Sandra loves working the graveyard shift. In her 67 years she has worked all the shifts on all the days, and the 10pm to 7am shift is her absolute favorite. It starts late enough for most kids to already be in bed and ends early enough for most day dwellers to still be at home, or just starting their commute.

Sandra despises kids, and she hates their parents. In her opinion, kids nowadays are spoiled little shits, and their parents are hapless fools. Schools instill high self-esteem in these kids without any skills or knowledge to back it up, resulting in headstrong and entitled dimwits. She has lost count of the number of times she witnessed temper tantrums and disrespectful behavior. The graveyard shift drastically reduces interaction with these dumbass families.

Sandra often gets through her shift without saying a word to anyone. She enjoys being alone in her head. The store closes at midnight, and reopens at 6 am, giving her 6 peaceful hours to think about how much she despises people. Especially kids and teenagers.

***

Korey is 18 years old and already an addict. He left home and quit school shortly after he turned 16. He could no longer handle all the rules at home. Clean your room, brush your teeth, do your homework, stay home on school nights, don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t do drugs, don’t sneak girls into the house at night. The list goes on and on, and his mother and father were always on his case about breaking these rules.

He couch surfed with friends and eventually shacked up with an older woman named Lori. She had huge boobs and a great body, and traded room and board for sex. Lori always had drugs and she happily shared with her boy toy. The drugs gave him tons of energy and erections that lasted for hours. Korey knew he was not the first to have this arrangement with her, and that Lori might eventually tire of him and send him packing. This motivated him to perform, and her body was amazing, making the arrangement easy for him and satisfying for Lori. They would smoke meth and screw for hours. She liked it in the ass, and Korey was happy to oblige.

A week ago, Korey woke from a bender and was surprised to see Lori still in bed. She died sometime during the night. Her body gave out because some vital component could no longer take the overstimulation the meth caused, and she over-ramped. She nodded out and never woke up. She is still in bed, Korey wrapped her body in trash bags and bedding, and she is starting to stink. It’s time to move on.

He went through the apartment looking for cash and drugs and found more than he expected. In a bedroom closet, under a pile of shoes he found a duffel bag with bricks of cash, bags of purplish crystals that appear to be meth, and a 9-millimeter Beretta.

The pistol has a threaded barrel, and the bag contains a silencer and a couple of extra magazines, already loaded with hollow point bullets. Korey has played video games for years growing up, and the pistol does not scare him. He knows he will be able to use it if he must, and if needed he can always sell it. Looking at the bricks of 100 dollar bills he did not think that would be necessary.

***

Paul suffers from a mental condition. He got an overnight job at the store, unloading trucks, stacking shelves, cleaning bathrooms and doing whatever else Sonya, the overnight manager, assigned him.

He likes Sonya. He likes the way her breasts strain against the buttoned blouses she favors, and how her tight skirt shows off her shapely form. Sonya wears shoes with modest heels, but these still make the muscles in her calves flex when she walks. The voices in his head would be quiet when she speaks to him, and the ringing in his ears even stops for a minute. Sonya has a sultry voice that makes something in the back of Paul’s head vibrate. He treasures these moments when the voices are quiet, and the only voice in his head is his own.

As soon as Sonya is out of sight though, the noise resumes. He can’t always hear everything these voices say. They often sound like they are in another room, and even though he hears them constantly, only some words and phrases are clear enough to understand. Sometimes Paul would just stand there, frozen with his head cocked to one side, trying to understand the conversations. He would return to reality when the ringing in his ears starts, and when the ringing starts, he must be busy. Working with his hands seems to turn down the volume.

Sandra, the old woman wearing the oxygen bottle at her hip with plastic lines under her nose, also makes the voices stop. Not for the same reason as Sonya. With Sandra he can feel the owners of the voices stare at her through his eyes, and their disapproval is palpable.

