Lara, Kyle, and I make our way carefully through downtown, where despite VC’s prohibition on sleeping in the streets, the sidewalks are filled with sleeping bags and tents. People are desperate to be first in line to grab the best deals.
Several VC soldiers head over, and I worry we’re about to be plucked until I see a soldier help an old lady to open a folding chair. He tells her, “Have a nice Black Friday, ma’am.” Kyle’s phone chimes, and she shows me a text message from Vanguard: ATTN SOLDIERS. Remember to SMILE today and be as helpful as possible. -VC MGMT.
Soldiers are marching single file down the sidewalks, and it hits me that today is Vanguard’s time to justify all their bullshit. They couldn’t heal the world, but they’ve helped people stay drugged out on mindless distractions.
“Let’s keep going before VC cannons start shooting Walmart coupons,” I mutter.
It’s 11:10 p.m. when we get to the mart. There’s a line of people outside the front doors. “Could one of these folks be a horseman?” I ask Lara, who’s in my backpack.
“Unlikely,” she replies. “Look at how anxious they are. These people came to shop.”
“Right,” I mutter. “So we should be on the lookout for anyone who isn’t shopping or behaving like a shopper.” Good news, since I’m familiar with almost every animal found in the safari known as Retail.
We head to the rear staff entrance and use it to enter the back room. Kyle goes to the VC inventory room to get a new uniform and a flamethrower, while I head to a quiet corner with discarded boxes. I find an empty eight-inch square box, use my fingers to poke a small hole in the front, then slip the Chipmunk flashlight inside. I line up the bulb with the hole.
After that, I take off my backpack and pull out Lara.
“What’s the box for?” Lara whispers.
“Discreet portable scanner,” I reply, holding the small box under my left arm and Lara in my right. “Now, time to get you set up. Before someone sees us.”
I hurry to the aisles and carefully toss Lara up onto the top of the toy aisle, where she can hide amid a display of plush animals. I’m alone here, so I call up to her, “Can you see the whole store?”
“Sort of,” she replies.
Good enough. Kyle and I will check in with her every few minutes, and I’m guessing there’ll be so much chaos that no one’s going to notice us talking to a plushie.
When I return to the back room, Kyle beckons me away from the nearby staff and over to the moldy storeroom from the other day.
Once we’re inside, door closed, Kyle looks at the box and says, “Good thinking.” She pulls out a VC walkie-talkie—a small three-inch unit, just like the one clipped to her vest shoulder pad. She pins this on the inside of my work vest and says, “This comm is linked to mine. Press the top button to talk, the bottom to receive. It’ll beep when one of us comms the other.”
Kyle puts a gun in my free hand.
I flinch. “Seriously? I’ve never—”
“Don’t worry. It’s easy.” Kyle shows me how to turn off the gun’s safety mechanism, then how to hold it, and says, “Remember, don’t yank on the trigger. Squeeze it.”
I nod and shove the gun into my pants pocket. The weight of it is hard to ignore.
After a long pause, Kyle says, “Anything you wanna say before shit gets crazy?”
I once saw a VC soldier make the sign of the cross before entering this place. I’m not religious, but right now I wish I had a prayer to say. But instead, what pops into my head is what Gutierrez told me a VC recruiter said at our graduation:
“ ‘What more can school teach you? You know as much about survival in a broken world as any adult. You know shit all.’ ”
“You remembered that?” Kyle asks.
Instead of explaining, I tell her, “I get it now. We don’t need anyone to teach us a damn thing. We’re learning about the world in the only way that matters—by being in it. That’s why we do know shit. About survival. About laughing through all the crap. About living.” I step closer. “We fucking got this.”
Kyle leans forward to kiss me.
When we pull away, she says, “Let’s do this.”
We head into the back room again, just in time to see clerks gathering in the loading zone. Kyle gets called away to join a nearby group of guards; Gully catches sight of me and waves me over. He gestures for us to squish in closer and says, “Okay! Listen up, turds! Black Friday’s about to begin, and I expect you all to be on your best fucking behavior. And FYI, I’ve locked up the back exit . . . so don’t even think about sneaking off early.”
It’s 11:58 p.m. The mart doors are locked.
Hundreds of shoppers are massed outside the store, cheeks pressed to the glass, and I’m reminded that some of the worst demons don’t have fangs or claws, but loyalty cards.
Gully calls out, “Activate the sliding doors and roll out the red carpet! It’s go time!”
With the flick of a switch, the store opens and an ocean of humanity spills through the entrance.
“Here we go,” I tell Kyle via our comm.
