The day the world changed started as more or less a normal one. I awoke far too early and stumbled about my tiny, frigid apartment getting ready. The Bullseye uniform I wore for my job wasn’t too stupid looking, at least - jeans, heavy work boots (for an entirely indoor job), and a red polo with an unfortunately massive logo. But that was a small consolation for the rest of my miseries. And the worst part was that I had spent years working and studying, trying to avoid ending up exactly in this sort of situation.

But here I was, paying the price for my good deeds. The elevator still wasn’t working, so I took the stairs, dodging the super as I went. I didn’t have time for his grumbles. You could make an argument that it was my fault he didn’t get a raise, but even if the planned rent hike had gone ahead over the objections and protests, I doubted our landlord would have spread the wealth around. But you try convincing a prick like Anthony of that.

I walked to the bus stop and shivered in the cold morning air. As I stood there, I felt goose bumps spring up across my arms and hairs prickle on the back of my neck. Someone was watching me. It wouldn’t be the first time, and I did my best to pretend I didn’t notice, leaning against a pole and slowly sweeping my gaze about.

The feeling vanished after a few seconds, but I didn’t stop looking. There were a lot of possible reasons for someone like me to be followed, and none of them were good. One hand slid down to my waist and the comforting, if dubiously legal, weight there. Whatever this was, it was getting to me. My dreams had been strange lately.

And then the bus came and I forgot my fears for a moment in the usual rush to get my card out and swipe it and find a seat.

I dodged other commuters, found an empty spot, and took out my phone. I had sent out dozens of job applications over the past few weeks.

As usual, I hadn’t gotten any replies, so I switched to a more productive app. The password screen came up, and I typed in the key phrase. Chats opened up and I browsed through them, promising to attend some phone banking sessions and other events. Simple stuff, easy stuff, but not the stuff I wanted to do. But it was all I could handle these days.

That done, I closed my eyes, just for a moment.

Somehow, I woke up in time to get off at my stop.

I wasn’t the only one, either. Half the bus exited as we trudged into the heart of Thiva, New York: Sheffield Mall, owned and renovated by Alexander Sheffield, billionaire and businessman. And a total scumbucket, but that didn’t matter, not when you were as rich as he was.

I would admit that the mall didn’t look half bad. It was a massive structure, tall and imposing, but the bright murals on the concrete softened how intimidating it could be, and some fancy glass embedded in the concrete caught the light, making it quite literally dazzling to look upon. It was styled faintly like a castle, with four crenelated towers, and a “ genuine moat and drawbridge” at the entrance.

We all filed over it and then dispersed to our various jobs. There were countless stores and restaurants in this place, everything from a pharmacy to a outdoorsmen’s shop. All of them making money for the mall owner first and the people who did the work last, naturally.

The Bullseye I worked in was one of the larger stores in the mall, taking up three of the four floors, positioned just across from the food court, about as far from the entrance as you could get. Even taking my time and stopping to buy a cheap coffee, I was nearly ten minutes early.

The manager, striding about in a clip-on tie, immediately set me to work. “Don't clock in until you finished mopping these floors!” he barked.

I did as I was told like a good little worker bee, although I saw one of my coworkers scribbling down what happened. We had an agreement to keep track of every time this happened. I doubted we would be able to get anything from it, none of us could afford the time a lawsuit would require or the fees a lawyer would demand, but at least we were aware of how badly we were getting screwed.

That set the tone for the rest of the day. I cleaned floors, stocked shelves, and helped customers. Despite the frenetic pace the manager tried to set, I found some snatches of time to relax. A few minutes leaning against a wall, a long conversation with a gaggle of teens probably skipping school and clearly not interested in buying anything, taking my time to help an old lady carry her purchases to the next store and enduring her attempts at setting me up with her granddaughter.

Watching and chatting with the customers as they wandered through the store was always the best part of my work. It was fun to try and figure them out, to guess at what they had going on, what they did. Sometimes, they were interesting, but not today. It was just a bunch of ordinary, boring people.

