The Black Friday Massacre
The fluorescent lights flicker,
casting their sickly pallor
across marble floors still slick
with the residue of a thousand
frenzied transactions.
The doors are sealed.
Someone — capitalism itself,
maybe — has locked the cage
and swallowed the key.
“Did you hear that?”
Lisa’s voice fractures the stillness.
She’s clutching a bag of discounted electronics
like a life raft.
Her eyes scan the shadows.
“What if there are… other people here?”
“Other people?”
Greg snorts, his beard bristling.
“You mean like zombies?
Because those grannies in line
for the half-off blender —
they’d make excellent candidates.”
He laughs,
but the sound dies somewhere
near the ceiling tiles,
strangled by the weight
of what’s pressing in around them.
A low rumble rolls through the atrium.
It bounces off polished stone,
reaches them
like a warning
they’re not ready to read.
“That better not be my stomach,”
Rachel mutters.
Her designer handbag
hangs from her wrist
like a shield she knows won’t hold.
“Don’t worry,”
Greg says, mock-solemn.
“I think it’s just the sound
of capitalism weeping.”
He means it as a joke.
Nobody laughs.
The joke hangs there anyway,
sick and true.
Night devours the windows.
Shadows stretch across storefronts
filled with merchandise
that promised joy
and delivered something else entirely.
The shelves stand like witnesses —
colorful packaging,
smiling faces on boxes,
all of it obscene now.
Their breathing quickens.
Eyes meet eyes,
and something shifts —
a calculation,
a measuring
of who has what
and who wants it more.
Greed isn’t hidden anymore.
It’s just
lying there
in the open,
as naked as the fluorescent glow.
“We need to stick together,”
Lisa whispers.
“If we start turning on each other…”
She doesn’t finish.
She doesn’t have to.
“Turn on each other?”
Greg’s laugh is edged with hysteria.
“I only came for that TV.
I’m not dying
for a two-hundred-dollar discount.”
His eyes drift to the door.
Sealed.
Gilded cage.
He hadn’t noticed before
how beautiful the bars were —
how perfectly they caught the light.
An hour passes.
Then another.
Panic seeps in like poison,
slow and certain.
“What’s next?”
Rachel’s fingers drum against her thigh.
“Are we going to make alliances?”
“Great idea,”
Greg deadpans.
“I’ll be team leader.
First order of business —
snacks and weapons.”
He gestures toward
a display of kitchen gadgets.
The knives gleam.
Suddenly they’re not cutlery.
Suddenly they’re something else entirely.
“Stay calm,”
Lisa insists,
but her voice betrays her.
“We could… I don’t know…
have a scavenger hunt?”
“A scavenger hunt?”
Greg stares at her.
“What do you think this is?
Survivor: Black Friday Edition?
We’re fighting for our lives here.”
But something strange happens
in the spaces between his words —
a camaraderie,
wrong-footed and feral,
born from shared desperation.
Their resolve hardens.
What was competition
becomes something older.
Primal.
Hungry.
The air thickens with dark humor
as they push through aisles
littered with abandoned treasure —
electronics no one has time for
when there’s something better
just around the corner.
A mannequin watches from its alcove,
plastic smile twisted
into something that looks
almost like it knows
what’s coming next.
Then —
movement.
A shopper lunges
for a cache of toys,
bright boxes promising laughter,
and the others follow
without thinking,
a chaotic surge,
a human mosh pit
collapsing into itself.
“I swear,”
Rachel snarls at an old woman
who’s shoved past her elbow,
“if you touch my dollhouse,
I’ll drop you faster than
you can say Black Friday.”
The old woman retaliates —
purse swinging,
surprisingly agile,
mouth set in a hard line.
“You think I’m scared of you?
You’re just another consumer,
lost in the abyss.”
Their laughter mingles
with shouts and curses,
echoing off vaulted ceilings,
filling the dead air
with something almost alive —
a cacophony of chaos,
of humor turned desperate,
of friendship fraying
under pressure.
They grapple.
Not just for bargains now.
For sanity.
For something to hold onto
in all this wreckage.
And in this battlefield —
absurd, fluorescent,
littered with the casualties
of wanting —
one truth settles
like dust after a collapse:
The monster was never hiding.
It came with them.
It wears their faces.
It answers to their names.