Shoppers crush past, clutching gaming consoles as though the boxes were life preservers. People carry flat-screen TVs above their heads with a strength I’m sure they didn’t know they had until they saw the sale price.
I climb up a wheelable ladder to get a better view of the action. I spy butt cracks galore as people bend down to grab stuff off shelves. The metal trough of DVDs—which I thought was bolted to the ground—is moving amid the crowd like a barge.
A dozen feet away, two girls film two grandpas fighting over a jumbo crate of Tang. (Who even wants that much Tang?) A giant of a woman grabs on to my wheeled ladder and begins pushing it toward the checkouts. “Ma’am! This isn’t for sale!”
The woman looks up, sees me, thinks for a second longer than I’d expect, then says, “I don’t want that” and wanders off.
Kyle has taken position on top of a crate near aisle four. “Jasper! Focus.”
Right. I try to look for folks who are not shopping, not jostling, not screaming, not cheering. Eventually, I realize I’m too conspicuous on the ladder, so I reach into my box and turn on the flashlight, then head down into the fray.
“You never know, Jasper,” I mumble as I hold the device in front of me and let it scan the three feet space ahead. I might get lucky and pick up a signal. With that, I step farther into the crowd. And . . .
Big mistake. Shoppers rush at me with ridiculous questions. “Does that forty percent discount on pet food apply to people food?” “Where is aisle seven?” (Uh, between aisles six and eight.) “Do I have enough VC credits to afford this new stereo?” I try my best to answer while I push through the crowd, trying to find anyone who might be giving off Horseman of the Apocalypse vibes.
The crowd is starting to seem like a Where’s Waldo? book but instead of Waldo, I’m looking, you know, for heralds of doom. “Anything, Lara?” I call up to the cat once I’m in the toy aisle.
“Nup!” she replies, shouting to be heard over the din. “Nothing so far.”
In the security mirror, I catch a glimpse of the clothing section, where some people are trying on clothes right there on the spot. They’re literally getting naked in public to see if a ten-dollar pair of jeans fits.
“Kyle, I don’t see anyone who’s not shopping,” I whisper into my comm.
Kyle slips away from her area of duty to tell me in person, “It already feels like the end of the world out here.”
This place would definitely top our list of best worst places.
Standing by the back room entrance, Gully peers around the store, clapping. I remember the Black Friday Bonus Bonanza challenge that he’s hell-bent on winning.
“Stay focused. Things could turn at any moment,” says Kyle.
The crowd parts nearby. A flash of silver appears as the wheelable ladder I was using earlier comes careening toward us. I push Kyle safely out of the way. My eyes widen when I realize a woman is pushing this ladder through the store like a plow driver to carve a path to the checkouts. “Ma’am!”
A man bumps against me and growls, “Watch it, buddy!”
Before I can say anything, he shoves me backward, ready to hit me until another man stumbles across his path and draws his attention. Only then do I look around to find people yelling, pushing, and shoving. The hairs on my neck stand on end as invisible lightning seems to flicker through the store.
Kyle hurries to my side and says, “What’s going on?! Has everyone lost their mind?”
We have to dart aside to avoid getting sucked into a melee. Just to our right, a ten-year-old kid bites a woman’s arm.
Lara hops off the toy aisle and onto my shoulders, but I don’t bother telling her to stay hidden. “Whoa! Horsemen!” she hisses.
“They’re all horsemen?”
My Hell Sniffer isn’t glowing.
“No, no, no,” Lara mutters. “These folks are all human! But I think they’ve been affected by a horseman’s power! Like, it’s put them all into some kind of berserker mode.”
Kyle and I duck into the freezer section, where we have space to avoid shoppers.
Kyle says, “There’s too much chaos. It’s the perfect cover.”
“But how could a horseman have infected them all?” I ask Lara.
“They would’ve needed to physically touch all these people.”
A fight spills into the freezer aisle, and before long, people here are whacking each other with frozen food—fish fingers and calamari are flying everywhere. Kyle and I barely make it safely to the garden section. Forget the apocalypse. How will we survive this?
“Stop! Stop! Stop!” a familiar voice yells. “Why are you doing this to me?!”
To our right, we see Pete huddling in a corner as an old woman tries to bludgeon him with her walker. I rush over, put my box down in order to grab the walker away from her, and toss it aside. The woman stares hard at me, screams in anger, and then rushes after her walker.
“Pete?!” Kyle and I mutter.
