It's a beautiful October day here in Trenton, with temperatures in the high fifties and expected to drop into the thirties overnight. For those of you looking to celebrate Halloween a little early this year, scattered clouds will be the most frightening weather this next weekend as they roll in on the sea breeze—Gavin Maye's voice cuts off and garbles over the radiowaves, his words chopped up as if thrown into a blender.I turn the volume knob all the way to zero and keep sitting there, arms folded over the steering wheel to keep an eye on my watch. The background flashes blue and I press the button on the side before it can beep my five-minute warning.If it takes two minutes at a brisk pace to reach the back doors from where I'm parked—which it does, I've timed it—then that means I can take an extra three to coordinate the best possible way to get my shit together.GED, college, six-figure salary.Too long. Switch gears to the easiest way then.GED, lottery, question mark.The watch beeps its three-minute warning and my time's up. Unless the latest Rockerfeller knocks on my window right now with the intention of handing me a blank check, it's time to cut the engine and double-time it to the mall's back entrance."Bummer."Pager in my pocket, I hop out and lock the car door.A briny smell latches onto the back of my throat, the sea air particularly indistinguishable from clogged sinuses, an esophagus stripped raw by ibuprofen overuse, last night's four-day-old leftover dinner, and the shirt I pulled out of what I swore was the clean clothes pile. I sniff my armpits to make sure the stench isn't coming from me.The air smells more like summer rather than the middle of fall, threatening the rare thunderstorm this far north. It's nice. It would be nicer if I didn't have to spend my next nine hours locked inside a concrete box with no windows to the outside world.Upturned collar pressed to the back of my neck to fend off the biting breeze, I jog across the packed employee parking lot. Head down, no eye contact. Hair tucked inside my windbreaker.The neon sign above the backlot doors flickers, barely visible in the daytime, but its hum causes an unmistakable vibration that leaves imprints when dense fog rolls in. Cool to look at, but kind of eerie. If management was really devoted to staff safety, I feel like they should have done something about the sign first.My hand is less than an inch from the door handle when a miniscule bolt of lightning zaps my fingertips. I yank away with a too loud "Fuck!""Rubbing your socks over that fancy security carpet again?"My watch blinks 2:02pm. If I'm going to be two minutes late, I might as well make it five. "You know how much I love getting all the shit people track in stuck to my feet," I say, half turning to give Oliver a wave. "I'm all about athlete's foot."Oliver—a spry old man in his sixties with hair as white as his teeth—makes his way up the handicap ramp while shoving his shirt into his pants. The new donut mascot on the opposite side of his name tag looks demonic, whoever embroidered the patch having either run out of the correct thread color or messed up on the order altogether. "I promised Liv I wouldn't turn into one of those old farts who don't get modern day youth," he says.I hold up my fist. "If it makes you feel better, it's not just old folks." Oliver bumps it. "How goes it?" I say, trying the handle again with my sleeve pulled over my hand.The door slams shut behind us, all nature sounds shot pointblank.The concrete walls that separate the back rooms from the areas frequented by guests are thick, with multiple coats of white glossy paint to dampen the noise desperate to bleed in from the food court's late-lunch rush."Same old, same old," Oliver says. "Ready for another exhilarating day at the office?"I snort, reaching into my pocket for my daily spare quarter. I slot it into the four-foot-tall gumball machine that stands at the bend between the employee entrance and the loading bay. "At least I don't have to deal with parents putting their stinky babies on freshly cleaned food counters.""Looking at so many TV screens for so many hours can't be good for your eyes.""We've got plasma now." I tilt the machine four clicks before a full spin of the coin mechanism, and out it spits two gumballs instead of one. "I don't know if they'll keep me from going blind any quicker, but they don't make any noise when they're off. I'm guessing that counts for something."I hand Oliver the yellow one and keep the blue one for myself. Very little things in life are more satisfying than that first crumbling bite and rush of concentrated artificial flavor."I haven't the darndest," he says, inspecting the pilfered goods. "Dealing with customers makes for a pain in the tush but it does make the day go faster, I'll tell you that.""Fair trades."Oliver's watch beeps. "Alright, alright. Time to see the disaster those teenagers made out of my joint.""Need me to clock you in?""If it isn't too much trouble.""I got it. May your shift be quick and shitless."Oliver pops the candy in his mouth before holding a hand to his chest in a gesture of gratitude. "You be good now, Shaw," he says. The soggy smacking of his gums stay in my ears even after he's wandered off towards the food court.

