OVERNIGHT

Earl just drove off with a couple hundred miles worth of gas. He could be anywhere by now, probably halfway to Millerville with your supplies and your only means of escape.

You spend the next hour checking every car in the parking lot, hoping against hope that someone left their keys behind. Most are locked tight, but a few open easily. You search frantically—glove compartments, cup holders, sun visors, under seats. Nothing. People weren’t stupid enough to leave keys in their cars during an evacuation.

Defeated, you drag the generator and your cart of stolen goods back into the store. At least you have supplies now, even if you’re stuck here. You find an inflatable camping mattress in the sporting goods section and set it up in the main aisle, using a sleeping bag you’d grabbed earlier.

The store feels different at night. Too quiet, too empty, with just the hum of refrigerators and that constant fluorescent buzz overhead. You settle in to wait for morning, maybe figure out a plan then. Walk to Millerville? Forty miles on foot could take two days…

At exactly midnight, the lights click off.

Emergency lighting kicks in, casting everything in an eerie red glow. The exhaustion of the day finally catches up with you, and despite the unsettling atmosphere, you drift off to sleep on the inflatable mattress.

You sleep for a few hours, dreaming of fire squirrels and empty highways, until something wakes you in the deep of night.

Skitter. Skitter. Scratch.

Your blood runs cold. You know that sound.

Skitter-scratch-skitter.

It’s coming from multiple directions now—the ceiling, the walls, moving through the store like whispers in the dark. You grab one of the tennis rackets and try to peer into the shadows, but the emergency lighting creates more darkness than it illuminates.

A chittering sound echoes from the produce section. Then another from electronics. They’re surrounding you.

“No, no, no,” you whisper, scrambling to your feet.

The first squirrel drops from the ceiling onto your shoulder. Then another. Then a dozen more pour out of the shadows like liquid fur.

You swing the racket wildly in the darkness, but there are too many of them, coming from every direction. Their claws find purchase on your clothes, your skin, their tiny teeth flashing in the red emergency lights.

The last thing you remember is the chittering growing louder, echoing through the empty store as you disappear beneath a writhing mass of gray fur.

GAME OVER. In the squirrel apocalypse, even the grocery store isn’t safe.