"FWLS64" - читать интересную книгу автора (A Future We'd Like to See)

eventually weapons are drawn and the war begins.

Psychologists don't know what makes the shoppers go berserk,
prizing packages and parcels over human lives. Maybe it's the
color arrangements and light patterns in holiday displays. Maybe
it's the stress of an entire life of family living building up into
a crescendo of rage. Maybe people are just bastards.

This year would be different, though.

I wasn't gonna hang around this year, and neither were any of
the other mall staffers. By mall administrative order, once seven
PM rolled around (statistics showed this to be the approximate
start of the bloodshed), all staff members would be evacuated by
crack Not-So-Secret-Agent teams and lifted by shuttle to a safe
distance. The doors would be sealed and sleeping gas would pour
in, leaving the shoppers in a happily comfortable state before any
major anarchy can erupt.

A bold measure, yes, but over the last decade it has been
proven again and again that nothing less than bold measures will
work. Closing the mall for the day is no good, since the shoppers
show up on the last available day. Riot police usually lose more
in the ranks than the shoppers do, and after two years they
officially protested being hired to guard the mall, claiming cruel
and unusual punishment. Closing down the sporting goods store to
keep weapons from flowing freely was no good, since the shoppers
had proven they could break through the cheesy mall barricades;
adding more barricades encouraged BYOB, Bring Your Own Blaster.

So the mall was just going to clock everybody over the head
with gas and call it a night. Sounded perfectly fine here. None
of the shoppers knew this, of course... that would ruin the plan.

The clock approached 6:50 when the man in the trenchcoat
walked up to the Sit On Santa's Lap! display.

"Five credits buys you five Christmas wishes," I recited.
"Ten buys fifteen. One buys one. Photos with Santa and the elves
are five extra."

"I'll take one wish, and that's to get you out of here," he
said. "Not-So-Secret-Agent #46336A. I'll be your personal escort
out of the building tonight. Are you miss Stacey Q. Victim?"

"Yeah," I admitted. "When do we go?"

"NOW. All of the others have been evacuated already. The
crowd is starting to get suspicious; apparently the lifelike
dummies we left in place aren't fooling them. The staff is