The interconnected employee hallways in the mall's ground level back rooms are at their busiest during the first shift change. The bulk of staff is scheduled from eight to three, with the intention to accommodate working parents while school is in session.Afternoons are my preferred shift since it frees up my nights and lets me sleep in, so I don't bitch about it. I don't sweat the fact that none of these outstanding family men and women meet my eyes as we brush shoulders at bottlenecks, because I'm here for a paycheck, not to mingle with people who consider me less-than.Honestly. The morning shift thinks they deserve a Nobel Prize, as if it weren't something everyone and their mom could do.My one gripe with my two-to-ten is that boredom is a repeat offender that makes my job more tedious than it needs to be. Management insists I keep busy and scour the security cameras in search of anyone violating the world's vaguest code of conduct.I can't speak for every shopping center out there, but a whole lot of nothing happens inside Prime Plaza. At least, not when I'm on the clock.I take a left, a right, another left, then two rights to reach the break room.I punch Oliver's card first, not because I think a couple of seconds will make a dent in either of our paychecks, but because the man has worked here for so long that it just makes sense. Respecting my elders, as it were.There was also the time I punched mine, got distracted, and then forgot to do his. Oliver has never brought it up and I know for a fact that management does not fix time cards, so unless Rocca figured out how to manually change the amount on that paycheck, I haven't the slightest idea why Oliver never got mad over an entire day of free labor. He's a better man than I will ever be.And speaking of Rocca."Are you ever going to use your locker?" Her clipboard covers half her face as she tries to read it, the bat chains that hang from her glasses caught on the metal clip. She clicks her pen at ten miles per second. "We've got a fresh group of new hires but nowhere to shove them."I don't mean to scoff in her face. "Three empty store fronts, a fourth on the fritz, and you're bringing new people on board.""The turnover rate is getting outta hand," she says."Why not use those lockers, then?"Rocca looks up at me and I have to turn my face away. Her already humongous blue eyes are horrific to witness behind Coke bottle glasses. "It's a waste of valuable space if you're not using your locker.""I keep my spare work shirt in there.""A spare work shirt that will be in there if I ask you to open it right now."I shove my hands in my pockets, thumbing the pager as I walk past the mall's general manager and back into the sickly lit hallway. "Look, if you can guarantee that your bosses won't get mad at me for hauling my shit into the office, then sure, you can have it."Rocca follows, forced to double her pace so that her short legs can keep up. "As if you lot in security don't wipe your asses with that rule.""I don't see why it matters. It's not like anyone ever looks up.""Fire hazard.""The CRTs didn't explode," I say, maneuvering towards the opposite direction I came from. "You think a lunchbox is gonna spark a server?""No, but that fish sandwich smell is going to make whoever clocks in after you go postal. Rules are rules, Shaw, and you're not special.""Whatever, man. If you wanna talk fire hazards, you'd fix the sign out back. You know, the one I reported three months ago."There's no queue for the back room elevator today, which means there's no need to pull out the flashcards with jokes designed to end small talk. Pressing the button still takes a short eternity to call the damn thing."You're still on your first write-up," Rocca says. She won't ride up with me, but she will sure as hell stick around until she can't bug me anymore. "Play it safe and you should be fine.""You're not gonna rat me out?""Play it safe and I won't have to.""I can do that."For the second time since entering the mall, all sound is plugged out of my ears at once, like pool water draining out after days of discomfort. I look over my shoulder and what was a bustling two-way crowd is now just Miss Janice, her bony hands pushing and pulling her mop over the mandalas made by dozens of shoes scuffing the polished linoleum.The elevator dings.I pull the access card out of my pocket as I step inside and hold it up to the wallet-sized scanner on the door panel until the red light blinks green. When it does, the words SHAW PRICE: AUTHORIZED marquee over the digital screen right above it."I'm reassigning your locker," Rocca says, making sure she gets the last word as the elevator doors close.

Stale air and that omnipresent mechanical hum manage to overstay their welcome for such a short ride up.The administration wing is located midway to the second floor, with security sandwiched between the seldom occupied conference rooms and the more frequented bathrooms. It's an awkward space shaped like a partially open hand fan—if the fan had a randomly protruding stick out of its side to host ominously dark rooms.A water cooler that neither cools nor heats the water from its jug stands where the rivet pin of said metaphorical fan would be.I spit my discolored glob of gum into the half-full trash bin next to it.The gray carpet looks darker. It also feels damp in a way that suggests having been recently cleaned, but the space smells of mildew and last night's cigarette. Not mine, I don't do nicotine, but someone else's remnants.I knock on the security office door.
