Extinction by J.T. Brannan

man’s voice was equally coarse, threatening. Then others joined in, and there was scuffling as the man and woman went for each other. Shopping carts were pushed to the side and crashed into shelves as people tried to split them up. More shouts erupted, and then it sounded as if a full-scale fight had broken out down the aisle, and not just the man and woman now but many more, taking sides against each other. Alyssa flinched as the shelves swayed towards her, pushed by the struggling bodies on the other side. It held, but only just.
    And then other fights broke out, all around the store, and Alyssa watched in mute desperation: two men kicking a woman on the floor, their feet repeatedly stomping on her belly, her head; another man driven face first into a refrigeration unit, the thick glass shattering and cutting him, blood pooling down his neck and chest to the floor; four women fighting in the queue directly in front of her, pulling each other’s hair, kicking at each other with sharp heels; and then the man with the gun.
    At its appearance, the whole store seemed to go quiet for a fraction of a second; or at least that was the way Alyssa would later remember it. Maybe it only went quiet in her own mind as her senses focused on the terrifying sight in front of her: the dull black metal of the pistol being raised by the panicked man in the pinstriped suit and glasses, the slight pressure on the trigger, the slide ratcheting backwards and forwards, the empty shell casing ejected; the head of the woman next to her exploding, covering her own face with the unknown woman’s sticky, thick, bright red brain matter.
    Despite herself, Alyssa screamed. The man dropped the gun in terrified recognition of what he’d done and was tackled to the ground by the people surrounding him. Alyssa clamped down on her scream. As she watched the gunman being mercilessly kicked to death by the crowd, his glasses broken across his bloodied, smashed face, she knew she had to keep her head together or she wasn’t going to make it out of there alive.
    Wiping the blood and brain tissue off her face, she went into a low, protective crouch and looked around, assessing the situation. The gunshot had acted as a catalyst for true chaos to break out, and her options were limited.
    All around her, scenes of violence erupted, as people started fighting everywhere, most using just their fists but others using bottles, shopping carts baskets and any other improvised weapon that came to hand. People trying to escape were trampled underfoot, their screams muffled by dozens of pairs of shoes and boots.
    And then the sheer force of the crowd smashed through the storefront windows, glass shattering on to the street outside, people spilling out after it. The violence gave way to looting then. People gathered up as many items off the shelves as they possibly could and raced for the huge opening that was once a window. People fled from the store carrying piles of goods in their arms or in overflowing baskets. Some even pushed their shopping carts over fallen shoppers on their way out, crushing them.
    Alyssa edged her way forwards, sidestepping as a man fell to the floor, hit on the side of the head by another man wielding a heavy piece of wood. She looked outside to gauge her chances of escaping through the window, and decided that they weren’t good. Shoppers were being jostled and shoved to the ground by people pushing their way out of the minimart with their stolen goods; and Alyssa now noticed that other people were actually
entering
the store through the hole where the window had been, opportunists seeking to loot the store, maybe perfectly normal people until recently, now possessed by the mentality of the rampaging mob.
    She looked to the check-outs and saw some of the staff fighting running battles with the looters, trying desperately to stop them, but it was hopeless, there were simply too many of them.
    Alyssa sensed movement behind her and reacted, dodging