Public Enemy Zero by Andrew Mayne Read Free Book Online Page A

of a Hollister, looked at Mitchell and charged in his direction. They formed a wall as they closed in on him.
    Looking for the weakest link, Mitchell ran straight into the girl and pushed her in the chest. Pink-colored nails tried to scratch out his eyes as she fell backward. He kept moving. From behind he heard two thuds as the young men ran head on into the crowd and their bodies fell to the floor. Mitchell could hear a sickening crack as a leg or an arm was broken.
    Directly in front of him was a large department store. The front looked clear of people. Maybe he could make it in there and lose some of the crowd in the clothes racks. He pumped his arms and kept pushing himself to keep going. Occasionally he’d feel a hand grab at his backpack and then fear would kick in and he would find a little more speed.
    He was dying to turn around to see how big the crowd was and how close, but he didn’t dare lose a millisecond of advantage. The sound of pounding footsteps, kiosks being toppled and wailing as people screamed at him told him enough to just keep running.
    The only thing helping him was the fact that due to the law of averages, the people who could run faster than him were somewhere back in the mass of people. If they were able to break free, god help him. All it would take would be someone to grab one ankle or just loop one arm through his damn backpack and he would trip and fall to the ground. The last thing he would ever see would be a tidal wave of people falling on top of him, tearing him to shreds with their hands and teeth.
    Thank god he jogged. Thank god he’d lost that 30 pounds last year. Mitchell knew he’d have been fucked if he hadn’t been in reasonably OK shape. He’d be dead.
    The entrance to the store was deserted. He ran through it and tried to pull over a rack of coats when he moved by. Only one fell to the floor. In front of him was a perfume counter. A woman behind it with too much plastic surgery and makeup looked up at Mitchell and then leaped onto the counter like a cat.
    The glass countertop broke as the woman jumped into the air and tried to claw at his throat. He was already moving to the right to go around the perfume counter. She overshot and fell into a display of men’s cologne, sending hundreds of boxes into an avalanche on the floor.
    Mitchell looked to his left and spotted the escalator. He skidded around the corner and ran up it. It was going down. Fuck!
    Wait, this is good, he realized. Mitchell knew the secret to going the wrong way was to run up it in large steps and to not stop. It took him a half-dozen strides and he was at the top. He turned around for the first time since he left the food court.
    “ Holy shit!” he shouted as he saw the mob.
    It wasn’t a few dozen people. It was hundreds of people all trying to surge onto the escalator. Two or three would try to step onto it and then get tripped up by the people in back of them. Those people would then try to step over the people in front of them. Other people were trying to climb over on the side rails. Fingers and hair got caught between the collapsing metal stairs, trapping them.
    Mitchell watched in horror as a man in thick glasses pulled away a stump of a hand and tried to use it to climb over another person whose face was shoved between the railing and the escalator.
    As much of a cluster-fuck of human carnage as it was, the sheer body count of people was adding up, and they were making progress. Mitchell pulled a display rack of glassware in front of the escalator and shoved it down onto the crowd. He watched wineglasses and brandy snifters rain down on people before the shelving collapsed in the middle of the escalator. That was when he realized the up escalator across from him was going to be bringing a deluge of people as soon as they worked their way around.
    He could see people running around the bottom of the up escalator to join the mob. He had seconds to do something. From behind he felt a hand reach out