I'm fifteen minutes late, which is ten over the acceptable tardiness cutoff by casual corporate standards, and only five over Prime Plaza's 'potential for termination' line.I swear I'm trying to get my shit together, but forty hours a week in a soundproof box will make anyone do anything to steal as many minutes outside of it as they can get away with. I'm sure you understand where I'm coming from.I knock again. "Craig. You're good to go." I open the door to a whole lot of nobody.I've been at this job for two years now. Took a sick day here and there when my organs refused to cooperate, but kept determined to save up as much PTO as possible. I did the math a while ago and that's an average of four-thousand two hundred hours. A grain of sand in the retirement bucket, sure, but four-thousand hours spent in a place that can double as a sensory deprivation chamber leaves imprints indistinguishable from prey animal instinct.The smell of mildew stops at the door, overwhelmed by the scent of plasticy new tech."Yo. The hell are you, man?"There's no backpack, no cellular phone cord, no gutted multi-color pen, and most obvious of all, no Craig. The lights in the diamond-shaped office are off, which is normal when the widest of three walls is made of Plexi and faces the atrium, allowing for the mall's beige and neon blue illumination to radiate in. What isn't normal is that all of the monitors are in sleep mode.Huh. Maybe he had to bail early.Whether he did or he just didn't show, it is not my problem.I wiggle the mouse, rapidly clicking the left button until a small, bright green penguin waddles from the left side of the screen towards the right, leaving behind a trail of pixels. I walk away from the desk to look out the massive window, and wait until the camera installed on the top left corner of the atrium's intersection comes back online with a red dot.The reflection is faint and warped following the Plexi's curvature, but I've seen the logo for Krasner Technologies enough times that a close-up of the beveled edge would give it away. The logo vanishes, and the office is filled with its usual green glow.All systems are go for launch, and Prime Plaza's faithful shoppers may continue to use and abuse their credit cards in peace knowing that if any funny business goes down, we've got it all on camera."What's on the schedule for today, Armada? Spoons, algebra review?" I ask our employee of the month. Fifth year in a row. "Eddie's skin mags? We're due for the next issue."Armada the Armadillo doesn't answer.Its beady eyes are off-kilter, whatever taxidermist gave it a second life fucked the poor animal up more than the alleged truck that did it in. Half the thing is missing and no one knows who the hell parked it in the office, but a former security guard gave it her shirt the day before her resignation.I pinch a corner of my shirt and use it to polish Armada's badge."Eddie's skin mags it is."No other staff members or mall employees are quite as adept at breaking rules like security personnel. We know all camera locations—both approved and not—their field of view, timing, and loops. I know that the Plexi wall is one-sided, letting me play voyeur to the world from right above the atrium while everyone is oblivious. The new hires know this not.The door to the security office is at the room's axis. The right wall is all monitors. The far wall is a pervert's delight. And the left wall is half lockers, a vent, and Armada's pedestal.Rules prohibit personal items in the inter-level floor for reasons that make zero fucking sense to me and every other sad sack working here, but there are still lockers.They're not assigned to us and we're therefore not allowed to use them, but no one aside from security and a single janitor makes the long trek up here to verify the sanctity of unaccounted for storage space.While no locker is labeled, an unspoken gentleman's agreement stands.The one closest to the door belongs to Miss Janice, the third shift janitor. Hidden behind a pile of crusty rags are her gallons of bleach, the kind management won't approve in favor of the standard mandated stuff that, I quote: "doesn't work shit on shit." She keeps spare clothes and meds on the top shelf—with the threat to chop the fingers off any motherfucker who dares touch her hydrocodone—and a photo of her and her wife pinned to the back.The second locker is haphazardly split between regulars. My Walkman is jammed up against Carol's CD case, Craig's Gameboy is on top of Eddie's many issues of the Scientific American, backpacks and laptop bags are crammed in with a spare pair of non-OSHA compliant shoes sticking out between them; you get the gist.The third and fourth locker though, that's where we keep the communal stuff. Spare AA and AAA batteries, stationery, puzzle books, computer chargers, bulk boxes of chips, gum, and jerky. And further back, hidden behind a spiral notebook: condoms, lube packets, and a frequented tin of mints that hasn't been occupied by mints for longer than I've worked here.I don't know who keeps supplying the office with fresh joints, but in my heart of hearts they're the one who deserves employee of the decade.Pulling the beat-up Sketchers out of the way, I lift the flap to Eddie's bag and blindly rummage through it until my fingers touch glossy paper. "Fingers crossed the November issue is a little more to our taste." Armada, obviously, does not answer.Mindful not to jostle the bag too much, I extract the magazine with no evidence of tampering left in my wake.The issue is from 1985 but it gets no complaint from me. The model on the cover—her big blonde hair held back by an exercise headband, gray shirt drenched in fake sweat, and shorts that might as well be panties ready to choke the hell out of her crotch—is tied to a white folding chair, gagged by a red bandana."Dude, you're a freak," and I don't mean it in a disparaging way.I like Eddie the most out of all of my superiors, but only because he keeps his nose out of my business. So long as I clock in, do my job, and clock out, no personal interaction has ever been necessary.To