Most of my coworkers were like that, really. Even my manager. We were all ground down and wrung out and exhausted. Me, perhaps most of all. I couldn’t remember the last time I awoke without feeling tired. It must have been back when I still had a future, back before the rent strike.

Of course, even in this miserable place, some were still lively and cheerful. For a few minutes in between tasks, I managed to have a chat with the exemplar of excitement, my coworker Celia.

And I was somehow able to avoid making a complete fool of myself while I did it.

She showed me a new game she got on her phone, a cute little adventure game featuring adorable animals and some sort of involved plotline about heart crystals that I didn’t quite get, and a bunch of stupid pay-to-roll-to-win mechanics. She enjoyed it quite a bit, and I promised to check it out. And then we talked about games we had played before, and how much it sucked how they were all full of hidden costs and monetization and addictive tricks.

Just the thought of some of the things I had found trying to pass the time made me clench my jaw. So I took a moment to share a story.

“Just be careful. They g-get into your head in the worst ways. A couple years back, I got this dumb matching game to play on the bus to my classes. It had all these things to make you want to play it constantly, and I got so caught up in it, I started missing classes, fucking up assignments...I nearly had to drop out. It was a bad couple weeks,” I told her.

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She giggled, bright and cheerful. “Benny, I think that’s at least partly on you. You’ve worked here for a year, I can tell you don’t go halfway on anything.”

There was no way for me to disagree, so I just did my best to hide my red cheeks and scampered away.

When I got into something, I really got into it. Sometimes my interest faded after a couple weeks, sometimes it stuck around, but it usually got me into trouble at least once, whether by cracking a finger from too much kickboxing or alienating friends by obsessively rewatching a kid’s show.

I’d learned to manage my fixations, and some of them had even proved useful - my kickboxing hobby was the only reason I was still in shape - but they could definitely be annoying.

At least thinking about them gave me something to distract myself with when I wasn’t chatting with customers.

And then because my manager was an evil bastard, he put me somewhere I couldn’t do either.

On the cash registers.

Some people liked doing that.

I didn’t.

And naturally, the stupid prick yelled at me for even suggesting the possibility of a trade. I could have done his job ten times better than he did, which only made his spewing vitriol and spittle at me even less tolerable.

But I was barely treading water on my loans and couldn’t afford the slightest risk of an interruption. I gritted my teeth and set about scanning purchases. And selling people a reward program. No one ever wanted the reward program.

There was barely a break, just an endless rush of shoppers and the manager coming by to remind me to try and upsell people. At some point, the regular one had left and a new one came, but the two were barely even any different. They even looked similar, with pug faces and mean eyes. Or maybe it was just my imagination.

I seemed to be imagining a lot today. I heard a faint keening coming from nowhere a couple times, and four or five times I had felt someone watching me again, just like I had this morning. By the fifth time, I had decided I was just paranoid.

I could see someone watching me at the bus stop, or from the food court or the store. But there was no way someone was hiding in the ceiling of the Bullseye to spy on me. The flickers of movement I kept catching out of the corner of my eye were just figments of my imagination.

Endlessly onward the day ground, until finally, it was time for lunch.

Our bosses might be cheap bastards, but they were smart enough not to want us drooling with hunger or pissing in bottles. So they gave us a decent lunch break, a full half hour, and we had no restrictions on our time during that break.

We even got coupons for the food court, although not enough to make it worth going there every day. But this was one of the times I would allow myself that small luxury.

So I chowed down on a deliciously disgusting burger and cheap fries. It wasn’t something I would have eaten a year ago, but it was cheap and tasty and filling, and I didn’t have to do any thinking to get it.

As I ate, I saw one of the mall cops coming around.

There were a lot of them, and they seemed to come into two categories. Most were assholes only held back by their relative lack of authority. They reminded me of overaggressive puppies, yapping and showing teeth that couldn’t break skin. They had no guns, no tasers, and I once nearly made one wet himself with nothing more than a few half-whispered sentences.

