Directly in front of him was a large department store. The front looked clear of people. Maybe he could make it in there and lose some of the crowd in the clothes racks. He pumped his arms and kept pushing himself to keep going. Occasionally he’d feel a hand grab at his backpack and then fear would kick in and he would find a little more speed.
He was dying to turn around to see how big the crowd was and how close, but he didn’t dare lose a millisecond of advantage. The sound of pounding footsteps, kiosks being toppled and wailing as people screamed at him told him enough to just keep running.
The only thing helping him was the fact that due to the law of averages, the people who could run faster than him were somewhere back in the mass of people. If they were able to break free, god help him. All it would take would be someone to grab one ankle or just loop one arm through his damn backpack and he would trip and fall to the ground. The last thing he would ever see would be a tidal wave of people falling on top of him, tearing him to shreds with their hands and teeth.
Thank god he jogged. Thank god he’d lost that 30 pounds last year. Mitchell knew he’d have been fucked if he hadn’t been in reasonably OK shape. He’d be dead.
The entrance to the store was deserted. He ran through it and tried to pull over a rack of coats when he moved by. Only one fell to the floor. In front of him was a perfume counter. A woman behind it with too much plastic surgery and makeup looked up at Mitchell and then leaped onto the counter like a cat.
The glass countertop broke as the woman jumped into the air and tried to claw at his throat. He was already moving to the right to go around the perfume counter. She overshot and fell into a display of men’s cologne, sending hundreds of boxes into an avalanche on the floor.
Mitchell looked to his left and spotted the escalator. He skidded around the corner and ran up it. It was going down. Fuck!
Wait, this is good, he realized. Mitchell knew the secret to going the wrong way was to run up it in large steps and to not stop. It took him a half-dozen strides and he was at the top. He turned around for the first time since he left the food court.
“Holy shit!” he shouted as he saw the mob.
It wasn’t a few dozen people. It was hundreds of people all trying to surge onto the escalator. Two or three would try to step onto it and then get tripped up by the people in back of them. Those people would then try to step over the people in front of them. Other people were trying to climb over on the side rails. Fingers and hair got caught between the collapsing metal stairs, trapping them.
Mitchell watched in horror as a man in thick glasses pulled away a stump of a hand and tried to use it to climb over another person whose face was shoved between the railing and the escalator.
As much of a cluster-fuck of human carnage as it was, the sheer body count of people was adding up, and they were making progress. Mitchell pulled a display rack of glassware in front of the escalator and shoved it down onto the crowd. He watched wineglasses and brandy snifters rain down on people before the shelving collapsed in the middle of the escalator. That was when he realized the up escalator across from him was going to be bringing a deluge of people as soon as they worked their way around.
He could see people running around the bottom of the up escalator to join the mob. He had seconds to do something. From behind he felt a hand reach out at his throat and start to strangle him. Mitchell jerked his head back and bashed in his assailant’s nose. He turned to see a saleswoman topple into a rack of wallets.
Mitchell recognized her. She’d once helped him pick out a suitcase for a trip he never ended up going on with Rachel. The woman had been exceedingly polite.
All of that was gone as she made it to her feet and ran at Mitchell. He sent a knee to her face but tried to soften the blow out of guilt. She fell to the ground again. Mitchell used this opportunity to push another display over. This one he dropped onto the entrance of the up escalator to create a temporary roadblock.
People were halfway up the down escalator. Mitchell looked around the upper level for an exit. He remembered the woman going to a storeroom near the bedding department. Mitchell headed in that direction.
If he could get into the storage room, maybe he could block the door. If it led to a service corridor, he could hopefully find a fire exit and get out of the building. From there, he had no idea what he would do. For the moment, he forced himself to disconnect his actions from anything bad that was happening to the people chasing him. In his mind the building was on fire and he had to get out.
He ran around the shaft and past the exit for the up escalator. Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a mass of people making their way through the tables and suitcases he’d dropped in front of it. Ahead of him, two athletic-looking men came running from the bedding section.
Mitchell reached out and grabbed a large metal pot and threw it at the closet one. It hit him in the face and opened up a gash above his eye. The man didn’t flinch.
He tried to avoid them by running left, but they cornered him in front of a display table. Rather than go around it, they just climbed onto it. One of them was on all fours reaching out to claw Mitchell. The other landed on his feet and was ready to jump on Mitchell. He knew he couldn’t handle the both of them in close quarters.
The table wobbled as the two men climbing over it unbalanced it slightly. Mitchell grabbed the edge closest to him and lifted as hard as he could. The table flipped over and the two men fell off. One was trapped under it while the other fell backward and smashed the back of his head against another display. He fell to the ground like a rag doll.
There was a snarl to Mitchell’s left as luggage lady came at him. He jumped onto the overturned table and ran into the mattress section. He tried running over the tops of the beds but lost too much speed as the mattresses absorbed his footsteps.
He spotted the entrance to the storage area and ran to it. The luggage lady tripped and fell behind him as one of her heels broke. Behind her, the mob had finally made it to the top of the escalator. Mitchell could see splatters of blood on the bodies of the people in the lead.
He felt like he was going to throw up. Somewhere a buzzer was going off because the escalator was jammed. Mitchell tried not to think what was jamming it as he bolted through the doors leading to the service corridor.
10
The doors pushed inward. Mitchell scanned the hallway for something to put in front of the doors to hold back the crowd. There was nothing. Damn.
To his left there was a break room. Further down there was a door and then the hallway went in two directions. One of them had to lead to a stairwell and out of the building, away from the mob.
He ran to the end of the hallway and spotted a fire hose in a glass case. Desperate to try anything, he pulled the door off and pulled the hose free. A label on the hose warned the user to have at least two people hold on to it due to the high pressure. Perfect.
He threw the head of the hose down the hallway pointed toward the doors he’d just run through. Mitchell spun the wall valve until it came off the screw. The slack hose began to fill up with water as it was flooded with pressure. He watched the bulge race toward the nozzle and come gushing out. Once all the slack was free, the water burst forth, throwing the nozzle around the hallway like an angry tentacle.
Water flew everywhere, creating chaos in the hallway. Mitchell knew people could make it through. But the water, the hose and the metal nozzle chaotically bouncing around would slow some people down and cause another bottleneck.