wrap up my starting routine and kick off my afternoon, I grab a new pack of sunflower seeds out of the locker.Acquired treasures tossed onto the desk, I open the drawer to check whether Craig left any incident reports for me to digitize. The tray is empty save for one pink sheet.0900 hours—A bald man in a striped black and gray shirt tried breaking into a white Honda Civic in the West parking lot. Multiple shoppers yelled at him to stop. When approached, the man kept trying to jab a crowbar into the side of the door. Police were called and the man refused to stop even after their arrival on the scene. The man started speaking 'in tongues'. He was removed from the premises at 1200 hours. Before returning to my post, multiple shoppers and mall employees also started speaking in tongues.Craig always gets the interesting ones.All I ever deal with is the occasional Teenager's First Shoplifting Experience, and often turn a blind eye to first time offenders. No one's gonna notice a drop in sales because of one Snickers bar. And frankly it's not worth the trouble to strap up, take the elevator back down, push through the food court's convergence point, and cross miles of squeaky tiles for a kid who will be long gone by the time I get there. Not for $5.15 an hour.I should bug Eddie for a raise. Maine's looking to bump it up on the yearly starting summer of 2003, so there's a slight chance he might consider it when our end-of-year reviews roll around.Incident report propped up against The Phantom Menace novelty cup that moonlights as a pen holder, I type in the local computer's password.I see it when dragging the pop-up window to the corner of my screen.There's a commotion on monitor B6, the one whose lower left corner touches the upper right of the computer screen. A group of people are huddled at the top of the escalator, their frantic to-and-fro movements turning the Discover Zone sign on the opposite side of the second floor landing into radiant flashes of white in the security camera's grayscale.If the scene is meant to be one of those artsy dance routines that keep showing up on the news, it's the strangest one I've seen yet. It's also the most dangerous.Before I can grab my walkie and radio anyone closer to the mob than I am to go break it up, I see Eddie lurking barely within frame.He's in uniform, leaning against the fake brick wall that separates the kid's play area and the new bar & grill called Bar & Grill. He's not wearing his trademark glasses and it's a Clark Kent sort of situation where, had it not been for the uniform, I wouldn't have recognized him. In fact, he's far away and pixelated enough that I don't know how I recognize him—but I do.My boss watches a group of people 'dance' at the top of one of Prime Plaza's busiest escalators, as shoppers struggle to climb down the perpetually rising steps without trampling those standing behind them, and does nothing.The traffic jam doesn't keep people from trying to get on. Two teenage boys run up the crowded down-going escalator, shoving bodies out of the way as if the building was on fire and the only exit was somehow located on the second floor.Someone teeters over the edge and I lunge for the walkie, my thumb somehow managing to miss the button whose location I know better than my own nose."What the fuck are you doing?" The walkie's small yellow light flickers intermittently. "Shit."One of the boys slows near the top, trying to jump over to the up-going escalator. Someone in the mob shoves him back and the second boy catches him, both getting right back to their frenzied attempts."Eddie, Christ. For the love of fuck, do something!" I still get no response. I shake the walkie, click open the back cover, roll the batteries, change the frequency to an open channel, and press the button again. "We have an urgent situation at the food court escalators. I need anyone in the immediate area to drop what they're doing and get over there stat."A high-pitched whine pops through the walkie's speaker, loud and sharp enough for me to yank it away from my face. By the time it stops, the button doesn't light up at all.
I see none of my team on any of the neighboring cameras.On the monitor, people have stopped taking the escalator down. The boys still climb, still try to jump over. The mob is still writhing, and Eddie is still only watching.I've had this nightmare before: one where I'm in the shoes of a woman trapped under an escalator's revolving platform.The scene plays out like hitting fast-forward on a tape I've watched a million times over. Vividly comedic, detailed and luscious only in my mind's eye.I stop trying the walkie because it feels like the VCR's remote control.The boy tries one more time but a long, muscular arm shoots out of the writhing mob. Rather than pushed back, the boy is pushed downward.He plummets down the two-foot gap between the escalators, his back connecting with the corner of a gyro stand, before crashing onto a vacated table with a finality so abrupt my own breathing stops.Newer VCRs have a slow motion function if you hit fast-forward while paused. Stupid fucking thing to add when DVDs are taking over video. DVDs are expensive, though. Probably just a fad. Lasers wear out, right? They can't outlive magnetic tape and good ol' fashioned spools, right? Discs don't have flaps that can—Snap."No."The food court erupts into chaos.Eddie is now by the escalator with a standard security whistle between his lips. There's no audio, but his chest rises and falls. The mob responds the second time he blows it, and even then not all of them at once. Not a single person looks at him. They drop their arms and stop moving, stepping away from the buffet of gore at their feet.There's a woman—or what's left of a woman—crumpled near the seam where steps flatten and feed into the escalator's mechanisms beneath the landing platform. Fabric and hair and chains jump and rattle as the motor continues to run, incapable of differentiating between human and common detritus, grinding her up like it would a burger wrapper.I don't make it to the garbage can in time.