Then there were four or five who were more like Great Danes - the biggest dogs in the room, and confident in that. They wore pistols on their hips and swaggered about proudly and never had to ask people to leave twice.

The one who was approaching now was from the latter group, and was probably my favorite among them. I had seen Joe let people off for shoplifting baby food and medication more than once. We had only talked a few times, but he had plenty of interesting stories.

We exchanged nods when he passed my table, then he started on a big loop around the court. I felt the sensation of eyes on me again, but I brushed it off.

The temperature seemed to drop maybe twenty degrees in a few seconds, leaving me shivering and wishing I hadn’t left my jacket in my locker. I heard a faint scream coming from somewhere nearby. For a second, the world vanished around me.

When I came to, I was standing, panting, covered in a cold sweat. My chair had clattered to the floor and the table had fallen over, spilling the remnants of my lunch across the pale tile. Joe had come over and was talking softly, but I couldn’t hear him over the pounding of my heart.

“I’m fine,” I rasped at him, bending down to pick the table up.

He stepped forward to help me. “Nothing to see here, just a bit of clumsiness,” he said loudly.

With a start, I looked around. I hadn’t even realized people were staring. Joe leaned in. “I used to have the same thing happen. I know a guy who’s good with this sort of thing, if you like I can give you his number.”

Before I could answer, I heard the screaming begin again. It was keener, sharper, crueler this time, piercing through me unrelentingly. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from, but the sound drove me to my knees and made my stomach curdle.

Through hazy eyes, I saw other people flinching and stumbling, but no one seemed to be as badly off as me. Some didn’t even seem bothered.

I felt strong, gentle hands wrap around my shoulders and raise me up. “Something’s wrong,” I heard Joe say, and then he started speaking into his radio.

I grabbed onto the table, leaning on it like it was a life raft, ignoring the way spilled ketchup and soda stained my palms.

For a third time, I heard the scream. It started soft and quiet, nothing more than a low moan that fell off into a choked rattle. Then it grew and grew and grew, increasing in pitch and volume until it seemed enough to shatter glass and filled the air such that I could not escape. At some point, a manic cackle joined the scream until the two sounds were merged in a twisted harmony.

But this time, I was ready and I refused to falter. The sound raged inside me and I stood against it. I endured the sudden spike of cold fear in my spine, the straining tension in my muscles, the writhing nausea in my stomach.

People around me were starting to panic, to retreat from the sound. Distantly, I heard something about evacuations shouted into a radio. I heard my manager shouting for me to get back to work, I heard Celia calling my name with concern in her voice.

The scream reached a peak, then suddenly cut off. Still leaning on the table, I raised one hand and probed at my ears and nose, checking for blood.

There was none, and I sighed in relief. Everything was fine. I was fine.

There was a sickening lurch and a hole appeared in the air in front of me.

It was like someone punched through a sheet of paper. It just...tore open, leaving behind a jagged, yawning void. My eyes skittered away from it as I shook with sudden terror. Out and up and around and in the tear ripped, forming some twisted shape that looped back on itself and had far too many sharp, jagged angles.

It was a pitch-black pit, but within the darkness, I saw the green of putrid meat and the yellow of bleached bone, the red of spilled blood and the blue of suffocation, the purple of gangrene and the white of corpse-eating maggots.

It hummed and thrummed and screamed and sang.

“What the fuck?” murmured Joe, taking a careful step back, hand going to his gun.

Something dropped from the pit, falling bonelessly to the ground.

Then it rose, and rose, and rose, at least eight feet tall, with arms that dangled to the floor and bowed legs. On the end of each arm were fingers, dozens and dozens of them, twitching and squirming and tipped with jagged nails. It had pallid, bloodless skin and three malevolent, pupilless red eyes.

For a moment there was silence, then a pair of lipless mouths, one in its face and one in its belly, opened, filling the air with breath that stank of rotten meat and a giggling voice that spoke with an eerie echo.

“Eat kill eat kill, make you scream. Eat your souls, eat your skins, eat you slow!” it chuckled.