We help him up before anyone else can try to beat him to death. “The photo booth!” Kyle calls out. “It’s our best bet.” We make a beeline to the front. On the way, a man tries to grab Kyle’s flamethrower, but she doesn’t slow down. Nope. She just swings her elbow at his Adam’s apple and leaves him writhing on the floor, clutching his throat.
I have never been more in love.
We throw ourselves into the booth, slide the velvet curtain closed, then hold our breaths as we peer through the gap.
My gaze goes to Pete, who is still shaking. He’s lost his Chipmunk feet and cowl, and his green onesie body is stained with grime. “How did—?!” I start to ask. “We thought we’d never see you again!”
Pete tells us he was being transported to a VC facility when “a monster shaped like a sliced avocado slammed into the van. It just split it right open.” He shows us scratches all over his arms. “But I got out . . . and . . . man, it’s crazy out there on the street! Demons are everywhere, dudes!”
Kyle and I peer out into the store as people keep fighting. Lara climbs onto Pete’s lap and says, “It’s not exactly a slumber party in here either.”
Pete pats her on the head. “I know. But I’m here to help.”
“We could use an extra set of eyes to help ID horsemen,” I tell him, but before I can say more, I notice that my hands are empty. “Crap! I left the box with the Hell Sniffer outside!” My gaze goes to the space beyond, and it’s nowhere to be seen. “Shit!”
Before I can think of heading out, Kyle says, “No! We can’t just barge out now, Jas. We’ll be trampled.” She looks at all of us. “First things first. We can’t do anything until we get the shoppers under control. Ideas?”
“We need to shock them,” says Lara. “Physically. Just totally shock them.”
Kyle thinks about it and asks, “What about a cold shower?”
“Cold water?” says Lara, shrugging. “One hundred and twenty volts to their nuts would be better, but sure, maybe cold water could work.”
I realize Kyle is peering out of the booth at the ceiling.
“The sprinklers?” I realize. “We can set those off easy.”
“Good. While you’re doing that, I’ll go to the mart’s mini VC office and see if the CCTV cams can show us who touched all these people.” Kyle looks to Pete. “Once people calm down, can you scan the store for anyone acting abnormal?”
Pete nods. “Sure. Once more into the fire, right?” But his hands are clenched tightly around the velvet curtain edge.
“Take Lara with you,” I tell him as I hand him the cat.
Kyle holds out a hand, and the rest of us place a palm atop hers.
“Let’s do this,” I tell them. “Hashtag TeamDoomie!”
We split off in our different directions. I rush to the far right, ducking to avoid a folding chair that someone’s thrown into the crowd for whatever reason, and find myself in front of a wall-mounted box that holds the sprinkler controls.
I punch the glass window of the sprinkler box and yank down the pull tab.
Klaxons fill the air. I stumble away as the sprinklers bloom jets of water. Cold showers rain down on everyone. Shoppers stop brawling and stare up at the ceiling. The evil energy of this place almost instantly evaporates. People lower their fists and Saran Wrap roll batons and look like they’ve just awoken after sleepwalking.
I rush toward the back room, ready to rendezvous with Kyle in the mini VC office, but as I move beyond the checkouts, I spot Gully clenching a pool noodle, gritting his teeth. He looks set to murder whoever fucked his chances at nabbing that bonus. Except it dawns on me that he’s not looking at all the soggy products and packaging, but rather, the folks who’ve calmed down.
“What a waste of time and energy,” he mutters.
A chill passes over me.
Gully’s a fucking horseman.
He catches sight of me and flinches. Somehow, I sense he knows he’s been made.
“Gully! He’s one of the four!” I shout as Gully darts off into the crowd behind him.
I race into the back room’s mini VC office. Kyle is standing alone next to a bank of cameras.
“I’ve got one!”
“Who?” she asks.
“Gully.”
Kyle blinks in surprise but doesn’t comment. “Well, look at this,” she tells me, pointing at a freeze-framed CCTV image from sometime earlier: Lieutenant Shiner standing at the mart entrance, his palm outstretched to shake everyone’s hand. “He touched everyone. He’s a fucking horseman too.”
“What do we do now?”
Kyle says, “I lost sight of Shiner in the crowd. But he’s obviously still here. These are the live feeds.” She gestures at the monitors, and we start scanning for our two suspects. “He’s gotta be somewhere—”
“Freeze,” a voice whispers from the shadows.
Abruptly Kyle stops in place as though someone hit PAUSE on a video of her. I turn and see Gully standing behind Kyle, his hand on the back of her neck.
Before I can react, Gully places a hand on my shoulder, and a pulse of lightning rushes through me as he says to me, “Freeze!”
I’m powerless to fight his command.