The smell was worse than surströmming. Even people who didn’t know what surströmming was knew that the moment the corpse of the god washed ashore. We didn’t know it was a god, not then, but we all knew what it smelled of: imagine the worst thing you can smell. No, worse than that.

Imagine what the despair of hope smells like, then the sour smell – more a taste of a body days dead – that bypasses the olfactory entirely to lodge in the liver. An apotheosis of plague.

The god was scarcely bigger than a man, and by the time we’d begun to understand it was almost too late. New York had been contaminated by one, ground turned sour, the air a bruise.

We burned it, using napalm and curses. It took children in the end to get the fire going but the god did not infect the land and that was enough for us.

It started with the overtime. The Company doesn’t pay it. Never has, never will. (It’s in the Contract. Contract. Company. Corporation. C-words tend to be sacred ones.) But it took too long to train new staff who often fled to bigger and better pastures. Or at least better ones; we were the only big box store in town, so nothing else was bigger. And management knew this; word was that they’d lobbied hard to prevent others from getting into town. But it also meant there are only so many staff, no one paid full time, all stretched thin to breaking. Because profit margins matter more than people ever do.

So management offered overtime. They didn’t call it that. We didn’t get paid for it. Not time and a half, not regular pay, nothing. But we were given explicit permission to say what we wanted. To do what we wanted. To let slip the polite civil masks and tell customers what we thought of them. Some of us even reduced our paid hours from the get-go, just so we could be there when certain customers arrived. Just so we could talk to them.

After a week, management had to insist the greeters at the door weren’t allowed to do this when greeting. The concession with the staff was that after putting in twenty ‘free’ hours, we could also speak truth to management.

We lost customers. Oh, God, did we lose customers. Friends. Family. Even a spouse, when Derek in Electronics tore his wife apart and made sure it was on every tv screen in the store. But pretty soon everyone was working for as near to free as they could afford, even management cutting hours. Some managers resigned to become staff just so they could cut loose. And prices dropped, because overhead went down, and customers had to keep coming back for the deals.

By the time summer ended, upper-upper management had taken note of our store. Where the bean counters lived. The people who had never worked in any of the stores in their lives, the ones who saw us all as interchangeable parts. They tried making The Offer in other locations, but it just caused them to hemorrhage sales until they fell apart. And it became The Offer in official records, something holy and profane all at once. A legend in the making, and we were enough to get the edges of it.

We had no competition, so what worked for us failed for the other locations. The store rose in sales as overhead plummeted. Staff cashed in stocks and bonds so we could afford to barely work, some of us sleeping in departments in lieu of our own homes. No one quit. No one dared quit and have to work in a job where they had to put the mask back on. The line-up of people applying to work at our store was staggering. They were hungry for truth. We were all hungry for truth.

I’d like to say it was my idea, but truth is I’m not sure. I organized it all, though. The section of the warehouse turned into its own room, walled in by unsold product and items waiting on recalls. It wasn’t big enough for a proper theatre, but we wired up cameras and audio equipment and everyone could watch it if they wanted. Every would-be new employee fighting in the arena for the right to work at our store. The winners had to be nasty in words and deeds, but not so nasty the police would shut us down. We learned to recognize those people. The dead ones, who walked and smiled and had nothing at all inside them. Not even hate. We directed them to apply to upper management, in a joke that was more than half-truth.

Word got around, and another arena was made in the back. For customers who were furious at staff, who wanted revenge on us, who needed their own outlets to. Weapons were limited to the toy department, the rules specifying first blood as if we’d recreated duelling in French courts from centuries ago. I’m not going to lie: there were wounds, and sometimes things got carried away. But we never went too far. We’d dropped all masks, but we understood that the wider world still existed. We were able to put masks back on when we had to. If the press came. When stock arrived. We managed it. I don’t know how. I look back, and I don’t know how. But we managed it until the Christmas season.

When everything was too much for everyone. When tempers broke and fury morphed into furies. It’s normal for there to be deaths during Black Friday events. The press wouldn’t have stories, wouldn’t have created it if not for the chance to see masks slip. But we were too far gone. Everything was too far gone from the centre. They tore Mavis apart. She was at the door, greeting politely through gritted teeth, waiting her turn to be able to let loose, but someone said something. Demanded to see some item, shoved their entitlement into her face. She swung first, and they swung, and it’s amazing. The human body is amazing. We carry so much blood inside us.

The entrance was ruined. Turned into something out of a Lord of the Flies remake, you know? One done by Uwe Boll or Michael Bay. And they came in hungry, wild, turned into wolves as well by the madness of the season. We fought them off, but we were only good at ugly words, at nasty insults to tear apart the soul. They went for flesh, the customers, howling and crying out. I don’t know that anyone bought anything.

The company still made a profit from the insurance. No one knows who started the fire. though most of us think it was one of the janitors. The entire store burned down in a single hour because nothing had been kept up or maintained, stuff stolen in every direction it could be taken from. Superstores don’t burn like that, not that fast. Local conspiracies were born, and it became our own 9/11 as people tried to come up with lies that made sense, to pretend that the world makes sense. That’s the nature of conspiracy, a desperate hope it all makes sense.

Which is why you’re here for your documentary. Oh, no. I’m not complaining. I’ll be in it. I just need someone to help me sign the papers. My fingers don’t work right anymore. They broke all of us, just as we had broken them. But we won.

Oh, how we won.

Do you pay for overtime?