***

Sonya feels sorry for Paul. She has seen him when he freezes up, and once walked over to ask him if she can help. The whites of his eyes were showing, and before she could call 911 the silent old lady, Sandra, spoke behind her, ‘Don’t call anybody. Paul will be fine in a minute. He gets these seizures a few times a week, and they don’t last long’. Paul’s eyes roll into place, and he grins widely at Sonya, happy to see her, then frowns when he notices Sandra.

Sandra has the voice of a woman that smoked for most of her life, raspy and grating. Sonya appreciates the fact that the old woman almost never speaks. Her voice assaults her ears, and her watery blue eyes makes her own eyes water.

Sonya is in her early thirties, a college graduate with a business degree, and a girlfriend she plans to marry as soon as she can transfer to a better shift. Working third shift is just a steppingstone, a way to get some experience so she can move on to something better. Working with misfits comes with the territory.

***

The graveyard shift runs a skeleton crew. Sandra, Paul, Andy and Jet make up the night crew. Andy and Jet are young men, and this is their first job. They have been working at the store for the last five months. They are good workers, not yet jaded by the drudgery of life, and often dance and sing along to the music piped into their ears by their ever-present white earphones.

Even though Sonya is the manager, she does not mind getting her hands dirty, and after the store closes, she often rolls up her sleeves, kicks off her shoes for a pair of loafers and helps stocking shelves.

Sonya is the first person to encounter Korey. She went to the back of the store to fetch a trolley jack stacked with toilet paper when Korey walked out of the men’s restroom, carrying a black duffel bag and pointing the silenced pistol at her.

***

Korey could not resist sampling the purple meth. He was sure that it was meth, he had seen many color variations before, just never purple. He loads his pipe and smokes. The effect is immediate. His mind becomes crystal clear, he smells, hears and sees everything. He had never felt so present, so in control and focused as at that moment. He realizes that this purple crystal is something special and that he needs to leave immediately before someone comes looking for it.

Methamphetamine has many names, just like the devil. It is a potent nervous system stimulant and supremely addictive. It elevates mood and increases sexual desire, making it very popular. You can screw for days while binging on this stuff. Used in large quantities it will make you crazy, you will see things that does not exists, believe all sorts of strange shit, develop severe paranoia and become psychotic.

The purple stuff made Korey believe that the owners of the duffel bag was searching for him to reclaim their property and kill him. He came into the store just before closing time and used the restroom to take another hit. This last dose pushed him over the edge, and he became convinced that he had been found. Realizing they would take the bag from him filled him with rage, and he decided to kill them first.

***

Fear froze Sonya in place. Her eyes widen and she instinctively raises her arms. Korey sees a wide-eyed monster raising its insectile arms, like a praying mantis, and he shoots Sonya several times in the head and chest.

Silencers do not make weapons silent, it just diminishes the report of a fired round, and often makes the sound unrecognizable. Thanks to their headphones Andy and Jet did not hear the silenced gunfire. Jet’s brains splattered over his hands and the cans of soup he was stacking when Korey walked up and shot him point blank in the back of the head. Jet was listening to Pink Floyd’s ‘Comfortably Numb’, and he died with David Gilmour playing a fantastic guitar solo. Kolby did not see Jet as a human being, but as another monster, collecting cans, probably to kill him with.

Andy came around the corner of the aisle, pushing a trolley stacked with product, singing along to ‘Money for Nothing’ by Dire Straits. He did not see Korey around the trolley, he only saw Jet slumped over and immediately came running to assist. Korey shot this monster several times before it collapsed at his feet. The pistol’s slide locked open, its magazine spent. Korey ejects the empty magazine and inserts a fresh high-capacity magazine. He felt like a million bucks, already he dispatched three monsters, and he will get every one of them. He fumbles for a second with the pistol, not finding the slide release, then manages to make the slide ram another round into the chamber.

Korey finds Paul in his frozen state and shoots him in the temple. Paul dies while eavesdropping on the voices in his head, and is momentarily puzzled when they address him directly, shouting that he needs to run, and do it now!

