapped it around the door handles as the zombies began beating on the door. I reached over and grabbed the two arms of the shirt and fashioned them into a hasty square knot.
"How many of the cameras did we shut down before we ran?" I asked.
"Apparel, furniture, grocery, and food court." Allison said, still leaning against the doors as the zombies pounded on the steel.
"Okay," I said, "So now, how do we unlock the doors?"
"Oh, I don't think you should be worried about that." Came a twisty voice from behind me, like a dagger pressed against a femoral artery. We turned, back still to the doors.
"Now, gentleman," Came another voice, its return as welcome as a kick to the groin, "Are these associated exhibiting the Walton's Family Standard of Customer Service?"
Doctor Wells stepped forward, tablet in hand.
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