"Good work out there, Andrea," her supervisor told her after she had brought them in. "Andrea, I have a pressing engagement, so I'm going to let you close tonight." Reading between the lines: he wanted to meet with his mistress before going home to his wife.
"Thank you, sir," she said, having long since learned it was the only thing he wanted to hear. He handed her the keycards and casually waved as he walked out the front doors toward his car.
She locked the front doors first, then began checking the store aisle by aisle, to make sure an errant customer hadn't been overlooked.
Naturally, she found Kevin Thompson in the sporting goods section.
"Oh, hey! You're that, uh...goth chick...right? An...An...Angela?"
"My name is Andrea, Kevin," she informed him through clenched teeth. "The store is closed now, so you have to go home."
"Oh. Okay!" Well, that was easy enough.
As she led him to the front of the store, he stopped in front of row of plasma TVs. "Hey look, Dawn of the Dead is on!" he observed. Andrea turned to look and stopped cold.
"...It is now known that when the bombs exploded, they dispersed an unknown biological agent which authorities believe are responsible for the incidences of violence, rioting, and cannibalism in New York, Washington, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and elsewhere. The President has declared a Terror Alert level of red, and has asked that citizens stay in their homes and places of business until the situation is under control..."
The footage shown over the news anchor's narration was a vision of hell. Three people, staggering down a street in some city, their bodies covoered with burns, cuts, and blood. One of them had an obvious compound fracture in one leg, which he ignored as if it were a pinprick.
A woman -- an uninjured woman -- walked into the frame. She was obviously begging with one of the injured, but her words were lost to the drone of the anchor. Whatever her pleas were, they fell on deaf ears, just as the three injured fell on the woman and began...oh God...
Andrea turned away before she could throw up.
"Hey, this scene wasn't in the movie," Kevin observed.