Korey fires two or three more rounds into Paul’s back, just to make sure the monster is dead. He looks up just in time to see a large can of peaches rotate on a perfect arc, in slow motion, before the can slams into his forehead and knocks him down. He hits the back of his head against the floor and drops the pistol. Any other man would have been knocked unconscious by the can and the floor, but the purple meth kept Korey going.

He sat up, feeling around for his pistol when he saw another monster charging at him, holding a club in its claw. Just before his fingers touched the butt of the gun, the monster hits him in the face with the club, and he blacks out.

***

Sandra just finished restocking the cereal aisle, thinking to herself that kids today are so fucked up because their parents feed them this shit, when she heard the muffled gun shots. She walked in the direction of the sound to investigate, and saw Korey disappear down another aisle. She saw the gun in his hand. Sonya was on the ground in a sitting position, her back against a pallet of toilet paper. Her skirt moved up exposing her beautiful legs, and most of her face was gone.

Sandra suffers from emphysema, and the doctors told her she might live another 5 or 6 years if she quits smoking immediately. That was four years ago, and she never quit. She decides to do something about this shooter or die trying. She walks over to the aisle the man turned into and peers around the corner. The bastard stepped in Sonya’s blood and left tracks on the linoleum floor. He walked down the aisle and turned right at the end. Sandra grabs a large can of peaches as she follows the tracks to the end of the aisle.

She heard more shots being fired, and moments later a lot more. She finds Jet and Andy lying in expanding pools of blood. The last time she saw Paul he was running a mop in the soda aisle, some idiot shopper managed to spill soda all over the floor. She arrives just in time to see the man shoot Paul in the head. She approaches the man as he fires more shots into Paul’s back. Somehow, he becomes aware of her presence and looks up, right at the moment Sandra flings the heavy can of peaches at his head.

Before Sandra got married the first time she played softball, and she was good. Her ability to toss a ball at a precise location was not lost, and the can finds its mark. The shooter goes down hard, and Sandra removes her oxygen tank from the hip sling and rushes the man.

When Korey sits back up Sandra knows he must be on some sort of drug, and she puts all her weight behind the metal oxygen tank and hits him between the eyes. He goes back down and Sandra tumbles over him. Amazingly the fucker starts to get back up again, holding his hands against his forehead. He gets up and looks around at Sandra. Blood is streaming from his nose, and his head has a dent right between his eyes where she hit him, making his eyes look crooked.

Sandra does not give him time to recover, she swings the oxygen tank and hits Korey’s nearest knee. His leg gives way, and he goes down on the injured knee, howling like a banshee. Sandra gets up and takes her time to make a perfect swing and caves in the back of Korey’s head with her oxygen tank.

She stumbles backwards and when her back hits the shelves behind her slides down into a sitting position. The exertion was too much for her damaged lungs and she labored for breath. Sandra uses two of these tanks during her shift, and this tank is almost empty. Her increased breathing is depleting it fast, and she does not have the energy to get up. Sandra watches Korey’s body convulse for a while as the drugs keep him animated, before eventually becoming still. She loses consciousness minutes later, and dies from hypoxia later that morning.

***

The police were called at 7:30 am when irate parents could not get into the store to buy sugary cereal and other ultra processed poisons for their addicted kids. They broke open the door and spent the rest of the day investigating the scene. Everything that happened was recorded on the store’s closed circuit camera system.

The local news has a ball with this event for a few weeks, producing many tv spots dealing with the dangers of illicit drugs, and speculating how the internet has made it possible for people to create their own variations with lethal consequences.

Sandra is hailed as a hero. Her own addiction to nicotine is never mentioned. The general population’s addiction to sugar is also ignored. Nobody ever considers that the rise in addiction might be related to the high consumption of sugar by millions of children, affecting their mental health early in life that leads to ADHD and other phycological conditions. The connection between mental health and substance abuse is well known. The reasons for the increase in mental health concerns in the young not so much.

The news always goes for the low hanging fruit that provides the most sensation and does not upset their wealthy advertisers.

It serves them well to have their viewers chomping away at the sweet and salty products that their advertisers peddle. Just maybe these viewers will star in their very own news flash in future.

One can only hope!